Hugo! (60 page)

But much to the opposition's surprise, Chávez was still in power.
He was proving to be far more tenacious and resourceful than they
expected. He found he had friends. Trinidad and Tobago, off Venezuela's
Caribbean coast, pitched in to help stave off the crisis, sending four
hundred thousand more barrels of gasoline. The Dominican Republic
shipped rice. On January 8 a Venezuelan navy ship arrived in Colombia
to take on five hundred tons of food and supplies including flour, corn,
wheat, soft drinks, tomato sauce, butter, toilet paper, and diapers.
Another two ships from Venezuela were on their way, too, to pick up
more food. When some of the supplies came in, Chávez made sure they
got to his power base in poor neighborhoods.

The strike was failing to dislodge him for another reason. Forced to
wait on long lines for gasoline, Venezuelans did what they do best: they
socialized and turned it into a party. People pulled out dominos, gathered
under trees, and shared
empanadas
and coffee. They spent hours
gabbing, telling jokes, and trading war stories about surviving the
strike.
Waiting on long lines was nothing new for the average Venezuelan:
working-class people did it every day waiting for the bus to take them
to work. The opposition leaders, out of touch with the masses, failed
to foresee the patience many poor Venezuelans would exhibit in confronting
the hardships the opposition was inflicting. Even many in the
middle-class started to feel the strike was ridiculous.

By the start of the New Year, it was showing signs of
fraying. More
and more businessmen were unwilling to destroy their livelihoods
in a quest to oust the president. Increasingly desperate, the opposition
leadership tried to step up the pressure and pry Chávez out of
Miraflores. They called for a
tax boycott and organized a march to the
federal tax agency. Television networks ran "public service announcements"
encouraging citizens to stop paying the sales tax. The government
reminded them that tax evasion was a crime, punishable by up to
seven years in prison.

The banks, which had been operating for three hours a day, shut
down completely for two days. Carlos Ortega, who two weeks earlier
declared he would not call on protestors to march to Miraflores because
it "would be irresponsible" after the violence in April, now reversed
himself. He threatened another march if Chávez did not permit the
nonbinding referendum, which by now was tied up with court challenges.
"I say, let's go," Ortega said on New Year's Eve. "And if they are
going to kill us, let them kill us once and for all."

Chávez invoked some audacious moves of his own. On January 17
National Guardsmen raided two privately owned
bottling plants to seize
bottled water, soda, and beer in the city of Valencia. The owners of the
plants were Cisneros's
Panamco, the Coca-Cola bottler in Venezuela,
and Pepsi bottler Empresas Polar, the country's largest brewer and food
producer. They claimed they had been unable to distribute the products
because of fuel shortages and striking workers. The government
contended they were hoarding them to help starve the population and
spark Chávez's overthrow.

National Guard general Luis Felipe Acosta Carles, the brother of
Felipe Acosta Carles, the MBR-200 founder who was killed during the
Caracazo, led the raids. He had to battle through a ring of protestors to
get inside the plants. After he did, he appeared on television. "Taking
into account that collective rights preside over personal rights, we are
proceeding to distribute these products to the population," he said.
"It's for the people." He grabbed a warm soda and drank it. Then he
promptly belched into the opposition television cameras.

Chávez's opponents were horrified. They thought it was a disgusting
display that symbolized the vulgarity of the Chavistas and the
illegality of Chávez's assault on private property. But in most barrios,
Venezuelans were delighted by the raid and even the burp. To them, it
was an act of in-your-face justice against elites who were trying to sabotage
the economy and force Chávez out.

By now clear signs were emerging that the strike was backfiring.
Graffiti appeared on banks: BANKER THIEVES! COUP PLOTTERS! Many
small businesses never joined the walkout in the first place. In January
many of those that had quietly reopened, although large transnational
companies remained shut. Traffic increased in Caracas as more shops,
restaurants, and markets opened their doors. The strike was turning
into a form of economic suicide or cannibalism. Many business owners
wanted nothing more to do with it.

