Redeemers (60 page)

Chávez's unquestionable boldness has been the subject of a number of anthropological studies that attempt to explain its success. Some scholars point to the popularity of various Bolivarian myths among the Venezuelan people. Pino Iturrieta has collected incredible accounts of these secret and magical Bolívars: the Bolívar possessed by the spirit of a supernatural being gifted with powers of healing and salvation, called Yankay; the Bolívar of popular legend, the purported son of a black slave woman from the cocoa plantations; the Bolívar of liberation theology, who died poor and promises redemption for the dispossessed; the syncretistic Bolívar of Venezuela's old African religions, who occupies the center of a “Liberationist Court” presided over by Queen María Lionza (incorporated into the Catholic Church as a saint), the major deity of the Venezuelan version of Santería. She is worshipped by those who seek love, health, money, and good fortune. In her ceremonies, the shamans invoke Bolívar to condemn “political parties,” to bring equality, peace, and liberation, to “bless the neighborhood guerrillas and proclaim a kingdom of happiness ruled by the military.”

Imbued with these strains of popular religiosity, and exploiting them instinctively but also with calculation to further his cause, Chávez has continued to play the role of a magician, saint, and messiah—but his most audacious move was to invigorate the Bolivarian cult by setting himself in the place of a High Priest, appropriating Bolívar's charisma. The historian Pino Iturrieta found a fitting metaphor within the history of Christianity: “Now a tropical Constantine has imposed the complete identification of a people with a national deity.”

 

II

To what political tradition does Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian rhapsody belong? According to his own version, his destiny was revealed to him around 1977, when he read a book:
The Role of the Individual in History
by Georgi Plekhanov. He has more than once told the story of this moment of inspiration, his epiphany before the text: “I read Plekhanov a long time ago, when I belonged to an anti-guerrilla unit in the mountains . . . and it made a deep impression on me. I remember that it was a wonderful starry night in the mountains and I read it in my tent by the light of a flashlight.” Again and again he turned to it “in search of ideas [about] the role of the individual in historical processes.” He still has the same copy of “the little book that survived storms and the years; the same little book with the same underlinings . . . and the same arrows and the same cover I used as camouflage so that my superiors wouldn't say ‘what are you doing reading that?' ”

Herma Marksman, his mistress in the 1980s, has said, “He read everything, but he especially liked the stories of great leaders.” The stories—and the theories. In an interview in 1995, Chávez remarked that “we men can situate ourselves . . . in leading roles that speed or slow the process, give it a small personal touch . . . But I think that history is the product of the collective being of the people. And I feel myself absolutely given over to that collective being.” In colloquial terms, he has often referred to himself as a mere “instrument of the collective being.” This is a highly idiosyncratic use of Plekhanov, but with it Chávez crafted his argument for the rule of the traditional Latin American military autocrat, the
caudillo
: “If they [the
caudillos
] develop a real awareness, if they detach themselves and view the process from a distance, if they devote their lives, their efforts, to collectivize through their ‘mythical' power . . . then you can justify the presence of the
caudillo
.”

This theory of the individual in history, which is really a theory of the great man in history, explains his admiration for Castro. Although at the time he still wondered whether it was “a curse or a spreading virus” for the historical process to rely on a single man, when he visited Cuba in 1995 Chávez was deeply moved by the way the people identified with the leader, the “collective” with the
caudillo
. While he was traveling in the eastern region of the island, a woman recognized Chávez in a restaurant and hugged him: “Caramba! you talked to the chief, you talked to Fidel.” For Chávez, “that is the people's message, I get everything I need straight from the people, the people on the street.” Apparently Chávez had made his decision. It was sufficient for the leader sincerely to declare himself a humble servant of the collective, and for the collective sincerely to accept him as its leader. “The role of the individual in history” could then unfold.

