I did not remember anyone talking about waking us up at, what? 2 A. M.? 4 A. M.?
But there was my father, shaking me awake hours before dawn on a weekday morning.
In my torpor I figured we were going fishing, but the little voice in the back insisted and persisted in affirming that today was a school day and it would be highly unlikely for him to encourage us to play hooky.
By the time I was on my feet, shuffling to the living room, I saw that my mother had already awakened my sisters, who, equally perplexed, waited for me in the living room. We were too sleepy to speak or even grumble. The house was silent.
Our parents led us through the long kitchen and someone drowsily asked whether the Flor de La Medianoche (Midnight Flower) was blooming that night. A most reasonable question, which would unlock tonight’s mystery.
However, there was a difference: trumpets usually (always?) preceded the Flor de La Medianoche spectacle. Throughout the day, the talk around the camp, among children as well as adults, would reflect the excited anticipation of getting up at midnight to witness the event. We’d go to bed knowing that we’d be awakened to go outside and gawk at this magnificent, aromatic flower which buds at midnight. Sometimes, at that hour, we’d receive visitors who did not cultivate it but who enjoyed its beauty and would come over to celebrate with us. Photos would be taken. Other families around the camp who cultivated the flower, would do likewise.
The flower not only blooms at midnight, but it also begins to die almost immediately. As I recall, this was a biannual occurrence.
But tonight was different. Too quiet, for one thing. No excited talk the previous day, for another. It was as if the adults had thought about engaging in whatever it was that we were about to do, but did not commit, given the nuttiness of the hour.
My father held the kitchen door open and we all, no longer shuffling, marched out to the carport as he ordered us to get in the car. In our pajamas? Really?
Mother and father said nothing or very little or very quietly or I was too sleepy to capture any conversation. We three children (at the time) just sat in the back seat as we rode along the familiar camp road out, past the club grounds, and to the alcabala (security gate) whose guard dutifully opened for us.
I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I recall is coming to Rankin Hill, a residential section of the labor camp (otro campo) with a clearing at the edge, which afforded an expansive overlook. As my father sought a space to park, we saw many (many!) people, from both camps, gathered there. Through the windshield we beheld the most spectacular constellation of lights, with a brightness that surpassed the moon’s, and an apparent proximity which felt as if we could reach out, just beyond the hill, and grab a handful of stars.
We walked, hurriedly, to the clearing; everyone knew everyone and greetings were continuously exchanged, but always the gaze, the commentary, the wonderment was towards the spectacle displayed against the tropical night sky. The brightness was powerfully magnetic, like a consuming fire which doesn’t allow you to look away.
“Ikeya-Seki”, someone said. What? “Ikeya-Seki!” And what in the world is an Ikeya-Seki? A new constellation appearing next to the earth?
It was a magnificent comet, discovered by Japanese scientists in 1965, just a month or so before it became visible to the naked eye as it swept within 500,000 miles of the sun. This was brighter than Halley’s. I had seen photos of Halley’s. I had read about Halley’s. Halley’s was a good friend of mine. And this was way more impressive than Halley’s.
Ikeya-Seki was confirmed to have been the brightest comet of the 20th century; indeed, of the past one-thousand years. Some called it “The Great Comet”.
Scientists tell us it was 10 times brighter than the full moon. From a child’s perspective, it seemed like another sun, only broken into countless, infinitesimal pieces, with a 75 million-mile long tail that looked like a curtain majestically splayed across a massive night stage. From Rankin Hill, the comet shot downwards, with a tail stretching up into limitless space. We looked almost straight up, as if standing at the foot of the Empire State Building and looking up to try to see the observatory deck. The tail seemed to “hang” down from infinity, and lowering our gaze to behold it horizontally, we could see its width extending across, and its length dropping behind the jungle horizon. To say it dominated the sky would be the understatement of the ages.
Ikeya-Seki continued to own the sky throughout the month of November, 1965.
Seems that someone from the labor camp had called our parents and encouraged them to come, and to bring us along, as the sight was one for a lifetime.
