Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution

Richard Gott

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781844677115
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781683873
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The authoritative first-hand account of contemporary Venezuela, Hugo Ch?vez places the country's controversial and charismatic president in historical perspective, and examines his plans and programs. Welcomed in 1999 by the inhabitants of the teeming shanty towns of Caracas as their potential savior, and greeted by Washington with considerable alarm, this former golpista-turned-democrat took up the aims and ambitions of Venezuela's liberator, Sim?n Bol?var. Now in office for over a decade, President Ch?vez has undertaken the most wide-ranging transformation of oil-rich Venezuela for half a century, and dramatically affected the political debate throughout Latin America.
In this updated edition, Richard Gott reflects on the achievements of the Bolivarian revolution, and the challenges that lie ahead.

PART ONE: PORTRAIT OF A PRESIDENT

1

A BASEBALL GAME IN HAVANA, NOVEMBER 1999

On a hot evening in November 1999, Comandante Hugo Chávez, then aged forty-three, came jogging out onto the ground of the main baseball stadium in Havana, followed by his Venezuelan team. Beside him was Comandante Fidel Castro, aged seventy-three, the ‘manager’ of the Cuban squad. Chávez, the principal pitcher for the Venezuelans, was wearing his country’s colours of orange, blue and crimson. Beside him stood his wife Marisabel, a handsome blonde woman with a dazzling smile. Castro wore a blue jacket and sported a red cap; he was accompanied by his vice-president, Carlos Lage, and his foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, both dressed in Cuban colours.

The event that evening was a friendly match, designed to cement the close links developing between the two comandantes of Venezuela and Cuba. It had been agreed beforehand that all the players would be veterans over forty, although Castro had warned of a little ‘surprise’. For the thousands of spectators in the Havana stadium – and for the millions watching on television all over Latin America – this was an historic sporting encounter between two political giants. Fidel Castro was the oldest and most famous revolutionary in Latin America in the twentieth century, while Hugo Chávez was perceived as the ‘new kid on the block’ with everything to play for, a radical former army officer whose anti-imperialist rhetoric echoed that of Castro. His dramatic plans for Venezuela and for Latin America were as wide-ranging as those of the Cuban leader had once been.

By an accident of history, the game of baseball, the favourite sport of these two presidents and the national sport of both their countries, is also the preferred game of the United States, the chief imperial power in the region and the champion of the neo-liberal philosophy against which both these radical leaders have directed their rhetoric. Che Guevara, an Argentinian-turned-Cuban, once argued that the Cuban revolution would never make much headway in Latin America unless the Cubans learnt to play soccer, while Henry Kissinger, a US secretary of state of German origin, believed that the future of US hegemony in the continent would depend on the capacity of the United States to adapt to the same game. In practice, the Cubans and the Venezuelans (and the Nicaraguans) have remained content to engage in the demonstrably imperialist sport of baseball – and are very good at it.

Despite the disparity in age between Castro and Chávez, both men share a number of similarities. Just as Fidel Castro became a national hero in Cuba after his failed attempt to seize the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba in July 1953, so Colonel Chávez was projected onto the national stage after leading an unsuccessful military coup in February 1992. Moncada, it should be recalled, to illuminate the generational difference between the two men, took place just a year before Chávez was born.

Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 after a period of prison, exile, and a two-year guerrilla war; Fulgencio Batista, his defeated predecessor, fled from the country. Chávez also spent time in prison, two years encarcerated at San Francisco de Yare, but he took a less spectacular, though no less intriguing, route to the top. He formed his own political movement when released from prison, and his presidential bid in 1998 was supported by radical nationalist officers and a number of well-known left-wing journalists and intellectuals, many of whom had been supporters of Venezuela’s fidelista guerrilla movement in the 1960s. So corrupt and detested had the country’s existing ‘democratic’ regime become that Chávez stormed his way through to electoral victory in December 1998 over the ashes of a dismayed and dispirited ancien régime. His principal civilian opponent in the 1990s, former president Carlos Andrés Pérez, though not in exile, was forced to spend time under house arrest facing charges of corruption.