In practice, though, what was the “collective”? Did it have segments, or was it a homogeneous whole? And were those parts free to form judgments? Could they disagree with the
caudillo
? Was there a way of measuring how well the
caudillo
served the collective? Could the collective choose another
caudillo
, or no
caudillo
at all? These questions did not occur to the ambitious soldier. The important thing was the mystical union of the many and the one, the dissolving of the collective into the leader. That was why it seemed natural and even desirable to Chávez that Castro had “enormous influence over the island”: that “generations have gotten used to Fidel doing everything. Without Fidel they would be lost. He's everything to them.” Castro was an example of the way in which
caudillos
can “detach themselves, view the process from a distance and devote their lives . . . to collectivize through their ‘mythical' power.” And Castro had the historical right to be “everything”: he was, after all, a hero—the great hero of Latin America.

Chávez also proposed to “detach himself,” just as Castro had for more than fifty years. And he was a hero, too—maybe not a conquering hero, a triumphant and legendary guerrilla like Fidel, but still a soldier with the heart of a guerrilla: “The body of the nation is in pieces. The hands over here, the legs over there, the head on the other side of the mountains, the body of what is really the collective. Now, to go through life and get something done about putting that body back together, joining the hands to the arms and bringing it to life, giving the people, the collective, a motor, I think this justifies having lived.” Marksman saw a transfiguration in her longtime lover: a “messianic glow” had descended upon him. According to another revolutionary friend, Chávez “was convinced that he was carrying out an earthly mission guided by a superhuman force.” At the time, Chávez himself seemed to reject—but only halfheartedly—this vision. “I don't believe in messiahs or
caudillos
, although people say that's what I am, I don't know whether I am or not, maybe there's a little bit of that in me . . .”

 

PRESIDENT CHÁVEZ
has been an assiduous reader of Plekhanov, but perhaps not the most astute reader. Georgi V. Plekhanov, who was born in Gudalovka, Russia, in 1856 and died in exile in 1918, was considered the father of Russian Marxism. He wrote
The Role of the Individual in History
around 1898, during the honeymoon period of his relationship with his disciple V. I. Lenin, with whom he edited the journal
Iskra.
Originally a Bakunian populist, Plekhanov fled czarist Russia in 1880, taking refuge in Geneva. He would not set foot on Russian soil again until 1917. It was he who coined the term “dialectical materialism.” Plekhanov believed that there were immutable laws of history, and he thought that if Russia followed the same trajectory as the countries of Western Europe, it would emerge from feudalism into a state of mature capitalism, which was the necessary condition for its inevitable evolution into the ultimate and final dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1889 he made his first appearance at the Congress of the Second International. In 1895, Lenin traveled to Switzerland to meet him.

Following the lead of Thomas Carlyle, Plekhanov believed in the existence of “great men” as initiators or originators. “This is a very apt description,” he wrote. “A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others.” In this sense, the great man is a hero “not . . . in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course.” The leader is the supreme instrument of history's search for its conclusion. His freedom consists in his ability to choose a course of action in accordance with the fixed laws of historical progress:

 

If I know in what direction social relations are changing, owing to given changes in the social-economic process of production, I also know in what direction social mentality is changing; consequently, I am able to influence it. Influencing social mentality means influencing historical events. Hence, in a certain sense, I
can make history
, and there is no need for me to wait while “it is being made.”

 

Plekhanov's concept of the “individual's role in history” might have been inspired by Hegel, who in his
Philosophy of History
speaks of “world-historical men.” These beings with an essential role in the development of the universally valid “Spirit,” these visionary agents of History, are followed by their sympathizers, who “feel the irresistible power of their own inner Spirit thus embodied.” From this metaphysical-authoritarian premise Hegel concluded that the ordinary rules of ethics were not applicable to great men. “Heroic coercion,” he noted in his
Philosophy of Right
, “is justified coercion.” The moral equivalence of might and right was also a key doctrine of Thomas Carlyle: “Might and Right,” he wrote in 1839, “so frightfully discrepant at first, are ever in the long run one and the same.”

