Hugo! (28 page)

They spent two days locked in each other's company. Castro, who
had telephoned Carlos Andrés Pérez with a message of support during
Chávez's 1992 coup, had rethought the matter. He accompanied Chávez
throughout his trip to Havana, walking through Habana Vieja, placing a
wreath at a statue of Simón Bolívar, visiting the house where the Liberator
passed through when he came to Cuba at the age of sixteen. Chávez gave
a speech there, with Fidel sitting in the front row. Later the two made
their way to the
University of Havana, where both delivered speeches to
student leaders. In his address Chávez declared the island a "bastion of
Latin American dignity" and confessed, "It's the first time I have come
physically to Cuba, but in my dreams I have come many times."

Besides giving the speech at the university, El Comandante also
visited Cuba's armed forces academy, walked through the underground
tunnels that hid tanks poised to repel an attack by the United States,
and inspected a room with models of the major military battles in world
history. Before he left, he and Castro sat on a sofa together and pored
through a photo album that the Cuban leader gave him as a memento
of the trip.

Chávez's opponents would use the visit against him for years to
come. They cited it as evidence he planned to impose a Cuban-style dictatorship
in Venezuela. When he ran for president, a video of his speech
at the University of Havana surfaced and was widely circulated. It was
true Chávez admired many aspects of Castro's revolution, including
an educational system that gave Cuba a higher literacy rate than the
United States and a health system that the
World Health Organization
cited as a model for Third World countries. Chávez himself would later
compare his relationship with Castro to that of a father and son. The
Cuban leader would help guide Chávez through some of his bleakest
moments, including when his presidency and even his life were on the
line — with the United States lurking in the background.

But he also seemed to recognize that installing a Castro-style
regime in Venezuela was
impossible. Venezuelans held a deep antipathy
to communism, especially after the bloody guerrilla wars of the
1960s. Chávez himself was skeptical of many Venezuelan leftists,
saying they had spent so many years in the hills engaged in armed conspiracy
and isolated from the masses that they had lost touch with the
average Venezuelan. Beyond that, a new century was dawning. Castro's
model implemented forty years earlier with its heavy state control of the
economy, the media, and the electoral apparatus — albeit in the face
of US hostility and numerous attempts to destroy his revolution and
assassinate him — was out of date and heavily criticized. While Chávez
clearly admired aspects of Castro's revolution and the man himself,
he would follow his own leftist path. Venezuela was not Cuba, and he
knew it. The world had changed.

After his return to Venezuela, Chávez kept up a frenzy of meetings,
tours, and discussions with
community leaders, advisers, and Bolivarian
sympathizers. While his constant forays into the capital's barrios and
the villages of the countryside were open affairs, he was also quietly
meeting with small groups of community leaders in unpublicized
private sessions. He wanted to win their support, broaden his movement
to include more civilians, and explain his proposal for a
constitutional
assembly. His
slogan was "Constitutional Assembly Now!"

He faced challenges even among those on the left. Many were skeptical
because he was a former soldier. Others didn't know how to react.
A few months after his release from jail when he showed up for a low-profile
meeting at the community organizing center where Xiomara
Tortoza worked in Catia, some of the local leftists called Chávez
"comandante" and gave him a military salute. Tortoza was horrified.
She'd traveled to the Southern Cone countries during the so-called
dirty wars of the 1970s and 1980s and thought the last thing Venezuela
needed was another "military gorilla" trained to order people around,
or worse. Indeed, when Chávez traveled to Uruguay,
Eduardo Galeano,
the leftist author of one of his favorite books about exploitation,
The
Open Veins of Latin America
, refused to meet with him.

On another occasion Chávez showed up at a meeting of leftists in
Caracas's Parque Central. He walked in, and no one on the dais bothered
to recognize him. "I never forgot that . . . Imagine, I was trying
to present myself to the political left. I was being watched, persecuted,
defamed, etc. and the leaders treated me like that . . . The official
bourgeois discourse infected and destroyed the left. I don't deny my
mistakes, I have certainly made some, but those groups rejected and
condemned me."

