My Lunch with Juan
or, tales of daunting threats to the Bolivarian Revolution, and the extraordinary ability of the Venezuelan people to somehow continue to manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat
by Clif Ross
The other day I was in Humberto's office. He's a fairly high ranking local government official, revolutionary and chavista (supporter of President Hugo Chavez). We were talking about what everyone is always talking about here in this highly politicized situation, “the Process.” At one point he looked me in the eye and said, “The Revolution is being destroyed from within. The enemy is inside the party and they are determined to destroy the Revolution.” Humberto didn't offer much in the way of an explanation, but today Juan Veroes did.
I haven't seen Juan since I returned to Mérida and besides just wanting to see him again, I was curious about his analysis of the recent elections for city council. In addition to his training in political science (he earned his master's degree in the subject, having done his thesis on Afro-Venezuelans) Juan is Afro-American from the Barlovento region of the country and he knows first-hand what it's like to suffer racism and oppression. In Juan's case that suffering has made him an implacable revolutionary with a tender heart. I think that's why he ran for the city council of Mérida against the official party.
Juan arrives early with a copy of Nuestro Chavez, a book of interviews which he tried to give me the last time I was at his house. He tries to give it to me again but I tell him, once again, that I have the book and promise him I will read it one day. I've made chicken stew with nabo . I tell Juan that I didn't know what nabo was but had seen something at the market that looked like small pieces of yucca, so I bought it, thinking it would be good in a soup. When I got home I discovered that the brown skin was really caked on clay and that this was some sort of tuber... I chopped it up and threw it in the stew. Only on eating the stew did I realize what it was and went to the dictionary to look up the word “turnip” and sure enough, I'd put in two very strong turnips, giving the stew an overpowering flavor. I begin to cut the limes for the soup and Juan tells me how I should cut the limes...
We sit down to eat and I ask him about the elections. Juan had worked very hard in the FARO, Frente Amplio Revolucionario Organizado , a coalition of four left organizations that ran against the Movement of the Fifth Republic , MVR, the official party. While the MVR is officially the party of Chavez, locally, according to Juan and many others I've talked to, it is are corrupt and has, ironically, opposed, sabotaged, blocked and otherwise interfered with many of Chavez's most important social programs. “Here we are in Mérida, “the city within a university,” as it's called, and we still have all this illiteracy. How is that possible?” he asks. Juan had written an article on illiteracy in the city of Mérida , published on page two of Despertar , the local progressive weekly founded and edited for a time by José Sant Roz. “The city and regional government thinks of the Missions as Chavez's problems. They do nothing to help. And so one of the two Barrio Adentro clinics (free health clinics staffed by Cuban doctors) have been closed for months because they're missing one part on a compressor in the consulting room. There are five casas de alimentación (community-based, government funded soup kitchens that provide three free meals to poor people) to feed all the poor people of Mérida. One Mercal (a government subsidized low-cost supermarket) for the whole city? And then look at the schools. At the Bolivarian University the students use the kindergarten classrooms at night. Imagine all these adults studying in desks made for little children.”
I ask if he's ever been paid for teaching at the Misión Sucre (a free community college-level school). “They paid me for May. But that's it. They owe me for five months. I was fired because I opposed the corruption in the MVR. Then Ramon Ramirez and his wife were fired when they asked the school to pay me. That's also part of the problem. If you oppose or resist the corruption in any way, they go after you and you lose your job.”
Juan leans back in the chair. “All these corrupt people. You go to the hospital early in the morning and there are dozens of homeless people sleeping in the parking lot. And yet the governor has employed a police force that is armed to the teeth with new uniforms and motorcycles. It's fascist. Then if you criticize them, you're called an escuálido (counter-revolutionary). I don't know about other regions, but all the MVR people here, over the course of the past six years or so have all gotten new cars, fincas , new houses. And the way it works is that the governor gets elected and he appoints the mayor who appoints people under him, so it's all a little mafia of people in power.” I know about this. I just heard about it from my landlord Bety, who dared criticize the mayor and now is under attack herself. The manager at the radio station where both Juan and Bety have shows, has recently been replaced for the same reason, the MVR people telling Caracas that he was an escuálido who needed to be replaced. My friend José Sant Roz is still in Barinas battling a group of thieving MVR people who robbed and pillaged the Universidad Experimental de los Llanos Ezekial Zamora (UNELLEZ.) There is an uncomfortable consistency to this story...