The close friendship of Chávez with Castro, forged over the years, and celebrated with an official state visit to Havana in 1999 and a game of baseball, provided Chávez with incomparable revolutionary credentials, of the kind that are recognised in the shanty towns of Venezuela, where the majority of the population lives. They have not been so warmly approved by Venezuela’s rich and tiny elite, whose Cuban friends live in Miami not Havana, and whose lives are spent in a constant state of alarm about the future of their property and their bank accounts.

Chávez sought to stir up the nationalist passions of his country’s population with a dose of revolutionary rhetoric that had long been out of fashion, both in Latin America and the rest of the world. He has tried to combat the unquestioning acceptance of neo-liberalism and globalisation by means of a revival of radical nationalism, drawing on the words and actions of Venezuela’s pantheon of nineteenth-century heroes. He has exalted the figure of Simón Bolívar in much the same way as Castro used the example of the Cuban patriot José Martí. Bolívar and Martí both fought against the Spanish empire, and Castro and Chávez have revived the memory of those nineteenth-century struggles in their campaign against the US attempt to rule the world.

Chávez took up this theme during his visit to Havana for the baseball game. ‘Venezuela is travelling towards the same sea as the Cuban people,’ he told an astonished audience at the University of Havana, ‘a sea of happiness and of real social justice and peace.’ Then turning to Castro, and calling him ‘brother’, he enlarged on one of his central themes, the indivisibility of the Latin American revolution:

Here we are, as alert as ever, Fidel and Hugo, fighting with dignity and courage to defend the interests of our people, and to bring alive the ideas of Bolívar and Martí. In the name of Cuba and of Venezuela, I appeal for the unity of our two peoples, and of the revolutions that we both lead. Bolívar and Martí, one country united!

Castro, who had spent forty years searching for allies on the Latin American mainland, was more than satisfied with the rhetoric, but he had no intention of allowing this newfound friendship to stand in the way of winning the baseball game. In the stadium, at the start of the sixth game, his promised ‘surprise’ materialised. Two members of the Cuban reserve were brought on: two of Cuba’s most famous young professionals, Oresty Kinderlan and Luís Ulasia. They were disguised with wigs and beards to make them look like veterans, but no one was fooled – although Chávez claimed to have been. With such guerrilla tactics, Cuba won the game without much difficulty, 5-4.

Chávez’s visit to Cuba was not just about baseball. Other, more serious matters were under consideration. Cuba’s long-established sugar-for-oil swap with Russia was scheduled to end in 1999, and the Cubans were hoping that they might now be able to secure Venezuelan oil at preferential rates. There was a precedent for this, in that under the terms of an agreement signed in 1980 in San José, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Mexico had agree to provide oil at a low price to eleven countries of the Caribbean and Central America. Cuba now joined this select group.

Meanwhile, in another part of Cuba, Héctor Ciávaldini, then the head of Petróleos de Venezuela, the Venezuelan state oil company, was examining what could be done with Cuba’s Cienfuegos oil refinery, built by the Russians in the 1960s and now in a dilapidated condition. The Cubans had expressed hopes that Venezuela might invest US$200 million in the refinery, but the eventual agreement was more modest. Petróleos de Venezuela and Cupet, the Cuban state oil company, would set up a joint company to run the Cienfuegos operation, and Venezuela would supply it with 50,000 barrels a day.

Ciávaldini was asked by journalists what effect this agreement might have on the United States. ‘We don’t ask questions when the US buys things from China. Thirty per cent of the mass consumption articles that the US imports come from China. If they have these kinds of relationships, I don’t think we should feel inhibited from having relations with whoever we want – with China, with Malaysia, or with Cuba.’ A week later, Ali Rodríguez, then Venezuela’s minister of energy and mines, visited Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to seek support for the revival of OPEC, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Venezuela and Cuba have had a long and troubled interaction over the past half century, and it is appropriate to begin a book about Hugo Chávez with an account of the reconciliation of these two countries and their governments. For the radical programme embraced by Chávez has its roots in the conflictive events in Latin America of the past fifty years. During that time, revolutionary movements in Venezuela, inspired and directly assisted by Castro and Che Guevara, sought to spread the revolutionary message of the Cuban revolution from the island to the continent. Castro visited Caracas in 1959, just after his victory over Batista, to thank the Venezuelans for their moral and practical support. At that moment, he was the most popular man in the country, spontaneously welcomed by thousands of people demonstrating in the great space of El Silencio in the city centre.

