Don't cry for me, Venezuela!

Over the years, I have come to understand one trait of mine: when I travel to a city or a country, then those, too, are places that I then read about as a way of keeping in touch with those old friends, whom I might never visit again.  As with "real" friends, I get excited if what I read about is positive and exciting, and feel awful if otherwise.

For a few years now, I have felt nothing but awful about Venezuela, which was the first country I visited  in 1988, a year after coming to the US.

The graduate student group, of which I was one, spent only a couple of days in Caracas before we shifted to the project site--Maracaibo. Twenty five years have passed, and the airline that we flew, PanAm, has long since disappeared from the world of business.

Recently, when I was in Ecuador, I was reminded a lot of Venezuela and Simon Bolivar.  That Bolivar legacy, has not worked out well for the country--Hugo Chavez claims to be doing all the crazy things that he does in that grand Bolivar style, and what a mess the country is in now!

The New Yorker had a lengthy piece (sub. reqd.) on the Venezuela and Caracas of today, that have been completely messed up by the bizarre policies of Chavez.  What a curse!

A couple of years ago, when I was on talking terms with a few faculty colleagues, a conversation with one of them--yes, an ultra-left sympathizer--turned to Chavez.  Despite all my interests, I preferred to stay quiet and end that conversation because I knew well that she wouldn't like my take on Chavez' policies.  The New Yorker essay is a reminder of how awful the conditions are now.

My graduate school professor, who  was the guide for our project work back in 1988, has also blogged about this essay and adds this note:

A couple of good friend Venezuelan expats (Tico and Aloha Moreno, now in Florida) sent me this video (and accompanying story in Spanish) about how chickens are distributed (not sold) in Maracaibo. You can tell students all you want about prices rationing on the demand side and eliciting on the supply side, but show them the video first.
We can chuckle from a distance, but these are episodes from the real lives of real people. 

Yes, the real lives of real people that Chavez has messed up.  And messed up big time.

Now, with his illness, it appears that Chavez is battling for his life, not in his country but in Cuba, and this writer notes that the entire Chavez presidency and the country's political misfortunes can make for a good telenovela:

The long and at times surreal saga surrounding the illness of President Hugo Chavez has many Venezuelan writers and intellectuals likening the nation's drama to a soap opera. Venezuela has long produced such telenovelas, and some say no one could have imagined a more bizarre plot than the one that has unfolded in the more than seven weeks since Chavez traveled to Cuba for his operation and disappeared from public view.
"Reality in Venezuela has turned implausible. It's hard to believe that these events are happening, where each one exceeds the last one, and where our capacity to be amazed is being constantly challenged," said Leonardo Padron, a writer of Venezuelan telenovelas and a critic of Chavez's government.

It seems more and more like a re-telling of that other notoriously screwed-up South American country--Argentina, whose messed up leader has been more than a telenovela star, thanks to Evita.

To paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, a lot in literature and in life does seem like a constant re-telling of old stories.  But, why don't we want to re-tell wonderful stories and, instead, we are so fascinated to repeat horror stories?

Caption at the source:
A mural in Caracas, inspired by “The Last Supper,” which depicts Jesus
 flanked by Fidel Castro, Mao, Lenin, Marx, Simón Bolívar, and others.