Eugenio Montejo
We’ve lost Eugenio Montejo, one of the noblest voices amid the poetry written in the tongue of those who pray to God in Spanish – as Rubén Darío said in one of his verses. However, this mini-columnist cannot speak of the poet. Others do so today with superior knowledge than my own. Instead, I have to say something about Eugenio Montejo the citizen. A citizen of this republic whose torments were never foreign to him. Dante reserved one of the worst places in hell for those who during times of profound moral crisis opted for the comfortable posture of silence or for an accommodating “neutrality.” Montejo wasn’t one of those. A profound sense of moral duty, much more than a political one, made him negate all pretensions that his work be used as an instrument by a regime that, without gesticulations and from his discrete position in public life, he rejected with absolute firmness as an expression of a moral decadence that repulsed him. This country is fortunate that it can depend on poet-philosophers – as Francisco Rodríguez so accurately describes them – such as him and Rafael Cadenas, who are able to give sustenance, with their mere conduct as citizens, to the deep moral revulsion these Venezuelan times inevitably generate in all good people. Of the poet, his pure verses remain, with their robust simplicity and density, along with the sage chronicles of his various heteronyms and the example of his moral rectitude. This is no minor legacy for the country he loved.
{ Simón Boccanegra, Tal Cual, 9 June 2008 }
Showing posts with label Teodoro Petkoff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teodoro Petkoff. Show all posts
6.10.2008
4.21.2008
Stalinismo tropical / Teodoro Petkoff
Tropical Stalinism
This year the government’s celebration of the events of April 2002 had a precise objective: to destroy the figure of general Raúl Baduel. The vast amounts of hot air spent during those days, Yo El Supremo’s superfluous speeches broadcast on required TV and radio bulletins, the liturgy of Puente Llaguno and general García Carneiro’s intervention, all had a guiding thread: to demonstrate that Baduel had nothing to do with the president’s return to Miraflores Palace and that this “Hero of the Revolution” is actually nothing more than a traitor.
The procedure recalls the manipulations of history that took place in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s era and which always ended, after a certain amount of time, not only with the death but also the disappearance from history of the people Stalin condemned. It would begin with a campaign of insults against the “enemies” that covered them in mud, in order to then, once they were sufficiently destroyed politically and morally in the eyes of the citizenry, not only execute but also erase them from history with impunity. Stalin dedicated himself with zeal to destroying in this manner the entire Bolshevik elite who led the revolution of 1917. In this manner the great leaders of the Bolshevik assault, along with thousands of old revolutionary fighters, were erased from history, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and finally Leon Trotsky himself. The slaughter had a quality that could seem comical if it hadn’t been such a tragedy: each time Stalin liquidated a member of the communist directorate of 1917, that individual was eliminated from the photographs where he appeared as a leader. So every year the official photographs had to be retouched.
Fidel Castro has also been given to these types of exercises, although with less amplitude than what was done in the USSR. There is a famous photograph of Castro with Carlos Franqui, the director of Radio Rebelde in the Sierra Maestra mountains and later one of the first dissidents, standing to his right. After Franqui left Cuba, he too was taken out of the photo.
This constitutes one of the profound differences between a democratic conception of life and a totalitarian one. A democratic vision of history assumes contradictions. No one would think of erasing general Manuel Piar from our history. A totalitarian regime, on the other hand, is proud of projecting a monolithic image. Both the part relating to past history, of which it claims to be a descendant, as well its own, cannot present fissures or contradictions, and much less positions countering the leader.
We continue to be perplexed by the effort to copy practices that are not just aberrant but frankly stupid, such as the notion of writing history to please the chief. But, on the other hand, if this Stalinist campaign against him demonstrates anything, it’s the importance of having the name Raúl Baduel.
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 21 April 2008 }
This year the government’s celebration of the events of April 2002 had a precise objective: to destroy the figure of general Raúl Baduel. The vast amounts of hot air spent during those days, Yo El Supremo’s superfluous speeches broadcast on required TV and radio bulletins, the liturgy of Puente Llaguno and general García Carneiro’s intervention, all had a guiding thread: to demonstrate that Baduel had nothing to do with the president’s return to Miraflores Palace and that this “Hero of the Revolution” is actually nothing more than a traitor.
The procedure recalls the manipulations of history that took place in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s era and which always ended, after a certain amount of time, not only with the death but also the disappearance from history of the people Stalin condemned. It would begin with a campaign of insults against the “enemies” that covered them in mud, in order to then, once they were sufficiently destroyed politically and morally in the eyes of the citizenry, not only execute but also erase them from history with impunity. Stalin dedicated himself with zeal to destroying in this manner the entire Bolshevik elite who led the revolution of 1917. In this manner the great leaders of the Bolshevik assault, along with thousands of old revolutionary fighters, were erased from history, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and finally Leon Trotsky himself. The slaughter had a quality that could seem comical if it hadn’t been such a tragedy: each time Stalin liquidated a member of the communist directorate of 1917, that individual was eliminated from the photographs where he appeared as a leader. So every year the official photographs had to be retouched.
