The Narrative Instinct
From Cumaná. – I assure you, Rodolfo Izaguirre, that even though the occurrences narrated by Rubi Guerra in La forma del amor y otros cuentos happen in the recent past or in others of this region’s life, that’s not the most important factor regarding the substance of each short story within the collection of eight that won the 2009 Premio Salvador Garmendia.
This is spoken with certainty because “Past events exist (...) only in memory, which is a form of imagination,” according to the phrase by Ursula K. Le Guin, the American fiction writer, engraved on the doors of the book beside one by Francisco de Quevedo, regarding Virtue, once feared, lies “in vanity and in dream buried.”
These aren’t there as mere adornments for the hallway, but rather significantly. The author plays fair and gives clues. To explain them, the commentator feels the need to depend on intertextuality, to crucify himself for the truth with Kristeva and Bakhtin. But now he wants –as always– to stay within pure impressionism, in the register of amazement, joy, fury, emotions and commotions enjoyed and suffered with Guerra’s book.
A recording wouldn’t have been bad, so I might be seen on YouTube the minute during reading when the savagery of war highlights a human trait that I resist understanding even in an extreme situation.
For example, in the short story “La guerra,” the instant in 1817 when the hour arrives for the doctor and the two fugitive patriot soldiers to depart from the rural house, inhabited only by a grandmother and her young granddaughter, since the men were taken away by one of the bands. After dinner, they sleep in the manger and afterward, at that hour, occurs the event that unleashes the crisis the author has insinuated with masterful technique.
I would be seen stunned. The book to one side grazing the floor, more and more wild eyed while from the very center of the earth the infernal ascends through my arm never before felt in such a manner.
Why? What is different now? I think that in the subtle modeling of insinuation stands out the recourse to olfactory sensations and how the warrior animal interprets them.
The author of La forma del amor y otros cuentos senses the spaces in all those stories and recreates so much, with the instinct of each one of the beings that he fictionalizes.
So we sense universal human diversity and in this short story the effluvium of hatred.
Besides, when the doctor of the battalion defeated near Clarines rides “through an ancient dead lake covered with crusted salt,” the shots of a film throb in slow quietude.
In his love of form, Rubi Guerra developed a quality innate in David Suárez, our greatest screenwriter, by which the word designs and moves what others would hope to move with the resources of cinema.
That’s what you’ll see, better than I do, in this mature book.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, El Tiempo, 18 February 2011 }
Showing posts with label Silvio Orta Cabrera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silvio Orta Cabrera. Show all posts
8.18.2009
La quietud presurosa / Silvio Orta Cabrera
The Quick Stillness
Eleazar León foreshadowed his death many times. In 1977, in his book Cruce de caminos, he does it in a certain, shall we say, indirect manner, imagining in the poem “Orfeo ve al amor en una última mirada” that the son of Apollo and Calliope, when he reads the palm of Eurydice’s hand, glimpses the death of the beloved and the immortality that awaits her, since he says to her: “... you shimmer somehow in each woman.” And, towards the end, “I see you / for the last time and I find no other prayer. // You have / that taste of oblivion that belongs to hope, / Eurydice my fog, my greenness.”
In the same book we find “Sin comienzo ni término,” a poem where the key points of the relationship between creator and the life-death pair flower. One shouldn’t think, after the previous phrase, that finding it will be difficult. We should recall, as Rafael Arráiz Lucca points out in El coro de las voces solitarias, that Eleazar León is one of the poets from the Universidad Central de Venezuela who in the 70s made “of literature his academic object” and, therefore, in his poems we find evidence, alongside his experiences, of “organized knowledge” (p. 313).
It’s worth noting that this UCV poet arrives at the Escuela de Letras already a poet, as the rennovation movement is well underway (1969). The Rennovation in Letras had its very own features, among which stood out the quotidian creativity in how to think about the phenomenon and how to face its dynamism, while maintaining convergence among divergence, in other words, the natural experience and coexistence of the singular amidst the plural. If a revolution calls itself life, in order to give itself and keep growing it should promote such a consciousness, not subjugate it.