And that it was.
I had never seen anything like it; nor have I since.
It’s due to return in about 1,000 years.
Photo taken in southern California in late October, 1965. This is not the view I had in southeastern Venezuela, but unfortunately I cannot find photos taken in the vicinity of my childhood. Maybe someone took a photo, but I’ve had no success thus far in tracking it down.
Midnight Flower
My sisters enjoying the Midnight Flower in our El Pao home, circa 1967
You might remember the story of Squanto, the Wampanoag Indian who, circa 1608, was captured by a Captain Hunt and sold into slavery in Spain. He was purchased by a well-meaning monk who taught him the basics of the Christian faith. Squanto eventually made his way to England and worked for a John Slaney who was sympathetic to him and promised that he would do all he could to see that Squanto made his way back home to Massachusetts. That promise was kept and, in 1619, over ten years after his kidnapping, Squanto, now an English-speaker, was back in Plymouth, Massachusetts, only to learn that all his loved ones and companions had died of an epidemic.
Accounts vary, but all agree on the major events: from America to Europe and back to America to find himself desolate.
A year later, the Pilgrims landed, knowing no one in that “desolate wilderness,” and over half of them perished that winter. Then they met Squanto. Here is how William Bradford, the long-time governor wrote about Squanto in the classic, Of Plymouth Plantation (he always wrote in the third person): “…but Squanto continued with them and was their interpreter and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation. He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish, and to procure other commodities, and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never left them till he died.”
Squanto was at that first Thanksgiving in 1621. Both he and the Pilgrims expressed their thankfulness to God for His bountiful mercies. How is this possible in the face of so much desolation and death? Because God is good. We only see part, but He knows the end from the beginning of a story whose chapters are still being uncovered for us. Catastrophic events are only part of that story. In similar fashion Martin Rinckart could write the wondrous Now Thank We All Our God within the context of The Thirty Years’ War and pestilence which carried away thousands of his fellow citizens and parishioners, including his own beloved wife.
Bradford was at Squanto’s side as he lay dying. Squanto “desired the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in heaven.” He asked that his possessions be given to his Pilgrim friends “as remembrances of his love.” The Pilgrims were deeply affected by this “great loss,” yet they remained a people characterized by thankfulness to God.
I appreciate living in a land where Thanksgiving is a national holiday. We used to observe it in the mining camp in El Pao, and it was observed in American camps and facilities all over the world as I was growing up. This is a quintessentially American observance.
And it’s a good observance, because, rightly observed, it can compel us to pause and consider His blessings, which are beyond number.
Lillie and I think of men and women who impacted our lives when we were children in Puerto Rico and Venezuela, respectively. We are thankful for the friendships that our parents cultivated and are amazed, and deeply moved, when we consider that those friendships survived the death of some of our parents, even to this day.
We are grateful for childhood friends who are still faithful friends. What a treasure!
We are thankful for the members of our extended families. Each of you have had an influence on us and we thank you, dear uncles, cousins, loved ones.
We are thankful for our grandparents. I was fortunate to have met Lillie’s maternal great-grandparents and her grandparents (both sets), and my maternal grandmother. What men and women of character they were! But I am also grateful for my father’s patiently telling me (and re-telling, because I always wanted to hear more!) about his father and mother, my paternal grandparents. Even though I never met them, I feel like I know them and often in life have asked myself how my grandfather or my grandmother would react or think about certain situations in life.
I also met my father’s last living uncle, having visited him in a retirement home in Arizona in 1980 shortly before his passing away. The memory of that short visit still possesses the power to move me deeply. He was quite a man.
We are grateful for the small churches we knew in Latin America. For the humble, unassuming, yet hearty and steadfast brethren who loved us. Many of them said little, but their lives said much! I recall at least two of them who were rescued by a Loving God from lives of dissipation. They said little, but their renewed characters and lives have affect me increasingly as the years go by.
