The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, waves his country's flag after a rally to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Chávez's return to power after the failed 2002 coup, on April 13, in Caracas. Matias Delacroix (AP )
William Neuman went to Venezuela as a correspondent for
The New York Times
in time to cover Hugo Chávez's last election campaign, in 2012.
He remained four years in the country and was able to report the death and transfiguration of Chávez into Nicolás Maduro.
In 2019 he returned to cover the epic of Juan Guaidó, Leopoldo López's surrogate, as interim president of the Republic.
Between whistles and flutes, his close observation of the country consumed a decade.
I feel, when writing “decade”, that a hundred years have passed.
By the time Neuman arrived in Caracas, no one, except for the witches of the wasteland who stand in the way of Macbeth and the Cuban G2, would have given a nickel for the political future of Nicolás Maduro as successor to Hugo Chávez.
Henrique Capriles, at that time the great white hope of the opposition, told me, speaking with disdainful handsomeness of the candidate Maduro, appointed by Chávez
in article mortis
: "I'll take that asshole."
Today, Daniel Ortega and Miguel Diaz-Canel compete with Maduro, I think at a disadvantage, for the title of the most despotic and unsinkable contemporary Caribbean ruler in our America.
Neuman has very recently published a book based on his experience of what is Venezuelan in the "Maduro era" that has not yet been translated into Spanish.
He titled it
Things are never so bad that they can't get worse
(Martin's Press, New York), something whose translation admits nuances not only of speech but of
Caribbean
weltanschauung .
Although it can be summed up as "It can always get worse", there is a lot that this would still leave out.
It is, I say it once, a remarkable book, very remarkable.
During the years of the rise of Chávez, dean of the so-called “second wave” of populism, the prospective genre of the future of Chavismo in the continent prospered in the editorial globality.
To his ego satisfaction, public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and media stars like Oliver Stone hailed the unexpected arrival of the 21st-century socialist.
Journalists from all over the world sublimated, at the expense of the Venezuelan revolution, the repertoire of techniques taught by the so-called narrative journalism workshops.
The “profiles” of the petropolitical caudillo were numerous and the new Chronicle of the Indies ardently testified to the anti-imperialist scope of Bolivarian petrodiplomacy.
More than one Graham Greene appeared for our Omar Torrijos with a checkbook.
Expressed in 2013 dollars —the year the “eternal commander” died—, the Chávez era represented for the country, since 2000, a bonanza of 832 billion dollars.
The charioteer of his star was the longest price boom in the entire history of the oil civilization.
Everything bad about the Third World petrostate — the incentives to waste and corruption — was aggravated by military-populist authoritarianism.
In Venezuela, the inheritance of Chávez, increased under Nicolás Maduro, has been unspeakable corruption, an annihilating humanitarian crisis and the emigration in less than five years of almost 10% of the population.
Neuman's strategy sticks to the chronicle of the failure of the Chavista model where it is most flagrant: in public services whose domestic emblem is electricity and running water.
Neuman closely follows the great blackout of March 2019. He traces its origins and enters the dysfunctional jungle to which systemic corruption has reduced the institutions of the Venezuelan State.
Such is the common thread of the book: the meticulous account of a blackout that killed twenty newborns and caused the ruin of tens of thousands of family businesses.
From the turbines of the great dam to the shack where a destitute old man languishes.
From that main current of the story of a colossal blackout, pipes of diverse flow emerge that converge in the delta of generalized and lethal inanity that is 21st century socialism.
This thematic restriction is, however, only apparent: in its simplicity lies the fascinating strength of this book.
Neuman's emotional memory lends humanity and vigor to the account of his Venezuelan years.
There is, moreover, in her writing an unusual sensitivity to the bundle of meanings that the Spanish spoken in our America has.
A constant in his observations is the attention the author pays to the changes in intonation that make the same word polysemic in the voice of a defenseless person or in that of a caimacán from the upper echelons of the madurista government.
Another achievement of Neuman, and not the least, is the answer he knows how to give to the obligatory question: why is Maduro still there?
The chapters that Neuman dedicates to the performance of the opposition during the Maduro period, notably the hallucinated and already embarrassing interim of Juan Guaidó, are a model of journalistic probity.
The Cúcuta episode, the obscene twist that the Trump administration and the opposition leadership gave to the feigned humanitarian aid and the bloody mercenary fudge by Macuto are the best I have read in a long time.
Reading Neuman I remembered what a colleague of his, also an American, told me about the cosmopolitan Guadocista leadership in the days when Trump's candidacy reached its zenith and the formula "all options" was on everyone's lips in Miami, Bogotá and Madrid: “too many seminars in Georgetown, bro;
Too many series on Netflix.
I close my praise with one last note: William Neuman loves the light of the southern Caribbean, he knew how to get along with Armando Reverón's painting and with the legend of his coastal madness.
His book is read like a good rum served honestly by a friend who won't lie to you.
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