How does Eleazar proceed in “Sin comienzo ni término”? As a poet and teacher. As if he were doing nothing special, so as to unveil the conclusion, he asks: “Did something ever have a beginning at one point?” He doesn’t strain in search of an answer. On the contrary, in an Asian manner, he thinks “of the slow water of certain springs / down the mountain, flowing / until dying of cold in the muddy river-bed / of a well in the sun.”
What then does poetic knowledge discover, the one Saint-John Perse, when receiving the Nobel (1960), points to as an open road when those of philosophy and science seem obstructed? He discovers “that a spring doesn’t cease when a spring ends,” that “The water is lost perhaps, but not the current, / but not the quickness seeking stillness / that departs again once it finds it.”
Such a discovery that makes us understand that Eleazar having died this August 7th, his spring will not cease, it is a rain of stars on the poems of Descampado (1999), the highest and most beautiful prefiguration the poet had of his urgent stillness. We will encamp in his pages, as soon as the pain passes.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 17 August 2009 }
Eleazar León foreshadowed his death many times. In 1977, in his book Cruce de caminos, he does it in a certain, shall we say, indirect manner, imagining in the poem “Orfeo ve al amor en una última mirada” that the son of Apollo and Calliope, when he reads the palm of Eurydice’s hand, glimpses the death of the beloved and the immortality that awaits her, since he says to her: “... you shimmer somehow in each woman.” And, towards the end, “I see you / for the last time and I find no other prayer. // You have / that taste of oblivion that belongs to hope, / Eurydice my fog, my greenness.”
In the same book we find “Sin comienzo ni término,” a poem where the key points of the relationship between creator and the life-death pair flower. One shouldn’t think, after the previous phrase, that finding it will be difficult. We should recall, as Rafael Arráiz Lucca points out in El coro de las voces solitarias, that Eleazar León is one of the poets from the Universidad Central de Venezuela who in the 70s made “of literature his academic object” and, therefore, in his poems we find evidence, alongside his experiences, of “organized knowledge” (p. 313).
It’s worth noting that this UCV poet arrives at the Escuela de Letras already a poet, as the rennovation movement is well underway (1969). The Rennovation in Letras had its very own features, among which stood out the quotidian creativity in how to think about the phenomenon and how to face its dynamism, while maintaining convergence among divergence, in other words, the natural experience and coexistence of the singular amidst the plural. If a revolution calls itself life, in order to give itself and keep growing it should promote such a consciousness, not subjugate it.
How does Eleazar proceed in “Sin comienzo ni término”? As a poet and teacher. As if he were doing nothing special, so as to unveil the conclusion, he asks: “Did something ever have a beginning at one point?” He doesn’t strain in search of an answer. On the contrary, in an Asian manner, he thinks “of the slow water of certain springs / down the mountain, flowing / until dying of cold in the muddy river-bed / of a well in the sun.”
What then does poetic knowledge discover, the one Saint-John Perse, when receiving the Nobel (1960), points to as an open road when those of philosophy and science seem obstructed? He discovers “that a spring doesn’t cease when a spring ends,” that “The water is lost perhaps, but not the current, / but not the quickness seeking stillness / that departs again once it finds it.”
Such a discovery that makes us understand that Eleazar having died this August 7th, his spring will not cease, it is a rain of stars on the poems of Descampado (1999), the highest and most beautiful prefiguration the poet had of his urgent stillness. We will encamp in his pages, as soon as the pain passes.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 17 August 2009 }
9.26.2008
Oficio de poeta / Silvio Orta Cabrera
Poet’s Task
Three months after the death of Eugenio Montejo, the one to whom wandering humans appeared as innocent as ever, pondering his murmur to his fatigue, although he never managed to capture them completely in his notebook, as would happen with the thrush’s final squawk through which the tree speaks, I can glean his greatest obsession more clearly: to find the word that would help reveal each secret. The poet’s full task. According to Gustavo Guerrero, Montejo affirmed that nothing like emotion “helps so much to clarify what is truly necessary.” This seems true to me. Emotion led me to begin this note with “September,” a poem from Terredad (1978), whose own beginning observes that “we have lost nothing / placing our trust in its leaves.” Speaking in confidence, the poetic voice says this to the corporeal month that, shovel on its shoulder, drags away the dry leaves. Moreover, because September uncovers the forest for us, it finally invites him (invites us): “Open your hands, fill them with these slow leaves, / don’t let a single one be lost to you.” In similar structures, Guillermo Sucre (La máscara, la transparencia, 1975) notes the determining “constructive passion” in Montejo. His poems return to the starting point and constitute themselves in an open writing process.
