By Carola Chávez on November 16, 2018
With Hugo Chavez we did a master’s degree in unconventional wars. We had the media war deciphered, the blockades, the color revolutions, the infiltrators, the NGOs as masks of the CIA, of the State Department, of the Pentagon. We became experts in the detection of fake news, as its main objective. Later, we learned about the manipulation of the law. Then came the war against us.
Before the war, there was a rapture with the heroic struggle of the brotherly peoples under attack. Cuba, a beacon of resistance. Allende’s Chile, a glorious death with his boots on, after resisting all kinds of sabotage, blockades, shortages planned by the usual enemy, our enemy. The dignity of not breaking, of not giving in, of not giving the enemy the satisfaction of seeing us defeated. “First dead than on our knees”… Until it was our turn…
Then the dimensions of this war escaped the comprehension of those who seemed to understand everything. So, all of a sudden, after living and glorifying the resistance of other peoples, they knew that they could not live without a fast Internet, without a constant flow of electricity, without quality public services. And they began to ask themselves, in many places you could hear them complain, what the fuck does war have to do with inefficiency, “because electricity and water is not bought in dollars,” they say, ignoring machinery, spare parts, blockades, theft of strategic material, sabotage and not to mention the more than 500 years of colonial and neocolonial dependence, which, according to them, should have been eradicated in the last 20 years with a magic recipe that those who know have.
And they were amazed when the chicken disappeared from butcher shops overnight, and the eggs, and the sugar, and the cookies, and all necessary products, and what it was unnecessary too, because the quality of life and such and such… They were surprised when the war market embodied in the speculators and hoarders, as if the black markets had been invented by us. And they fainted with prices that capital imposes on us, its deadliest weapon, and they were indignant that the government failed because the enemy, as is logical in any war, responded with a fierce attack to the first step (of so many that will be necessary) of the economic recovery plan that the President announced for the next two years (at least). That part was not heard by them.
And look in a straight line as they skate along this winding and complicated road that no one has walked, clothe themselves in a mantle of morality that more than morality is arrogance. And the ink of lament runs and the lament spreads seeking defeated applause, while joy is proscribed and it is sprinkled with suspicion, so that it does not get in the way, and in this war that not only wants to kill us with hunger, but first with sadness, only the ego feeds itself.
And the cool, the trendy, the nice, is the narrative of the grey, of hopelessness, of the slightest detail of discouragement, of the man who sells vegetables and who saw me ugly under the eternal rain of Caracas, where the sun no longer rises as before.
Making invisible the people who come out early to face the day in the middle of this downpour, when the easiest (and most useless, of course) would be to throw in the towel. Making invisible the heroic struggle that they once admired in other towns and now they are giving theirs. The narrative of surrender, of fallen arms, of complaint without proposal, of hopelessness, of defeat. An act of suicidal ingenuity that ignores that we may give our lives in this, and that, in order for its arguments to fit, also denies that the first sentence is Nicolás, who “is disconnected”, you know, so that the revolution goes to hell, and the counterrevolution arrives to do what it does, and I don’t tell you the law fare, that happened with Lula we haven’t seen anything… What a Lula! Gaddafi would be too little for the hatred that the right wing has for Nicolas, you know, because he destroyed Chávez’s Legacy… Oh, wait! So easy it would have been to betray him as Lenin betrays Ecuador…
In short, that in every war there are casualties, and it is painful to see them fall live and directly through social networks, while I wonder what the Special Period in Cuba would have been like, with all these crying on Twitter, and the rumba of Instagram and that insatiable thirst for ephemeral and useless clicking on “I like it”.
http://misionverdad.com/opinion/lo-que-la-guerra-se-lleva
Source: Mision Verdad translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau