Etiqueta: English

“As always, there’s the mass of people and I throw myself among them, I embrace them, sweat with them, cry with them and find myself. Because the drama, the pain, is over there, and I want to feel that pain. Because only that pain, alongside the love one feels, will give us strength to fight for a thousand years, if need be, against corruption, against inefficiency, for the good of a noble, dignified, brave people like the Venezuelan one. We don’t have to look very far to find tragedy.” (1) These words, halfway between revelation and a declaration of principles,…

And this land shall be free and this country shall be great, worthy of us and those who come after us. It won’t be a foolish country. – Hugo Chávez, June 12, 2004 We are no longer a foolish country, we are a caribe country. Not the foolish country which they ran as they pleased. A caribe people is what we are. – Hugo Chávez, November 19, 2010 Because they believe these people are idiots. No, these people are not the idiots they used to be, this is not the foolish country of yesteryear. This country has awoken, and that’s…

When one decides to dedicate one’s life to the gigantic mission of national liberation, social revolution, emancipation of the human species, one must learn how to deal with triumph and failure: with triumph to avoid becoming vain, and, eventually, adapting to new circumstances, putting away the flags and with failure, which happens recurrently, to gather strength to continue fighting. We should understand that such a task implies swimming against the current all the time or, as Walter Benjamin would put it, brushing history against the grain, having to deal with a common sense tailor-made by the order or things one…

In October 2013 I wrote a few lines about a phenomenon which I saw as one of the biggest dangers, if not the biggest, that the Bolivarian Revolution faced in the chapter that opened following the death of Hugo Chávez: a resigned loyalty. Six months after I joined President Nicolás Maduro’s first cabinet [in 2013], assuming the Ministry of Communes and Social Movements, it was clear that this micro-climate prevailed in many decision-making spaces. At the time, I thought it was my responsibility to address it publicly with the goal of warning about its possible political effects. I alerted at the time…

Much of what I wrote until 2013 was in direct dialogue with Chávez. This wasn’t a conscious effort. It was something I realized talking to those closest to me, taking stock of seven years of writing and defining what was to be done moving forward, at a time when we tried to deal with the loss of the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. I’d never meant for it to be that way. This “dialogue” was simply my reading of a very fluid relationship between Chávez and Chavismo, which expressed itself in many ways. It’s no secret to anyone that, in…