I write out from a land that (still) surrounds me (as a middle-class, left-wing bourgeois child) as soft as cotton does, and it protects me from bad experiences all around the World. I’ve never been discriminated, at least not openly, and certainly not because of my race, culture or nationality. Tall, thin, white and well dressed, I get through every corner of the world; that has been my experience until now. A doorman at a club has never rejected me, I was never denied as a member of anything, and even USA’s Homeland Security Office wave aside, bored. In my life, the summit of discrimination was some innocuous anti-German needles from a Norwegian exchange student. A joke, really.

What I really appreciate and love from this country, appears to me like an execration in questions like perceiving discrimination: it appears impossible to us, the German Germans (those white-to-the-bone children of German parents and grandsons of German grandfathers), not to be at the sunny side of life; that means, we condescend in will and consciousness with poverty and lawlessness, but that hasn’t got anything to do with discrimination, but with brutishness and the need of collecting experiences.

Is it indeed a sophistry when I say that I’m twice discriminated with this manifest indiscrimination? My words “I want to feel someday discriminated too” at the beginning of this text, may be consciously too out of line, but they comprehend a nuclear point that appears to me as fundamental nowadays, when a decisive debate about Muslim immigrants takes place in Germany: How on Earth could a regular “original German” (as some name them now) understand, how it feels like to be discriminated because of your origin, culture or colour of skin? How should anybody that belongs to the dominant culture and race (which apparently protects them worldwide from discrimination) measure the situation of those, who can’t find a way in to that culture, or even worse, who are rejected to get into that culture?

Without experiencing a daily discrimination, I can only have a slight idea about how obscene it has to feel like, as an aggrieved party, when everyone of those in this land who discriminate collectively the Muslim immigrants, talk about “discrimination” when they are answered with acrid objections –and not just from those immigrants. The experience of a real discrimination regarding religion, culture and colour of skin would scotch the culture of crisis, of breaking taboos, of “we should be able to say…”.

Until that happens (and it could not happen at all, that would be paradoxical), it should be possible to say again that the bourgeois “Original Germans” are clueless wimps, and it would be good for them to be discriminated somewhere (and therefore that this people (we) would surely have to deal with their hubris), and know how it feels like to be a hard-to-integrate minority.

© Jo Schneider

Translation:
Ralph del Valle

My country is Cuba, but I am now visiting the United States; Miami, to be precise. An amazing city, full of Latinos (people emigrated from Latin America) and with a similar weather as Havana. The “Latino” term only seems to make sense here, or elsewhere in the rest of the United States and Canada. Latino is a label which I find very active politically, that makes everybody aware of cultural differences and similarities; namely, the differences with a North American, or “gringo”, and the similarities to him of the different Latin American cultures.

Not all Latinos have the same behavior in North America: that’s not true. The most of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans (these can be found in greater numbers in Texas), Colombians, Dominicans, among others, are differently adapted to the american dream. In Miami, for example, Cubans seem to get an affordable American dream as a trend. I know from Puerto Ricans that are somewhere in this city, who remain in an area identified as poor and mainly for black people. The first thing is easy to notice there, the second one has to do with the way certain cultural identities fit into the northern imaginary, where a “white people” thought referring to ethnic and political/economic superiority dominates. When you say white people it’s easy to think in WASPs or descendants of these. Significantly, all that falls out won’t be “white”, which recalls the fact that the idea of race was born in America’s colonial times.

In an informal meeting of students and workers at University of Miami’s Library, I found young immigrants from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, Haiti, Cuba … all were living in the U.S. for years, and I had the impression that they talked about their countries as if they spoke of a distant past, or of a place that had to be left because the U.S. is a better place. They asked me if I wanted to stay and live here instead of returning to Cuba. When I answered no, they asked me why. Why would someone want to return to a country where the economic and socio-political situation is unstable and even nightmarish, in the sense that it seems a neverending circle with no way out? My answer is not a reason, but an intuition. I want to get back, because I consider important the Latino identity as a way to expand the frontiers from harmful ideologies and from a somehow outdated national identity. I also find important to work with civil society of the countries they leave behind when they migrate. More than a migration in Cuba’s case, and any Latin American country so accustomed to layoffs and families separated by oceans, I believe it’s important to be here while you are there, and vice versa. Not to look to the North or to Europe as a model, but as an example of what we are not nor will we ever be. I therefore propose journey as a learning, not immigration, nor acquiring a new national identity or a dual national identity, but arriving from an expired or in-development national identity (when hadn’t happened this in America?) and heading towards an identity, that crosses the empirical knowledge: that is, the experience of knowledge that can not be otherwise acquired… about the cultural practices of others with their own.

