Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  I left the hospedaje the next day and I walked through Mérida, avoiding the places where I’d once hung out with all my old Chavista friends, like the Café Paris Tropical. I didn’t call friends, like Malacara, and I dreaded running into him or other acquaintances because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep my thoughts to myself.

  And my thoughts were changing. All the doubts I’d had over the past few years were being confirmed and I felt myself slipping into neutral and slowly moving in reverse to all I’d ever thought. Gear-tooth-by-gear-tooth, I watched myself going over the past few days, and all the hints over the years that had indicated to me the questions I was only now beginning to allow into my conscious mind. I asked myself how I missed this before, both the utterly partisan morality and the underlying authoritarianism of the Bolivarian movement? The experience reminded me of my first doubts about the divinity of Christ, which led to the next questions: “and if x is not true, what about y? And then we have to look again at a…”

  When I called Betty and Humberto later in the day, I found that Betty was out of the country at the time, but Humberto insisted that I come right over with my baggage. “We have a room ready for you, brother! Come on over.” I walked over and stopped at the newsstand to buy papers. I bought El Comercio, El Nacional, and El Universal, all opposition papers. I didn’t bother to pick up the Chavista press. I stuffed the papers in my bag and walked over the viaduct to Teatro Colibrí.

  Humberto greeted me with a big smile and a hug and took my suitcase into their house. Each time I’d arrived at their theater complex, they took me closer to the center of their home. This time I got the room next to theirs in the main house and then Humberto fixed coffee for us. Soon his sister-in-law and a friend of hers, both of whom were visiting from Barinas, came in and we all sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. The subject, of course, turned to the elections, and I was relieved to see the discussion was good-humored. Humberto was a Chavista, but a very critical one. Betty’s sister was in the opposition, as was her friend, and to their angry comments about the fraud, Humberto made casual, friendly jokes and came back with smiles and more jokes. That was how Humberto was: an actor, puppeteer, storyteller, musician, in short, an artist and trickster to his core. With his many tricks, jokes, enactments of hilarious situations he’d passed through in his life, or tragedies he recreated as comic incidents, he had us all laughing and, for a time, forgetting the tense political moment.

  Arturo came over in the afternoon and we went into the theater to look at some video clips for a movie we were working on about Occupy Oakland. Instead, Arturo and I ended up talking for far too long about the election, and I soon found myself in an argument with my friend. Arturo was defending Maduro, for whom he had voted, against the “fascist” Capriles. Just a week before I would have been listening and agreeing, though with some reservations. But now I was getting angry, especially when I heard Arturo repeating the same propaganda about Capriles, the “fascist” who represents the “oligarchy” and the “Empire [of the USA].”

  “Arturo,” I said, pleading, “Listen to what you’re saying. What do you mean by ‘fascist’? Last night the opposition was demonstrating peacefully, yes, with road blockades and little fires to stop traffic, but it was peaceful. And yet I saw Chavistas throwing rocks at them, attacking them. Who’s the fascist there? And Maduro and all these corrupt people in the party who you know have been robbing the country blind for years with impunity, and have amassed fortunes, yet you call people in the opposition the ‘oligarchy’? The Bolivarians have indebted the country to China, Russia, and to Chevron, and given them concessions to mine and drill and take out the wealth of the country, and you call Capriles an imperialist?” At last Arturo saw my point, and we dropped the talk of elections agreeing that they were all malditos politicos (damned politicians) anyway, and we got down to work.

  That night the cacerolazos in Mérida were drowned out by a downpour that cleaned the air and left behind a dramatic silence. The next evening, the cacerolazos were back even more loudly, accompanied by fireworks. Betty’s sister and friend excused themselves after dinner so they could join in the cacerolazo, and Humberto good-naturedly wished them a good time as they departed with pans and spoons to go to the roof.

  I then learned a tangible lesson on how one can look and not see, listen, and not hear, that which is entirely visible and audible. I’d gone to the supermarket the first day back in Mérida and noticed that the shelves were full. Everything was very expensive, but I found what I was looking for. I returned to Colibri and reported I didn’t know what everyone was talking about when they discussed shortages. All I saw were full shelves.