Lenin certainly agreed. But Plekhanov did not, and this was the irreparable difference between them. Against the backdrop of the Second International in Brussels in 1903, the disagreement between the two grew deeper, and led finally to a break. Lenin assumed absolute leadership of the movement, with the support of the group that would come to be known as the Bolsheviks. “This is the cloth from which Robespierres are cut,” thundered Plekhanov, who would accuse them of “mistaking the dictatorship of the proletariat for a dictatorship over the proletariat.” Shortly afterward he gave up the editorship of
Iskra
, leaving it in Lenin's hands. His final article was a prophetic
j'accuse
titled “Centralism or Bonapartism”:

 

Let us imagine that the Central Committee, recognized by all of us, had the right, still under consideration, of “liquidation.” The following could then occur. A congress is convened, the Central Committee “liquidates” the elements with which it is displeased, selects at the same time the creatures with which it is pleased, and with them makes up all the committees, thus guaranteeing itself without further ado an entirely submissive majority at the congress. The congress composed of the creatures of the Central Committee affably shouts “Hurrah!” approves all its acts, good or bad, and applauds all its projects and initiatives. In such a case, the party would really have neither a majority nor a minority, because we should have put into practice the political ideal of the Shah of Persia.

 

Over the following years, Plekhanov grew more and more isolated, disturbed by the new phenomenon of absolute power concentrated in a vanguard party, itself commanded by a person beyond appeal, a “Shah of Persia.” This phenomenon struck him as contrary to the laws of history. That was why he called Lenin the “alchemist of the revolution” and considered him a “demagogue from head to toe.”

In the standard manuals of Marxist-Leninist theory, Plekhanov figures as a wrongheaded dissident. According to Lenin, the attitude of his old ally was “the height of vulgarity and baseness.” Plekhanov is remembered as the first leading intellectual before Trotsky to sound an alarm against Marxism-Leninism. Just months before his death, he came out in support of the ill-fated Menshevik prime minister Kerensky. Of Lenin, he said in his
Political Testament
that “not understanding the true goal of that maximalist fanatic was my greatest mistake.”

 

IF PLEKHANOV
had lived until the end of the twentieth century, chances are that his view of Castro would have been much the same as his view of Lenin. He would have denounced the Shah of Cuba. The Plekhanov who fought for humanist values, the Plekhanov who refused to subordinate society to its leader and represented the classic Marxist critique of the Caesarist and Bonapartist spirit of Lenin and Leninism, is not the Plekhanov whom Comandante Chávez has been reading and rereading for thirty years. He may consider himself a Plekhanovist, but Plekhanov would not have been a Chavista.

And judging by his political writings, Plekhanov's teacher would also not have supported Chávez nor his mystique. In Marx's writing after his famous attack on Bonapartism (
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
)
there is an unexpectedly direct connection to President Chávez's epic script. In London, around 1857, Marx received a request from his New York editor, Charles A. Dana, to write an article on Simón Bolívar for
The New American Cyclopaedia
. Although military affairs were Engels's specialty, and although Marx felt a marked and racist distaste for what he regarded as the backward and barbarous countries of Hispanic America, he accepted the assignment. He wrote hastily, with his usual sarcasm, drawing on just a few sources, all hostile to the Liberator. The final version of his biographical sketch made Dana uncomfortable, though he published it anyway in 1858.

In Marx's account, Bolívar is pilloried—among other negative qualifications—as a yokel, a hypocrite, a clod, a womanizer, a traitor, a fickle friend, a wastrel, an aristocrat putting on republican airs, a liar, a social climber who surrounded himself with the show of a court and whose few military successes were due to the Irish and Hannoverian mercenaries whom he hired as advisors. That Marx's animosity toward Bolívar was almost personal is clear. In a letter to Engels he repeats his opinions, calling Bolívar “the most dastardly, most miserable and meanest of blackguards,” comparing him to Faustin-Élie Soulouque, the flamboyant Haitian
caudillo
who in 1852 had himself crowned emperor under the title of Faustino I.