As a year ends and another begins, it is good to pause and look back at recent events and developments in Venezuela which have been alluded to in the blog.
Malaria is making a comeback in Latin America, with Venezuela earning the unfortunate distinction of leading in this revival. Refer to the August 17, 2019 blog post, “Clouds of DDT” https://thepulloftheland.com/clouds-of-ddt for a discussion of the phenomenally successful control of malaria in Venezuela in the 20th century (we don’t hear much about this because DDT is politically incorrect. Best keep quiet about that!). For an update on the return of malaria to the stricken land, refer to the Caracas Chronicles article, “Blame the Gold Rush: Malaria Keeps Spreading”, link below.
The December 13, 2019 blog post, “The Lost Children of Vargas” The Lost Children of Vargas tells of the terrible events precipitated by the rains of December 1999. For one account of that calamity, you might want to read another Caracas Chronicles narrative, “Only Two of Us Survived”, linked below. It is a heart-wrenching tale about the then-mayor of Vargas. Incredibly, politics intruded in this devastation. Assuming your heart is not made of stone, he will speak to you.
What about the elderly? Again, the redoubtable Caracas Chronicles has an interesting article about the demographic unit, the elderly, included in the millions who have voted with their feet, emigrating from the stricken land. The March 12, 2019 blog post, “Humanitarian Crisis” Humanitarian Crisis tells of this catastrophic migration. The Caracas Chronicles article about the older folks in the throngs is linked below.
You may have read recently about Juan Guaidó’s re-election as Speaker of the Venezuelan National Assembly. His breaking through the wall of Chavista soldiers a few days ago, might inspire hope. However, I’m afraid that hope will likely be dashed absent a true change of heart by Mr. Guaidó, wherein he sincerely rejects Socialism. Otherwise, all we’re talking about is a switch from leaded to slightly-less-leaded Socialism: both more of the same and both deadly. See the September 20, 2019 blog post, “Venezuelan Second Amendment?” for comments on this potential bait and switch A Venezuelan Second Amendment?
Contra Caracas Chronicles, this blogger has little faith in Mr. Guaidó and his party, Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD, no pun intended). First of all, do not put your faith in princes. So says the Good Book. Secondly, MUD and Guaidó may talk “big”, but their actions are sheer accommodation with the tyrannical regime. From gun control to submission to controlled elections, MUD and its supporters are no Founding Fathers.
And Founding Fathers are what Venezuela needs at this moment.
For the second year in a row, Venezuela emigration has been deemed by UN as a top migration issue in the world, second only to Syria’s.The Vargas disaster continues to echo in modern memory twenty years later. Read it and weep
“Hey, why are all the Christmas lights off?” I had said to no one in particular one night. My mother and father were out. So I dutifully began plugging all Christmas lights back into their respective power outlets, fully expecting hearty congratulations the next morning, for having had the self-initiative to have covered my parents’ gross oversight in not having switched on the season’s bright and lively bulbs.
Reactions, congratulatory or otherwise, would not have to wait till morning.
As I was plugging in an old, petrified Orinoco bough laced sparingly with small, white lights — a lovely, natural Christmas-embellished furnishing with a place of honor in the front, enclosed porch from where it could be enjoyed by anyone passing by on the lower side of the block — my parents drove up.
I was stunned, expressionless, as they rushed in, unplugging every light they came across. “The Christmas lights are on!” my mother anxiously exclaimed as she reached to the nearest socket and pulled the plug. My father was outside, pulling the plugs there.
What on earth? Christmas season in the camp extended well beyond the 25th of December. Festivities lived on at least through January 6th, Día de Reyes Magos (Epiphany), and in many cases beyond, especially in the labor camp.
I looked outside, through the porch screens, and noticed that neither of our immediate neighbors had a single light on. I suppressed the urge to run outside to see if any lights were on in the entire block. I rightly suspected that none were.
Standing there, in the middle of the passageway between the porch and living room, my father’s voice explained the matter, “Son, I realize you were thinking we somehow forgot to turn on these lights tonight, but did you forget that Mr. Fuentes died today?”