Fidel Castro has also been given to these types of exercises, although with less amplitude than what was done in the USSR. There is a famous photograph of Castro with Carlos Franqui, the director of Radio Rebelde in the Sierra Maestra mountains and later one of the first dissidents, standing to his right. After Franqui left Cuba, he too was taken out of the photo.
This constitutes one of the profound differences between a democratic conception of life and a totalitarian one. A democratic vision of history assumes contradictions. No one would think of erasing general Manuel Piar from our history. A totalitarian regime, on the other hand, is proud of projecting a monolithic image. Both the part relating to past history, of which it claims to be a descendant, as well its own, cannot present fissures or contradictions, and much less positions countering the leader.
We continue to be perplexed by the effort to copy practices that are not just aberrant but frankly stupid, such as the notion of writing history to please the chief. But, on the other hand, if this Stalinist campaign against him demonstrates anything, it’s the importance of having the name Raúl Baduel.
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 21 April 2008 }
4.08.2008
Monte Ávila, Rafael Cadenas, Carlos Noguera / Simón Boccanegra
Monte Ávila, Rafael Cadenas, Carlos Noguera
Assuming as reliable the information provided by a professor at UCV’s Escuela de Letras regarding a supposed veto against the work of Rafael Cadenas by Monte Ávila, this mini-columnist made the mistake of publishing a critical note about the matter, revealing my surprise about such behavior coming from Carlos Noguera, the director of the State’s publishing house. Well, the information I commented on doesn’t coincide with the truth. The exact opposite is the case. It is Cadenas himself, along with Eugenio Montejo, who refuses to publish his work with Monte Ávila. Moreover, Noguera has made efforts to publish the verse of the great poet from the state of Lara. So, I apologize to Carlos Noguera for having attributed a censor’s spirit to him. Having received the information, it left me a bit perplexed because I know Noguera well enough to realize that intolerance isn’t one of his characteristic traits. Forgive me, my friend, but in such singular times as these, when the weirdest things happen, and after one has seen so many old friends, once furious critics of Stalinism, who become mute when faced with Farruco [Sesto]’s abuses and other excesses in the cultural landscape, I attributed to you a responsibility that isn’t yours. I’m happy to know you don’t run with that crowd.
{ Simón Boccanegra, Tal Cual, 8 April 2008 }
Assuming as reliable the information provided by a professor at UCV’s Escuela de Letras regarding a supposed veto against the work of Rafael Cadenas by Monte Ávila, this mini-columnist made the mistake of publishing a critical note about the matter, revealing my surprise about such behavior coming from Carlos Noguera, the director of the State’s publishing house. Well, the information I commented on doesn’t coincide with the truth. The exact opposite is the case. It is Cadenas himself, along with Eugenio Montejo, who refuses to publish his work with Monte Ávila. Moreover, Noguera has made efforts to publish the verse of the great poet from the state of Lara. So, I apologize to Carlos Noguera for having attributed a censor’s spirit to him. Having received the information, it left me a bit perplexed because I know Noguera well enough to realize that intolerance isn’t one of his characteristic traits. Forgive me, my friend, but in such singular times as these, when the weirdest things happen, and after one has seen so many old friends, once furious critics of Stalinism, who become mute when faced with Farruco [Sesto]’s abuses and other excesses in the cultural landscape, I attributed to you a responsibility that isn’t yours. I’m happy to know you don’t run with that crowd.
{ Simón Boccanegra, Tal Cual, 8 April 2008 }
1.24.2008
¿Otra dictadura? ¡Jamás! / Teodoro Petkoff
Another Dictatorship? Never!
Half a century ago, on a day like yesterday, an uprising of the Venezuelan masses, represented by the residents of Caracas, overthrew the military dictatorship of [Marcos] Pérez Jiménez. In order to produce that result, three central factors converged. First, the unifying agreement of that era’s political forces, who created the Junta Patriótica as an organ to direct the joint effort; second, the uprising of the Caraqueño masses, which began with the general strike on the 21st; third, the final intervention of the Armed Forces (already fractured internally, as evidenced by the February 1st rebellion), who when faced with the political bankruptcy of the dictatorship, took out the chair from under the feet of the General who had ruled in their name, forcing him to stand in the dust.
One historical lesson remains from that day and the events leading to it: the Venezuelan nation is not willing to tolerate an indefinite confiscation of its freedoms by a dictatorship. The people rose up because of apparently abstract things such as freedom and democracy. It’s relevant to remember that the popular revolt began to brew when the dictator tried, by means of the artifice of a plebiscite, to give his mandate a continuity beyond the period established by the Constitution. Ironically, Pérez Jiménez was strangled by his own Constitution. So, it wasn’t necessarily due to strictly material reasons – though these did contribute to the climate that made the insurrection possible – but instead to a democratic complaint: the right to choose; to choose in the widest sense and not only in the political sphere, which had been severely wounded by a dictatorship that made law of the General-dictator’s will.