I propose a way to practice immigration as a civic action. My country, my city, are found mostly at intersections. And I’m not the only one…

© Lizabel Mónica

Translation:
Ralph del Valle

With a growing wave of violence, President Felipe Calderon (who is in part responsible due to his poor strategy in what he called “war against the narco”) drawed a line and asked the media not to alarm the society. But about what else can we talk? : so titled very aptly the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles her last exhibition at the Venice Biennale. A brutally pertinent installation, made from materials that the artist collected at crime scenes mainly related with drugs: the floors of the ancient Venetian palace were “washed” with a mixture of water and blood from the victims (sometimes turn killers), murderers’ messages embroidered in gold on canvas soaked in blood (in reference to the “narco-blanket”) were hung on the walls, and ostentatious narco-style jewelry, made of gold and glass chips (as if they were diamonds) from broken windshields in the shootings were shown. The installation is almost an illegal work, because she works with materials that are police and forensic evidences. Materials, whose collection by the artist implies the corruption of government officials. Certainly a very accurate image of Mexico in its paradoxical symbolic literality, which deeply angered the federal government.

Margolles installation works with fear and body-anxiety, and invites everybody to think twice about them, almost as a provocation. Is not fear an effective control mechanism, finally? We have all experienced a striking example after September 11th’s attacks: nowadays, trying to introduce a bottle of water on a plane makes a suspect from you. A bottle of water! We live in an era of wide-spreaded paranoia: said that, I do not intend to say that the danger is not real. But the truth is that I hate each day airports even more, because they are now a performance of fear and control. And I hate to feel controlled.

That’s why I don’t know what to think anymore, what to ask, what to demand, what to propose in terrible situations as one appeared a few days ago: 72 Latin American migrants were killed by the Zetas (a group of hitmen associated with drugs). So do Los Zetas operate. Among their activities, kidnapping immigrants from Central and South America who try to reach the United States through Mexico, looking for a job. Where on Earth killing at once 72 people is something that could be made with impunity? The first thing that comes from the guts, is to require order and control to the authorities. Then my own desire scares me. Totalitarism and many State crimes have emerged from the same popular demand. Not to mention the corruption, complicity and criminality of the Mexican “law enforcement”… And the truth is, that this “war against drugs” there have been many civilian casualties, innocent people killed by the bullets of the army or the police. As Liliana Felipe-s song says: “You have to decide / Who would you prefer to kill you: / a terrorist / or your own government, to save you / from the terrorist ….”

Of course we should legalize drugs. And of course, talking about a “war against drugs” in Mexico is full of hypocresy: the money earned from dealing with drugs is one of national economy’s biggest supports. Politicians and authorities: if you really want to do something, you should start by reading The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs.

Meanwhile, a dear friend, the poet Maria Rivera, recently proposed at her facebook a sort of sabotage or civil protest: she invites recreational drug consumers to stop buying their candy until violence levels fall. A boycott as any other boycott to any other product, which attacked a principle we consider valuable. Because own complicity plays here a role too.I imagine a bizarre place where all my abstinent friends with eyes popping out of their heads are marching through the streets shouting slogans like “Until the end of the thriller / I’m not buying from my dealer!” Maybe. Who knows. I don’t know it anymore.

© Luis Felipe Fabre

Translation:
Ralph del Valle

That “Cucumber Jar” day, I was just six, maybe seven years old. I started making questions, and learned: my mother travelled to the USA with this box when she was young, to work as a nanny. She heaved that chest with a ship; she had no luggage but that. Until then, I didn’t really think twice about the fact that we received constantly mail from America or Indonesia. Neither that my mother normally kept buying marshmallows, nor that she already knew of fruits I never heard about. In Christmas, my father always tried to find a mango fruit, because my mother fell in love with it when she was on travel. If he was able to find any, he packed it in gift-wrap paper and placed it under the Christmas tree; my mother was touched. I started getting interested in exotic fruits and foreign languages.

Whereupon I did understand the fruit thing was when I suddenly saw for the first time mango fruits in Kupsch’s and Kaufland’s greengrocer section, at all seasons, as if they were part of our national menu as potatoes and beetroot are. At Christmas, my mother behaved as usual: as if she was still touched of seeing a mango fruit under the tree. But everyone knew: surprise and the “where on earth did you find THAT?” was all faked. Anyone could buy a mango fruit. Then, kiwis started being usually present too, and I still remember how I had no idea how to eat them for the first time. And then I realized it was the most practical fruit: cut in half, eat each half with a teaspoon. Awesome. I understood later, that globalization meant more than just exotic fruits. And how fatal consequences for world’s weaknesses could arise from it, if combined with an unlimited capitalist acquisitiveness. And I understood too, that the land where I grew up was a happy enclave in a world where loads of things were going wrong.

