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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
I ask Dorado how he plans to continue to retail European luxury goods as the most populist regime in Venezuela's history wages a war against elites. Pairs of $200 jeans don't exactly call out "Viva la huelga!" The room grumbles as the question is translated. Dorado launches into his reply:
"You have the liberty of asking that question, but I don't have the liberty of answering it. You can go back to New York and rest there tranquilly, but I have to stay here and face this president as the cameras are filming me ... I always have written with my heart in my pen, without considering the consequences. Today I made the decision to stop writing entirely. In this country we can no longer write with our heart in our pen; one must write now with his wallet in his pen. We're one of the richest countries in the world in resources and also the most poorly administrated country on the planet. Until we Venezuelans -- rich, poor, businessmen, workers -- understand that we will find the solutions to our problems through our intellect and hard work, and that we have to put aside the demagoguery and radicalism, all these resources ... will end up being used against us and turn us into one of the poorest countries in the world."
As a fashion journalist I don't really keep up on political theory. Still, there is no mistaking that this is a poignant defense of individualist capitalism offered in the face of totalitarian collectivism and the draconian media laws passed to protect it. Dorado may be a member of the oligarchy, but he is the only person in the room who feels entitled to exercise anything resembling a First Amendment right.
Everyone, that is, except for Mr. Venezuela, who has a song to sing.
Francisco Leon was selected as the country's most beautiful man in 2004. He has a metrosexual Tarzan look, with espresso hair dangling about his latte face and a Thrilleresque red leather jacket with black racing stripes down the arms. Around his neck is a set of dog tags from the army of Narcissus. These bear no marks of identity but serve as ever-ready mirrors for the chronic checking-out of self. He stares into the barrel of a live camera, twists his face with a longing scowl, and croons a ballad from the Julio Iglesias School of Angst and Longing.
There is no way they air this, I tell myself. But the very next morning I will turn on the news to see the entire painful episode replayed in its entirety. Following the serenade is a laudatory news item about Hugo Chavez receiving a humanitarian award from that great civil libertarian Moammar Gadhafi. Dorado's reflections on the flagging state of modern Venezuela are not shown.
More Deep Jeeps arrive at the hotel to take us to lunch at the Caracas Country Club, a retrofitted Spanish mission. As Dorado orders wine for the table, I notice a crucifix set above a small altar in a garden off the colonnade. This is not the Vatican II Jesus that I was brought up to know and love (and to know loved me); this is bleeding Christ, suffering Christ, wailing Christ. In Latin America, the hope of Christ's resurrection allows the poor to endure poverty without despair while the visceral and universal pain of his suffering allows the wealthy to endure comfort without guilt.
The Deep Jeeps are there after lunch to take us back to the hotel. Soon we pass what could be the campus of a small university, surrounded by tapered barricades and barbed wire. This is the home of Gustavo Cisneros, one of the wealthiest men in the world, with a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $4 billion, personal holdings that include AOL Latin America, and personal friends that include George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. Most accounts put him at the center of the April 2002 coup d'état that briefly deposed Chavez, replacing him with an interim government friendly to U.S. oil interests, which is to say, the oil interests of Bush supporters. The coup was briefly successful, but Chavez found support among the military and the masses. Forty-eight hours later, Cisnero's new president, businessman Pedro Carmona, was quite literally history. All fingers pointed at the United States, which by varying accounts blessed and assisted the entire ordeal.