Of course I had not forgotten. Mr. Fuentes was a corpulent, true-to-stereotype jolly man who delighted in greeting children at the club and elsewhere in the camp. A Spaniard who had left Spain for greener pastures in Venezuela, he was well-liked. His wife possessed a sharp wit and hearty laughter, yet retained that lighthearted femininity so characteristic of Spanish women. They had one young daughter.
He had suffered a heart attack as he drove a company pickup to the Otro Campo (labor camp). The vehicle had gone over a small cliff of about fifty feet. Mr. G____ had been driving behind him and raised the alarm. But, according to the camp’s doctor, he had expired before the pickup had crunched to a stop at the bottom.
Afterwards, as the weeks and months went by, every time I accompanied my father or mother to the Otro Campo, as the automobile approached and passed by the spot where Mr. Fuentes had gone over, I would look, conscious that no one paused. Cars came and went by that spot as if nothing had ever happened there; as if he had been forgotten as quickly as he had died. Life is for the living, and must go on.
But there is a time for sorrow and the entire camp was in mourning that Christmastime; it was understood no festive lights would be switched on for at least two days, if not three. Grief was a shared passion there. I now felt I had violated that shared spirit of compassion and felt utterly miserable. My father pulled me to himself, “I know you meant well, son. We should have told you clearly why we left the lights off.”
That was his way of apologizing. And my love and respect for him increase all the more.
That year, the block without any lights shining those nights was sorrowfully dark indeed. The joy of Christmas outweighed the sorrow, but did not erase it totally. The season was joyous, yet serious. Like the profoundly evocative Wexford Carol, it bade all to consider well and bear in mind its eternal as well as temporal import — after all, the world has never been the same since that first Christmas. This juxtaposition of joy and quiet seriousness may have appeared contradictory to more sophisticated, technically oriented observers, but not to me as a boy.
Paradoxical perhaps, but not contradictory.
So, still being within the twelve days of Christmas, I again wish you all a Merry Christmas and also a most prosperous new year. We may not know what the year brings, but we certainly do know Him in Whom all things consist, including every single day of our lives.
Venezuelan nativity scenes tended to be elaborate and memorable.
Although it had long faded from public memory, this century has brought renewed awareness of the “Christmas Truce” of 1914. About ten years ago our family enjoyed the deeply moving, 2005 production of Joyeux Noel. We knew a little about the truce, but hardly enough. We later learned that there were truces in all fronts of that war.
To better understand this event requires an appreciation of the religious awareness of men and women at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the nihilism of Nietzsche, combined with the deleterious effects of the German, and, later, English “lower criticism”, had begun their march across elite academia and her handmaidens, their effect had not yet dribbled down to Everyman. Yet it was Everyman who would be sent out to march to his death in the name of the cynicism making its inroads into western civilization.
Most men and women of the West considered themselves Christian and cherished their traditions, with Christmas occupying a special place in their hearts. So when, a few days before Christmas, 1914, in defiance of national leaders, a “Christmas Truce” was observed across all fronts of the war, the politicians and military brass (along with certain civilian sectors ) were outraged. In other words, those not actually in the arena, in the war’s front; those not bleeding and dying, were angry. Adolph Hitler was not in the trenches at the time, but he is known to have been bitterly opposed to the truce. Charles De Gaulle called it “lamentable.”
In one section, the Truce began with Germans singing Silent Night, in their language. The British across no man’s land were surprised, but also began to sing the same Christmas carol in English. Eventually, a German soldier came out of his trench and erected a Christmas tree in no man’s land. British guns were aimed on him, but no one fired. That action spurred more spontaneous reactions, and, eventually, British and German soldiers were meeting in no man’s land, shaking hands, laughing, singing, exchanging cigarettes, food, and other small gifts — even soccer matches were held — in the spirit of Christmas.
