Hugo McChavez

As the title might suggest, I´m about to get into a big, fat diatribe about politics and economics in Venezuela. You´ve been warned.

But first, let me tell you about my diarrhea.

Just kidding, sort of. We spent our first four days in Venezuela in Rio Caribe, a comfortable but unspectacular little coastal town. Then we took a Sunday morning bus to Cumana, a city of 350,000 people. Amber and I both got a nasty case of motion sickness on the ride. Fun.

To make a lame story short, my motion sickness kept going for about 72 hours after we got off the bus. Fun! My first nausea of the travel season. Amber was fine, thankfully, and brought me crackers and sprite and stuff. The owners of the posada found out that I was sick, and sent soup and fruit up to our room--unbelievably nice of them.

So if you´re ever in Cumana, stay at Posada La Cazuela, on Calle Sucre. There´s my shameless ad for the day.

We did almost nothing of great tourist interest in Cumana, though we did find our Swedish friends. They had a ton of fun with the military. More on that later.

After three uneventful days in Cumana, we headed to Santa Fe, a small fishing town just an hour away. We almost immediately found the posada of our dreams. Our room is on the third floor, overlooking the sea. The room actually is completely open to the ocean--no windows or anything, just a half-wall, so we constantly have a breeze from the water and the moon shines through the palm trees onto our bed at night. Amazing place--the town is nothing special, but we´re just two flights of stairs away from the beach, and we get most of the joys of being outside while we´re in our cozy room. All for just US$20 per night. We´ll be here for awhile. There´s even an outdoor kitchen that we can use. Good stuff.

Okay, that´s it for the personal garbage. Now, about Venezuela and the great Presidente Chavez...and baseball....

More than a few friends/family expressed concern about our travels to Venezuela. I think I mentioned earlier that everything has been fine--we were treated well at the border, and people have been extremely kind everywhere we´ve been so far.

(Our Swedish friend Paul was strip-searched at the border, and then was searched two more times at checkpoints during his first two hours in Venezuela. Amber and I apparently look less suspicious--or less wealthy, or something. For more, feel free to read Paul´s blog: http://frigyes.blogspot.com/.)

I think that a lot of us in the United States have a bit too extreme of an image of ¨dictatorships.¨ Chavez, according to the American press, is a dictator who restricts the free press and manipulates far too many aspects of daily life. To an American, this sounds a bit like Soviet Russia or North Korea. We then assume that people are on lockdown, with no freedom of speech whatsoever and military pricks running around everywhere.

There´s a grain of truth to this image, but only a grain. Yup, there are lots of guys running around in fatigues--a couple of dozen were dispatched to keep order at the little festival we saw in Rio Caribe. Completely unnecessary--I don´t think that little town needed even two cops for its festival. And there are a fair number of checkpoints on the roads, but nothing more intense than in the American Southwest.

But freedom of speech? No problem. Nobody seems shy about speaking their minds. We had a chat over breakfast one morning with a pair of businessmen from western Venezuela. When they left, one of them said, ¨Have a wonderful time with your travels in Venezuela. The entire country is beautiful, except for that cunt we have as a president.¨ At the posada in Rio Caribe, the owner told us to ¨be careful at the beach--the military cameras watch everything.¨ Honestly, I don´t think there were any cameras at all, but her comment was interesting.

In Cumana, the posada owner went on a diatribe about what a useless populist schmuck Chavez is. We were the first American guests at his (six-room) posada in the three years that he´s had the business, and he was thrilled. ¨The people of Venezuela love America. We love New York, and hot dogs, and baseball... it´s just that our president is a dipshit.¨ He and I talked about baseball for a good while, boring Amber almost to tears.

By the way, this country is baseball-crazy. When Magglio Ordoñez won the batting title, it was front page news. Not on the sports page...on the front page of the whole damned paper. I like this country. Except that most people seem to be Yankee fans--I see Yankees gear everywhere, and sports radio shows disproportionately focus on the bastards. That´s unfortunate.

So for those of you who might be wondering how I´m managing to keep up with the playoffs, it´s fairly easy. Some of the games are broadcast on the radio, which is great...although the schedule seems a bit capricious, in a stereotypically Latin way. And the Venezuelan announcers tend to drift off and talk about things which have nothing to do with the game being played. Suddenly, a couple of batters have come and gone while they were talking about some guy who isn´t even in the playoffs.

Yesterday, the games were pre-empted by a really long speech by Chavez, who seems to be everywhere. He has an extremely long-winded TV program on Sundays, consisting of Chavez blabbing on without a script for three hours. I watched some of it. Excruciating. Then he´s back on TV and radio a few days later, with another really long speech.

People are obviously free to criticize him here, but I think most people do actually like the guy. After listening to a few of his speeches, I agree somewhat with my baseball-loving friend in Cumana: Chavez is kind of a blowhard. He´s either not that bright, or he thinks that his listeners are idiots--or both.

Why is he so popular? Well, part of it is simply that he does seem to give a shit about normal people. His biggest focus is on reducing unemployment. He has some pretty silly ideas about how to do it (increasing the military, shorting the legal workweek...for starters), but at least he seems to genuinely want the country to enjoy full employment. He has brought health and education services to a whole lot of rural places for the first time. In a few ways, I think he´s done well, based on what I can pick up from newspapers, radio, and conversations.

So you might be able to convince me that Chavez is a prick, but I still love the way he stands up to George Bush, who is a far more murderous prick. And I think that a sizeable minority of Venezuelans love Chavez for his anti-imperialist rhetoric alone, and pay little attention to the rest of his activities. He´s done an amazing job of creating a ¨brand¨for himself. Hugo Chavez, building a NEW socialism. No freedom fries, but maybe a McMarx Burger with cheese.

Having said all that, I think the economy here is pretty screwed. Food prices are way out of whack with everything else. An hour at an internet cafe costs US$.50, but a can of corn costs about $1.75 on average. Gasoline is massively subsidized, but there´s a disturbing dearth of food stores, restaurants, etc. My impression is that most people get by on a pretty simple diet of rice, beans, and plantains--even a meal in a cheap restaurant (usually close to $8 for an entree) has to be well out of reach for most people. Which is why we´ve seen virtually no restaurants, and precious few stores stocked with any real variety of food products.

I can´t claim to be an expert on Venezuelan economic policy, but I have the impression that Chavez has done some serious distorting. He tries to keep prices down by imposing price controls on food, but that´s just forced some producers out of business. Since less food is being produced, the prices ulitmately rise--I think some basic foods are sold cheaply at government-subsidized stores, but other products end up being really expensive...especially when you start to think about how low wages are here.

The other big oddity is the capital controls. You can walk into a bank in Venezuela, and they´ll give you bolivares if you bring them some good old American dollars. But they won´t make the exchange in the other direction, not at any price. A Venezuelan simply can´t buy dollars or any other foreign currency with bolivares. As far as I can tell, Chavez is just trying to stockpile foreign currency for some reason, and does not allow the free conversion of the bolivar.

The official exchange rate is 2,150 bolivares per dollar. But people have little faith in the currency--I was offered 3,500 bolivares per dollar by a private (highly illegal) moneychanger. In other words, normal people expect the bolivar to someday be worth a whole lot less than it is now, and they´ll pay a 65% premium just to get their hands on a nice, stable currency like the US dollar. Crazy stuff.

Have your eyes glazed over yet?

The internet connection in Santa Fe is miserably slow, so these entries might be a little bit rare for the next week or so. After three days here, I´m in absolutely no hurry to leave. Maybe another week? Then, we´re off to Ciudad Bolivar and the Gran Sabana, a region of jungly table mountains on our way to Brazil.