Fantasmas / Elizabeth Araujo

Ghosts

There is no spectacle more fascinating than that of resurrection. The return of what had been assumed buried, appearing without warning, to the surprise of those who were beginning to grow accustomed to enjoying life in another manner. A week ago, the body—already dry, already wasted—of the caudillo Juan Domingo Perón was moved to the pantheon of Argentine heroes, and its transit through Azopardo street occasioned a disturbance with dead and injured, due to a ridiculous confrontation between partisan factions who were fighting to stand closest to the corpse.

Days later, president Hugo Chávez gives an exclusive that brings the world out of uncertainty: his ideological mentor was not at the gates of hell, as Time magazine suggested, but instead for the disgrace—some say—of that long-suffering nation, Fidel Castro is up and about, visiting fields and farms, to the surprise of those who bump into him on the road.

His word be said. To judge by the graphic proof offered by Granma, the reappearance of the comandante seems more like the odyssey of a dead person who, in effect, must have frightened more than one Cuban, who hears noises near his house one night, looks out the window and finds himself face to face with a migrating corpse.

Just yesterday, the candidate-president brought to life a project that Venezuelans had taken for dead: the Vuelvan Caras mission.

Conceived to assure two million jobs, this program, which strangely leans on the slogan "Traitor, oligarch, who chose to die over there in the land of the empire," was never discussed again. Of course, for electoral reasons, the plan was updated and with a different slogan it returns thirty days before the election, granting virtues that were denied for eight years to a population that wanders from here to there in search of any little job to survive. Days before, the candidate had pulled Karl Marx out of his handkerchief to sell the socialist mode of production to a few workers at a cacao farm that was inaugurated in Petaquire. A proposal that wouldn't have pleased the members of that cooperative because, according to his reading of Marx, "this isn't about become rich, but about producing for the benefit of the community, renouncing individual earnings and luxuries." Far from saying goodbye to the past, this passionate reader of Chomsky seriously incubates a model for an openly communist society, but obviously...

for everyone else, if one observes the lifestyle of his ministers and representatives, whose will of submission to the proceso has allowed them to enjoy an opulence that invokes the past.




{ Elizabeth Araujo, TalCual, 31 October 2006 }