This is what establishes a link between 23 January 1958 and 2 December 2007. On the latter date, less than two months ago, the nation gave a “back off,” this time peaceful and electoral, to the attempt to eternally install a political regime by means of a constitutional reform that attacked not only the right to choose but would have also transformed into constitutional norm a project that gave the State an invasive power in the private lives of citizens, a move that can only be described as totalitarian. On this occasion, Venezuelans once again came out to defend democracy’s substantive values. On December 2nd, just like fifty years ago, the people mobilized again behind the flag of freedom. Those who aspire to give orders for life should never forget the words of Alonso Quijano, known as Don Quixote: “For the sake of freedom, Sancho, as well as for honor, one can and must venture for the sake of life and, conversely, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall men.” This is what the Venezuelan masses believe in.
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 24 January 2008 }
Half a century ago, on a day like yesterday, an uprising of the Venezuelan masses, represented by the residents of Caracas, overthrew the military dictatorship of [Marcos] Pérez Jiménez. In order to produce that result, three central factors converged. First, the unifying agreement of that era’s political forces, who created the Junta Patriótica as an organ to direct the joint effort; second, the uprising of the Caraqueño masses, which began with the general strike on the 21st; third, the final intervention of the Armed Forces (already fractured internally, as evidenced by the February 1st rebellion), who when faced with the political bankruptcy of the dictatorship, took out the chair from under the feet of the General who had ruled in their name, forcing him to stand in the dust.
One historical lesson remains from that day and the events leading to it: the Venezuelan nation is not willing to tolerate an indefinite confiscation of its freedoms by a dictatorship. The people rose up because of apparently abstract things such as freedom and democracy. It’s relevant to remember that the popular revolt began to brew when the dictator tried, by means of the artifice of a plebiscite, to give his mandate a continuity beyond the period established by the Constitution. Ironically, Pérez Jiménez was strangled by his own Constitution. So, it wasn’t necessarily due to strictly material reasons – though these did contribute to the climate that made the insurrection possible – but instead to a democratic complaint: the right to choose; to choose in the widest sense and not only in the political sphere, which had been severely wounded by a dictatorship that made law of the General-dictator’s will.
This is what establishes a link between 23 January 1958 and 2 December 2007. On the latter date, less than two months ago, the nation gave a “back off,” this time peaceful and electoral, to the attempt to eternally install a political regime by means of a constitutional reform that attacked not only the right to choose but would have also transformed into constitutional norm a project that gave the State an invasive power in the private lives of citizens, a move that can only be described as totalitarian. On this occasion, Venezuelans once again came out to defend democracy’s substantive values. On December 2nd, just like fifty years ago, the people mobilized again behind the flag of freedom. Those who aspire to give orders for life should never forget the words of Alonso Quijano, known as Don Quixote: “For the sake of freedom, Sancho, as well as for honor, one can and must venture for the sake of life and, conversely, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall men.” This is what the Venezuelan masses believe in.
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 24 January 2008 }
11.08.2007
Los estudiantes / Teodoro Petkoff
The Students
The students, ah the students. You can imagine the bitterness of the leader of the “revolution” and “socialism” now that he’s facing off against the students. The man who has managed the power of symbols so efficiently, who has created so many symbolic images (“missions,” “Santa Inés,” “Maisanta,” “squalid ones,” and many others) that trap the minds of his followers and inflame their hearts, he knows perfectly well the symbolic value of young people – the country’s future, as the saying goes – rejecting his regime. That’s why he seems to be so out of his wits. Chávez understands perfectly well that when the kids are marching on the streets and the government has nothing else to use against them but tanks, national guards and police, the “revolution” ends up looking “skinny, wilted and undone.” The “revolution” has already become an anachronism, it’s stuck in the past, it lost the future and its present is an ancient, vacillating, erratic, shaky old lady. For the first time in this war of symbols – which has been waged these past eight, almost nine, years –, Big Papi is on his knees.
This is no longer the government of a revolution, it is simply just another government, the same as so many others we’ve had before, whose response to the students on the street is the same as yesterday’s: batons, water cannons, tear gas, sadistic brutality. In his desperation, conscious of the effect of the powerful image of thousands upon thousands of defiant girls and boys, throughout the entire country, Chacumbele tries out that same old, worn-out trick. “Mama’s boys,” “rich kids,” “puppies of the oligarchy,” these are the insults he expels through his mouth in a pathetic attempt to disqualify his opponent, who now steps onto his terrain. But there’s no way for him to downplay his opponent’s gains. The students have always been loved in Venezuela. There hasn’t been a dictatorship that didn’t have them as enemies, and the masses have always felt themselves represented by them.
