Day 1
Iām sitting in the āSky loungeā at Heathrow. So sleepy. The person at the check-in desk told me I have a business-class ticket, so Iāve got all the perks. The priority lane in security, priority boarding, and free use of this lounge.
Donāt think Iāve ever been in this situation before and feel very out of place. Thereās a buffet breakfast. Free food and uncomfortable white chairs, so this is the life of the one-percent.
I went to the toilet before the flight, they were piping upbeat music into the stalls. So youāre there, straining to empty your bladder, all along to the smooth tune of James Blunt singing āyouāre beautifulā¦ā ā«
Absolutely dire experience.
This might be my first time flying business class, the meals on the flight were very fancy.
I feel self-conscious about the space Iām taking up. Not only am I taking a transatlantic flight for a visit of only a couple of days, but Iām also taking up the space of about 2.5 regular seats.
Still, for a ten-hour flight on very little sleep, I really needed this. I put my seat back into a bed position and had a nap.
The terminal building of Simón Bolivar airport reminded me of Cuba - concrete pillars, polished stone floors, and lots of tropical plants indoors.
There are some of the new housing developments (from the Gran Misión Vivienda) on the road out of the airport. Theyāre medium-rise buildings, with narrow gaps between them, and they look a bit like student housing blocks. Later on, I met someone who lives in these towers near the airport, he told me he was happy with his accommodation. Places in these buildings are usually provided for free, or at subsidised rents.
Thereās a lot of Chavista graffiti around the place.
I was impressed by these vast tower blocks in the centre of Caracas.
I didnāt hang around for dinner once weād arrived, went straight to bed.
Day 2
I slept a solid 10 hours, from 8pm to 6am. Caught the sunrise glinting off the block across from my hotel.
There is intermittent/weak WiFi signal in the hotel, and at the conference centre. I donāt have a SIM card for mobile internet here, and so⦠Iām basically disconnected. It definitely has an effect on organisation, in that you canāt rely on being able to text or email people, if you want to set up a meeting you sort of have to hope you bump into the person you want to talk to.
I thought about this a lot when I was in Cyprus, the fact that when voting on critical issues I was able to quickly check in with people back home for guidance. Thereās also something just quite cathartic about narrating the dayās events to your friends, and I just canāt do that here. I camped out in the hotel lobby for a long time in order to post a couple of photos on twitter, the upload kept timing out so I had to compress them first.
Before coming here I made some more optimisations to my contact page. The whole thing is contained in a single 7.7KB file, and thatās only one HTTP request. So it loads fast, although itās fast in a way that nobody really cares about until you find yourself in this particular situation.
I sat in on the conference discussion on student affairs, the panel asked if I wanted to speak and I declined. They talked about the municipalisation of universities, and the introduction of free education, although I didnāt really learn much about the system. Later on I spoke to one guy who seemed about my age, and he mentioned that he had two degrees, one in engineering, and another in law (I think). Without projecting too much of my own experience, this seems like the problem of young people cycling through higher education when they canāt enter the labour market.
I am curious why sustained investment in education hasnāt developed into a significant scientific specialism. Consider the following constraints:
- US sanctions
- Over-reliance on oil revenue
- A low level of manufacturing
Balanced out by:
- A welfare state which takes care of most social necessities
- 23 well-established universities which pump out a steady supply of new graduates and research
It seems like it would make sense to build a specialism in a couple of concentrated high-tech projects. If you canāt build a mass industrial base, you can at least keep a couple of long-running research initiatives ticking over, and those might eventually produce valuable innovations.
Cuba is always a good practical example here - there are 47 universities for an island of 11 million people, spending on education makes up 10% of GDP, and access to education is free. Cuba has a fantastically low ratio of teachers-per-capita and doctors-per-capita, and thatās a product of decades of sustained investment in health and education. If you wanted to put it in horribly economistic terms: they invest in human resources (human capital). And, what comes out of all that investment is a strong pharmaceutical sector.
There arenāt many third-world countries which can independently make their own cancer drugs. So, while Cuba is constrained by sanctions and other problems, itās still got an unusually competitive edge on biotechnology. Given the way Venezuela is heading, I would expect there to be some similar high-tech sector which they could direct research into.
In the afternoon we went off to the Miraflores Presidential Palace to see Maduro speak. I sat up in the stands, underneath the presidential helipad.
The sun was glaring, my colleague fashioned a sun-hat out of conference papers, and I got a single line of sunburn across the back of my neck. After a while Maduro appeared and gave his speech (warning, this one was pretty loud, Iāve reduced the volume at source).
It was a long speech, and I didnāt catch much from the translation, although I did get that he was summarising the situation since this time last year. In between criticising the Washington Post, Maduro asks: what progress have the right-wing forces made in a year?
Do they control the national assembly? No.
Do they control the constituent assembly? No.
Do they control the army? No.
Are there protests in the streets? No.
In all cases the regime-change effort has basically floundered. The āself-proclaimed interim presidentā Juan Guaidó is busy touring Europe and the USA to drum up support, he even spoke at Davos. Without a popular movement inside the country the only way Guaidó is going to end up in power is by convincing the US, Brazil, or Colombia to launch an invasion.
Maduro also emphasised the line that āwe cannot fail, itās us or nothingā, and we can excuse the dramatic rhetoric, but thereās really something behind his argument. Observers in Venezuela are acutely aware of what happened in Bolivia only three months ago, where the āliberal oppositionā declared the presidential election invalid, staged a coup, and immediately revealed themselves to be fantastically reactionary.
