Accents
Comprehending the 'Bolivarian Revolution'
I'm yielding my space to Dr. Delia D. Aguilar, or Del, a friend and classmate at UP, who recently visited Venezuela with her husband, Dr. Epifanio "Sonny" San Juan, Jr. A homegrown Ilongga, Del is a professor in Women's Studies Program. She has authored books on feminist concerns and has written in peer-reviewed national and international journals. Sonny himself is the director of the Connecticut-based Philippine Cultural Studies Center. Del does the writing for this week's column -- A Visit to Venezuela, an article of great relevance to the Philippines as it touches on geopolitics and its economic ramifications on a Third World country that is very much like ours. Is the Venezuelan President's "Bolivarian Revolution" the panacea for the woebegone Bayan ko? Perhaps. Read on and have your say:
I would like to share with your readers some of my observations about a recent Venezuelan study/tour that Sonny and I took part in. The trip marked the culmination of a college seminar in which we registered along with 15 others here in Connecticut. The course objectives were to comprehend President Hugo Chavez' "Bolivarian Revolution" and to get a glimpse of the "misiones" that are its backbone. Because mainstream media has nothing but condemnation for Chavez and his projects, we were very interested in finding out what activities the Venezuelan people are engaged in that pose such a huge threat to the West, in particular to the United States.
Landing in Caracas felt much like landing in Manila. The climate is very similar (though perhaps not as humid), as were the buildings and commercial logos. Familiar billboards of Nescafe, Pepsi, etc. were visible from our hotel, serving as landmarks on the occasions that we ventured out on our own. But inhabited by a mere 5 million--Venezuela's total population is 25 million--Caracas isn't as crowded as Metro Manila. The affluent in Caracas who, like in the Philippines, comprise a tiny minority, are surrounded by the poor who are concentrated in slums along the hillsides. We were taken to one such slum by a former Maryknoll priest from the US who had lived in that neighborhood for many years. That, too, felt like being in Tondo. The priest reminded me of Father Gigi, an Italian priest whom we met in New York not long after he was booted out of Tondo in an army jeep and shoved into a Rome-bound plane by the Marcos dictatorship in the late 70s.
But what was very different from the Philippines are Venezuela's remarkable misiones and cooperatives. We visited a cooperative that included a garment factory, a shoe factory, and a medical clinic. The latter, especially, impressed all of us, even those in our group whose only point of comparison was the US. Furnished with the latest equipment and staffed with doctors trained by Cubans (up to 20,000 Cuban doctors are in Venezuela for this purpose), the clinic had its waiting room filled with patients of all ages, poor patients who were getting medical care at zero cost. Medicine was also dispensed entirely for free! Although not large, the clinic offered dental, pediatric, obstetrical/gynecological, and other specializations; it had X-ray machines and equipment to conduct simple lab tests, and could handle common ailments. What a contrast to our own situation in the Philippines!
Both the shoe and garment factories were clean, spacious, and airy, quite unlike the factories I'd visited outside Manila. Like most shoe and garment factories, the majority of the workers were women. In the garment factory the conventional gender division of labor prevailed; that is, the cutters were men. What departed from convention was that the cutters were not paid more than the sewers. But the most unusual sight for me was that of women working together on a whole outfit, rather than each sewer being confined to, say, sewing only a sleeve or a collar. One could see how labor here was not alienated, the workers themselves deciding how they would go about the production process. Our guide, a journalist, told us that these women came from neighboring slums who were working for the first time and, under no pressure by a supervisor, tended to work at a leisurely pace.
Nearby was a government-subsidized food cooperative that sold basic foodstuff for half the price. We walked through the aisles poring over the food products and toiletries and making a few purchases. We learned that almost half the population procures food at subsidized prices, and one million get food for free. Add that to the fact that 17 million are for the first time receiving universal health care and free medicine, and it is clear that this was a government determined to meet the needs of the majority, not the privileged few.
We visited the new Bolivarian University that is located in what were formerly the central offices of PdVSA, Venezuela's oil company. Ironically, these offices constituted the nerve center of planning for the aborted coup in April 2002 (engineered with thinly-veiled US support) and, in December of the same year, a work stoppage intended to cripple the Chavez government. Now they had become the site for the construction of an alternative worldview, a transformation that is necessary if the Bolivarian ideals are to take hold. In line with the goals of the Bolivarian Revolution, the new University has two priority areas of study: medicine and education. According to the young Dean who addressed our group, the goals are well-being and social justice, both of which are possible only in opposition to neoliberalism and empire. In practical terms this means educating doctors to work in poor communities rather than in expensive private hospitals, and shaping people's thinking to uphold humane values over purely material, acquisitive ones.
(To be continued)