  I should have known better, having lived in Nicaragua in the ’80s. One would think I’d be more observant. One image in particular sticks in my mind from Nicaragua, 1987: a supermarket with a whole aisle of Worcestershire sauce, an item no one in Nicaragua had probably ever even tried.

  A few days later I told Humberto I was going shopping and he asked if I could pick up toilet paper. Sure. No problem, I told the nonchalant trickster, who thanked me with just the glimmer of a smile as he went into the kitchen to make coffee. Betty was gone and he was living on fruit and coffee.

  I went into the Yuan Yin Supermarket where I always shopped, asked where the toilet paper was and was told by an employee, whose job it was to scrape gum off the floor with a long-handled scraper, “no hay.” I immediately began looking for napkins. There were two brands, located near the dairy where cartons of yogurt “hecho en socialismo” competed with the Táchira “capitalist” brand, and both brands populated the front of long shelves that were nearly bare behind the display.

  Suddenly, my eyes opened as I walked down the aisle of mayonnaise, a long row of jars punctuated by a stack of pasta, and turning down another aisle of more mayonnaise and mustard, the other side of that aisle bare but for a few random bottles of salsas, soy sauce, and, of course, Worcestershire sauce.

  Nothing had changed. But what just a few days before were the full shelves of a supermarket, I noticed today were nearly bare. Now that I could see behind the display, and now that I could understand the meaning of two aisles of mayonnaise, I began to understand how the deception worked. Certainties vanished suddenly like a card up the magician’s sleeve and I needed someone to orient me in this strange world I thought I knew. So I decided on my way back to Colibrí to get in touch with Marco at the posada and see if I could take him out to dinner.

  Back at Colibrí I unloaded what I bought on the table, and apologetically showed Humberto the napkins, saying there was no toilet paper. He smiled and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Oh, and by the way, was there any flour?” I said I didn’t notice and he shook his head again and repeated, “it doesn’t matter.”

  I’d seen Marco a couple of times already, stopping by the posada to talk to him and get recommendations for people to talk to, books to read. I was already reading Damian Prat’s book, Guayana: El Milagro Al Revés, having bought the last copy available at Librería Temas. Between the daily newspapers I’d managed to read a couple of chapters and had decided I needed to go to Guayana to interview him. Marco had also suggested that I get in touch with his friend Rafael Uzcátegui at PROVEA (Programa Venezolano de Educación-Acción en Derechos Humanos, Venezuelan Education-Action Program in Human Rights) in Caracas. Rafael also was an editor on El Libertario, an anarchist newspaper. I recognized PROVEA as a group my friend Arturo had volunteered for, and still highly respected. I also recalled that El Libertario had sponsored an independent World Social Forum of Caracas in 2006 that I hadn’t attended because, at the time, I was convinced by the Bolivarians that they were being “sectarian,” and, after all, were just a bunch of “bourgeois” youth who would rebel against anything.

  I met Marco at a mall a few blocks from Colibrí. I invited him to Chinese food that was mediocre at best, but a relief from the usual fare of meat, rice, and yucca or plantain. We sat down to eat in the large dining hall and he beg
an to tell me his story.

  Marco joined the revolutionary communist Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PRV) when he was sixteen. The PRV, split from the Venezuelan Communist Party in 1966, was a political organ of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), the guerrilla movement of the time. Marco made oblique references to having been part of the FALN, but we never pursued that subject since the present situation dominated our discussions. He did mention that he later went into the military where he served in military intelligence until 1993.

  “You were in the military when the coup happened,” I noted.

  “Uh huh.”

  “What did you think of the coup?”

  “I supported it. After the bloodshed in ’89, the Caracazo, most of us did.”

  I paused. “That was Carlos Andrés Pérez, wasn’t it? Acción Democrática. Part of the Socialist International...”