When my friends come to Buenos Aires to pay me a visit, they see a modern city. And they’re surprised again and again that they feel themselves “far away”, because they’re not able to solve everything with just a couple of clicks. And they are surprised to find a land in which not everyone knows who Lady Gaga is. In which you almost see no iPods at all in buses and underground. They’re surprised about a currency that you’re unable to exchange abroad. Surprised about a Miele hoover without any dust bag, because they don’t import them anymore. Surprised about a country from which you’re not able to buy books in Amazon without going to the International Post Office, then wait two hours, and then pay a horrible duty customs fee. Surprised about a country from which you can’t buy MP3’s in international stores, because you live in the wrong country to do so, with a wrong IP address: “The wished product has unfortunately geographical restrictions”.

Consequences? Now we’ve got a former president, historical myth and semi-radical left- wing dinosaur –Fidel Castro, yes-, who recognizes in an interview how unfunctional Cuban’s socialist model is. Even though he later retracted himself from his opinions, that statement has connections way too clear with Raúl Castro’s new economic measures: for the first time in 50 years, private property has a value, and it is even incentivised with massive dismissals. How has that a reflection in my normal life? Let’s say: globalization (economically speaking) is a legend, from which I’ve heard a lot and with the same influence on reality as Santa Claus…

Another sign of globalization: growing emigrations. Cuba’s case: again a nationalist-communist-socialist nation (those were the run of names of the revolutionary period) boosts massive migration waves, in specific contexts and under controversial conditions, meanwhile forbids to the common citizen the right to travel abroad by creating an exit permit –and even an entry permit for an emigrated Cuban-. That turns the island into a massive prison, where sea is the border. Then… the migration subject is a very sensitive thing for any Cuban, and it’s quite far away from even looking similar to first world’s privileged citizen modus vivendi.

Last but not least: each one of us is a mosaic made of elements, states North-consented new ideology’s propaganda –that’s globalization, what else? In Latin America things are, or would be very different… We became independent from our colonialist states, by throwing away some continental pieces of this mosaic. Those First Nations inhabitants, plus black people and Chinese immigration, were forced to move out, to head to each country’s surroundings, making the new criolla society white and occidental.

When this process was about to end, many “ethnologists” –in Cuba we do have Fernando Ortiz- started talking about syncretism, transculturization, and, anyway, melting pots everywhere. Nevertheless, that effort of conceiving all mosaic’s ingredients all together in the same soup, was a reflexive movement that we could easily state as fallacious, as something that went too far. It’s including without inclusion: how could we possibly include anything, if everything is already there? How this line of thought evolved and turned positivist, has been clear when 20th century arrived and Cuban Revolution took its place: they decided to get rid of all minorities’ organizations, and to abolish any racial discrimination in a peculiar way: executing positive discrimination at one hand, and at the other hand declaring that no revolutionary could ever be racist. If we analyse how Cuban Revolution has dealt ideologically with the difference between “what-it-should-be” and “what-it-is”, we could learn something about Politics. Unfortunately, we would learn something about “multiculturalism”, that globalized label.

Translation:
Ralph del Valle

Maybe everything started when a guy (who usually sold seeds in a little village of an imaginary past) had an idea: to look for new customers some kilometres away. O maybe it started with a girl who couldn’t stand more violations, beatings, blood in the mouth, all from her primitive father, and ran away from her home. Walking through unknown tracks, through the woods and the mountains, sweating in endlessly seas, crying in solitude. And then she found a man, let’s say a Chinese man, and he treated her in a delicate way, he knew how to look into her rounded eyes and how to find the magnetic erotism that comes from things that are different. She settled herself down there, they were happy ever after, and she had yellow and blue children, and she felt what love is for the first time. Another one: a guy with dirty nails, intense smells from his body, decided to leave it all behind and to part to Poetry, to Utopia. He saw in strange places exotic animals, giant women and cyclopes that massacrated whole villages. In his pilgrimage, he learned the most strange customs and skins, he learned hospitality and war, and surely, he learned what love is.

