Feeling Nostalgia for the Future

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: There is a wonderful story by Ray Bradbury about a man who travels to the future in some kind of time machine. He goes there and he finds a world without poverty, without war, without hunger, where everybody enjoys a reasonable amount of wellbeing. He travels back to the present with these excellent news and the people, now knowing the bright future that awaits humanity, simply start working to realize it. Since there is no doubt that they will get there, all hesitations and uncertainties are removed from the minds of humans. The traveler, however, eventually feels the pangs of remorse and confesses to a reporter that he did not really travel to the future, that he made up the story and delivers to him a document to that effect. Once the reporter is alone, he briefly thinks about his alternatives and decides to ... burn the document.

It is a nice story. It simply means that if we are sure that we can attain our ideal world we can work effectively to fulfill the prophecy. Sometime ago, a young and bright Venezuelan economist, Ricardo Haussman, now self-exiled at Harvard (not a bad place to be an exile) expressed a similar concept. He said that "Venezuela" was " condemned to success." It was a great phrase but sometimes we wonder...

In my case, I will borrow the poetic license of Jorge Luis Borges, who used to say that we do not really know in what direction time flows, in order to feel nostalgic about the future of Venezuela.

There is a Venezuela that, either because we have already seen her in the future, from where Borges said we might come from, or because we have dreamt so much about her, we already take for real.

We are certain that there is such a Venezuela ... one that contains the material and spiritual ingredients that we desire to see in our country. Knowing that she exists, we yearn for her, suspecting, however, that it might be located in a bend of the river of time which we might not get to visit.

• In this Venezuela, the Synagogue and the Mosque are built side by side. As it has been already noted by someone whose name I do not remember, the group that manufactures our textiles worships in the Synagogue while the group that sells them worships in the Mosque, but they say hello to each other as they cross paths...
• In this Venezuela, "negro" only has an affectionate meaning and racial hate or class resentment does not exist. We can walk in the east and the west of our cities without feeling we are in enemy territory.
• In this Venezuela, a teacher or a famous novelist can become President of the nation and a military man can be a President who walks among the people without bodyguards, revered by all.
• In this Venezuela land reform can be done without violating private property and peasants do not have to invade lands to be able to work them.
• This Venezuela has plenty of good main and secondary roads, new hospitals and universities in which people are attended in a dignified manner, where everybody pays according to their means.
• In this Venezuela there are few beggars since most everybody has a decent job. Street children are rare since the State will not allow children to be abandoned.

In short, the Venezuela of the future will look a lot like the Venezuela we have already had in the past. The Synagogue and the Mosque already exist and our Jews and Muslims have been able to coexist peacefully for years and to complement their economic activities.

Gallegos, the teacher and novelist was our President, until the military overthrew him. General Medina was our President and was the most civilian of civilians, revered by all, until he was overthrown by the military in combination with a political party. The Land reform of the 1960s gave land to more than 320,000 families without arbitrary land takeovers.

Venezuela was an example of relative prosperity for the region.

Venezuela surely can be that good and better in the future ... provided that our political leadership, by whatever name, opts for the promotion of an integral national effort based on respect for dissidents and civilized manners ... provided that our resources are developed with common sense and a modicum of administrative tidiness ... provided that democracy prevails over totalitarian ideologies.

To know that the future of Venezuela can be bright we do not really need a time machine, like the character in Ray Bradbury's story. All we need is to look back to our better years of democracy, the years of Medina, of Gallegos, of Betancourt, of Leoni and of the first Caldera, refine the good experiences we had then, exercise more social solidarity, educate our people to empower them to create wealth and elect capable political leaders, not leaders who pretend to know all, but leaders who surround themselves with the best and the brightest ... not leaders who sow hate but leaders who inspire people to realize their potential ... not a leadership based on terror, but a leadership based on example.

I feel very nostalgic about that Venezuela ... about the Venezuela we once had and of the Venezuela we could have again ... their positive aspects reinforced, their negative aspects minimized ... all in an environment of decency, respect and dignity.

A Venezuela where physical and spiritual garbage do not exist.

A Venezuela we can feel justifiably proud of.....

Some claim that the future is no longer what it used to be...

I am sure that it can be, if we apply our best efforts as a society to make it happen.

Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983.  In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort.  You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email gustavo@vheadline.com