  Marco nodded. The irony wasn’t lost on him. “Exactly. In fact Cuban intelligence informed Pérez that a coup was in place as he was returning that night.” The irony wasn’t lost on me. While the Venezuelan socialists were sending the Army into the streets to shoot anti-austerity protestors, Cuban intelligence was collaborating closely with that government and would play a significant role defending it against the future leader of the “Bolivarian Revolution.”

  “The G2 (Cuban Intelligence Agency) has always played a complex, dual role here in Venezuela. Just like the United States. It’s interesting how so many these days scream about US interventionism and interference, but what other country has allowed its sovereignty to be trampled on, opening its arms to a foreign government and allowing it to come in and direct policy as we have with Cuba?”

  Marco drew a circle with his finger on the table. “So a movement starts here and it comes around and then becomes what it opposed in the first place.”

  “That’s a Greek idea. It’s known in Greek philosophy and drama as ‘enantiadromia’ and it’s based on the Chinese idea of yin/yang, that anything reaching its conclusion turns into its opposite,” I said.

  “Yes,” Marco said, “that’s what’s happened with Venezuela, all this resistance to US imperialism has turned into a wholesale selling off of the country to China and Russia, and other international capitalist countries, and turning the direction of the country over to Cuba.”

  I prodded him. “My friends in the US, my wife in particular, would ask, ‘well, why would you want to invite US imperialism back into the country in the form of Capriles?’ How would you respond to that?”

  Marco smiled. “I told you I voted ‘nulo’ (no one, null). But really, on one hand you have an increasingly authoritarian variety of so-called ‘leftists’ who are on a witch-hunt against anyone who disagrees with them. They’re destroying the nationalized industries, and selling them off to the Chinese and Russians, as you’re discovering in Prat’s book. They’re destroying national capitalist enterprises that are the source of jobs for the people. They’re giving small subsidies to people to buy their loyalty. They’re buying up television stations, and have control of radio all over the country, where they broadcast their propaganda. Who would you rather go up against? Them or Capriles? We could deal with Capriles, and keep him in line. But these people [the Bolivarians] don’t listen to us. They’re arrogant and cynical and utterly corrupt.”

  “I’m sure my wife will also want to know how the Left plans to organize an opposition.”

  Marco shrugged. “We’ll see if it manages to mount an opposition.”

  We moved down the hall to find a quieter place to talk than the large open area surrounded by food stalls. Everything was starting to close at 8:30. We found a table outside of a closed coffee shop and sat down for a few more minutes.

  Marco told me he’d recently received a death threat.

  “By whom?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. The Tupamaros, I think. But they don’t say who they are.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  He smiled wryly. “I take a ‘zen’ attitude toward it.”

  I thought of the Tupas I knew, like Malacara and Matute. They didn’t seem like killers, but then again, I never could have imagined Chavistas chasing down people in the opposition, beating them up and throwing rocks at them.

  On April 23rd the government began “militarizing” Corpoelec, the national electricity company, stationing military in installations to guard them against “vandalism and sabotage.” Vice president Jorge Arreaza announced the measure, while Jesse Chacón announced conservation measures for the state to undertake.

  Damian Prat had a different take in his April 24th 2013 column in Correo del Caroní. Prat saw the current situation as a political ploy by Maduro, “a ‘McCarthyist’ campaign of persecution of the workers accusing them of phantasmal acts of ‘sabotage.’ That’s the government’s way of avoiding responsibility for the black-outs, the disguised rationing, and the disastrous electrical service.” He talked about the four thermo-electric plants that were bought for millions of dollars to deal with the problems in 2010. “Millions of dollars and bolívares were spent and the plants never functioned.” Of the two he mentioned, one was painted red and the other wasn’t even painted. They didn’t provide enough power to “light a light bulb.” “They were announced by Chávez himself, by Alí Rodríguez, the cabinet where Maduro and [Elías] Jaua sat [now President and Foreign Minister, respectively] and then-Minister [Rodolfo] Sanz, to be producing 800 MW in a few months that Sidor would use, and also free an equal amount of MW... toward the National Electric System.”