By the middle of January strike leaders were quietly signaling to
some hard-hit businessmen that it was all right to reopen their doors,
although publicly they maintained the walkout was still in effect.
Weakened, they dropped their demand that Chávez resign before new
elections could be held. Instead they focused on the February 2 nonbinding
referendum, which in the end was suspended by the Supreme
Court on a technicality.

By the last week in January the opposition leadership was publicly
telling schools, restaurants, and malls they could reopen in February, at
least part-time. Many tanker pilots were also returning to their jobs. A
risk management expert at Energy Merchant LLC in New York called
their decision "the first chink in the armor."

On January 23 hundreds of thousands of Chavistas took to the streets
of Caracas in a massive rally to support the president. They chanted,
"Ooh! Ah! Chávez isn't leaving!" Residents of middle- and upper-class
sectors where private militias were forming braced behind the gates
of their homes, fearing an invasion that never came. Four days later,
on January 27, the
Caracas Stock Exchange opened for the first time
in nine weeks. It operated for two and a half hours a day to continue
showing support for the walkout. The next day Chávez scored another
victory: Oil production passed the one-million-barrel-a-day mark. It was
a milestone even dissident PDVSA executives reluctantly acknowledged.

A week later, as Chávez marked the eleventh anniversary of the
February 1992 coup attempt, the
strike all but collapsed outside the
oil industry. Private schools, businesses, restaurants, franchises, and
banks opened their doors full-time. The
walkout was over. Chávez had
achieved what many observers believed was impossible: He had survived
a strike by the oil industry.

He came out of the crisis even stronger than after the April coup, when
he felt compelled to make concessions to the opposition. Now his opponents
were proving increasingly inept. "They have an 'F' for failure on
their foreheads," Chávez quipped. This time he did not reinstate any of
the dissident PDVSA executives or managers; instead he fired a total of
eighteen thousand of them by the end of March. It was close to half of
the oil giant's thirty-eight thousand employees.

Leaders of the strike were not allowed to walk the streets freely to
continue conspiring or occupying plazas they declared "liberated territory."
Instead judges issued arrest warrants for them.
DISIP political
police seized Fedecámaras president Carlos Fernández on February 19
as he left a restaurant in trendy Las Mercedes. His counterpart in the
CTV, Carlos Ortega, went into hiding and later fled for Costa Rica,
where he gained political asylum. He and others contended they were
victims of political persecution. Some even called Fernández a "political
prisoner."

But Chávez saw the
strike leaders as nothing more than "terrorists"
and "coup plotters" who had tried to oust him by wreaking
economic
chaos. It was a repeat of the CIA-backed coup in Chile in 1973, only
in Venezuela it didn't work. The military stood by Chávez. If the April
2002 revolt was a "media coup," this one was an "economic coup."

While Chávez survived, the walkout inflicted devastating economic
damage on Venezuela. The economy nearly collapsed, contracting
by 27 percent in the first four months of 2003. In total, it cost
the oil industry $13.3 billion.

Despite the economic damage, Chávez was now freer to pursue
his radical reform program and spend less time fending off attempts to
topple him. "The coup-mongering, fascist opposition had their turn at
bat and they have struck out three times," he said. "Now it's our turn to
bat." He turned his attention to his social programs. They were in their
infancy in his first four years in office. Now they were to become the
centerpiece of his administration.

At the suggestion of Alejandro Gómez, the man who'd helped organize
the rescue of the
Pilín León
, Chávez made one final move to mark
the end of the disastrous strike. He changed the names of the PDVSA
tankers that had refused to deliver their contents. Instead of beauty
queens, they took on the names of heroines of Venezuela's independence.
The
Susana Duijm
became the
Manuela Sáenz
, for Bolívar's
longtime companion and fellow revolutionary. The
Barbara Palacios
was renamed the
Luisa Caceres de Arismendi
, for the woman who —
while imprisoned by the Spanish on Margarita Island — delivered a
baby girl who died at birth.

Two more ships were honored with the names of two black women
who played a crucial role in Bolívar's early life. The
Maritza Sayalero
became the
Negra Hipólita
, in honor of the wet nurse who helped raise
Bolívar and whom the orphaned Liberator once referred to as both his
mother
and
his father. And the
Pilín León
, the ship that helped turned
the tide for Chávez, was rebaptized the
Negra Matea
for the governess
who helped raise Bolívar. In the aftermath of the devastating oil strike,
Chávez wanted to remind the country of Venezuela's revolutionary
roots as his own revolution prepared to take off.

