My First Life by Hugo Chavez

Author:Hugo Chavez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

10

Conspiring and Recruiting

Gently flowing water – The Power Within You

Sandinista victory in Nicaragua – Marx and Bolívar

‘About-Turn’ – First micro-cell – Winning over cadets

Crisis theory – Trip to Dominican Republic

Back at the Academy – Tools for thinking

First appearance on television – The Popy Show

Advice from Hugo Trejo – General Olavarría

Seedbed of revolution – The death of Mamá Rosa

A poem and an oath

My impression is that at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, you experienced a kind of blossoming in personal, intellectual and professional terms. Your character grew more assured, you were more confident in yourself, your abilities, your potential. You seemed ripe for action.

During those years – 1978, ’79, ’80 – I felt a whole set of spiritual, ideological, political triggers ready to go off, yet at the same time these were also years of study and reflection. I started seriously to prepare political briefings and reports on military matters for my meetings with Douglas Bravo and the PRV-Ruptura central committee. It was now called the Civilian Military Movement, although not yet the MBR-200. I also remember reading a lot of Alfredo Maneiro’s work, he was much more intellectual than Douglas, although I respected Douglas intellectually as well. Maneiro’s work [he shows the book] was bedside reading for me in those days, it contains Maneiro’s ideas, speeches, his ‘negative notes’, as he called them. He died of a sudden heart attack before he was fifty.

This [he holds up a pamphlet] is one of Maneiro’s speeches in 1971. La Causa R used to bring out a cultural magazine called La Casa del Agua Mansa [The House of Gently Flowing Water], a line from Bertolt Brecht, something like, ‘Over time, gently flowing water triumphs over hard rock.’ The water does not pierce the rock by force, it wears it away. It was part of our philosophy; not to become a waterfall, yet. Waterfalls would come, whirlwinds would come, but for the time being we were gently flowing water.

I also spent time researching Maisanta, reading the history of twentieth-century Venezuela, and trying to better understand its political processes. At school we’d only been taught the half of it, the ‘heroic’ history, and only the nineteenth century, as if the twentieth century didn’t exist.

They only taught ‘heroic’ history, no social history.

None at all. Only the heroic history of battles, wars, events without any social or economic context.

I also read a book at that time which had a huge impact on me. I mentioned it before: The Power Within You. In Maracay, in August 1978, I read in it something Victor Hugo said that stayed engraved on my mind for ever: ‘There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.’ That book helped me mature, in the same way Quillet’s Encyclopaedia had done. I had become a father, a lieutenant with responsibilities, etc….

July 1979 saw the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. Do you remember what was said about it in the political circles you moved in?

For us, the Sandinista victory was a very positive step forward.

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