We are most thankful for our parents, who have been careful to encourage us to appreciate what has gone before. Thanks to them, we deeply appreciate you, our aunts, uncles, and cousins, and friends. Our fathers and mothers would be the first to deny perfection in anything, but if we could attain a good measure of their character, we would do well indeed!
Each of you whose paths have crossed ours, are not a “happenstance” to us, nor we to you. Our Good Lord sees to it that all has a purpose which continues to work itself out for our good and His glory.
As we thank Him, we also thank you for your kindness and love and care which in many cases have been a constant through the years.
May you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Psalm 100
Plaque honoring Martin Rinckart in Eilenburg, Germany
Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices, Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices; Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today. First stanza of the hymn Now Thank We All Our God by Martin Rinckart
Arecibo, Puerto Rico, town where Lillie spent most of her childhoodMayaguez, Puerto Rico. Town where Lillie was bornSome of my childhood friends in El Pao. Annual Christmas program at the club
My paternal grandfather, Max A. Barnes in Cuba circa 1898, at the end of the Spanish American WarRepresentation of SquantoWilliam Bradford
The below was published in 2015 in the Harvard Review of Latin America (link below the article). Some of his observations do not comport with my own experience (Jim Crow type arrangements and treatment may have prevailed in his camp, but not in mine; not all westerns were insensitive to the American Indian, witness Fort Apache and many others; the sentiments in the limerick at the end became all-too-prevalent by the mid-sixties, but were not based on fact or economic reality, etc.); however, overall, Mr. Tinker comes close and I won’t distract further from his narration.
Life in a Venezuelan Oil Camp
Tío Conejo Meets Uncle Sam
By Miguel Tinker Salas
Workers dig a well in Caripito. Photo courtesy of the University of Louisville.
I grew up in a Venezuelan oil camp. Eversince I can remember, I have heard both Spanish and English spoken all around me or conveyed through music or films. With my family, I ate traditional Venezuelan arepas, cachapas, carne mechada (shredded beef), fried plantain, and black beans, but invitations to dinners at friends’ houses often meant sampling curry goat, roti and thali, borscht, or U.S.- style barbecues.
In many ways, Caripito, the oil town where I was raised, embodied the changes occurring throughout Venezuela after the discovery of oil. In 1930, the Standard Oil Company of Venezuela built a port facility and began work on a refinery in this town, in the state of Monagas in eastern Venezuela, to process oil from fields in Quiriquire, Jusepin and Temblador. The promise of the oil attracted Venezuelans from throughout the country; many caripiteños (people of Caripito) had roots in the adjacent state of Sucre. In succeeding decades, people from Trinidad, Italy, Lebanon and even a handful of Russian exiles also made their way to Caripito. By 1939, Caripito had a population estimated at about 5,000 people, some 300 of whom were “white Americans.” In Caripito, as in most oil camps, to be white increasingly became synonymous with being a U.S. expatriate. By 1960, the total population had soared to a little over 20,000 people.
At an early age I became acutely aware of how different the oil camp experience was from the rest of Venezuela. After several years of living in the residential enclave, and seeking to avoid the demanding social expectations of the camp, my parents moved to Los Mangos, a neighborhood of Caripito. However, they also recognized the importance of straddling both worlds, and my mother dutifully drove me everyday to the company school and our family selectively participated in many camp activities.
After oil was discovered in 1914, Venezuelan production was concentrated in the interior of the country, where infrastructure and sanitary conditions had improved little since the 19th century. To ensure operations, foreign companies took charge of basic services including electricity, water, sewage, roads, housing, health services, schooling and a commissary. In these rural areas, the companies supplanted the state, and local communities became dependent on foreign enterprises for basic services.