Dilia Mari Davila grew up in rural Venezuela and never went to school
to learn to read and write. When she was eight years old her impoverished
family sent her off to work as a live-in maid, since they could barely
afford to feed her. It was a childhood of deprivation not uncommon
among millions of people in Venezuela's lower classes.

Nearly three decades after leaving her family, Davila finally got a
chance at an education. She signed up for one of Chávez's signature
social programs,
Mision Robinson. She learned to read and write, and
within a year was even mastering division and multiplication. By 2004,
at the age of thirty-four, she had reached a fourth-grade level of education.
Before, she could not help her elementary-school-aged son with
his homework because she didn't understand the words on the paper.
Now she could. She even started dreaming of going to college.

Davila was among a million and a half Venezuelans who took part
in Mision Robinson, one of the first of several social programs that
marked a new, more radical phase of Chávez's presidency in the postcoup,
post-oil-strike era. Initiated in 2003, the missions were a more
elaborate and organized version of the makeshift Plan Bolívar 2000
that Chávez started early in his presidency to meet immediate needs
for food, medical care, roads, and schools. Offering everything from
subsidized food markets to literacy classes to health services, the missions
became wildly popular in the teeming barrios of Caracas and
other urban centers and in the impoverished countryside. They were so
successful that even Chávez's opponents eventually declared that if they
took power, they would continue funding the programs.

Davila lived in the Sector A, La Casita (little house), section of La
Vega, a sprawling mountainside barrio in Caracas that turned into one
of the showcases of Chávez's social experiment. It attracted visitors and
journalists from around the world, although Venezuela's media ignored
it and up until the middle of 2004 no journalist from the United States
had visited. The barrio was a collection of simple cinder-block homes
including some packed into narrow, winding streets barely the width of
a person's outstretched arms.

One of the first and most dramatic missions to arrive in La Vega was
Barrio Adentro — Inside the Neighborhood. Starting in 2003 Chávez and
Caracas mayor Freddy Bernal sent hundreds of Cuban doctors into barrios
in Caracas such as La Vega, and thousands more into other poor neighborhoods
throughout the country. The program stemmed from Chávez's
agreement in 2000 to provide energy-starved Cuba with cut-rate oil. In
return Castro sent doctors, teachers, sports trainers, and other experts.

When Chávez took office, Venezuela's
public
health system, which
most of the population relied on for care, was collapsing. In the barrios
and impoverished countryside, medical attention was pitiful and in
some cases nonexistent. "Pregnant women in these neighborhoods have
never been to the doctor for prenatal care, and give birth at home on the
floor," noted
Rafael Vargas, who was Chávez's chief of staff during the
coup and later managed the Cuban doctors program. "There are ten-,
fourteen-year-old kids who have never been to the dentist."

Barrio dwellers had to leave their homes before dawn to make the
long trek to a clinic or a hospital to be seen. If they weren't far ahead
enough in the line, they were sent home. Those undergoing surgery had
to supply everything on their own: gauze, medicines, sheets, even Band-
Aids. The joke in Venezuela was that the only thing patients didn't have
to supply was the doctor. Sometimes even that was missing. Patients
commonly languished in hospitals for weeks waiting for a doctor to
become available or broken surgical equipment to get fixed. Some in
urgent need of emergency care simply died.

Cuba was a different story. The island had a health system recognized
by the World Health Organization as a model for Third World
nations, although economic troubles in the 1990s after the collapse of its
main benefactor, the Soviet Union, deprived it of some basic supplies. It
sent doctors all over the world, from Haiti to Honduras in Latin America
and the Caribbean to Gambia
and Angola in Africa, as part of its revolutionary
solidarity with other Third World nations. Venezuela became
its largest operation, with twenty thousand doctors and health workers
eventually. By some accounts, the fourteen thousand doctors amounted
to one-fifth of all Cuba's physicians. While previous governments had
tried to bring some health care to the barrios, by now that was a distant
memory and was nothing like the scale of Chávez's project.