Terredad [earthness] will always astonish me, since it is there, in “The earthness of a bird,” that we are shown how that force resides in its song. I will never understand it, I think, but in that verse I found myself inhabited by the Montejian oeuvre. That is, by that secret something, flower or pebble that poetry bequeaths us as a simple gift, something “always so intense that the heart beats too fast. / And we wake.” I scrutinized it this trimester, as I was gathering support for the library being built by the Fundación Chacao to be designated the “Eugenio Montejo” Library, participating in formal and spontaneous readings, distributing hand outs with his verse… and I kept listening to “El azul de la tierra” [The Earth’s Blue], a recording by the Fondo de Cultura where the poet reads forty of his miracles. Listening to Montejo is another listening, since his sensibility throughout the tongue’s resonance is transmuted into an untransferable saying.
It’s one of those recordings that insert a musical piece (in this case a Beethoven sonata) as an interrupted background at the beginning of each poem. Many people like this. I liked it, but in this opportunity less and less the more I listened to it. I ended up considering it a double crime that decapitated Montejo and Beethoven. Although it’s pretty, it’s neither music nor poetry. It seemed to me like certain informational “presentations” in which bad taste stands out because of its abundance. In particular, the necessary silence seemed to be obscured. I decided to test this and asked my son to erase the music. And how I enjoyed it! Montejo explained it to me: “The blackbird sings alone, which is enough sustenance,” says one of his poems. And another reinforces this: “Poetry crosses the earth alone (…) / and asks for nothing – / not even words.”
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 15 September 2008 }
Three months after the death of Eugenio Montejo, the one to whom wandering humans appeared as innocent as ever, pondering his murmur to his fatigue, although he never managed to capture them completely in his notebook, as would happen with the thrush’s final squawk through which the tree speaks, I can glean his greatest obsession more clearly: to find the word that would help reveal each secret. The poet’s full task. According to Gustavo Guerrero, Montejo affirmed that nothing like emotion “helps so much to clarify what is truly necessary.” This seems true to me. Emotion led me to begin this note with “September,” a poem from Terredad (1978), whose own beginning observes that “we have lost nothing / placing our trust in its leaves.” Speaking in confidence, the poetic voice says this to the corporeal month that, shovel on its shoulder, drags away the dry leaves. Moreover, because September uncovers the forest for us, it finally invites him (invites us): “Open your hands, fill them with these slow leaves, / don’t let a single one be lost to you.” In similar structures, Guillermo Sucre (La máscara, la transparencia, 1975) notes the determining “constructive passion” in Montejo. His poems return to the starting point and constitute themselves in an open writing process.
Terredad [earthness] will always astonish me, since it is there, in “The earthness of a bird,” that we are shown how that force resides in its song. I will never understand it, I think, but in that verse I found myself inhabited by the Montejian oeuvre. That is, by that secret something, flower or pebble that poetry bequeaths us as a simple gift, something “always so intense that the heart beats too fast. / And we wake.” I scrutinized it this trimester, as I was gathering support for the library being built by the Fundación Chacao to be designated the “Eugenio Montejo” Library, participating in formal and spontaneous readings, distributing hand outs with his verse… and I kept listening to “El azul de la tierra” [The Earth’s Blue], a recording by the Fondo de Cultura where the poet reads forty of his miracles. Listening to Montejo is another listening, since his sensibility throughout the tongue’s resonance is transmuted into an untransferable saying.
It’s one of those recordings that insert a musical piece (in this case a Beethoven sonata) as an interrupted background at the beginning of each poem. Many people like this. I liked it, but in this opportunity less and less the more I listened to it. I ended up considering it a double crime that decapitated Montejo and Beethoven. Although it’s pretty, it’s neither music nor poetry. It seemed to me like certain informational “presentations” in which bad taste stands out because of its abundance. In particular, the necessary silence seemed to be obscured. I decided to test this and asked my son to erase the music. And how I enjoyed it! Montejo explained it to me: “The blackbird sings alone, which is enough sustenance,” says one of his poems. And another reinforces this: “Poetry crosses the earth alone (…) / and asks for nothing – / not even words.”