He had to swallow the threats he made on Sunday. He thought he’d be able to intimidate the students and their answer was a proud, “Who said fear!” There’s a new political actor on the scene. He’s been absent for over two decades, but he has reappeared, with a full tank, the vanguard of a country that today, even within the ranks of the masses who vote for Chávez, honestly asks itself what abyss the President intends for us. The NO to the constitutional referendum grows gigantic. The disposition to defeat the self-continuing and totalitarian intent, with vote in hand, is receiving a formidable impulse. The battering ram emerges from the classrooms.
*
Wednesday’s march was majestic. Well organized, with the students themselves preventing any actions by provocateurs or hotheads. They accomplished their objective to reach the Supreme Court. The response from the regime’s fascist-gangster squads was the assault on the Universidad Central de Venezuela [when students returned from the march], with its sum of students wounded by gunshots. Desperation is beginning to take hold of the Constitutional “reformers.” Their masks are falling off, in effect; the masks of those who lack any reason besides brute force. They’re hoping for a pretext to take over the university. They provoke violence so as to invoke government violence. What a contrast between the students’ march and the treacherous, cowardly and armed attack against the students and the university! The attack is the echo of Chávez’s speech last Sunday.
[Photo: Saúl Uzcátegui / Tal Cual]
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 8 October 2007 }
The students, ah the students. You can imagine the bitterness of the leader of the “revolution” and “socialism” now that he’s facing off against the students. The man who has managed the power of symbols so efficiently, who has created so many symbolic images (“missions,” “Santa Inés,” “Maisanta,” “squalid ones,” and many others) that trap the minds of his followers and inflame their hearts, he knows perfectly well the symbolic value of young people – the country’s future, as the saying goes – rejecting his regime. That’s why he seems to be so out of his wits. Chávez understands perfectly well that when the kids are marching on the streets and the government has nothing else to use against them but tanks, national guards and police, the “revolution” ends up looking “skinny, wilted and undone.” The “revolution” has already become an anachronism, it’s stuck in the past, it lost the future and its present is an ancient, vacillating, erratic, shaky old lady. For the first time in this war of symbols – which has been waged these past eight, almost nine, years –, Big Papi is on his knees.
This is no longer the government of a revolution, it is simply just another government, the same as so many others we’ve had before, whose response to the students on the street is the same as yesterday’s: batons, water cannons, tear gas, sadistic brutality. In his desperation, conscious of the effect of the powerful image of thousands upon thousands of defiant girls and boys, throughout the entire country, Chacumbele tries out that same old, worn-out trick. “Mama’s boys,” “rich kids,” “puppies of the oligarchy,” these are the insults he expels through his mouth in a pathetic attempt to disqualify his opponent, who now steps onto his terrain. But there’s no way for him to downplay his opponent’s gains. The students have always been loved in Venezuela. There hasn’t been a dictatorship that didn’t have them as enemies, and the masses have always felt themselves represented by them.
He had to swallow the threats he made on Sunday. He thought he’d be able to intimidate the students and their answer was a proud, “Who said fear!” There’s a new political actor on the scene. He’s been absent for over two decades, but he has reappeared, with a full tank, the vanguard of a country that today, even within the ranks of the masses who vote for Chávez, honestly asks itself what abyss the President intends for us. The NO to the constitutional referendum grows gigantic. The disposition to defeat the self-continuing and totalitarian intent, with vote in hand, is receiving a formidable impulse. The battering ram emerges from the classrooms.
*
Wednesday’s march was majestic. Well organized, with the students themselves preventing any actions by provocateurs or hotheads. They accomplished their objective to reach the Supreme Court. The response from the regime’s fascist-gangster squads was the assault on the Universidad Central de Venezuela [when students returned from the march], with its sum of students wounded by gunshots. Desperation is beginning to take hold of the Constitutional “reformers.” Their masks are falling off, in effect; the masks of those who lack any reason besides brute force. They’re hoping for a pretext to take over the university. They provoke violence so as to invoke government violence. What a contrast between the students’ march and the treacherous, cowardly and armed attack against the students and the university! The attack is the echo of Chávez’s speech last Sunday.