I ask Juan, with all this, why his coalition didn't win a seat on the council. FARO was a clear chavista alternative to the MVR, and the corruption in the local MVR couldn't be too much of a secret. “We won third place and we would have won second place but the Tupamaros pulled out of the FARO coalition.” I ask why.
“I don't really know. I think Matute (the Tupamaro who ran for the council) wanted to poll their votes separately so they could show off to the Tupamaros in Caracas how powerful they are when their votes were counted separately. As a result, we lost the seat to Acción Democrática (AD, the former ruling party) but we beat COPEI (the other former ruling party). We polled 1,800 votes and the Tupamaros got 800. Together we would have beaten the AD.”
I ask about the current problems in Caracas with the Tupamaros. There have been demonstrations over the past few days against the factions of the Tupamaros represented by Jose Pintos in the 23rd of January neighborhood, the Tupamaro birthplace and stronghold. Ultimas Noticias reported that “youth in bandanas with patriotic colors covering their faces” (and shirts with the image of Che, who is also a Tupamaro saint) have burned tires, blocked streets and trucks and protested in other ways, all with their faces covered for fear of reprisal from the armed Tupas. These youths are accusing the Pintos faction of criminal activity to which they want to call a halt and they also accuse these “neo-Tupamaros” of being a “fifth column flirting with the opposition” after some Tupamaros suggested a possible break with Chavez.
Juan has his own take on the situation. “They (the Tupas) seem to be splitting three ways,” he says. “One faction going with Chavez, another going another direction and the third going into the opposition. It's like Bandera Roja, the Trotskyist former guerrilla group who were murdered for forty years by the AD and now they're in cahoots with them. Hard to believe, isn't it, that they could forget forty years of murder and bloodshed to team up against Chavez? I think something similar might be happening with some of the Tupamaros.” Nevertheless, FARO is working again with the local Tupamaros and trying to build their coalition with them for the national assembly elections.
“There are so many problems, so many ways that people inside the process, supposed revolutionaries in the MVR, are trying to discredit Chavez and destroy what he's trying to build here. Like what's happening with the cooperatives. New cooperatives are forming everywhere but they can't get any funding. They go six months or a year or more waiting for credits and loans to come through. How can you survive that? The money is there; it's been approved. It just sits in banks all that time. And where does the interest on that money go? Who knows? It's like the ten thousand clinics that were supposed to be built. Chavez approved the money, the project went forward and then at the deadline only 2,500 had been built and the money was all gone. And no one knows where it went? Chavez himself is shocked.”
I ask Juan about “ chavismo sin Chavez” (Chavism without Chavez) and what that means. “Well, if something happens to Chavez there are people who want to keep his reforms going. There are a few good people around him. Like Vicente (Rangel, the vice-president). He's more radical than Chavez. Thank God he's there. He's a guarantee for the Revolution. But you know, I don't know about all that. People can call us whatever they want, stupid, or whatever. But I'm a chavista . Call it what you like, caudillismo , or whatever, but I never thought I would live to see the day that we would have a president like him. Someone who would say, ‘Yankee go home' (he says this in English), someone who would take the oil money and try to do something with it. Even with all the corruption, even with all the problems, look at what he's done. Schools, feeding poor people, building houses for homeless, job training. Maybe we're all deceived but really, even if only part of the money gets to the people it's a lot more than the nothing that they used to be given.” Juan's eyes tear up.
