Caracas Chronicles

In 2004, just as the U.S. was using in Fallujah, Iraq, internationally prohibited armaments like white phosphorus, poison gas and nuclear armor-piercing bullets, targeting ambulance drivers and civilians, and laying waste to the entire city, I was mulling over the advice that the late Fr. Ernesto Cardenal had offered me when I visited Nicaragua earlier that year, during the 25^th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution.

I’d just done an interview with the poet-priest who I’d long admired and worked with during the years of Sandinista control in the country. Indeed, his poetry had inspired me to visit Nicaragua in the spring of 1981, when my Spanish vocabulary was confined to a few nouns, the present tense of a few verbs, and the ability to count to ten or so. 

Outside, as we did the interview that summer of 2004, the students were battling a neoliberal government, but Cardenal no longer held out any hope for the alternative, the man he called “dictator,” Daniel Ortega, with his populist party, the FSLN (Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional). There was, however, one bright spot in Latin America that he suggested I visit: President Hugo Chávez was leading the “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela, and it held great promise. I should visit there, he said, and I took the suggestion to heart.

When the U.S. began slaughtering its way through Fallujah in November of that year, I felt a sense of desperation, hopelessness and an impotent rage. If I could have stopped the war with my own life, I might well have done so, given the power of those feelings.

Operating under the assumption that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I even supported the Iranian theocracy led by Ahmadinejad and withheld my opinion when Ortega retook power.

I looked around the world for any hope whatsoever, and, with all the international institutions silent before the hecatomb, and our demonstrations, even in the San Francisco Bay Area of California just brief flashes of refusal so quickly extinguished, I remembered the words of Cardenal, and I booked a ticket to Caracas.

I met up with chavistas in Mérida and began interviewing them for what would eventually become a movie (Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out, 2008, PM Press). I was filled with hope, inspired by ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para los pueblos de America, which spells “dawn” in Spanish), a socialist internationalist proposal for Latin American unity to directly challenge the “imperialist” free trade zones proposed by the neoliberal regime of the United States. The “Missions,” especially “Vuelvan Caras” for job training; Barrio Adentro, a Cuban-Venezuelan project to bring healthcare to low-income neighborhoods; and especially the funding of cooperatives were all exciting proposals that Chávez had undertaken. 

Operating under the assumption that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I even supported the Iranian theocracy led by President Ahmadinejad, and held my nose, and withheld my opinion, of the Sandinista regime as it retook power and Chávez welcomed it. I said nothing as he welcomed Muammar Gaddafi from Libya, Putin from Russia and of course, Fidel Castro from Cuba, who was a demigod of the Bolivarian Pantheon. These unsavory autocrats were not to my liking, but I supported the vision of any kind of alternative to my own criminal government with its ongoing slaughter being carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq. After all, wasn’t maintaining my own hope in the face of this evil the most important objective of my life? To feed this hope and offer it to my fellow citizens seemed to be the very best thing I could possibly do with my life.

And I was wrong. I see it so clearly now, the narcissism from which that hope sprang. Allen Ginsberg put it well, at least if the story I once heard about him was true. He was at dinner with friends who were all bemoaning the evils of the U.S. at the moment—whether it was the napalm raids we were carrying out in Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia, or any one of a number of other crimes our government committed over the years. At some point someone blurted out, “we have to keep hope alive. We can’t give up hope!” and to this the poet responded fiercely, in effect, “Fuck hope! We have to do what’s right!”

I’ve had many years now to ponder that story and the underlying attitude and I think Ginsberg was right. Another poet, the Spaniard Leon Felipe, once asked, “And are there no false dreams?” I would add, and might not those dreams nurture false hopes?

When I consider this, looking back over my life as a solidarity activist, I feel a twinge of shame. Why was I doing the work of solidarity? Was it really for the Nicaraguans, the Salvadorans, the Zapatista Mexicans, the Venezuelans, or was it to nourish my own need for “hope” that ultimately was based on the false dreams of “socialism” “anti-imperialism” and all those noble ideals that somehow so often grew up into monsters?

Hope is no longer something I’m willing to blind myself to truth in order to attain; nor is it something I’m willing to compromise my values to maintain.

The Sandinista Revolution eventually became the Ortega/Murillo family dynasty that now rules Nicaragua with an iron fist; the Cuban Revolution continues to creep along repressing any movement for human rights, democracy and any vestige of freedom in the country, and Venezuela, poor Venezuela, under a dictatorship now that grew out of the false dreams and hopes of the Chávez mafia in alliance with the Cuban communist dictatorship. 

Of all the projects I’ve supported, only the Zapatistas continue to inspire me, but as a regional indigenous movement like many other small social movements of the continent. They offer evidence, I believe, of the argument I made in my political memoir (Home from the Dark Side of Utopia, 2016, AK Press) that the only “utopias” worth working for are those modest, limited and consensual utopias that reject coercion and violence of any kind to establish themselves and continue: worker-controlled collectives, community groups and organizations; neighborhood mutual aid groups, and for me, the 12-step self-help groups, sanghas, and other grassroots groups and organizations. I support these organizations and projects, but not because they give me “hope” but rather because I can offer my hope in the work I do for them. 

Hope is no longer something I’m willing to blind myself to truth in order to attain; nor is it something I’m willing to compromise my values to maintain.  I no longer work to “feel” hope, nor to generate that lovely warm glow it brings with its dreams, so often false. Nor am I cynical as I write this, because I, too, enjoy the warm glow of hope when I feel it. But I ask myself if this hope is real, or just another drug to maintain some false sense of myself and my world.

It took me nearly a decade before I was willing to risk foregoing hope and the dreams that sustained it for the naked, unvarnished truth. As I wrote in my memoir, in April of 2013, when I spent a month traveling through Venezuela after the election of the future dictator, Nicolás Maduro, I finally let go of that hope. Perhaps it was because my own country’s future at the moment appeared less bleak: Obama was president, winning on the “hope” ticket and it looked briefly like we might even have a bright future. But there was also something else: I had finally made a commitment to find, and live by, truth, and my ethical values and not by anything else, especially ersatz hopes and false dreams.

I know many of my leftist friends believe I’ve abandoned “the cause,” and they may be right. “Socialism” and “communism” are dreams I no longer can consider anything but nightmares as I look back over the history of the 20^th century. I would dare them to give me one example today where those dreams have resulted in anything positive in the long term. Nor do I put my faith in “capitalism” and the “self-correcting market” of neoliberalism, as I learned from the English philosopher, John Gray, whose book Black Mass convinced me that utopia is more than anything a malevolent virus of the Western mind, afflicting equally the Left and Right. Those dreams, and their purveyors, I would argue, have brought little more than greater misery to the world. 

We’re left with Ginsberg, and many others like him, inspired by the great spiritual traditions of the world: Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the thousands of other faiths that teach that we should act out of compassion, kindness, reciprocity and ethics to do what is right in the world simply because it is right, not expecting any rewards in return. We may be powerless to change much in the world, but we can change ourselves, and thereby change our relations by living according to our values, and the most profound teachings of all these religions tell us that this is the path to salvation.

I’m afraid Venezuelans who hope that Donald Trump will save them from the evil dictator under which they live are clinging to a false hope because their own situation seems so bleak. I understand them, and I certainly can’t blame them for looking for hope. But I would suggest that they might consider that the man in whom they have placed their hope resembles no one more than the dictator who now persecutes them. And I would end by reminding them of the words of Jesus who asked, “How can Satan cast out Satan?” (Mark 3:23).