Many letters are extant which tell, sometimes in moving prose, the details of the truce as it unfolded and ended in the letter-writers’ sections. Especially touching are the narrations about how the respite also allowed each opposing side to bury their dead.
In some sections, this truce extended through the first of January.
The brass descended with guns blazing. In one incident, an irate British officer, beside himself, took a rifle and, not to put too fine a point on it, murdered an unarmed German soldier standing in no man’s land.
The war resumed and carried on through three more Christmastimes and almost a fourth, were it not for the armistice of November 11, 1918. The high commands ensured there would be no more Christmas truces by, among other measures, issuing orders the following December warning against any “fraternizing” with the enemy. Anyone participating in any Christmas truce would be charged with “rendering aid and comfort to the enemy.”
By the end of the war, over twenty million people had died in the conflict, ten million of which were soldiers such as as those who had participated in the Christmas truce of 1914.
The 20th (twentieth) century should be known as the atheistic century, as it was characterized by regimes that boasted their denials of God. Gil Elliott in his 1972 work, The Book of the Dead tells us that the twentieth century, the century which represents the great triumph of humanism, gave us wars, revolutions, and concentration and re-education camps that killed between 89 and 159 million men, women, and children. Twenty-eight years later, seven French scholars wrote the magisterial, The Black Book of Communism which in over 900 chillingly documented pages, using formerly unavailable source documents, demonstrates that over 100 million fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, boys, girls, and babies died under the hand of atheistic communism, in addition to the dead from the wars of that century.
“From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members (James 4:1)?” The great fighter pilot and writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose existentialist tendencies I reject, but whose insights of man-in-action I respect, expressed it pithily: “For in the end, man always gravitates in the direction commanded by the lodestone within him.”
The Biblical, Augustinian concept of Just War needs to be dusted off and examined once again. There is evil in the world and Just Wars may be necessary; however, many wars certainly are not just.
On that first Christmas Day over two-thousand years ago was born the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). God commands all, including governors and princes and judges to honor Him. In history, many have done just that. And many have disdained to do so, especially in the 20th century. Peace and life tend to characterize the former; wars and death, the latter.
On this Christmas season of 2019, may we renew our love for God and may that renewal bring us to love our neighbor, and to be at peace with one another even as those soldiers of opposing armies were at peace, albeit for a short time, on the Christmas Truce of 1914.
Our family wishes you and yours a Very Merry Christmas season.
British and German soldiers at the Christmas Truce Statue in Liverpool, England, commemorating the Christmas Truce of 1914. British and German soldiers during the Christmas truce of 1914 Germans and Brits at soccer during the truce
Yes, it’s my favorite season. You can blame my parents for that. They abused us by making every effort to ensure we children experienced the joy of Christmas every year we lived in El Pao. Did they not realize that those memories they took such pains to create would endure throughout all the years of our lives? For shame.
They also forced us to receive visits from my mother’s side of the family who, every Christmas, drove over an hour on the dirt/rock road (later, when the road was asphalted, it took 45 minutes or so) to our house in El Pao for Christmas dinner (something we’d reciprocate by visiting them, every year, on New Year’s Day). Ah, what visits! All the laughter and joy. How did we ever endure such mistreatment?
We even believed in Santa Claus! Yikes!
I recall rushing through our front screen door, which led to the screen-enclosed, spacious porch area, sparsely outfitted with a rattan lounge chair and small sofa to the left, and a tall wooden bookcase, built to order by Señor Montaño, the camp’s carpenter, to my right. These furnishings seemed, to me, to be permanently covered by what appeared to be clear plastic shower curtains to protect them from the mists and drizzle which would drift in through the screen windows during the rainy season. However, since Christmastime was not the rainy season, the diaphanous coverings were absent. But I’d see them anyway.
Then I’d hear the at once familiar diapason sounding forth from the living room, where the record player sat. The vinyl disc was a Christmas album by The Randolph Singers whose broad tessitura instantly announced the upcoming joyous season. It must be 1959, because we are only two children. To this day, whenever “The Boar’s Head Carol” or “The Wassail Song” or “Fum Fum Fum” is performed on radio or stage or disc, I can’t help but to compare such to The Randolph Singers.