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 15 September 2008 }
6.16.2008
Clarísima confusion / Silvio Orta Cabrera
Extremely Clear Confusion
Totalitarianism blinds. On October 22, 1956 the [former Interior Minister Pedro] Carreño of the Hungarian Stalinist regime banned the march planned by students for the following day, accusing them of “allowing themselves to be manipulated by imperialism.” The students reached the National Assembly. The police repressed them and the Hungarian revolution began, crushed to the tune of Socialism or Death by Soviet troops. The totalitarian adores violence and military boots.
Fifty-one years later on another October 22, a march by students in Caracas was authorized. On the 23, they tried to reach the National Assembly (a delegation of them was able to). Red-shirted militias persisted in ambushing and assaulting them, as they did days later to the veteran Pompeyo [Márquez] and the young [Yon] Goicoechea at the Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador. The government accused the students of allowing themselves to be manipulated by the empire.
On October 29 a Chavista intellectual sent me an article regarding the threat of imperialism to the Bolivarian revolution. His conclusion includes supporting Chávez and the constitutional “reform.”
I told him: “I don’t doubt the threat. But, does that obligate us to say Yes to the ridiculous Chávez-Escarrá “reform” that, from the start, discriminates against Venezuelans who aren’t socialist and makes an illuminated continuist the most equal of all equals? Such nonsense gets tangled in the string of errors that have fractured every venture of socio-totalitarianism. It obeys not only the professional deformations of the jackbooted commander and the typical lurches of Carlos Escarrá’s dismal Constitution, but also, with more responsibility, the intellectual complicit with the cult of personality, the key to failure.
“Whoever practices this disrespects himself and when he does this he weakens his own ethics and, by disseminating it, that of other citizens. Is that any way to form a New Man for a New Society? The plague aborts slaves within a bureaucratic and repressive apparatus, generally submitting them to misery. False revolutions based on hunger and oppression do last. There you have Cuba and North Korea as (bad) examples.
“They cling to the same sophism–I added–by which, facing the threats of the Yankee Empire against the Soviet Empire, we once put up with the Stalinist horrors. You won’t sever my free thought again with that cardboard cup. Whoever believes in democracy and freedom should stand up against the Bush Empire, against the Chavista one and against all fundamentalisms.”
“I understand. There’s a lot of confusion,” he sympathizes with me. But for me there is none, and I owe a great deal to [Minister of Culture] Farruco Sesto, the one who looks at us like a conquistador looking at Indians in the 16th century. His recent abuses find this mestizo defending the Indio de Cumaná statue and reading the novel No será la Tierra, by Jorge Volpi, thus confirming my desire to vote No to the “reform,” because there has never been more clarity amidst the confusion.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 8 November 2007 }
Totalitarianism blinds. On October 22, 1956 the [former Interior Minister Pedro] Carreño of the Hungarian Stalinist regime banned the march planned by students for the following day, accusing them of “allowing themselves to be manipulated by imperialism.” The students reached the National Assembly. The police repressed them and the Hungarian revolution began, crushed to the tune of Socialism or Death by Soviet troops. The totalitarian adores violence and military boots.
Fifty-one years later on another October 22, a march by students in Caracas was authorized. On the 23, they tried to reach the National Assembly (a delegation of them was able to). Red-shirted militias persisted in ambushing and assaulting them, as they did days later to the veteran Pompeyo [Márquez] and the young [Yon] Goicoechea at the Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador. The government accused the students of allowing themselves to be manipulated by the empire.
On October 29 a Chavista intellectual sent me an article regarding the threat of imperialism to the Bolivarian revolution. His conclusion includes supporting Chávez and the constitutional “reform.”
I told him: “I don’t doubt the threat. But, does that obligate us to say Yes to the ridiculous Chávez-Escarrá “reform” that, from the start, discriminates against Venezuelans who aren’t socialist and makes an illuminated continuist the most equal of all equals? Such nonsense gets tangled in the string of errors that have fractured every venture of socio-totalitarianism. It obeys not only the professional deformations of the jackbooted commander and the typical lurches of Carlos Escarrá’s dismal Constitution, but also, with more responsibility, the intellectual complicit with the cult of personality, the key to failure.