There's obviously much room for concern here, which is perhaps why politics is such a hot topic. Glancing through the newspaper I'd have to say that politics gets more paper territory, good and bad, than anything else, including fires, sports or fashion. And the corruption is a major concern, according to an editorial in today's pro-government Diario Vea . In the editorial entitled “Internal Counter-revolution” (I'm reading this after Juan's and my conversation) the writer warns us, echoing statements Chavez made to hand-picked MVR candidates to the National Assembly, that if corruption doesn't end it will end the revolution. This corruption, the writer in Diario Vea tells us, “puts at risk everything gained up to the present. The destiny of the country and the excluded classes are at stake.” From what I could read on Juan's face today, the writer wasn't exaggerating. Which is probably why, in the following day's paper, Chavez, from the state of Bolívar, calls for a socialism based on socialist morality and continues to stress “Christian” socialism. He is certainly aware of the limited potential for “legislating morality” and recognizes the need for endogenous regeneration, or a spiritual renewal and commitment to justice, fairness and an ethical life. The reform of the judicial system, new laws, and accountability are, of course, indispensable, but without the conscientización of society, a spiritual-cultural transformation that will touch and transform the core of persons, such reforms will merely be invitations to find ways around new laws and structures.
It's another day and I'm running errands in Mérida and when I run into three or four friends unexpectedly. I feel suddenly more hopeful that this process has potential for some unimaginable human victory. The process, Julio reminds me, though not in this imagery, is like a jazz song with its basic theme of revolutionary process improvised, recomposed and transfigured.
Julio is a poet who works in Kuai Mare bookstore across from Plaza Bolívar. I'd stopped in to see Karelyn, a poet and translator who has been translating Genny Lim's poems. (Ed note: Genny Lim is an Asian American poet who attended an International Poetry Festival in Venezuela with Clif Ross earlier in the year). Karelyn is reading on Friday and I said I would be there if I didn't end up in Maturin at a conference. I complain that the organizers of the conference still haven't answered my emails so I don't even know if the conference has been cancelled or what. Things seem to change here from minute to minute. Julio laughs. “Venezuelans are very creative. We're constantly improvising, changing everything. Somebody says, ‘Let's go to the beach' but suddenly they're off doing something with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Everything can change from one minute to another.” Certainly Venezuelans proved this in 1998 when they voted third party candidate Hugo Chavez into the presidency. The adaptability to new circumstances is certainly the best guarantee for survival and so there's reason to be optimistic about the future of Venezuela . And when I think of someone like Ramon Ramirez, I can't help but be hopeful.
Ramon, in addition to being the man who, along with his wife, lost his job for defending Juan Veroe's right to be paid, is the man who spent hours and hours designing my “Boycott the U.S. ” tee shirt which Genny Lim gave to Chavez during the Alo Presidente program. Ramon wouldn't allow me to pay for any part of the work he'd done, considering it all part of his work as a revolutionary. Ramon was in the armed guerrilla insurgency for decades until Chavez came to power and he decided to come above ground and work legally in the process. Coincidentally, I saw him on the street immediately after I left Kuai Mare, driving the opposite direction as I was running errands.
While we were talking in the heavy traffic (previously moving at a grandmotherly pace down First Avenue , but now utterly stalled) a skateboarder hit a hole in the pavement and broke out one of Ramon's tail lights with his head. Ramon called out to the skateboarder and asked what had happened but the skateboarder, obviously shaken and scared, but very much alive and apparently in possession of his senses, rolled off. Ramon went outside to survey the damage and shook his head. Then I got in his car to wait in the traffic with him and ride a half a block in the opposite direction of my errands.
Ramon was pissed for all of twenty seconds and then he looked at me and smiled. “How are you, brother?” he asks as he takes my hand. I notice that his car still desperately needs a tune up, that it stalls every few feet if he doesn't keep his foot on the gas while braking at the same time. Ramon is still a full time revolutionary, one that has no time to tune up his car because there are too many more important things to do to insure that the Process can survive all its trials and travails. He hasn't shaved, by my calculations, for four or five days, perhaps even a week. His shirt is old, faded and somewhat wrinkled, but he's cheerful, optimistic and is now on his way to Juan's house to work on new conspiracies and projects to push the Process forward. I ride with Ramon one block or so and then excuse myself so I can run errands. I promise to call and invite him to lunch, and as I wave goodbye I am convinced that if there are a few thousand people like him in this country, and I strongly believe that there are, who are more concerned with the good of the country than they are with the condition of their car, or their appearance, then, even with all its problems, there's hope for this revolution.
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