victory speech that night, Chávez denounced Luis Giusti as the devil who had sold the soul of Venezuela to the imperialists.
The next month, standing next to Chávez at the inauguration, was the outgoing president, Rafael Caldera, who had amnestied the lieutenant colonel in 1994. Caldera looked nothing so much as stunned. “Nobody thought that Mr. Chávez had even the remotest chance of becoming president of the republic,” he later said. As for Luis Giusti, he made a point to resign as president of PDVSA before Chávez could fire him. 14
CHÁVEZ IN POWER
But how would the forty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel govern? Was he a democrat or an authoritarian? His initial comments were not clear: “If you try to assess me by traditional canons of analysis, you’ll never emerge from the confusion,” he said. “If you are attempting to determine whether Chávez is of the left, right or center, if he’s a socialist, Communist or capitalist, well, I am none of those, but I have a bit of all of those.” At another time he added, “I absolutely refuse, and will refuse to my grave, to let myself be labeled or boxed in. I cannot accept the notion that politics or ideology are geometric. To me, right and left are relative terms. I am inclusive, and my thinking has a little bit of everything.”
Whatever the ideology, Chávez moved swiftly to consolidate all power in his hands, keeping the formal institutions of the state—“worm-eaten” though he called them—but depriving them of any independent role. He quickly pushed through a new constitution, which eliminated the upper house of the congress. He turned the remaining chamber into a rubber stamp. He increased the number of Supreme Court judges from twenty to thirty-two, packing it with revolucionistas. He took direct control of the National Electoral Council, ensuring that his personal political machine would count the ballots in future elections. He removed any congressional oversight of the army and then proceeded to set up a second parallel military force of urban reservists. And he rechristened Venezuela as the Bolivarian Republic.
He made a triumphant visit to Cuba, where he declared, “Venezuela is traveling toward the same sea as the Cuban people, a sea of happiness and real social justice and peace.” He also played ball with Fidel Castro—in this case, baseball. Although Chávez did the pitching for the Venezuelan team, the Cubans won, 5-4. The Cubans won something else as well—a Venezuelan subsidy. With the end of Soviet communism, Russia no longer had any ideological bonds with Cuba and had stopped providing cheap oil. Chávez stepped in to become Castro’s oil banker, delivering petroleum at a steep discount.15
In turn, Cuba provided advisers of many different kinds—health workers, teachers, gymnastic instructors, and a wide variety of security personnel operating under various guises. For Cuba, this was a return to Venezuela, for it had provided aid to guerrillas during the “violent years” of the 1960s. Castro had relished Venezuela’s oil wealth, and he had repeatedly tried to open a beachhead. Indeed, one attempt to insert Cuban military into Venezuela in 1967 had led to the death of Castro’s personal chief of security. This time, however, Cuba was there to bolster the government—Chávez’s government. Chávez also adopted the Cuban system of local neighborhood control. And in case it was still not clear where he stood, Chávez clarified matters. “There is only revolution and counterrevolution,” he declared, “and we are going to annihilate the counterrevolution.” When Roman Catholic bishops urged him to be less confrontational, he dismissed them as “devils in vestments.”16
Castro was a role model in many ways. As the Cuban president specialized in speeches that went five or six hours, Chávez adopted a variant with his Sundayafternoon television broadcast, Alo Presidente. Over the course of four hours or more, in a weekly demonstration of his manic energy, he would joke, sing revolutionary songs, tell anecdotes from his boyhood, and talk about baseball. He would also denounce his opponents as the corruptos and position himself as the leader of the revolutionary vanguard opposing the United States or what he calls the “North American empire . . . the biggest menace on our planet.” At one and the same time, he wrapped himself in the cloak of the nineteenth-century liberator Simón Bolívar and propounded his new theory of “socialism for the twenty-first century.”
And then there was oil, the soul of the Venezuelan state. The economic engine was PDVSA and Chávez quickly asserted his control. He was much influenced by a German-born energy economist,