Standard Oil Company of Venezuela (laterCreole Petroleum, a subsidiary of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey), and Shell Oil built residential camps to house their employees. In classic Jim Crow fashion, the companies created distinct areas for foreigners, typically white U.S. employees or “senior staff,” Venezuelan professionals or “junior” staff, and more modest housing for workers. The senior staff clubs included a pool, golf course, tennis and basketball courts, as well as bowling alleys while the workers club typically had a baseball field, a bolas criollas court (bocce), a bar and a dance floor. In spite of this hierarchy, by the 1950s the camps became symbols of U.S.-sponsored “modernity,” with orderly communities, higher salaries and access to a full range of services that sharply contrasted with conditions found in the local Venezuelan settlements.
The camps represented an improvised and largely transitory society made up of residents from different parts of the United States and Venezuela. The camps allowed Venezuelans to interact with people from other regions, races and countries. With few if any roots to the local community, workers were frequently transferred between camps, and the company promoted an esprit de corps among its employees that centered on an all-encompassing corporate culture. Company practices favored hiring family members, thus handing down values such as the “American way of life” from generation to generation.
t despite their artificial nature, the camps left an enduring legacy in Venezuelan culture and society. For the generations that worked in the oil industry, the camps reinforced their image as a privileged sector of Venezuelan society. Just as importantly, the camps were sites of cultural and social exchange, with the “American way of life” influencing everything from politics to values. Those employed in the industry expected the Venezuelan state to be the guardian of this distinctive lifestyle. Many residents retained a collective nostalgia for the experience of the camps, overlooking the racial and social hierarchy that prevailed and the detachment that existed from Venezuelan society.
Caripito was typical of this oil town culture. The same ships that navigated the San Juan River to load oil also brought an array of U.S. fruits and canned products for sale in the camp commissary. I still recall the amazement of eating individually wrapped red Washington apples for the first time, or savoring crisp Mexican tortillas that came in vacuum-sealed metal cans. Long before McDonalds appeared in Venezuela, the soda fountain at the company club regularly served the “all American meal” consisting of hamburgers, fries, and Coke. The Venezuelan diet quickly incorporated U.S. culinary preferences and tastes.
Like other children in the camps, I went to a bilingual company school that incorporated both the Venezuelan and U.S.-mandated curriculum. To a certain extent, exposure to a bicultural milieu shaped the consciousness and personal sensibilities of people like myself who inhabited the camps or its environs. Beyond simply the ability to speak both languages, the camps conveyed the importance of dealing with difference. This experience, however, was not shared equally, and it usually fell on the Venezuelans to learn English. Besides understanding English, familiarity with U.S. norms and customs proved essential for Venezuelans seeking to advance in the company. Interacting with foreigners became natural, but so did the imposition of a social racial hierarchy reinforced by U.S. expatriates at the top of the social order.
Festivities in oil camps highlighted the extent to which the camps represented self-contained enclaves of U.S. culture in the heart of Venezuela. Seldom if ever questioned, the pervasive influence of the U.S. oil industry made political and cultural ties with the north appear normal. Celebrations of the 4th of July melded with Venezuelan independence on the 5th of July, becoming shared events that allowed politicians and company officials to make largely perfunctory claims of solidarity. Expatriates, especially from Texas, saw the occasion as an opportunity to prepare Southwest-style barbecues where local beer flowed freely. Uncle Sam, the benevolent father figure that later morphed into a symbol of U.S. imperialism, mixed freely with Tío Conejo, a shrewd rabbit from a Venezuelan folk tale who regularly outwits his tiger nemesis, Tío Tigre.
Other festivities, however, diverged from Venezuelan traditions for which no parallel activity existed. During Halloween, children dressed as Mickey Mouse, cowboys, ghosts and witches wandered throughout the senior camp asking for candy from befuddled Venezuelans. Thanksgiving celebrations by the U.S. expatriate community, which often included public gatherings, and the consumption of frozen turkeys imported from the United States, remained an exclusively foreign activity. Venezuelans outside of the oil industry had no connection to these events. A traditional Christmas in Venezuela had always included building a Nativity scene, but in the oil camps, this practice was slowly displaced by ornament-laden imported pine trees. To add to the festive mood, the oil company typically decorated a nearby oil well or water tower with colored lights in the shape of a Christmas tree, with adjacent loudspeakers playing seasonal melodies.