We remember very well, sympathetic liberals cried that of course they didnāt want military rule in Bolivia. They just prefer a leader with the right background, a president who speaks Spanish with a slight Texan accent, someone who is āa good christianā. There were allegations of āelectoral irregularitiesā echoing from the US State Department, Evo Morales was a āpopulistā, he was dodgy, corrupt, he had to go.
These same liberals have (wilfully) misunderstood that US-backed coups and destabilisation of progressive governments donāt result in the kind of friendly pluralist society they have in mind. In case this point needs repeating, the CIA is not and never has been, an agent of democratic change.
So itās useful to underline what is actually at stake here. At best, Guaidó appears like an inoffensive social democrat, he doesnāt look like a dictator, and yet weāve seen how these things end up. If the socialist government falls, Venezuela will face rule by US multinational corporations enforced by right-wing death squads. This is what is meant when Maduro explains that his government ācannot failā.
Afterwards we all got fed in the building which houses the presidential guard. There are some pretty stained glass windows in there.
Day 3
I chatted with a guy from Haiti in the morning, we understood each other pretty well in french. He told me he doesnāt feel like thereās as much racism here, although he hadnāt stumbled across the wrong crowd yet.
Itās often useful to get the perspective from people living in the exploited countries, they see Cuba and Venezuela from one third-world country to another. Thereās a sense that those who criticise underdevelopment in Cuba have not seen what conditions are like in Jamaica, or Haiti. And this matters; someone coming from one of the leading imperialist powers will not really see the socialist countries in their proper context.
There is talk about the failure of socialism, yet where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? Where is the success of capitalism in places where thousands of millions of people live?
We went to Los Caobos Park for another speech by Maduro, along with a few other people.
This event ended in Maduro being awarded the Order of Lenin by a visiting (CPRF) deputy of the Russian Duma. I was interested in all the different PSUV sections present. Maduro deliberately addressed each group in turn: the unions, the women, the youth, the military, the communes, and finally the political allies of the PSUV - ORA, Podemos, the Venezuelan Tupamaros, the Communist Party, etc.
I spoke with someone from the womenās organisation of the PSUV, via a comrade who helpfully translated for me. She explained their reforms to increase the time required for an accusation of sexual assault to be treated as a grievous offence.
She was handing out little purple booklets with information for women - an outline of their basic legal rights, details of support services they can access, as well as how to get involved in the womenās organisation. There was also someone from an LGBT organisation who spoke at the student meeting.
Hereās a meeting of the PSUV youth wing.
From all this I definitely got the characterisation of the PSUV as a broad tent party. Itās not a centralised political unit, itās the alliance of social movements which make up ā21st Century Socialismā. I think this is an overlooked aspect of the pink tide governments, that theyāre grounded in a very particular moment of early 90s alter-globalisation politics.
However much the western media presents Bolivarian movements as āparties of the leninist typeā they actually have more in common with the likes of Greenpeace or Oxfam. Thatās been a point of criticism from the left, but once youāve understood that it goes a long way to explaining a lot of the contradictions in Venezuela.
I wandered around the Teresa CarreƱo theatre, had a moment in the cool shade to admire the lovely modernist architecture.
I was hovering around watching a guy who was buying juice at a street stall using Petros, a government-backed cryptocurrency pegged to the price of oil. Itās not mined independently, new currency is issued by the state, and it can be used in informal transactions.
The juice stand relied on swapping codes between cheap smartphones. Thereās also apparently a system in supermarkets which works using fingerprint scanning.
The guy showed me his Petro app.
And here he is paying for his tasty fruit juice.
If Iāve understood it correctly, the ā½ is a way of developing a new currency to combat hyper-inflation and pose an alternative to dollarisation. Iām really excited about it, there have been theoretical arguments over the potential of a āsocialist cryptocurrencyā, and here the experiment is being rolled out in a real national economy. Imagine how proud the architects of Project Cybersyn would be if they saw this, I love it!
Finally, in the evening I got back to the hotel, shared a bottle of local raspberry wine with my colleague, and watched the cars zipping down the Francisco Fajardo motorway in the dark.
Day 4
Conference business is over, Iām going home today. I saw a stall from one of the barrio organisations, theyād made a creative little model of their neighbourhood.
Hereās the comparison with reality.
I didnāt go inside the barrios, as apparently itās not wise for foreigners to enter them unannounced. If I ever come back here, maybe Iāll be able to negotiate a visit to these places.
I saw the lines of people queuing up for food assistance provided by the Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP). I was given this bottle of detergent at one of the stalls.
The CLAP programme evidently covers more than just food aid - it deals with all the daily necessities. Interestingly this programme is also targeted by US sanctions.
I went round the market and picked up a bunch of Cuban and Venezuelan films on DVD for a dollar each:
- The Liberator - Simón BolĆvar biopic
- Memories of Underdevelopment - looking forward to watching this one!
- Evo Pueblo - Evo Morales biopic
- Death of a Bureaucrat - already seen it twice, but itās such a great classic
- El Siglo de las Luces - no idea what itās about but the cover looks wizard, itās a Franco-Cuban production?
Before leaving Caracas, I went for a cautious little wander around the block and spotted this urban agriculture project. There was a sign outside reading āTierra y Hombres Libresā - itās part of the Misión Zamora land reform.
The airport is bigger than I realised, it took a good 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other, and considering there were only a handful of international flights for the whole day⦠it was not busy. Due to some conditions of the sanctions they ask all passengers to be at the terminal extra early, so there was a long wait before the flight.
I got this maltĆn drink from one of the airport shops. I didnāt have any change so the shopkeeper just let me have it for free.
It was sweet, but not as sugary as Cola. I vaguely remember seeing this drink (or something similar) in the foreign food aisles in Morrisons. Iāll have a look when I get home.