  Prat went on to write, “Persecuting workers, sowing terror, laying-off workers. That’s what they’re announcing. All this to hide their irresponsibility. Even the Chavista union leaders repudiate this ugly maneuver. For weeks they’ve rejected these accusations firmly and with clear arguments. They’ve said what we all know already: the cause of the problem is the absence of any investment or maintenance; the causes are the pathetic directors and the high officials put in office by the government; the poor state of many substations and installations in the cities. And we would add: for the nearly zero real investments (much money, the whereabouts of which is unknown) in generation plants and national transmission lines. For the destruction of [nationalized electric companies such as] Edelca, EDC, and Cadafe in the super-bureaucratic monster, Corpoelec, summa cum laude in inefficiency.”

  I was, at this point, half-way through Prat’s book, a shocking tale of corruption, inefficiency, ideologized ineptitude, neo-Soviet bureaucracies characterized by servility to “El Comandante” who, according to Prat, had the Midas touch in reverse as he turned productive industries into dust as soon as he nationalized them.

  While Chavista commentary dominated the five or so state television stations, the two or three private channels remaining were cautious in lending airtime to either side. I decided to try to watch the press conference Capriles had called for that night (April 24th) but he wasn’t allowed to speak: the conference was interrupted by a “public service announcement” from the government in which it broadcast inflammatory images, literally, of fires, and supposed acts of violence by the opposition. Among these were the charges that Integrated Diagnostic Centers (CDIs) had been attacked and set aflame. In an interview in the opposition paper, Tal Cual, director of PROVEA Marino Alvarado claimed to have “used three direct sources” for its investigation into the supposed arson attacks: “people working in the centers, patients, and neighbors of the installations. A close examination of the information offered by public media was done. And, finally, [examination of] photos taken by people sent there.” According to Alvarado, none of the clinics were burned, even if five were “attacked” by “cacerolazos” and rocks were thrown and windows were broken and, in one case, a rocket was fired at a center. Alvarado went on to condemn those attacks but he also called for a dialogue with the government, but one that “had the minimal conditions of respect.”

  Chris Carlson dutifully repeated the
government claims in an article he published at Venezuelanalysis without mentioning that PROVEA came to other conclusions. Communications Minister Ernesto Villegas accused PROVEA of “protecting fascists” and being itself a “fascist rearguard,” without, of course, addressing the issues.

  Throughout this time the blindness and intransigence of the international left press was the most disturbing for me. After initially publishing one or two pieces at one of my usual venues, I found it impossible to publish anything else. Even Upsidedown World, where I’d published a number of articles in the past, rejected my articles and decided instead to publish a pro-government article written by a San Francisco writer about the elections, based on government sources. I was told my firsthand articles from on the ground were, “not what we’re looking for.” When I asked what that meant, I received no response. I was getting a taste of what was to come.

  It was beginning to look as if the messianic cult of “El Comandante” was unraveling badly, and with it, the Bolivarian Revolution. But there was another element of the Bolivarian Revolution. It was Humberto, and all the people like him.

  Thursday night Humberto and I headed out for what he described as the arepa de pinga (the best arepa). Up above the Plaza Bolivar and near the Charlie Chaplin statue, was a hole-in-the-wall family business with a line out the door. “Artists, drunks, police, intellectuals, poets, everyone comes here for their arepas,” Humberto told me as we got in line.

  I could see why. I ordered pollo frio (cold chicken) with yellow cheese and it was delicious. We accompanied this with cups of guanábana juice, the first I’d had on this trip.

  We left and Humberto drove us around Mérida slowly. I told him about the book I was reading, Guayana: el milagro al reves and he said he knew about the problem. He told me about a friend of his, a candlemaker who had a business he inherited from his father, who started it after fleeing Spain after the Civil War. “They produced eighteen tons of candles in a workshop. Then Colombians managed to get the paraffin from PDVSA and my friend couldn’t stay in business. He managed to scrape by but now only produces three tons of candles a year.”