“Whoever practices this disrespects himself and when he does this he weakens his own ethics and, by disseminating it, that of other citizens. Is that any way to form a New Man for a New Society? The plague aborts slaves within a bureaucratic and repressive apparatus, generally submitting them to misery. False revolutions based on hunger and oppression do last. There you have Cuba and North Korea as (bad) examples.
“They cling to the same sophism–I added–by which, facing the threats of the Yankee Empire against the Soviet Empire, we once put up with the Stalinist horrors. You won’t sever my free thought again with that cardboard cup. Whoever believes in democracy and freedom should stand up against the Bush Empire, against the Chavista one and against all fundamentalisms.”
“I understand. There’s a lot of confusion,” he sympathizes with me. But for me there is none, and I owe a great deal to [Minister of Culture] Farruco Sesto, the one who looks at us like a conquistador looking at Indians in the 16th century. His recent abuses find this mestizo defending the Indio de Cumaná statue and reading the novel No será la Tierra, by Jorge Volpi, thus confirming my desire to vote No to the “reform,” because there has never been more clarity amidst the confusion.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 8 November 2007 }
3.24.2008
El preso del Viernes Santo / Silvio Orta Cabrera
The Good Friday Prisoner
From the late 40s until the mid 50s I never missed a single Good Friday procession of the Holy Sepulcher, back in la Victoria. At the head of the procession was the fixed presence of a very humble man, who handed out movie flyers, wedding invitations and burial notices, a man with a long name, Nemesio Enrique Romero Castillo, who would always enunciate it when replying to us with irritation after we’d call him “Perico!” [parakeet], a nickname derived from the physiognomy of his crooked face. Aside from those instances, he was as peaceful as his honest linen coat, Chaplinesque shoes and crumpled grey linen hat with its black band.
Carrying a long pole, Nemesio led the procession so as to make sure the images, especially the tallest ones representing the Nazarene and the Pained One, didn’t get stuck on electric wires. A fervent member of the Society of the Holy Sepulcher, he assisted the progress of the dead Christ with a severity that accentuated the “Popule Meus” of José Ángel Lamas, resonating since 1801.
On those Fridays we would crowd in front of the police station to watch the prisoner they’d release. This is where the entourage and the compassed balance of sweaty bodies would pause the longest under the heavy image, a life-sized, marble reproduction of the martyr, to whose weight were added the thick windows of the funerary box and the cedar beams of the stage used to support the sculpture. The prisoner came out somewhat embarrassed, thanked the Lord and accompanied the procession until the nearby end of the trajectory at the Matriz church.
Nothing else. No thanks to the Mayor and his other captors. How different from president Correa subordinating the fall of Raúl Reyes to the argument that this event had prevented his plan to liberate ten more hostages in negotiations with the FARC, with Ingrid Betancourt among them! How far from the smiling impiety and the mixed-up clamor and consumerism of Piedad Córdoba calculating how much closer to the presidency each liberated person might bring her! How unlike the mercantile scream of “Manuel, send me Ingrid!,” which translates as “Help me, comrade, make 83 percent of Venezuelans forget the mobilization of the ten armored battalions, the anguish and the thousands of millions that my bellicose bluffing cost at least two nations, my own actions as a rrrevolutionary man of peace.” The already “ephemeralist” peace of 4 February 1992.
Do they understand how miserable it is to nourish themselves with the kidnapped victims? (I know, Chávez. You’ve proclaimed yourself opposed to kidnappings, so don’t manipulate them.) Chained every night. Unable to caress their families. Every day, an island surrounded by death on all sides. Is this how the New Man is built? With terrorism as barbaric as Bush’s arbitrary mess in Guantánamo? Your shouting, Chávez, doesn’t release prisoners on Good Friday. Though you may not believe it, you are not the Lord of Christians or non-Christians.