At the meeting in Catia with Tortoza's group, Chávez was low-key,
informal, modest, and accessible — a regular guy from the barrio. He
wore a colorful beach shirt and patiently answered questions. He made
a good impression. Tortoza's doubts eased a bit. Maybe this was a different
kind of soldier.

While Chávez's popularity was booming in the
barrios and among
community groups and he was slowly building organized bases of support,
he disappeared from most of the Venezuelan mainstream news
media and the international press. Major Venezuelan newspapers, television
networks, and radio stations had fought the Pérez government to
report on the popularity of Chávez and his coup in the days after the
revolt. The coup leader was still an unknown entity then, and Pérez was
virulently hated.

But now Chávez's radical nationalist views were well known. Media
barons hostile to his calls for revolution tried to eliminate him from
their coverage. When he returned from his trip to Colombia in July
1994 and held a press conference, for instance, most major newspapers
didn't report a word about it. "I was barred from TV, from the press
and from the radio. They even fired some journalists for interviewing
me and putting out a taped interview on radio, or they [the authorities]
would come and close a radio station because it interviewed me."
At one point, as Chávez recalled it, someone remarked on television
that he didn't even exist. Many editors and reporters considered Chávez
caliche
, Venezuelan slang for someone who is not news but tries to be.
When he visited newsrooms, editors scattered and hid so they wouldn't
have to meet with him.

But the boycott by the elite media merely added to Chávez's mystique
in the barrios. He got around the snubs partly by going to local
media in the regions he visited. He'd been told by a journalist friend
that people in the interior read the local papers a lot more than they
read the big-city dailies like
El Nacional
trucked or flown in from
Caracas
.
Many of the local editors were delighted, giving Chávez hours
of their time and pages of their newspapers. After a three-hour chat at
one paper, Chávez finally told the editor he had to go.

Operating below the mainstream media radar line, Chávez was tapping
into
working-class Venezuelans' growing frustration with the government.
Pérez's administration had been a disaster. But Caldera's wasn't
turning out much better. By now nearing his eighties, the grand old
man of Venezuelan politics spoke with a tremulous voice and had a frail
appearance, walking stiffly and slowly. One of the authors of a landmark
labor law in the 1930s, he came into office for his second term promising
to undo many of the
neo-liberal measures imposed by Pérez.

He inherited one of the worst banking debacles in Latin American
history. After the fall of
Banco Latino in January 1994 provoked a nearly
systemwide collapse, angry depositors milled outside the doors of
barred banks, frantic to withdraw their deposits. At the federal agency
that insured the banks, small groups stood vigil, sharing whatever news
they could get and reading missives left by other depositors. One listed
the names of sixty-three officials
accused of theft, including Presidents
Pérez and Lusinchi. "Don't let the guilty escape," it said. Underneath,
someone wrote in red: "Execute them. Now!"

Under pressure to act, Caldera merely exacerbated the problems.
"The government panicked. Desperate to avoid further bank failures, it
simply printed money, sparking a sharp rise in inflation and a plunge in
the value of the bolivar." Caldera tried to limit the damage by imposing
price controls on food, medicine, foreign exchange, and even movie
theater tickets.

He also suspended some constitutional guarantees. The decree
allowed the government to seize private property, make arrests without
the usual legal safeguards, and restrict travel. When Congress restored
the guarantees a few weeks later, Caldera simply suspended them again.
He threatened a referendum in which the loser, himself or the legislature,
would have to resign. Congress backed off. Underscoring an
authoritative streak, Caldera also started sending out police to interrogate
critics of his government, from academics to media men.