A few nights later, the camp would shine with a host of blinking white lights interlaced among the scores of steady, multi-colored bulbs entwined throughout overhangs, bushes, and large boughs, and stately trunks and throughout the vast coronas of the Araguaneys. The lights were so many that the camp seemed a mini-Times Square in the eye of the jungle, forever stamping in my memory an enduring association of lights with Christmas.
A most apt association indeed as Jesus Christ is the Light of the world.
The aguinalderos would soon begin their sporadic visits, going door to door, singing with good cheer and hilarious make-them-up-as-you-go carols. The aguinalderos were the Venezuelan version of 20th century descendants of the medieval jongleurs, or English and French minstrels. These men were adept at playing the “cuatro”, a four-string, mini-guitar, the tambour, a lightweight, slender, but sufficiently long and loud percussion instrument, maracas, and, often, the guiro, a conical instrument with washboard-like grooves across which the musician would rasp a small wooden board.
But these men were even more adept at making up songs with pointed, relevant lyrics, often detailing some physical characteristics of the house at which they sang, or quirks of its inhabitants, along with some historical anecdotes about them; but all tying back to Christmas somehow, and all at the spur of the moment. Those who knew Spanish, would laugh uproariously, fully understanding and marveling at the jokes, the light sarcasm, the sweetness, but most of all, the agility. Those homes with little or no Spanish knowledge enjoyed the lively music, but only for a little while because it quickly began to sound repetitious, which it was to those not understanding what was being said.
Another two memories which come immediately to mind at Christmas.
Mrs. Bebita De La Torre had a beautiful and sweet singing voice. At Christmastime, events would be held at the camp club. One Christmas season night, it seemed the entire camp population fit into the main club hall and we stood around the hall about two lines deep and sang “Silent Night” in English and Spanish. I happened to have been placed right next to Mrs. Bebita. To me, her voice seemed to waft, to carry across the hall, even though it was not loud or overwhelming, and certainly not ostentatious. Towards the last verse, I just pretended to be singing, because I preferred to just hear her as she sang “Silent Night” next to me.
And then there’s “The Christmas Song”. The record player sits across the room from the tree under which many wrapped presents are placed and we children are being readied for bed. The silky soothing voice of Nat King Cole issues forth from the player and I know it is Christmas night.
Should you like to take 6 minutes to see snippets of a family Christmas in 1958. You’ll see four generations here, including the pipe smoking great-grandmother. This is around the same time of the events in this post.
Should you like to bask in the late, great Nat King Cole’s voice singing “The Christmas Song” Christmas 1961, the last Christmas in the “old house”. Early Christmas season, circa 1964, in the “new house.”
Uncle Alfred and Cousin Janis, early Christmas season, 1960, Miami. Aunt Sarah in background.
This post is one of the few where I direct the reader to current news, this time via three links (below).
The first link is a wrenching narrative by José Cordeiro, whose father was unable to survive the wait times imposed by socialized medicine.
The second link is an article on Venezuela’s refugee crisis, which now surpasses Syria’s. However, as you will read, the “international community” has provided over $7 Billion to the Syria crisis, but about half a Billion to the Venezuela crisis. One can only conclude that some crises are more chic than others.
The third, and final, link is perhaps the most wrenching of all. This hearkens to “the Vargas tragedy”, December, 1999, when days of rain precipitated massive landslides which destroyed, completely buried, or washed out to sea countless people and entire towns. The United States offered help, initially accepted but then refused by then-president Hugo Chavez who, in agreement with his good friend, Fidel Castro, believed a revolutionary stance was more important than saving lives. Many children were handed over to officials by distraught parents. What happened to them? The question remains unanswered twenty years later.
In a Socialist society, people often vote with their feet.There are countless images of the Vargas disaster. Among them are photos of makeshift wooden crosses with the names of the members of entire families who disappeared.