Shortwave radios allowed expatriates—and some oil camp Venezuelans—to keep track of events in the United States and important news quickly spread. This was long before the Internet or cable television made speedy news a fact of life. I can recall seeing my U.S. teacher at the Cristóbal Mendoza grammar school break down in tears when the school loudspeaker announced the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Another way of connecting to U.S. culture was through movies shown at the camp club; Spanish subtitles allowed the Venezuelan audience to follow the action without paying second thought to the overt racism present in many of the U.S. Westerns that stereotyped Mexicans and Native Americans. Many of my U.S. classmates at the camp shared LP records that came with a coonskin cap, plastic musket, and powder horn and recounted the exploits of Davy Crocket starring Fess Parker.
Venezuelans who did not live in the camp or work in oil sought entertainment in the San Luis movie house in La Sabana across from the Creole Petroleum refinery. I straddled both worlds, and loved to watch Mexican cowboy (charros) films or the comedy of Cantinflas and Tin Tan in the old-fashioned movie house that featured a range of seating from common wooden benches to higher-priced chairs. Outside the theater, my friends and I looked forward to savoring corn empanadas de cazón (dried shark), a local favorite in eastern Venezuela, made by an Afro-Venezuelan woman.
The importance of oil to the U.S. economy and military thrust Venezuela into the midst of the Cold War. In 1962, Peace Corp volunteers were assigned to Caripito to teach English in secondary schools and promote U.S. values. In case their efforts failed, Green Beret advisors gathered intelligence and trained the Venezuelan National Guard. In 1962, guerrillas launched an offensive in eastern Venezuela. The U.S. military advisors assigned to Caripito asked my local Scout troop to report on “suspicious activity,” including spent cartridges we might find as we hiked through the rainforest. To assuage discontent, the town’s poor also received sacks of grain from the Alliance for Progress and from Caritas, a Catholic charity. As I accompanied my parents into some of the poorest neighborhoods of Caripito to distribute food packages it became evident that oil had not benefited all sectors of society equally. The camps highlighted the existence of two Venezuelas, one benefiting from oil, and one for which the promise of oil remained elusive.
Oil never fully transformed Venezuela, but rather it created the illusion of modernity in a country where high levels of inequality persisted. The camps became a tangible symbol of this disparity. Local residents resented the inequities in lifestyle; businesses complained about closed markets; the government worried about divided loyalties; and the left viewed them as part of U.S. exploitation of Venezuela’s labor and resources. During the 1970s, popular protest singer Ali Primera wrote Perdóname Tío Juan (Forgive me Uncle John):
Having successfully created a trained and acculturated labor force imbued with company values, even the oil companies believed the camps had outlived their usefulness. Despite their eventual integration into local communities, the lived experiences of those employed in the industry coalesced with the perspectives of mid dle- and upper-classes that viewed oil as the guarantor of their status. Attempts to recapture the illusory sense of modernity experienced during this period inform many of the political divisions that characterize contemporary Venezuela.
Es que usted no se ha paseado por un campo petrolero/ usted no ve que se llevan lo que es de nuestra tierra/ y sólo nos van dejando miseria y sudor de obrero/ y sólo nos van dejando/ miseria y sudor de obrero.
(You have not visited an oil camp, you do not see that they take what belongs to our land, and all they leave us is misery and the sweat of our worker’s and all they leave us is misery and the sweat of workers.)
Miguel Tinker Salas is Professor of Latin American History and Chicano/a Latino/a Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He is the author ofVenezuela, What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture and Society in Venezuela (Duke University Press, 2009), among other books.
Venezuelan work crew in Caripito Coca-Cola and Shell in Venezuela. Venezuelan crew on the way to work in Caripito1950’s road map produced by CitibankCamp School in Caripito. Author is seated on floor, second from right.American investment and industry, especially oil and ore, dramatically improved purchasing power in numerous Venezuelan sectors.