[Photo: Saúl Uzcátegui / Tal Cual]
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 8 October 2007 }
11.07.2007
Contragolpe de Baduel / Teodoro Petkoff
Countercoup by Baduel
Coherence is one of Raúl Baduel’s virtues. His speech yesterday is absolutely coherent within the context of his institutional career. The citizen Raúl Baduel who yesterday assumed the defense of the Constitution, rejecting Chávez’s reform, is the same general Raúl Baduel who in April 2002, also in defense of the Constitution, was the decisive factor in the defeat of the coup and the return of the president to Miraflores Palace. And he is the same general Raúl Baduel, commander of the Army and later Minister of Defense, who always maintained his institutional role, expressing his disagreements through regular channels, without ever breaking away from the discipline and obedience that bound him to his hierarchical superior. It is the same general Raúl Baduel who, when he handed over his ministry last summer, gave a historic speech where he already announced his differences with the Chavista project, which were reaffirmed in his words yesterday. Baduel is a democratic officer, not a coup plotter and his conduct cannot be judged with the reigning view among certain sectors who intend to make impatience a policy, and who have scolded him for not speaking out earlier. He spoke when he needed to, free from the disciplinary constriction imposed on him by his condition as a soldier. Precisely because he is a professional – which is what a member of the Armed Forces should be – and not a politician, he didn’t use the military tribune for political plans, which in his case would have been a coup plotting plan.
Faithful to himself and to his civil and democratic convictions, committed, as we can see he continues to be, to a project of social change, yes, but unavoidably democratic, he drove home his declaration by calling on Venezuelans to use the path of the vote to defeat Hugo Chávez’s self-perpetuating and neo-totalitarian aspirations. He called on people to vote NO in the referendum. He spoke for the National Armed Forces, of course, but as a part of the country, not as a guide for them, so they might reflect alongside millions of Venezuelans who hold in their hands the power to prevent Hugo Chávez’s reactionary and proto-totalitarian project from consolidating itself, by defeating it in the referendum.
The impact of his speech is measured by Chávez’s reaction. First he placed his usual worshipers, the deputies of his power, to try and refute Baduel, and later on he dusted off two of his former Ministers of Defense so they could babble a few trivialities against Baduel. It will be useless. The rejection of the Constitutional reform is a stream of gunpowder.
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 6 November 2007 }
Coherence is one of Raúl Baduel’s virtues. His speech yesterday is absolutely coherent within the context of his institutional career. The citizen Raúl Baduel who yesterday assumed the defense of the Constitution, rejecting Chávez’s reform, is the same general Raúl Baduel who in April 2002, also in defense of the Constitution, was the decisive factor in the defeat of the coup and the return of the president to Miraflores Palace. And he is the same general Raúl Baduel, commander of the Army and later Minister of Defense, who always maintained his institutional role, expressing his disagreements through regular channels, without ever breaking away from the discipline and obedience that bound him to his hierarchical superior. It is the same general Raúl Baduel who, when he handed over his ministry last summer, gave a historic speech where he already announced his differences with the Chavista project, which were reaffirmed in his words yesterday. Baduel is a democratic officer, not a coup plotter and his conduct cannot be judged with the reigning view among certain sectors who intend to make impatience a policy, and who have scolded him for not speaking out earlier. He spoke when he needed to, free from the disciplinary constriction imposed on him by his condition as a soldier. Precisely because he is a professional – which is what a member of the Armed Forces should be – and not a politician, he didn’t use the military tribune for political plans, which in his case would have been a coup plotting plan.
Faithful to himself and to his civil and democratic convictions, committed, as we can see he continues to be, to a project of social change, yes, but unavoidably democratic, he drove home his declaration by calling on Venezuelans to use the path of the vote to defeat Hugo Chávez’s self-perpetuating and neo-totalitarian aspirations. He called on people to vote NO in the referendum. He spoke for the National Armed Forces, of course, but as a part of the country, not as a guide for them, so they might reflect alongside millions of Venezuelans who hold in their hands the power to prevent Hugo Chávez’s reactionary and proto-totalitarian project from consolidating itself, by defeating it in the referendum.
The impact of his speech is measured by Chávez’s reaction. First he placed his usual worshipers, the deputies of his power, to try and refute Baduel, and later on he dusted off two of his former Ministers of Defense so they could babble a few trivialities against Baduel. It will be useless. The rejection of the Constitutional reform is a stream of gunpowder.
{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 6 November 2007 }
8.02.2007
El socialismo irreal
[Oswaldo Barreto & Teodoro Petkoff, Caracas, 17 July 2007. Photo: Saúl Uzcátegui for Tal Cual]A couple weeks ago I attended the presentation for Teodoro Petkoff’s new book, El socialismo irreal (Caracas: Editorial Alfa, 2007), at the Alejandría III bookstore in Chacaíto, Caracas. The book was presented by Petkoff’s friend and colleague at his newspaper Tal Cual, the sociologist and professor Oswaldo Barreto. Petkoff also spoke about El socialismo irreal [Unreal Socialism], which is a republication of two texts from the 1970s, Checoeslovakia, el socialismo como problema (1971) and Proceso a la izquierda (1976). These essays were very influential when they were first published and have been out of print for several years. They represent Petkoff’s effort to forge a theoretical path away from the armed insurrection he led in the 1960s, as well as his formal break with the Venezuelan communist party (PCV) after his repudiation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As Barreto and Petkoff both pointed out, the topic addressed in these essays, namely, the possibility of creating a space for democratic socialism, remains a vital issue in Venezuela, as the country endures a prolonged political labyrinth under Chavismo with no foreseeable resolution.