In his first year in office, the doddering president still enjoyed a high
level of
popularity. His reputation as a man of personal honesty and integrity
was unblemished. One analyst said he had "more moral authority than
any living Venezuelan." In contrast with Pérez's ostentatious "coronation"
in 1989, Caldera assumed office with a simple ceremony in Congress
rather than the glittering Teresa Carreño Theater. Unlike CAP's invitation
to hundreds of dignitaries from all over the world, Caldera invited
almost no foreigners. "There will be no party . . . just some refreshments,"
Caldera's son Juan José, a newly elected senator, told reporters.

But Caldera seemed incapable of resolving the nation's mounting
problems. A string of constantly changing economic plans — eight in
the first year and a half of his administration — was doing little to ease
the economic woes. Inflation soared to 71 percent in 1994 and 57 percent
in 1995, the highest in Latin America. By April
1996 Caldera did
what he swore he would never do — he "got down on his knees" before
the International Monetary Fund. He implemented the same kind of
economic shock package Pérez had imposed.

To carry out the distasteful task he recruited the most unlikely of
neo-liberal free marketers: former Marxist guerrilla Teodoro Petkoff.
The son of a Bulgarian communist exile and a Polish physician mother,
Petkoff, with his trademark bushy mustache, acerbic style, and caustic
wit, was a legend of the left. An economist who graduated with honors,
he helped lead one of the most powerful guerrilla movements in Latin
America in the 1960s. He joined in spectacular antigovernment actions
including the kidnapping of a US Army colonel.

He spent three years in jail, and escaped twice. Once, he and several
comrades fled San Carlos military prison in Caracas by digging a
230-foot tunnel with their hands. They crawled through and climbed
up into a store jammed with their delighted Marxist comrades, taking
off amid the chaos of Carnival celebrations. No one had ever escaped
from the prison before. The second time, he swallowed and then spit
up smuggled cow's blood to convince authorities he was sick, then slid
down a rope of knotted sheets from a seventh-floor military hospital
window.

A brilliant and charismatic student leader in the 1950s, Petkoff
joined the Communist Party and fought to overthrow the dictator
Marcos Pérez Jiménez. He took to the hills in the 1960s when he and
other leftists felt the democracy that replaced the strongman was "bourgeois"
and didn't represent the poor masses. But by 1969 he and other
rebels surrendered, accepting an amnesty from Caldera as their armed
insurrection failed to catch on.

Petkoff and others split from the Communists in 1971, saying the
Soviet model was dictatorial. Three years earlier, he had earned a public
scolding from Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev for writing a book condemning
the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that had crushed
the "Prague Spring" democracy movement. The dissidents formed the
Movement to Socialism party, which turned into Venezuela's third
largest. Petkoff won a seat in the Senate and ran for president twice,
losing badly both times. During his first campaign, Colombia's Nobel
Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez lauded him with an
essay about his daring escapes, love of literature, and bold politics.
Eventually Petkoff migrated to the center, and then to the right.

Caldera's move to make Petkoff the point man for his free-market
turnaround was a stroke of genius, although his former communist comrades
called him a sellout and an "instrument of savage capitalism."
Caldera named Petkoff planning minister in March 1996. A month
later, the president announced his new economic program, dubbed
Agenda Venezuela.
Wall Street was thrilled. If a famous former communist
guerrilla was endorsing the package, it had to be good. Petkoff
argued that there was little choice, and that the world had changed. A
week before the announcement, he described Venezuela as a "house
on fire."

He became the administration's chief apostle for free-market economic
measures, landing on the front page as much as
Caldera himself.
He was certainly more colorful. When he underwent minor knee surgery,
the daily
El Universal
splashed a photograph of him in his hospital
bed across the front page with the headline, "The Economy Will Not
Limp." By some accounts, Petkoff became even more orthodox than
the US-educated technocrats who carried out Pérez's
paquete.
He negotiated
a new labor law, privatized subsidized state industries, forged a
lending agreement with the
IMF, tried to lure foreign investors to the
country, heralded an opening of the nationalized oil industry to international
companies, and handed out pink slips to 80,000 of Venezuela's
1.4 million public employees.