From a column by Scott Johnson on his friend, the late Peter Collier:
“Peter reflected long and deeply on his days as a radical. My favorite of these reflections is his essay ‘Coming Home,’ in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties.
“In this essay Peter recalled the trip he took with this laconic father to South Dakota, where his father had been born, while his father was dying. During one long stretch of Nevada highway, his father announced: ‘You know, I’m glad I was born a South Dakotan and an American. I’m glad I saw the beginning of the twentieth century. I’m glad I lived through the Depression and the War. I think these things made me a stronger person. I’m glad I came to California, because I met your mother there. I’m glad we had you for a son.’
“Peter commented: ‘It was the longest speech I’d ever heard him make…It was a moment of acceptance and affirmation by someone whose life had often been disfigured by hard work and responsibility and for whom words had never come easily. What he said and how he said it was so different from the chic bitterness and facile nihilism of my radical friends that I was shaken. It was like hearing speech, real and authentic speech, for the first time in years.'”
I was drawn to Mr. Johnson’s column because I had recently thanked God for having been born in Venezuela, for my Venezuelan-citizen mother and American-citizen father, for having worked in Puerto Rico, where I met my wife, and for the children He had blessed us with. A spirit of thankfulness had stirred within me and I can only wish for that to occur more frequently.
Recently a dear aunt passed away in Venezuela. She was utterly selfless, having sacrificed to enable her grandson to emigrate to the United States, knowing she would never see him again on this earth. I am glad I knew her and that I knew her mother. And that such a people still pull me to imitate that which is good.
As a reminder, for the most part, this blog leaves current events and commentary to other mediums, which are plentiful. However, every once in a while, we will publish or report or link to a commentary or report on the current situation in Venezuela. The link below is one of a series penned by Christian K. Caruzo, born in Venezuela, and witness to its deterioration.
I am unable to track down the author of the below. It was an email which found its way to me.
Having read it several times I can attest to his description of life in an American camp, in this case, a petroleum camp, Mene Grande, a Gulf Oil subsidiary. Refer to my prior post, “Memories of San Tomé” (November 2, 2019) for more detail.
The email was written in Spanish by Vinicio Guerrero Méndez, whom I’ve done my best to track down, but with no success. Since his email was clearly sent as a “blast”, I am confident he would be pleased with my translating and sharing it here.
As you read, you will become aware of his subtle (or maybe not so subtle) narration which, in effect, builds a stupendous contrast with life in Venezuela today, where scarcity is the everyday experience of the majority, especially the poor.
Many are the souls alive in Venezuela (or in exile) today who recall better times.
Tuesday, 21 October, 2014.
In 1930, long before I was born, Juan Vicente Gómez [for more on Gómez, see my July 22, 2019 post, “Apple Foot: A Road Trip to Mérida”] had paid off all foreign debt, as a posthumous homage to Simón Bolivar on the centenary of his death. But he cared not for the education of his people, he outlawed all opposition political parties, and he severely punished delinquency, while amassing a fortune of more than 155 million Bolivars.
When I was born in the hospital of San Tomé (a petroleum camp), General Marcos Pérez Jiménez governed the destinies of our country where he had established a political dictatorship, but his mandate was characterized by the growth of the petroleum industry via concessions to American [U.S.A.] companies, which opened the way for contractors, American and Venezuelan, which in turn abundantly increased resources and countless job placements to the residents of nearby villages, towns, and scattered populations. Great and grand public works were realized, and also corruption. He too left no foreign debt.
The process of my birth cost three Reals (“tres reales”, about 30 Venezuelan cents) and this was discounted from my father’s pay up to six pay periods, with no interest. Medicines were available in abundance and were prescribed to us at no charge.
What’s so strange is that even former president Jaime Lusinchi worked there. [Dr. Lusinchi was president in the 1980’s. He was socialistic and Venezuela continued her descent during his tenure. Lusinchi knew better.]
The doctors were honorable and totally dedicated to their profession: men such as Dr. Tulio Briceño Mass who was my godfather and eventually became the Director of Dermatology at the Vargas Hospital in Caracas.
