Venezuela’s ghosts still hover

Posted on Saturday, 03.15.14

Venezuela's ghosts still hover
BY MIRTA OJITO
MAO35@COLUMBIA.EDU

I was in the kitchen slicing sweet peppers and listening to the radio
when a voice from Caracas, speaking clearly and in perfect English, made
me stop the knife in mid-air and forget about dinner for a while.

In a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, this mother of
three was telling the BBC's James Menendez that she sometimes has to
visit seven or eight supermarkets to track down the food she needs for
her family and, even when she finds what she was looking for, she has to
stand in long line for hours. Competition is fierce, and products are so
scarce.

Right now, chicken and eggs are a problem, she said. You can't find
them. If you find deodorant or toilet paper, you find only one brand.
Certain medicines have disappeared.

She needs one for a thyroid condition and makes do by having a friend
send them from Colombia and taking half a dose. When one of her children
had an infection, she called every parent at the school her child
attends to see if anyone had the medicine the child needed; luckily,
someone did.

The question is why Venezuela — a country that used to import brooms —
should be in such dire circumstances? At 56 percent, inflation is the
highest in the region and one of the highest in the world. Blackouts are
common, and crime is rampant.

Economists say the government of Nicolás Maduro went from tinkering with
the market to replacing the open-market system by controlling the
foreign-exchange rate and the price of goods. This led to a decrease of
imports and, therefore, shortages.

And so people cope, by calling in favors from friends, by seeking visas
to the United States or by roaming the markets day after day and hoping
for change.

The situation reminds me of a conversation I once had with my mother. I
asked her why we didn't leave Cuba earlier, before 1980. She said we
couldn't, which is true. There was no way out for us for a long time.
But she also said something else.

She said that change didn't happen all at once. One year, chicken would
disappear, but one could still find eggs. Then the eggs were gone, but
there were potatoes. Then there were no potatoes but, by then, it was
too late. A decade had passed, and then another. Needless to say that
freedom had disappeared long before the last potatoes.

In the meantime, one hopes and waits, because most people don't want to
leave their country or die in a street protest or spend years in prison.
The big difference between Cuba and Venezuela is that Venezuelans have
taken to the streets — an option that would have been unthinkable in the
Cuba I grew up in.

Venezuelans have been protesting for a month. A month! At least 28
people have died, many of them young. The government, of course, blames,
the opposition for the deaths.

The minister of tourism, Andres Izarra, told the BBC that Venezuela's
so-called economic woes are a pretext to destabilize the country. And
the destabilizing force, of course, is the United States. This, too,
brings back memories.

During the interview, Menendez pointed to a large portrait of Hugo
Chávez, who has been dead for a year. Menendez asked, "Is he an
inspiration or is he, in fact, just a sort of ghostly presence that this
government cannot shake off, can't move on a year after he died?"

"No, he's not a ghost, he's alive," Izarra said, with what sounded like
a sad, or maybe a proud, chuckle. He meant that Chávez's ideas were
alive, I think. Still, Izarra's Twitter profile of doesn't have his
portrait; instead, it has a picture of a smiling Chávez wearing a yellow
shirt and riding a horse.

In Cuba, too, the framed pictures were not of Fidel but of Che Guevara
and Camilo Cienfuegos, who were conveniently dead, though we were taught
to think — and talk about them — as if they were alive. Their lives and
images were used to justify the increasingly bizarre ideas of a leader
who carefully controlled the length of the uniforms nurses wore, but who
didn't know how to make potatoes grow in the fertile land of a tropical
island.

In Cuba, we carried our ghosts for years until they no longer mattered.
In Venezuela, the ghosts are recent and they still matter. Thousands of
people are said to visit every weekend the mausoleum where Chavez is
entombed. But if the example of Cuba has taught us anything, it is that
nations, like people, need to let go of the ghosts.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/15/3995545/venezuelas-ghosts-still-hover.html