A popular uprising had broken out in Caracas in January 1958, a year before Castro’s guerrilla victory. A revolt at the military base at Maracay west of Caracas (later to be the base from which Chávez launched his own coup in 1992) had been followed by rioting in the capital. A left-wing Patriotic Junta appealed successfully for a general strike which led to the resignation of the Venezuelan dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Venezuela and Cuba appeared to be moving forward on parallel tracks.

The eventual beneficiary of the Venezuelan revolt was not a revolutionary but a reformist politician of great skill and ruthlessness. Rómulo Betancourt was a founder of Acción Democrática, a party that enjoyed the active support of the United States. The Americans saw Betancourt’s Venezuela as a model for Latin America, and held it up as a favoured alternative to Castro’s Cuba. Yet this was not the general view of the population of Caracas. Castro was cheered to the echo when he came to thank the Venezuelans for their support, while for Betancourt, standing at his side, there was only a storm of booing. Betancourt’s Venezuela soon became a bastion of the anti-Cuban cause in the Americas, and his government’s secret service was put in the charge of anti-Castro exiles from Miami.

Many left-wing Venezuelans, following the example of the Cuban revolution, took to the hills and organised a guerrilla insurrection in the 1960s that lasted until the end of the decade. Some of them came from the Communist Party, others from splinter groups that broke away from Acción Democrática. Still others worked hand in glove with radical groups within the armed forces – a significant development in the light of subsequent history.

Civilian activists from the Communist and other parties took part in two military revolts against the Acción Democrática government in 1962, at Carúpano and Puerto Cabello. The revolts were unsuccessful but left a powerful trace in popular imagination. In a statement after Carúpano, one of the Communist leaders, Guillermo García Ponce, described the political programme of the rebel officers as ‘far-reaching, nationalistic, and patriotic’, and praised it for calling on Venezuelans ‘to work for democratic reconstruction’. García Ponce thought the rebels had ‘done Venezuela a great service’. Nearly four decades later, in 1999, he was a Chávez supporter in the Assembly elected to draft a new constitution.

Chávez did not emerge from a vacuum. He was the heir to the revolutionary traditions of the Venezuelan left. Many survivors of the guerrilla insurrection of the 1960s were still participating in politics in the first decade of the twenty-first century – some on the side of Chávez, others in the opposition. Chávez had spent time cultivating the civilian left when planning his coup of 1992, and when in government he was able to draw on the talents of many of those who came from this radical tradition.

Half a dozen former guerrillas were to be found among the Chávez supporters in the National Assembly elected in 2000. Ali Rodríguez Araque, the minister of energy and mines who was to spearhead the revival of OPEC (and later became foreign minister), was a guerrilla fighter in Falcón state in the 1960s, and was subsequently active in a significant left-wing party, La Causa Radical. Lino Martínez, the minister of labour, was also once a guerrilla.

Chávez relied initially for political advice on two veteran civilian politicians – Luís Miquilena and José Vicente Rangel, both historic stars in the firmament of the Venezuelan left. Both had been in the public arena for close on half a century, some of that time spent in prison or in exile. Rangel, in his seventies and one of the great charmers of Latin American politics, had been the presidential candidate of the left on three occasions, and became an active and vocal defender of the Chávez government – as foreign minister and later as vice-president. Miquilena, in his eighties, became president of the National Assembly and was Chávez’s first minister of the interior. He had been a leader of the bus drivers’ union in Caracas in the 1940s, and the co-founder of an anti-Stalinist communist party in 1946. He retained a tough Leninist streak, which proved useful when helping to construct the political movement of soldiers and civilians – the Fifth Republic Movement – that supported Chávez’s election campaign in 1998, though eventually he abandoned Chávez in December 2001, and joined forces with the opposition.