The small bookstore was packed for the event, yet another sign of Venezuela’s thriving literary world, with bookstores full of new publications, reading groups sprouting up, and presentations & readings taking place on a weekly basis. Among the poets, novelists, historians, journalists and political figures in attendance that night (that I noticed) were Elizabeth Burgos, Inés Quintero, Ibsen Martínez, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Rafael Cadenas, Pompeyo Márquez, Manuel Caballero, Sergio Dahbar, Elías Pino Iturrieta, Mayé Primera Garces, Alonso Moleiro and Américo Martín. The large and enthusiastic audience reflects Petkoff’s ability to gather an astonishing array of writers around his small newspaper, which in seven years has become a crucial forum for critiques of Chavismo from the left and center. Petkoff’s daily editorials, along with the op-ed pieces of Tal Cual’s columnists, continue to offer insights on Venezuela’s convoluted political and cultural landscape. Although the Venezuelan government has already tried to silence Tal Cual, the newspaper remains a vibrant reference point for many Venezuelans on all sides of the political divide.
I’ve been a close reader of Barreto’s two Tal Cual columns, “Pórtico” and “Balanza de Palabra,” and I've been translating selections from them into English at this blog for several years now, so it was a pleasure to have the chance to hear him speak. Standing with Petkoff on a banister overlooking the audience, he read from a three-page essay with a slow cadence attuned to his rich and allusive prose style. He began with a comment citing Petkoff’s demand of his Tal Cual writers that their texts be succinct. He evoked a decades-long friendship with Petkoff, dating back to their clandestine efforts against the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s and their militancy as members of the PCV and the guerrilla insurgency during the presidency of Rómulo Betancourt in the 1960s. Barreto spoke of these essays as crucial moments that signaled a shift away from armed combat for many Venezuelan communists, as well as a lucid critique of Soviet policy in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. For him, these two essays are now autonomous entities, free from their author and the period from which they sprouted. They now exist in this new edition to help create problems and solutions for readers, particularly for those of us from younger generations.
Without being nostalgic, Barreto described the utopian ideals that moved them in the 1950s and 60s and how those values underwent a gradual transformation that has yet to conclude. He finished his essay, read with a cadence and intonation that at times brought to mind declaimed poetry, with an anecdote about Petkoff’s friend Gabriel García Márquez. It concerned a Venezuelan graduate student who visited García Márquez in Barcelona, Spain to discuss her dissertation on his work. In response to her questions about his novels, García Márquez told her that his character Colonel Aureliano Buendía was a “son of a bitch” and that he didn’t really like him, that his characters weren’t always under his control. Barreto’s anecdote was a way to remind us of a text’s independence from its author, how our own words can shift and take on a life of their own.
In his Friday column later that week, Barreto addressed the book further, writing:
“ (...) In the end every book is always susceptible to new readings, even on the part of a single person, since, parodying the most famous of Heraclitus’s fragments and inverting it, we can be sure that no book presents itself twice in front of the same pair of eyes. Thus, today we can find in the pages of El socialismo irreal what we didn’t see back then or what we didn’t suspect until today might be hidden within them.
For example, we can read luminous observations about the fatal nexus between imposed socialism and dictatorial forms of government, or about the inevitable rise and expansion of enormous state bureaucracies to which the government adjudicates the task of building intended forms of socialist life that no one is seeking or desiring.
(...) What El socialismo irreal highlights with unquestionable rigor and depth, is fundamentally aligned with the relations that exist between ideas and the possibility of realizing them, or between thought and will. The imagined project is one thing and the possibility of its realization another. What Teodoro saw in his passionate analysis and what he has communicated to us about situations with no exit, the great failures to which we can be led by the desire to impose certain ideals where the material and spiritual conditions don’t exist for men to experience them as their own, well, of course this speaks to directly and eloquently to all of us Venezuelans today.” (“Actualidad de El socialismo real,” Tal Cual, 20 July 2007)
Petkoff’s comments began with an observation on the generational gap he sees in Venezuela, and that he hoped these two essays might serve as an entry point for younger people to study the debates surrounding socialism, a concept now being used for authoritarian purposes by the Venezuelan government. He mentioned the experience of his daughter, in attendance that night, who was born in Bulgaria (Petkoff is the son of Bulgarian immigrants to Venezuela). When she left Bulgaria in her teens she was forced to endure an excruciating and Kafkaesque series of interviews and bureaucratic travails in order to be issued a passport. For him, Kafkaesque is a word that describes much of what’s happening in Venezuela under Chavismo. He wondered if the word “socialism” could ever be recovered from the horrible uses it was given throughout the 20th century. Petkoff suggested that socialism would carry the weight of its past mistakes for a long time, making an exploration of its definition a painful and difficult process.