The physicians were greeted like heroes in the barrios. Neighbors
fought with one another to offer them dinner invitations. Hosting them
was an honor. In some areas neighbors dropped off so much donated
food, the doctors had to tell them to stop. Initially the Cubans lived in
people's homes and ran makeshift clinics out of everywhere from living
rooms to the backs of bodegas. Eventually the government constructed
hundreds of two-story, hexagonal brick buildings; the doctors provided
medical service on the first floor and lived on the second. They usually
served two-year stints, and received a $250 monthly stipend from the
Venezuelan government.

They focused on preventive medicine, hoping to head off ailments
before they turned more serious and required extensive medical intervention.
Along with local volunteers they conducted surveys of the communities,
walking house-to-house to take down medical histories, find
out who was ill, and try to obtain the necessary medicines. They trained
community volunteers to give workshops on nutrition and preventive
medicine. By the program's second year dentists and ophthalmologists
were joining them, bringing advanced equipment into the barrios that
included new Chinese- and Brazilian-made dentists' chairs, eye-testing
and lens-making machines, and fully equipped Pap smear units.

It was not always an easy assignment. In some barrios, neighbors
convinced gang members to escort the doctors as they made their
rounds or were passed off from one gang-controlled area to another.
The safety measures didn't always work; a few Cuban physicians were
attacked and killed by common criminals.

Nor was the program universally hailed. The physicians' lobby criticized
it, saying the Cubans were not needed — eight thousand unemployed
Venezuelan doctors could take their place. They criticized
Chávez for failing to improve public hospitals, where most Venezuelans
went for more intensive medical treatment the Cubans could not provide
in the neighborhood clinics. They also questioned the credentials
of the Cubans, and accused some of malpractice.
Douglas León Natera,
president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation, went so far as to allege
that the Cubans weren't doctors at all. "We're not xenophobes," he said.
"We have information that these people, almost one hundred percent
of them, are not doctors. These are people masquerading as doctors,
wearing white robes with stethoscopes around their necks."

While that accusation was simply laughable to Chávez's supporters,
León's other arguments were undercut by some simple facts. When the
government placed ads in newspapers offering housing and jobs in the
barrios, few Venezuelan doctors showed up. Hailing mainly from the
middle class, they were more interested in treating affluent patients at
lucrative private clinics, where business was booming in elective procedures,
breast enlargements and other "touch-ups," in the beauty-queencrazy
country. Many doctors were simply afraid to set foot in the barrios.
The allegations of malpractice also seemed unfounded — the Cuban
health system was widely respected.

As for the notorious
public hospitals, they did not miraculously
turn into models of efficiency under Chávez overnight, but they did
improve, with supplies becoming more abundant, care getting better,
and more buildings going up. Social spending per capita on health rose
a whopping 74 percent between 1999 and 2005 alone, according to government
figures. It jumped an estimated 10 percent more in 2006, and
kept rising in 2007. Most of the money came from
PDVSA. Chávez set up
a special fund at the oil giant to finance the social programs. Booming
world oil prices helped make it all possible.

Thousands of poor patients who could not be treated in Venezuela
flew to Cuba for advanced treatment and surgery for strokes, back injuries,
and other ailments in another part of the medical program that became
immensely popular. One of the programs,
Mision Milagro — Miracle
Mission — flew patients to Cuba for free eye surgery. Many impoverished
people considered it a godsend, although some Cubans resented
their special treatment. Eventually Chávez expanded the program, flying
people from
Jamaica,
Bolivia, and other countries in Latin America to
Cuba for eye surgery. He even floated the idea of bringing in poor people
from Africa and impoverished communities in the United States. Cuba
provided the medical expertise; Venezuela provided the money.

Many of the patients suffered from cataracts and were blind or badly
impaired. After the operations, they could see. "This is an example
of integration and south-south cooperation," said Elinor Sherlock,
Jamaica's ambassador to Cuba. "You see them, especially poor people
who cannot afford care, staring in awe for hours out the window after
their operations. It really is miraculous."