Several other ministers came from the Venezuelan left. Ignácio Arcaya was Miquilena’s godson and the son of a former foreign minister who was sacked in 1960 for failing to sign a US-inspired anti-Cuban motion at a meeting of the Organisation of American States. Jorge Giordani, the planning minister, was formerly the economic adviser to the Movement for Socialism, another left-wing party that had emerged after the end of the guerrilla rebellion in the 1970s.

Not all the surviving revolutionaries of the 1960s supported Chávez. Opposing him from the right was a group of former guerrillas led by Teodoro Petkoff, once a Communist leader and a prominent minister in the reformist government that preceded the first Chávez electoral victory. Petkoff had also on occasion been the presidential candidate of the left, and throughout Chávez’s first year in power he was the influential editor of an evening paper, El Mundo, that was fiercely opposed to the president. Sacked by his paper’s proprietor in December that year, Petkoff reappeared in subsequent years as editor of Tal Cual, a formidable pamphleteering paper. Among his columnists were several former guerrillas who had made the journey from Cuban-style socialism to social democracy – and beyond.

Opposing Chávez from the left, almost from the start, was Douglas Bravo, the guerrilla leader in Falcón in the 1960s and perhaps the most well-known of the uncompromising leftists of earlier years. Bravo had collaborated with Chávez on his revolutionary military project in the 1980s, on the assumption that this was going to be a genuinely civilian–military operation. He withdrew after 1992 when he felt that civilians were being by-passed, and that Chávez’s programme was insufficiently radical.

Years ago, in 1968, I spent a couple of weeks in Caracas awaiting a call to interview Bravo in the hills. As so often used to happen, the contacts were never established, but some three decades later, in November 1999, I finally caught up with him, and he came to see me in the apartment of a friend. Then in his late sixties, Bravo had remained a cheerful and resilient revolutionary, though not in Chávez’s camp. He explained how he had got to know Chávez quite well, at a time when the future president was a junior officer conspiring against the government. ‘Chávez is an intelligent man,’ said Bravo, ‘bold, charismatic, and an excellent speaker; he has a natural ability to command.’

The old guerrilla leader was not without a few criticisms. ‘Chávez is quite capable of making sudden changes in direction. These can be positive or negative. He can easily make agreements with one group, and then abandon them when he makes a deal with another. This was a very serious characteristic when Chávez was a conspirator, and it is quite dangerous now that he is the president.’

When I talked to Rangel, who is of the same generation as Bravo, he took a less critical view: ‘It’s a mistake to demonise Chávez, just as it is an error to sanctify him. If he had not emerged, there would certainly have been somebody else. Fortunately, this has proved the best way to secure change, peacefully and with civilians. After all, we might easily have had a Pinochet.’

The debate within the Venezuelan left about revolutionary tactics, and about the alliance between soldiers and civilians, continued into the Chávez era, unremitting and unresolved. Yet Chávez’s capacity to survive in power, and to reinforce his Bolivarian Revolution, left his former leftist opponents high and dry, without arguments or supporters.

2

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE ANCIEN RÉGIME

Caracas was once a small town circled by relatively friendly ranc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map of Venezuela
• Introduction to the 2011 Edition
• Introduction to the 2005 Edition
• Part One: Portrait of a President
• Part Two: Preparing for a Bolivarian Rebellion
• Part Three: Recovering the Revolutionary Traditions of the Nineteenth Century
• Part Four: Organising the Overthrow of the Ancien Régime by Peaceful Means, 1992–1998
• Part Five: Chávez in Power: The Early Years
• Part Six: The Three Opposition Attempts to Overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution
• Epilogue: The Military and Civil Society
• Postscript: Venezuela in 2011