In the prologue to this new edition, he situates his two essays within the context of Venezuela’s political map and what he sees as a disappearance of the ideal of a humane socialism:
“El socialismo irreal speaks, then, of what could have been socialism with a human face which was tragically frustrated in Prague and vanished definitively from the historical horizon, once the vices we’ve addressed here were not able to be corrected – without, on the other hand, any pretense of originality, but with the will to reveal them completely, even if their nakedness might cause us pain and fear.” (8-9)
Petkoff’s introduction to the 1991 edition of Checoeslovakia, el socialismo como problema, included in this volume, addresses the danger of the authoritarian impulse in socialist experiments of the 20th century. He notes a continuity of themes leading from the Prague spring of 1968 to the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989. In his words, one finds the uncanny repetition of history that equates aspects of Prague and Moscow then to Caracas today:
“An autocratic political regime, but, above all, totalitarian, according to the Soviet model, inexorably leads to the isolation of leaders from their own people. The lack of democratic and plural institutions for deliberation makes a dialogue with the nation impossible. The leader only hears his own voice, reproduced in monochromatic parliaments, which gather a few days per year to approve, always unanimously, what the leaders--when not the leader--have decided. No feedback exists between government and nation. No institutional mediation exists between the masses and the heights of power which might create a canal that allows for the circulation of information in both directions. If we factor in the uniformity and control by the state of the means of communication, what is then achieved is the disarticulation of public opinion, which ceases to exist as an operative force of society. It becomes clandestine. At the same time, the regimentation of cultural life drowns the critical role that, in general, is usually played by intellectuals. With this situation the system loses one of its most important vaccines against sclerosis. Intellectuals then become either conformists or they “exile” themselves within their own country, or they abandon it. Or they invent the samizdat, which like a dark spinning top continues to feed the spirit that suddenly produces “springtime” explosions.” (30)
A week after the presentation of El socialismo irreal, the lawyer and analyst León Arismendi wrote about the evening for Tal Cual. He brought up the issue of generational conduits and history’s vicious repetitions.
“ (...) Teodoro’s brief words for this event couldn’t have been more heartrending and in them, as in Oswaldo’s, I can’t help noticing the existential drama of a generation that, to say it with one of Alfredo Padilla’s genial “self-critical” phrases, spent half a life fighting on behalf of communism and the other half, having realized the failure of that endeavor, toiling for a rectification.
It’s significant and seems to be the result of a fatality, that after long and torturous debates, after so many encounters and separations; after the majority of the Venezuelan left had broken ranks with the Soviet anachronisms and had understood that democracy and socialism should integrate into an inseparable juncture; after a great deal of intellectual and practical effort, we now see the rebirth of the totalitarian specter and its deeds, as if everything that had been said and done had fallen into an abyss.
The spokesmen for Chavismo, with their leader at the front, repeat the old communist discourse as though they were reinventing the wheel and they have all the intentions of imposing such a thing on Venezuelan society. All you have to do is listen to the young defenders of the proceso speaking to discover the source that inspires them. Even the tone of their voices sounds Cuban. Would it be too much to ask them to read El socialismo irreal?” (“El socialismo irreal,” Tal Cual, 23 July 2007)
I’ve just begun reading the book, so it will be a while before I can comment on it here. What remains indelible for me is the enthusiasm in the bookstore that evening, as people bought books, drank wine and talked. My father recognized many faces he hadn’t seen since his days as a student at UCV in the 1960s. People were laughing & smiling, unphased by the TV and radio cameras there to record the presentation. My father and I left the mall as the event was dwindling, walked through the trees and benches of Plaza Brión and went to eat arepas at a late-night café a few blocks away. Literary production and conversation as two modes of understanding an irremediably convoluted country.
4.22.2006
Una de Teodoro / Alexis Márquez Rodríguez
One About Teodoro
To my friend Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa
January 1958. The general strike against the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship was being organized, it was supposed to start on the 21st of that month.
With Dr. Antonio Requena, a well-known doctor, at the head, a committee of people from diverse sectors had been organized, in order to coordinate participation in the strike. The support of the businessmen was decisive in assuring that commerce and industry close their doors.
We would meet at Dr. Requena’s house, in a little street in the Country Club neighborhood. Among the representatives of the businessmen were Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa, Oscar Machado Zuloaga, Alfredo Rodríguez Delfino and a few others.
By chance it was up to me to be the link between the business group and the Junta Patriótica, which was promoting the strike from its clandestine places. The contact was through Fabricio Ojeda, a reporter for El Nacional. My ties with that newspaper made it easier for me, since my presence there raised no suspicions. Of course, I didn’t know that Fabricio was from the Junta Patriótica, nor that he was its president, a position they rotated among themselves.
