My recent Venezuela column in the Tampa Tribune prompted a prominent response from a local Venezuelan activist who took exception to some points I made. Fair enough. On this subject, I’m not an expert on anything but my own first-hand impressions based on what I saw — from health clinics to brazen street crime — and to whom I spoke — from Hugo Chavez acolytes to scornful opposition.
In responding, I want to underscore what my agenda for traveling to Venezuela for a fortnight was NOT. It was not to presume to learn enough to write a definitive treatise. Nor was it to disparage anyone forced into expatriatation by a socialist autocrat. I can never know what it’s like to walk in the shoes of anyone who feels orphaned from their motherland.
What my agenda WAS — was two-fold:
1)To look beyond the understandably easy caricature and demonization of President Chavez and get some sense of what on-site Venezuelans saw in him.
2)To see what a “Bolivarian Revolution” looked like up close and personal.
My conclusions:
1)Chavez, who’s mestizo, literally looks like so many historically disenfranchised Venezuelans. He induces a visceral, father-figure empathy. And his anti-imperialist, re-distributionist populism plays to their plights and hopes.
Key projects dealing with access to health care and education, for example, seem quite welcome, however imperfectly implemented.
In the highly divisive political climate that is Venezuela, Chavez plays the polarizing role of “Kingfish” with oil. Petro to many Venezuelans; snake to others.
2)Venezuela, as I had noted, looks like it’s in the midst of a hybrid upheaval, rather than a zero-sum revolution that was the Fidel Castro Cuban model. It has too many entrenched interests, including self-perpetuating bureaucracies and bourgeoisie consumer tastes, to do a dialectical 180 – no matter how embedded the historic inequities or how horrific the slums surrounding Caracas.
For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t want Hugo Chavez for my president. But if his socialista siren song plays well with a majority of Venezuelans, then it’s their sovereign call to elect or recall him. They have done the former and tried the latter.
Even a high U.S. Embassy official, who didn’t want to be quoted by name and obviously finds a lot not to like about the Chavez government, made a relevant concession. Chavez, he said, was “clearly not a dictator. I probably would have voted for him myself at first.”
And one other point — actually unsolicited advice — about Venezuelan and Cuban activists demonstrating together in Tampa as protestors-in-arms. Strategically, this is not a good idea for Venezuelans. The Cuban-exile cause still entails an unyielding approach on normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. Indeed, it is specifically associated with a hard-line stand on the counterproductive economic embargo, which is hardly in the best interests of the U.S.
For Venezuelans trying to make the case for increased U.S. leverage against Chavez, this is not the geopolitical company you want to keep, however understandable the animus is towards the Chavez and Castro governments.