Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for life.
Since December 11, 2012, a whole country and a good deal of the world has been expecting this day. That was the last time anyone saw and heard from Hugo Chavez for the last time, right before his last surgery in Cuba in a vain attempt to stop the unstoppable. Since then, the man that had just been re-elected to lead the country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world went silent, and given his penchant for televised speech marathons of upwards of 8 hours each, that should have been the first clue to his devout followers that things were not well, that their idol was not coming back. Since then, the government has jumped through hoops to make people believe that Chavez was, in fact, involved in the active government of Venezuela from his hospital bed. The fact that his followers actually believed such absurdity speaks volumes of the level of blind idolatry the man enjoyed from half of the country.
In a way that is perhaps a lot more morbid than we would like to think, the opposition has been expecting this day since far longer. In fact, many in the opposition have been hoping for this day for almost as long as the man had been in power. Even I, although ashamed to admit it, at one point hoped for the man to suffer a heart attack so that he'd die without anyone having to commit murder. It wasn't a heart attack, but nonetheless, my macabre wish was granted.
For as long as we have been waiting for this day -- at least to me -- the news of his death was oddly anticlimactic. I always imagined myself rejoicing, celebrating, crying with euphoria. And yet, none of those things happened. I do not feel overjoyed, I did not celebrate, my happiness was barely affected by the news. What I felt was a mix of relief and a great deal of dread. Relief because there are no more lies, because no matter how hard the government tried to pretend the charade could go on, the truth finally broke the chains and made itself known. Now we can begin to build the path to get out of the limbo our country has been living these past three months. Now we can finally allow our constitution dictate what we need to do, because there is not parapet to hide behind. Relief, because for better or for worse, it is always better to know than to speculate. Within the next 30 days we will elect a new president. For better or for worse.
And yet, despite the tremendous sense of relief, I have to admit that my sense of dread is 10 times lager. As much as we would like to believe that the man was universally hated, you can't cover the sun with just one finger. We know better than that. Let's face it, all those elections that we would prefer to believe he won thanks to fraud, he won mostly fair and square. The man was formidably charismatic, and was able, like no one before him, to connect with the masses -- mostly poor and uneducated, but also middle class and professionals. He saw the opportunity, and seized it. He saw the discontent, the disenchantment, the disenfranchisement that a great deal of Venezuelans felt, and he grabbed unto that, he fed their sense of having been wronged, he did more than others to meet their most basic needs with gifts and hand-outs. He found a scapegoat and fed it to the masses. The rich, the educated, those were to blame for the ailments of the poor. He gave the poor masses someone to blame, someone to hate, while keeping them dependent on his largess. The strategy worked. And it worked, not only on the poor, uneducated people of Venezuela, but also on the poor, morally void leaders of Latin America.
Charismatic people like that, with such phenomenal pull, are very hard to come by, and that's why, when one emerges, such person becomes the stuff of legend, and his name goes on to be part of the annals of history. For better or for worse. He could have done such great things. He could have made a country that had many reasons to be proud, into a country that had no reasons to be ashamed. Instead, he used his power to divide us, to turn brother against brother, mother against daughter, enemies one and all. And in the process he squandered our resources, buying favors and loyalty from lapdogs from all over the region, making the very same people he purported to defend more impoverished, less educated, more enslaved, less free.
If everything works according to the constitution -- and we all know that is not always so -- we will be electing a new president in 30 days. My dread is that the damage this man did to our country may now be irreversible. He taught a whole nation to expect a fish, but never how to fish for itself. My dread is that the next president will be chosen by a country full of beggars.