Some of Chávez's opponents claimed he was using Cuban doctors
to win votes, but in the end it was hard to argue that putting full-time
doctors in slums was a bad thing, no matter where they came from. "If
it's necessary to go to Mars or the moon to help the poor, then we'll get
doctors from Mars," said program head Rafael Vargas. Chávez claimed
that in the first few months of the program alone, the Cuban doctors
saved three hundred lives.

Eventually the government moved into a second phase of the
Mission
Inside the Neighborhood program, going beyond community-based
preventive health care initiatives to focus on improving or creating
facilities to treat more serious illnesses. It spent $52 million building a
state-of-the-art children's cardiac hospital. It spent another $1 billion to
repair forty-four hospitals, build about six hundred diagnostic or rehabilitation
centers, and open more than twenty-one hundred neighborhood
clinics for Mission Inside the Neighborhood. Doctors conducted
a growing number of surgeries in Venezuela as the government resurrected
the long-decaying public hospital system. It also sent hundreds
of young people to Cuba to attend medical school for free, returning
home to serve impoverished sectors.

The medical missions had an overwhelmingly positive impact on
barrio residents. By some estimates, by 2006 some fourteen and a half
million people — 54 percent of the population — was receiving free
health care through the Barrio Adentro program.

One typical beneficiary, sixty-three-year-old Margarita Mendez,
had been a prisoner in her small cement home for years. A severe case
of varicose veins had swollen her lower legs, which were covered with
pink, raw blisters. To leave her house in the grim San Pablito shantytown,
relatives had to carry her down a steep, dizzying outdoor staircase
leading to a main road below. To get back, she had to climb the flight of
stairs. She could barely make it. She had scaled the staircase only half
a dozen times in a decade to make the thirty-minute trip to the nearest
general hospital. In her last visit doctors told her they would have to
amputate. She never went back.

Her life changed when Cuban doctor Roberto Hernández arrived
on the scene. Burly and mustachioed, Hernández had served in Haiti
and Angola as part of Cuba's international medical missions. In Caracas's
San Pablito, he started making house calls to Mendez three times a
week, climbing the staircase and ducking under clotheslines. Gang
members escorted him and passed him off from one territory to the
next. The visits helped. Mendez's condition improved. She made her
first tentative steps through the unpaved streets outside her house, and
hoped to make it down the treacherous staircase within a few months
more. "Doctor Hernández," she said, "has been a godsend."

While Cuba excelled at health care despite its lack of democratic freedoms
and its morose state-controlled economy, it also boasted of a strong
educational system. One of the great achievements of the early years of
Castro's revolution was a literacy campaign in which thousands of volunteers
headed out into the streets and the countryside to teach the
illiterate to read and write. They wiped out illiteracy and, along with an
enhanced higher
education system, turned Cubans into arguably the
best-educated populace in Latin America. Cuba had a higher literacy
rate than the United States, according to the United Nations and other
independent organizations. Poor black Cubans who never dreamed of
going to college during the Batista dictatorship now could.

Chávez borrowed the Cuban model for his literacy campaign, with
some twists adapted to the Venezuelan reality. Cuba sent hundreds of
literacy trainers to Venezuela to teach a hundred thousand Venezuelan
volunteers how to give the classes. And while the Cubans a generation
earlier had gone out into the fields with pencils and notebooks to teach
people to read, this time they brought television sets, video recorders,
and reading glasses.

Volunteers gave classes in schools after regular classes got out, in
church basements, and in community libraries. In the Caracas barrio
of Coche one afternoon, twenty-two-year-old university student Rosana
Alviarez was teaching four elderly women who were enrolled in Mision
Robinson. They sat in a stifling hot converted cement garage on the
grounds of a local convent as a fan tried fruitlessly to cool off the
room. The women repeated words Alviarez said to illustrate the difference
in Spanish between the regular
r
and the rolling double-
r
sound.
Afterward they praised Chávez for allowing them to learn to read, write,
and master basic math. "He's a good president for all Venezuelans," said
sixty-eight-year-old Maria Barrio. "He's done very good programs that
were never seen here before."