None of this is new, nothing human can be so. We sniff each others asses trying to know each other better, as if we were dogs. Trying to recognize each other! We search in other people what we have and what we don’t, with different levels of pleasure, understanding, tolerance. Sometimes we do feel comfortable with those differences, and sometimes we just want to be homogeneous. But, unlike other times, we have now this new wheel, which takes us much faster than our feet to somebody else’s mind heat. Heat intermediated through a tool that changes everything into zeros and ones. An abstract institution, that levels us somehow through a new universal language. We’re flesh, organs, breath, heartbeat… and more than anything, conscious brains. “Air is free, I don’t touch you”, is what kids say to bother each other when they move hands in front of somebody else’s face, without contact. How much people do we know and how many of them have we ever embraced or stroked? How necessary is the material world to love somebody?

I am different things, many of them as abstract as words, ideas or dreams. And this thing that blends senses, levels and symbols, called Internet, helps me getting near to a great number of people to exchange what happens to me, what I feel and believe. Thanks to the net, I know many people (I even love some of them), and I’ve never touched or smelled them. So much so, that sometimes I even have the idea of digitalizing reality, mine, my city’s: to digitalize those from Buenos Aires, the porteños. I don’t really want to picture them, to film them or to describe them in a systematizable language as pictures, films or words. Neither would I want to state any conclusion, or even less a journey made to relate it to strangers. I would just want to digitalize them to feel them closer, to be sure that we all are a part in this new common language construction tale. A language, that appears to me to be infinite.

Translation: Ralph del Valle

Ch'utas. Foto: http://reyquienlapaz.blogspot.com/2010/02/los-chutas-de-la-paz.html

Strange thing, modernity. I get in touch with my best friend and work colleague more by Facebook than with my natural and talented speech abilities. Therefore, my fingers are supplanting my clumsy lips, and each day my tongue is getting expendable, when we talk about communicating in this digital era. I keep my words more and more hidden in the darkness. And this is a paradox for a social communicator, and even worse when we consider that my friend’s desk is just a meter away from mine.

Did I already tell you, that my work colleague is called Juan? He loves ch’utas (an eccentric urban-rural rhythm, with origin in La Paz, and danced in its streets at Carnival). Through Social Media, Juan has found supporters in distant places like the Czech Republic. Those gringos ask him constantly to upload carnival videos to the website , in which ch’utas music groups as Juventud Súper Elegantes y sus Lindas Mamitas, or the Papitos Choleros (womanizers) y sus Lindas Bellezas Tipo Holandesas. Anyway, he says that his Czech friends have promised him to go to Bolivia in 2011 to dance ch’utas at Carnival’s beginning. I can’t imagine which name are they going to use for their music group.

Jorge is trying to convince me to join one of his internet Austral Whales Sanctuary safeguard groups, there are whales still being killed. “Where’s that?”, I ask him. “No idea”, he answers. Jorge has absolutely no idea where that sanctuary is. He doesn’t even know the sea, but it doesn’t matter. He keeps sending messages to the whole world as “Let the whales live!”, “Long life to the Austral Whales Sanctuary!”.

Those are the advantages of being a part of this contemporary globalism. A society’s cultural expressions, its weaknesses and knowledge, its concerns and happiness are not just its property, are also adopted by other societies. Borders are getting more obsolete each day.

Massive, standardized messages are received at the same time by different people in different places around the world. The more technologically communicated we are, the less communicated we really are. For example, it’s a paradox that all the writers I try to interview for my newspaper do prefer to receive the questions by E-mail rather than to sit in a café and just talk. Then, annotations have no taste at all. They’re not that bad, but you could feel it: no human contact there.

One of today’s global dictatorships is the Internet. If you’re not on Facebook, you’re not part at all of this global neighbourhood. An unconnected person (no social networks, no E-mail) is a pariah, a Mr Nobody without identity in this cyber civilization. The more electronic devices filling our pockets, the better. No matter if they’re useless to us. And mobile phones? Has anybody ever thought how many brilliant minds have been working just to make possible that tiny thing with a tiny screen? What for? To send a text, most of the times. Or just to submit sentences that are unable to form a decent paragraph: “Where are you?” “Getting there”. “Wait for me, wait for me”. We’ll give it a better use, won’t we?

Translation: Ralph del Valle

How a city smells. Stinks Detroit like Automobile Industry? Is bacon Sweet Home Chicago’s aroma? When I was a kid, my city smelled like fried chicken. Not like fatty ins-and-outs’ tacos, burritos, lunch lunch lunch. My gran ciudad stinked like Pollo Santos. KFC’s invasion and Church’s Chicken was still not our emotions’ html code. The best fried chicken was made by shaken housewives, doddery grandmothers and, of course, Pollo Santos.

