HUGO CHAVEZ

HUGO R. CHAVEZ, THE MORNING AFTER

A

lthough regarded as  an epicenter for Cuban politics and subsequently  their Latin American counterparts, the forty-old Cuban rendezvous, Versailles Café was not as usual  attended on this morning of  6 March by the crowd of hot times, when something was boiling in the Caribbean island.  Few peoples were talking about the passing of the Castroist ally, the Venezuelan Hugo Rafael  Chavez.  Pronounced dead at the age of 58, a few days after undergoing surgery in Cuba, Hugo R. Chavez passed away at the eve of being sworn in for a new 6-year term. Having fought death unsuccessfully, Chavez seemed to have not survived his anti-imperialism battle to which he has dedicated his life.

“That’s the passing of a human being” mourned  an Italian woman , Claudia Sevenini, living in los Angeles.  Roberto Sanchez, a 30-year-old lawyer from Miami, thinks the wind of change is bowling, and anyone has to wait before any commitment. Inside Versailles which starts to gather clients and acquainted people coming for news, there is a kind of eerie silence as if something would soon show up. A 72-year old Cuban whispers  that it is better to wait, but outside, an old engineer apparently from Batista’s time carries a  pancarte reading:  murio Chavez.. le toca a Raoulito. Santiago Portal involved in environment policy, is angry even after the Venezuelan leader’ passing  who was plotting with Iran terrorist action against America, M. Portal concludes.

But, overseas, the death of Chavez triggered emotion and anger. In Santo Domingo, told Pouchy Mathieu  Durandis, a  Haitian student, Dominicans were crying. The same went somewhere in LA where Chavez was as well loved and disliked. Chavez had  emerged in the late 90s  as a leader coming from darkness , like  Alejandro Toledo in Peru, Evo Morales  from Bolivia and Lula from Brazil. Most of  these leaders were lured by socialism going as  far as mixing romantic ideals  and politics.  Unfortunately since Zapata times, this   dreamy anti-Americanism  had  vanished  not without permeating  the ambiguous relationship between  America and  Latin countries south to the Rio Grande.

Such uncertainties still persist even when the Hispanic vote were so  instrumental in the victory of Barrack Obama for a second term in last November. The late Chavez is gone now, gone probably with the wind as in the novel of Margaret Mitchel  despite a better life for the marginalized and needy for which a dying Chavez affirms to have scarified his life.

 His legacy of anti-imperialism remains however  mixed  with the Venezuelan’s quality of life having been improved at the third-fastest pace in the world, according to a UN index.