One day Dr. Requena tells me that an individual is offering the Junta Patriótica three radio stations, designed so as to not be easily found. I give the information to Fabricio. Soon he tells me that tomorrow, at noon I should meet someone on the bridge for the Country Club’s Avenida Principal, to then go see Dr. Requena. I ask him about who I’m going to meet and he tells me: “I can’t tell you. But when you see him you’ll know.”
In effect, on the next day at 12 sharp I’m crossing the bridge in my car, and already emerging from it appears, from I don’t know where, Teodoro Petkoff.
We go to Dr. Requena’s house. After the introduction and rigorous greetings, Requena says to Teodoro: “Tomorrow at 3 in the afternoon, in the atrium of the church of the Las Mercedes neighborhood, you will meet up with Dr. Francisco De Venanzi, who will explain to you about the radio stations.”
Teodoro responds: “Alright, I’ll be there. But I don’t know Dr. De Venanzi. I’ve never seen him and I don’t know how to recognize him.” To which Requena replied: “No one else will be there at that time. But if anyone else is there, you pay attention, and when you see a man with an idiot’s face, that’s Dr. De Venanzi.”
We all laughed, of course. I took Teodoro back to the place where we met and each one went his own way.
The handover of the radio stations was successfully accomplished, and the transistors were very important in calling together the general strike, which ended on January 23 when the dictator fled.
Thirty years later I was at El Nacional one day, with other people, in the Brujoteca as Oscar Guaramato called the cubicle of the legendary Arístides Bastidas, already in a wheelchair and a victim of all the plagues of Egypt, and I don’t know how the topic came up. I narrated the episode, and when I was finished Arístides said to me: “You were in on that too? I was the one who received the radio stations and handed them over to the Junta Patriótica.” Neither of us knew we had both participated in that episode. A living testimony of a well-done political job, impeccable and thus successful, the product of a mysticism and discipline that, unfortunately, were lost forever after the 1960s.
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, TalCual, 21 April 2006 }
To my friend Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa
January 1958. The general strike against the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship was being organized, it was supposed to start on the 21st of that month.
With Dr. Antonio Requena, a well-known doctor, at the head, a committee of people from diverse sectors had been organized, in order to coordinate participation in the strike. The support of the businessmen was decisive in assuring that commerce and industry close their doors.
We would meet at Dr. Requena’s house, in a little street in the Country Club neighborhood. Among the representatives of the businessmen were Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa, Oscar Machado Zuloaga, Alfredo Rodríguez Delfino and a few others.
By chance it was up to me to be the link between the business group and the Junta Patriótica, which was promoting the strike from its clandestine places. The contact was through Fabricio Ojeda, a reporter for El Nacional. My ties with that newspaper made it easier for me, since my presence there raised no suspicions. Of course, I didn’t know that Fabricio was from the Junta Patriótica, nor that he was its president, a position they rotated among themselves.
One day Dr. Requena tells me that an individual is offering the Junta Patriótica three radio stations, designed so as to not be easily found. I give the information to Fabricio. Soon he tells me that tomorrow, at noon I should meet someone on the bridge for the Country Club’s Avenida Principal, to then go see Dr. Requena. I ask him about who I’m going to meet and he tells me: “I can’t tell you. But when you see him you’ll know.”
In effect, on the next day at 12 sharp I’m crossing the bridge in my car, and already emerging from it appears, from I don’t know where, Teodoro Petkoff.
We go to Dr. Requena’s house. After the introduction and rigorous greetings, Requena says to Teodoro: “Tomorrow at 3 in the afternoon, in the atrium of the church of the Las Mercedes neighborhood, you will meet up with Dr. Francisco De Venanzi, who will explain to you about the radio stations.”
Teodoro responds: “Alright, I’ll be there. But I don’t know Dr. De Venanzi. I’ve never seen him and I don’t know how to recognize him.” To which Requena replied: “No one else will be there at that time. But if anyone else is there, you pay attention, and when you see a man with an idiot’s face, that’s Dr. De Venanzi.”
We all laughed, of course. I took Teodoro back to the place where we met and each one went his own way.
The handover of the radio stations was successfully accomplished, and the transistors were very important in calling together the general strike, which ended on January 23 when the dictator fled.
Thirty years later I was at El Nacional one day, with other people, in the Brujoteca as Oscar Guaramato called the cubicle of the legendary Arístides Bastidas, already in a wheelchair and a victim of all the plagues of Egypt, and I don’t know how the topic came up. I narrated the episode, and when I was finished Arístides said to me: “You were in on that too? I was the one who received the radio stations and handed them over to the Junta Patriótica.” Neither of us knew we had both participated in that episode. A living testimony of a well-done political job, impeccable and thus successful, the product of a mysticism and discipline that, unfortunately, were lost forever after the 1960s.
{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, TalCual, 21 April 2006 }
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