[Marxism] Visiting Venezuela

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, March 21, 2006
Visitors Seek a Taste of Revolution in Venezuela
By JUAN FORERO

CARACAS, Venezuela ? The actor Danny Glover has come. Harry Belafonte has 
also been here. So has the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, the prominent 
African-American writer Cornel West and Bolivia's new president, Evo Morales.

But most visitors are like Cameron Durnsford, a 24-year-old student from 
Australia who decided to study at a new government-financed university in 
Caracas. Mr. Durnsford was, admittedly, put off some by the cult of 
celebrity around President Hugo Chávez, which he says "seems a little bit 
Maoist." But Venezuela's revolution, he quickly added, was not to be missed.

"You've got a nation and a leader trying to prove an alternative to 
neo-liberalism and the policies that have ravaged Latin America for 20 
years," he said. "That's why people are coming here. There's a sense that 
it's a moment in history."

Mr. Chávez is decidedly unpopular with the Bush administration, which he 
has branded a terrorist regime out to get him. That antagonism, coupled 
with Mr. Chávez's huge oil-generated outlays for social spending, is 
drawing a following from all over and turning Caracas into the new leftist 
mecca.

Evoking other cities transformed by revolutionary leaders, like Managua, 
Nicaragua, in 1979, or Havana 20 years before that, Caracas is attracting 
students and celebrities, academics and activists, grandmothers and 
1970's-era hippies ? a new generation of Sandalistas, as some call them.

Some, including many Americans, have come to stay. But others come for a 
new brand of revolutionary tourism organized by the government or by 
private groups.

Venezuela welcomes them all, but rolls out the red carpet for high-profile 
visitors like Mr. Belafonte, the 79-year-old singer and activist.

In January, he led an American delegation that included Mr. Glover, Mr. 
West and Dolores Huerta, the farm workers' advocate. They met with Mr. 
Chávez, toured a neighborhood and visited government-run programs promoted 
as a way to shift the country's oil wealth to the poor.

"We respect you, admire you, and we are expressing our full solidarity with 
the Venezuelan people and your revolution," Mr. Belafonte told Mr. Chávez 
during the president's weekly television program. He called President Bush, 
a constant target of Mr. Chávez's barbs, "the greatest terrorist in the 
world." Then he shouted, "Viva la revolución!"

Other recent visitors have included the Rev. Jesse Jackson; Ollanta Humala, 
a leading candidate in the election for president in Peru on April 9; the 
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, and the Argentine Nobel laureate Adolfo 
Pérez Esquivel.

For less well-known Americans, the new vacation trail no longer goes 
through the famed beaches of Margarita Island. Rather, groups like Global 
Exchange, based in San Francisco, take visitors who pay $1,300 on a 
two-week jaunt through the tumbledown barrios where support for Mr. Chávez 
is strongest.

The tours include visits to literacy classes, cooperatives and 
government-financed media outlets. Visitors chat with government ministers, 
see "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," a documentary favorable to Mr. 
Chávez, and meet with state oil company officials, who explain how 
petrodollars are funneled to social programs.

Among the speakers who have met with visitors is Eva Golinger, a New York 
lawyer who is dedicated to unearthing what she claims is evidence of 
Washington's support for Venezuelan opposition groups, something the Bush 
administration has denied.

Americans like Pat Morris, 62, from Chestnut Hill, Mass., who never had a 
good impression of the Bush administration, are usually left speechless. "I 
thought that our current government was lying and greedy, but I had no idea 
of the long-term investment in destabilizing the country," she said, tears 
in her eyes after hearing Ms. Golinger speak.

Reva Batterman, 27, a graduate student, said she had wanted to come to 
Venezuela to show its people that "we're not all just Bush supporters or 
imperialists."

"I wish the people in the U.S. would try to understand Hugo Chávez," she said.

Not everyone is as enamored. Julio Borges, an opposition politician, said 
that while Mr. Chávez certainly had showered aid on the poor, he was also a 
strongman out to crush dissent.

Instead of lionizing him, Mr. Borges said, visitors should be aware of 
government ineptitude and growing abuses, like attacks on the press, 
charges the government denies.

"We always tell people who come with this romantic idea of Venezuela that 
despite the changes here, the people who carry out the transformation are 
the armed forces, that Venezuelan democracy is basically a militarized 
one," he said. "You have to have a profound concern about that. We want to 
take off the democratic veil the government uses."

Referring to American visitors, an American diplomat in Caracas, who could 
not speak on the record because of embassy rules, echoed the concerns, 
saying, "Come down here and get your consciousness raised, absolutely." He 
added, "My only request of them is that they try to get the other side of 
the story."

Emily Kurland, a 26-year-old social worker originally from Chicago, said 
that was exactly what she and the others here were getting.

"They're frustrated with Bush, frustrated with not being listened to, 
frustrated with Iraq," said Ms. Kurland, speaking in the Caracas house she 
shares with several foreigners. "They don't trust Fox News. They don't 
trust the mainstream news. They want to see with their own eyes what's 
happening here."

She came to Venezuela thinking she would stay just long enough to get a 
taste for Mr. Chávez's grandly titled "Bolivarian revolution." A year 
later, she said, she has no plans to leave anytime soon.

She has taught English in government-financed classes for the poor and 
talks about volunteering at a state-run microcredit bank for women. She 
spends most of her time, though, leading tours for Americans who flock here 
for a look at how Mr. Chávez is changing his country.

There is a precedent, of course: Fidel Castro's revolution, which in its 
early years placed emphasis on "people to people" contacts that enhanced 
support among vocal members of the American body politic, while 
neutralizing opponents.

Activists, intellectuals and leftists have gravitated to other governments, 
from Allende's Socialist Chile in the early 1970's to Sandinista-run 
Nicaragua in the 1980's, which also declared ambitions to overturn the old 
order in their countries.

"Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Chile at one point became the mecca for 
many leftists around the world," said Fernando Coronil, a University of 
Michigan professor and the author of "The Magical State," a book about 
Venezuela. "That has been capitalized upon by the governments of these 
places, in eliciting foreign support but also as a way of focusing on 
certain elements of foreign policy that have wide appeal, and not focusing 
on internal problems."

Some of the people who have visited Venezuela or have moved here 
acknowledge having some doubts. Chesa Boudin, 25, a New Yorker who has 
worked as a volunteer here, notes that some on the left glorify Mr. Chávez 
simply because he has positioned himself as the anti-Bush leader in Latin 
America.

But Mr. Boudin, one of the authors of a book favorable to Venezuela's 
government, said many people who had been dismayed by the advance of 
globalization saw the possibility of a better world in Venezuela.

"The fact that we have a country that's trying to create an alternative 
model is bold and ambitious and unique, and that's why people are 
wondering, 'Is this possible?' " said Mr. Boudin, whose parents, Katherine 
Boudin and David Gilbert, were members of the 1970's radical group the 
Weathermen. "The intellectual in me is curious."

Perhaps nothing so illustrates the intertwining of Mr. Chávez's rhetoric 
about serving the poor and the government's policies as the three-year-old 
Bolivarian University, which offers free tuition to its mostly poor student 
body.

Jerome Le Guinio, 23, from France, came a year ago and works in the 
university's administration. He lives in Catia, a poor neighborhood where 
support for Mr. Chávez is solid. "The idea is to find an alternative," he 
said, "and if you don't find it in Venezuela, you won't find it anywhere else."

Jens Gould contributed reporting for this article.

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