This is what I want to say today, at midnight on the Thursday I turn 72.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 24 March 2008 }
From the late 40s until the mid 50s I never missed a single Good Friday procession of the Holy Sepulcher, back in la Victoria. At the head of the procession was the fixed presence of a very humble man, who handed out movie flyers, wedding invitations and burial notices, a man with a long name, Nemesio Enrique Romero Castillo, who would always enunciate it when replying to us with irritation after we’d call him “Perico!” [parakeet], a nickname derived from the physiognomy of his crooked face. Aside from those instances, he was as peaceful as his honest linen coat, Chaplinesque shoes and crumpled grey linen hat with its black band.
Carrying a long pole, Nemesio led the procession so as to make sure the images, especially the tallest ones representing the Nazarene and the Pained One, didn’t get stuck on electric wires. A fervent member of the Society of the Holy Sepulcher, he assisted the progress of the dead Christ with a severity that accentuated the “Popule Meus” of José Ángel Lamas, resonating since 1801.
On those Fridays we would crowd in front of the police station to watch the prisoner they’d release. This is where the entourage and the compassed balance of sweaty bodies would pause the longest under the heavy image, a life-sized, marble reproduction of the martyr, to whose weight were added the thick windows of the funerary box and the cedar beams of the stage used to support the sculpture. The prisoner came out somewhat embarrassed, thanked the Lord and accompanied the procession until the nearby end of the trajectory at the Matriz church.
Nothing else. No thanks to the Mayor and his other captors. How different from president Correa subordinating the fall of Raúl Reyes to the argument that this event had prevented his plan to liberate ten more hostages in negotiations with the FARC, with Ingrid Betancourt among them! How far from the smiling impiety and the mixed-up clamor and consumerism of Piedad Córdoba calculating how much closer to the presidency each liberated person might bring her! How unlike the mercantile scream of “Manuel, send me Ingrid!,” which translates as “Help me, comrade, make 83 percent of Venezuelans forget the mobilization of the ten armored battalions, the anguish and the thousands of millions that my bellicose bluffing cost at least two nations, my own actions as a rrrevolutionary man of peace.” The already “ephemeralist” peace of 4 February 1992.
Do they understand how miserable it is to nourish themselves with the kidnapped victims? (I know, Chávez. You’ve proclaimed yourself opposed to kidnappings, so don’t manipulate them.) Chained every night. Unable to caress their families. Every day, an island surrounded by death on all sides. Is this how the New Man is built? With terrorism as barbaric as Bush’s arbitrary mess in Guantánamo? Your shouting, Chávez, doesn’t release prisoners on Good Friday. Though you may not believe it, you are not the Lord of Christians or non-Christians.
This is what I want to say today, at midnight on the Thursday I turn 72.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 24 March 2008 }
3.05.2008
Se compra oro viejo / Silvio Orta Cabrera
We Buy Old Gold
Hardcore Chavismo is en route to deciding in favor of Terror, just like that, with a capital T, no matter how Falangist it might sound. The various actions and behavior – cult of personality, militarism, control over education and culture… – which reveal the fracturing of the attempt to establish a socialist model different from ones that have failed, are supplemented by actions and behavior that concretize the menace of terrorism.
The victory on December 2, 2007 rejected the consititutional changes aimed at accelerating by electoral means the formerly-named “process,” later baptized by the German Heinz Dieterich, Marxist consultant to the government, as “21st Century Socialism,” a pompous name whose launch at the beginning of the century sought to synchronize socialism with the present, to separate it from the totalitarian past and give it a futurist makeover. It reminded me of those businesses, often owned by Colombians, that announce: “We Buy Old Gold.”
But beyond the rejection, December 2nd inflicted upon Chávez his first electoral defeat, as a consequence of the mistake of associating his image with the results at the urns. And that’s where the majority vote buried the myth of the unbeatable Chávez. Even worse, once the character lost what little sense of discretion adorns him, he threw the dice betting on the even worse misstep of associating his own existence with the defeat of the regional candidates in the upcoming elections on November 23rd. Such a paranoid error, which could submerge Venezuela in a war – Chávez dixit – is synthesized by his bark of “They’re coming for me!” with which he hopes to conjure the spirits and elevate the moral of his crestfallen and diminished faithful.
