Player watches home crumble
web.baytownsun.com Contact our news staff at (281) 422-8302. By Robbie Magness The Baytown Sun Published January 30, 2003
BAYTOWN — Heading into the spring season, Lee College’s Diana Martin is the best player on the best junior college tennis team in the nation.
Forgive her if she has other things on her mind.
Martin, 20, a sophomore from Valencia, Venezuela, has watched as a nationwide strike in opposition to the proposed policies of President Hugo Chavez has crippled the nation’s economy.
Here in Baytown, 2,200 miles away, Martin finds herself unable to visit her parents, cut off from her lifelong source of emotional and financial support. Talking about the home she has not seen since Christmas 2001, her voice remains strong, and she shows a remarkable grasp of her country’s sociopolitical structure, but her emotions clearly play across her face and in her voice.
“I have a lot of feeling going on because me and my family are really close, and I know they are having a hard time,” Martin said Wednesday, as the Lady Rebels stayed indoors following the afternoon rains. “It’s like my mind is not completely here with me. It has been real hard hearing all the stuff about the political system, how horrible Venezuelan citizens are doing right now. How are my family and friends? ... It hurts.”
Venezuela, on the northern coast of South America, has reached a 60th day in an opposition drive designed to strangle the world’s fifth-leading oil exporter and force Chavez to step down or call for elections.
While Chavez so far has refused to give in, the strike has put Venezuela on the verge of economic collapse, caused long-term damage to oil infrastructure and forced Chavez to extend his ban Tuesday on U.S. dollar purchases to preserve foreign reserves.
For Martin, that means her family cannot send money to help her with everyday expenses.
“My parents used to send me money just from their account ... They would transfer the money from Bolivars to dollars. ... I can’t get money from my parents anymore.”
Martin’s tennis scholarship includes tuition, fees, books and food, but the college has no on-campus housing, so there are living expenses. Martin shares an apartment with two teammates, Adriana Garcia of Mexico and Kalie Koening of West Columbia, Texas.
“The main things I need, thank God, the scholarship gives to me,” Martin said. “But, when it comes to bills and all that, that’s when I need the money. ... They have supported me since I was 16. They have sent me all the money I need. Everything I need, they have been there for me.”
Martin came to the United States when she was 16, spending most of two semesters at Troy State University in Alabama learning English. At 18, she took an internship at the John Newcombe Tennis Academy in San Antonio, where she both taught and learned the game.
Lee College coach Jason Haynes saw her there, and she joined the Lady Rebels in January 2002. She is ranked No. 2 individually nationwide, and the defending national champion Lady Rebels are ranked No. 1. There is much to enjoy, but perspective can dull the shine on such things.
“I’ve never had to work in my life, like work for money,” Martin said. “At Newc’s (Newcombe Tennis Academy), I was in an internship. I was learning. But this is actually my first time that I’ve got to step up for myself and start getting my money somehow. That’s kind of weird. And I’ve got to do it. If not, I can’t pay my bills.”
Martin said she hopes to land an assistant trainer position with Lee College, and she will continue to help the team with summer camps, for which players receive some compensation.
Martin said she has missed her family all along, “but it wasn’t like I was worried about them or anything.
“Since the president got there, things have been changing, new laws that most of the people do not agree with. But nothing really bad, nothing as bad as it is right now. ... To be honest, I don’t think (Chavez is doing a good job). I think he is trying to be a communist instead of a democratic (president). ... He is a really good friend with Fidel Castro. That’s a huge thing. Everybody’s scared because he’s listening to (Castro). Let’s hope he doesn’t want to turn Venezuela into Cuba.”
Martin said one of the policies Chavez tried to implement which most affected her family was an “equal society” system, under which landowners with large holdings would be forced to give up some of the land. This was particularly important to the Martin family because Carlos Martin Jr., Diana’s father, is an administrator of a large ranch in Venezuela, the former King Ranch. Her mother, Elizabeth, and one brother, Julio Castrillo, 30, round out her immediate family.
“(Chavez) was trying to make it a law,” she said, “but in the end, it didn’t happen. But when people hear this, they try to go over the ranch and take over, and it was a pretty rough time.”
Martin said two people working as security for the ranch were shot and killed in such a clash.
It’s just one more thing for her to worry about as she tries to focus on graduating, tennis and what she will do after Lee College. She admits to having “no idea what to do next” but says she wants to stay in Texas, partly because of her boyfriend of two years, Jason Wilson.
Wilson, of Marble Falls, recently moved from San Antonio to Houston to be closer to Martin.
“I would like to believe that,” Martin says with a laugh. “I don’t know if it’s true, though.”
Meanwhile, her concerns for her family are never far from the surface.
“I would love ... to really believe that this is gonna end real soon, but I don’t see it at an end anytime (soon). ... I was supposed to go at Christmas with them, and I couldn’t, and that was a big deal for me — my first Christmas without my parents. That was hard for me. Martin reassured herself with the thought that she could go for spring break instead, but that possibility is dimming as well.
“Now that I’m seeing how it’s getting long,” she said, “I don’t think I’m gonna get to go. I would love to believe that it’s gonna end shortly, but ...”
Her voice trails off as she thinks beyond her family to her downward-spiraling homeland and the president at the heart of what amounts to a civil war — one that thankfully has not given way to full-blown violence.
“I think (Chavez) has a lot of pressure from the population, and he knows that everyone is against him,” she said. “I don’t think a country can last this long in the same situation that it is. I don’t think it could last six months more because this is ridiculous. They have no food.
“I say thank God they are on the ranch, my parents, because they can (get food), but for the people who don’t have that opportunity, the country’s just going straight down, and the petroleum and the economic system is going down. I would say that if the population keep up with what they are doing, I think sooner or later he’s gonna give up.
“It seems so funny to me. I’ve seen interviews of him on the TV, like with another country, and he’s like, ‘In my country, nothing is happening.’ And I’m sitting here, and I’m saying, ‘Come on. How can you lie in front of everyone?’ I think he’s trying to (make) other countries believe that nothing is happening, but he knows it is.”
She said the press in Venezuela is fairly free from government control and that, despite the rhetoric, the people “definitely” know what’s going on.
Forty years ago, Martin’s grandfather, Carlos Martin, left behind wealth and property in Cuba and fled with his family to the United States, after telling Castro he could not live under a communist regime.
The family spent nearly 20 years in the United States before resettling in Venezuela. Now, Martin’s grandmother, Annamaria Martin, says she is “reliving Cuba.”
It’s one more worry piled on an already overburdened Diana Martin. So well versed in the real world, she allows herself at least a fleeting moment of fantasy.
“One of my dreams,” she said, “is the United States going down there and taking over that country. That would be my dream. I know it’s not gonna happen, but that would be my dream.”