“We traveled back in time,” my father said lightheartedly a few minutes after we drove past a Black Lives Matter protest in Miami, where we saw communist symbols and Che Guevara T-shirts. We heard the chants calling for defunding the police and we simply couldn’t wrap our heads around what we were seeing, right here, in the United States.
Yes, it absolutely felt that way. It absolutely felt like we were reliving some of the things we saw in Venezuela the first time around. The difference is, this time I wasn’t a child, and my parents were older and wiser. We already saw what was coming.
In 2004, the first statue of Christopher Columbus was taken down in Caracas, not by the government, but by the people who followed Chavez’s Socialist revolution. The group that knocked the first statue down said they had conducted a symbolic trial on Columbus, they had found him guilty, and he was to be publicly hanged. They dragged his statue through the streets of downtown Caracas, and finally hung his broken pieces in front of the Teresa Carreño Theater.
This was five years after Chavez had assumed power, and two years after he had changed the name of our Columbus Day Holiday. Throughout the Chavez Presidency, his rhetoric always favored the indigenous tribes of Venezuela, and disparaged those who came as a result of European colonization.
He changed the national narrative, in which Columbus was a recognized an Italian explorer who had made the coming together of Europe and the Americas possible, and therefore changing the course of history, to a genocidal maniac who had to be condemned.
Of course, that was always a narrative in the minds of leftist intellectuals, but this time, under Chavez’s leadership, they were emboldened. Therefore, they took it upon themselves to decide on the fate of that prominent statue in downtown Caracas, instead of going through a democratic process to remove it.
It wasn’t long before Chavez and his regime started changing the names of various streets in Venezuela. National Parks were also targeted as he thought the names we had were too “western,” and he had to honor the “indigenous.” The name of our Caracas National Park “El Avila” changed to “Wuaraira Repano.” Our National Flag went from having seven stars to having 8, our national shield was also modified. The official name of the country went from “Republica de Venezuela” to “Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela.”
These changes might seem innocuous to the untrained eye, which was my case during childhood and early teens in Venezuela. I know better now of course; and I recognize those changes were all components of the cultural revolution occurring in my country. Right before our very eyes.
Western elements of our culture were being rejected by the highest office; it became normalized. The indigenous were deemed victims, and anyone with a clear European ancestry was deemed the privileged oppressor. Of course, the indigenous, and those with a strong indigenous mix were merely being used as pawns, as a method of division, while Chavez plundered our economy, and enriched himself and his family.
The USA and the rich were made the enemy of the people, and suddenly Cuba and China were the examples to be followed.
Venezuelans resisted this change, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough. People didn’t have the strength to go against a state that had all of the weapons and military on their side. Those families that spent years of their lives from protest to protest, eventually started leaving, looking for places where their children could build a future for themselves. My family is one of those families, even though for years they were convinced they would ride out the storm in the country that gave them, and generations before, everything. Venezuela was no longer that country. It became unrecognizable.
I have been living in the United States for the past ten years, and I have been, for the most part, staying away from politics. However, in light of recent events, I started being more vocal with my opinions, as it felt the United States was flirting with leftist ideas that have led many other nations astray in the past.
I took to social media to voice what I was seeing; the violent attack on historic symbols, the censorship, the attack on religion… I drew the parallel of what we saw in Venezuela in the early 2000s. I got reminded of how Venezuelans dismissed Cubans when they gave us similar warnings. Within a few days, my social media post landed me on national television, where I denounced what I was seeing as clear signs of a cultural revolution, attempting to change the country’s identity.
Suddenly I received messages from people from all over the world, people whose families had left Russia, China, Hungary, even Greece. When communism knocked on the door of those nations similar parallels emerged. They are erasing symbols from our eyes, making way for a new national identity. Knowing the patterns of history, it was easy to extrapolate and compare the current social climate, to that of countries that made these mistakes in the past. Because despite their internal differences in government, and historical differences, all of these countries suffered at the wake of communism’s path.
This time I was seeing the movement arise from an organization whose co-founders have admitted to being trained Marxists. An organization who had a founder member visit Venezuela, and write on her twitter that she was “happy to be in a place of intelligent political discourse.” When combining all of the factors, I came to the conclusion that this was no time to be complacent.
For years, generations of Americans have been indoctrinated in the school’s systems. To the point that 70% of PhD’s lean left. My conclusion is that the remaining 30% of PhD’s are the rare kind, which can combine knowledge and concepts, with practical examples. Those are the wise ones. Those ones that are able to not only theorize, but to step out into the real world and test their theories with concrete, real-world examples.
Ronald Reagan once said that “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free”
Venezuela might be different to the United States in a lot of ways; which causes many Americans to dismiss Venezuela’s situation and say “It can never happen here.” But it was that same attitude which underserved Venezuelans in the first place. We had grown complacent, comfortable, and arrogant in our place in Latin America. We were the place illegal immigrants were sneaking into, not out off.
We forgot that democracy always has to be protected, that it always has to be nurtured, and that future generations always have to be taught its value. We slowly let our politicians off the hook, our economy became stagnant, the separation of powers suddenly wasn’t so separate, and corruption grew; even before Chavez was inaugurated. Never forget, that we tolerated our way to destruction. By the time we started standing up in the early 2000s, we had already voted our ruin into office.