If even in its weakness the opposition’s unity contributed to the victory of December 2nd, Chávez and hardcore Chavismo added another element, by dividing the pro-government ranks with the dogmatic and personalist mania of the stillborn single party. That stubbornness was influenced by the military harassment copied from the dictatorial Soviet communist formula, the pliability of some ex-communists (what a shame about Jesús Sanoja, Roberto Hernández!) and the jingle of the neo-adulators that prohibits confronting the Leader, their “Daddy.” What shamelessness!
Since December 2nd, Chávez spends his days and nights exploring the feasibility of a defeat and he openly prepares himself alongside hardcore Chavistas. This is demonstrated by the symbiotic acknowledgement of the FARC, the return to the use of violence against any opposition, the siege against Globovisión, the sergeant’s scolding of Últimas Noticias [pro-government newspaper] and the bloody terrorist act against Fedecámaras perpetrated by one of those red Falangists praised by miss Lina Ron [pro-government activist]. “Tell me who your friends are!”
These are signs of hardcore Chavismo’s possible descent into the inferno of terror. Nothing would prevent this possibility if fear were to impel a step back by plural Venezuela, that larger population which includes the Chavista majority that is neither suicidal, nor fatuous, nor corrupt and is aware that no one escapes from terror. But if that entire Venezuela, civilian and military, historically opposed to cowardly terrorism, joins together solidly and makes an effort to hand Chávez another overwhelming defeat, the crime of treason will remain an abortion.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 5 March 2008 }
Hardcore Chavismo is en route to deciding in favor of Terror, just like that, with a capital T, no matter how Falangist it might sound. The various actions and behavior – cult of personality, militarism, control over education and culture… – which reveal the fracturing of the attempt to establish a socialist model different from ones that have failed, are supplemented by actions and behavior that concretize the menace of terrorism.
The victory on December 2, 2007 rejected the consititutional changes aimed at accelerating by electoral means the formerly-named “process,” later baptized by the German Heinz Dieterich, Marxist consultant to the government, as “21st Century Socialism,” a pompous name whose launch at the beginning of the century sought to synchronize socialism with the present, to separate it from the totalitarian past and give it a futurist makeover. It reminded me of those businesses, often owned by Colombians, that announce: “We Buy Old Gold.”
But beyond the rejection, December 2nd inflicted upon Chávez his first electoral defeat, as a consequence of the mistake of associating his image with the results at the urns. And that’s where the majority vote buried the myth of the unbeatable Chávez. Even worse, once the character lost what little sense of discretion adorns him, he threw the dice betting on the even worse misstep of associating his own existence with the defeat of the regional candidates in the upcoming elections on November 23rd. Such a paranoid error, which could submerge Venezuela in a war – Chávez dixit – is synthesized by his bark of “They’re coming for me!” with which he hopes to conjure the spirits and elevate the moral of his crestfallen and diminished faithful.
If even in its weakness the opposition’s unity contributed to the victory of December 2nd, Chávez and hardcore Chavismo added another element, by dividing the pro-government ranks with the dogmatic and personalist mania of the stillborn single party. That stubbornness was influenced by the military harassment copied from the dictatorial Soviet communist formula, the pliability of some ex-communists (what a shame about Jesús Sanoja, Roberto Hernández!) and the jingle of the neo-adulators that prohibits confronting the Leader, their “Daddy.” What shamelessness!
Since December 2nd, Chávez spends his days and nights exploring the feasibility of a defeat and he openly prepares himself alongside hardcore Chavistas. This is demonstrated by the symbiotic acknowledgement of the FARC, the return to the use of violence against any opposition, the siege against Globovisión, the sergeant’s scolding of Últimas Noticias [pro-government newspaper] and the bloody terrorist act against Fedecámaras perpetrated by one of those red Falangists praised by miss Lina Ron [pro-government activist]. “Tell me who your friends are!”
These are signs of hardcore Chavismo’s possible descent into the inferno of terror. Nothing would prevent this possibility if fear were to impel a step back by plural Venezuela, that larger population which includes the Chavista majority that is neither suicidal, nor fatuous, nor corrupt and is aware that no one escapes from terror. But if that entire Venezuela, civilian and military, historically opposed to cowardly terrorism, joins together solidly and makes an effort to hand Chávez another overwhelming defeat, the crime of treason will remain an abortion.
{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 5 March 2008 }
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