As far back as I can remember, my father’s car ran on gasoline assigned by the company, even though my father was a laborer. His assigned car was changed for a new one every three years. Should any mechanical fault have arisen, he would take it to the “Motor Pull” [pool] for repair and while they worked on it, the company would assign him a used car replacement. Repairs rarely took a week, depending on the fault. We did not pay for fuel, which would be provided merely on the basis of my father’s signature.
Also, included with his vehicle, was a complete toolbox of the brand “Snap-On”.
As far as living, the camp was divided into two sectors: North Camp and South Camp. In the South Camp lived technicians and laborers and in the North Camp lived the Americans and any Venezuelan with a professional degree or who, over time, acquired a responsible position. In other words “the chiefs”.
In the South Camp, the living quarters were all the same. Of course, the North Camp’s quarters were more commodious and nicer-looking. But we did not lack any services such as gas, water, electricity, phone, etc. We either paid nothing for these, or, if we did pay, it was a token amount.
The same applied to schooling: it was without cost, and so were the books and the transportation. My mother made our uniforms, or dusters, as we used to call them.
We studied eight hours per day and we also took music classes so as to not forget our national hymn nor the Alma Llanera. We had religious conferences at least once per week and they invited us to mass on Sundays.
As for food, we were serviced by a large commissary which was well stocked with all the basics and more. I remember we would buy various brands of milk: Rosemary, Klim, and whatever other brand of the thousands stocked there. Without exaggeration, we’d sometimes exit the commissary with two full cartloads of goods.
My father received a salary as well as regular bonuses and even an additional sum in January, called, if I remember correctly, “liquids”. This was a payment to help employees who might have overextended themselves during the Christmas season. With these “liquids” funds, my mother would take us to Curazao every other year or so to buy clothing made by the Empire.
We had excellent recreational and sporting sites all over, as in Medina Park, etc.
In Carnival our celebrations gained the reputation of being the best in Venezuela and were known as The Black Gold Carnival.
On Easter Week we all went to Mass and we rejoiced when father Arias would rebuke us.
Christmas was a portent because the departments would strive to be the best when it was their turn to host mass that day. They gave away candy, “pastelitos,” firecrackers, fireworks, and innumerable gifts. There was always money for Santa Claus or the Child Jesus (by the way, I was 15 when I learned that both were my parents).
And then, as if the above were not enough, on the 6th of January, the Magi made their appearance.
I asked for the moon in my letters to Child Jesus: whether pistols, or “chácaras” [noisy toys]. I could not begin to imagine how there were so many toys at such low prices in that toy store that was at the other side of the commissary.
My father was sent to Mexico for a training course, all expenses paid. He brought me a beautiful Longines watch as a souvenir. In these days, should I use the watch, they’d call me “El mocho.” [dude; dandy; not a compliment today].
When we’d visit the baseball stadium, Francisco Pinto, “Owl Face”, was the Sporting Section boss and neither teams nor uniforms were ever lacking when celebrations took place. Even Enzo Hernandez (may he rest in peace) hit a homer and I said, this guy is going to be a major leaguer [he played for the San Diego Padres in the 1970’s].
As you can see, it was very hard living with those American imperialists.
Note: If a resident of that era can add or correct something in the above, I would be grateful.
Mene Grande San Tomé Camp
Mene Grande Commissary
Mene Grande Hospital
This plaque commemorates the beginnings of the Venezuela oil exploration in 1914, a century before Mr. Guererro’s email. The site of the above photo is on the coast of Lake Maracaibo and Mene Grande (Gulf Oil) also had massive investments there. It is now a scene of desolation.
Alma Llanera is one of the few “typical” songs or pieces of music that are known throughout the world. I heard it played in Saudi Arabia (Khobar). It is a landmark song, whose composition coincides with the beginnings of oil exploration in Venezuela: 1914. To begin to appreciate Venezuela, you might parcel out two minutes and see the video.