That chicken was cathedralical. Breaded with religious devotion. I’ve only seen in the movies such well-made chicken, or in magazines or TV commercials. But I won’t fall. I know it’s a fake. Props. Bloody photoshopped chicken. Worst of all: I have become a fried-chicken junkie. For a time I frequented a clandestine fried-chicken business. It really looked like a crummy place. Fried-chicken’s whole industry is a mafia. I don’t know how did they learn about it, but they blew that tiny chicken window.

My favourite actions: walking along some streets crowded with factories, stepping into the bus station’s main avenue, and visiting the Pollo Santos subsidiary placed in front of the Alameda. I never order anything. I just place myself in a table to read a book, or to observe fried-chicken shop assistants. I wasn’t a common high-school student. My friends worked at Domino’s Pizza or at Pizza Hut. I worked at Pollo Santos.

During my work schedule, I saw how hundreds of men became broken-hearted. The best place to get rid off by a woman is a fried-chicken vender. Hurts less than a cinema or a restaurant. You can always find relief in the golden crust built around a freshly fried chicken breast.

Box stars and wrestlers paid visits to Pollo Santos. I was a pariah. I smelled like fried chicken. No matter how often I took a bath: I couldn’t get rid of that aroma. I was a wrestling fanatic. They let me always into the changing room because of the extra portions I always gave to a referee. I knew big wrestlers without their mask. I felt important. I was proud to live in this city. Afterwards, Coronel Sanders invaded us and fried-chicken venders got multiplied. I shredded, I recall. I saw how MixUp ruled over all other little discotheques. I thought, the same would happen to Pollo Santos. But their secret recipe and their crispichicken are still there.

I know this city is a city, because of the garbage in the streets, its stray dogs and the transvestites at the corners. But I am also aware, if Pollo Santos perishes, KFC’s venders won’t be enough to make me feel like a citizen. Luckily, Pollo Santos still rules. It’s hard to believe how much chicken is sold. I don’t really think any US’ city can compete with our fried-chicken fanaticism. So much chicken, that the air smells no longer like fried-chicken. The whole city smells like defrosting chicken. Chicken destined to the deep fryer. Flavor Flav would be happy here. The most important thing here to everyone: fried chicken.

When somebody crosses through the industrial part of the city, no matter if on foot or by car, it’s mandatory to cover your nose: the smell of defrosting chicken is unbearable. Stinks like a chicken’s vulva, they say. It’s so familiar to me, that when I travel I miss that bloody smell. I come frequently back to Pollo Santos. To KFC too, despite urban legends that assure chicken has been injected with vinegar. And I do visit Church’s Chicken, I can’t know in which place I’m going to find my one true love. Maybe my dream girl will be there, biting a breaded fried-chicken wing in a plastic bucket.

Carlos Manuel Velázquez

Translation: Ralph del Valle

For the first time ever, my Argentinean friends have asked me what the heck was happening in Germany, and laughed about it: “What, are you going to be a banana republic?”

In the last years nobody was interested at all in internal German issues, why should they. When some reports arrived about the economic crisis in Germany, they were: A) dismissed, or B) smiled at (“so, now you know how it feels like!”). Neither can I exclude myself from that. I Often have to hear arrogant remarks when I report from South America: “Tsk, what won’t happen down there, in those Southern countries”. Always with that undertone: “Something like that could never happen to US”.

But now my friends are suddenly collecting press clippings and bringing them to me: Republic’s President backs out, offended. An octopus is an oracle. The Euro, threatened. Corruption scandals in Ferrostaal and Siemens. It’s possible to hire demonstrators and to buy driving licences. Loveparade’s tragedy in Duisburg, organizers miscalculated and expected just a couple of hundred thousand assistants, people was squeezed to death. Germany robbed Nefertiti and wants to keep it. Old nuclear power stations may keep functioning after 30 years of use (even though probably 98% of Germans would plainly refuse to drive a 30-year old car because it lacks airbags).

My friends ask ironically to me, “So, what is happening in Germany?” I have to disappoint them. Germany will never be a banana republic. A banana republic lays South, is full of exotic beauties, a little corrupt and not really serious. Germany will never lay South, and exotism… we simply don’t wangle it.

What aspect dominates my life? Many answers come to me, but there’s always a common aspect: absence. Like a pop-up window that you could always click away, I arise in my German friends’ life and in my Argentinean’s. When am I longer than three weeks at the same place? When I come back to Buenos Aires after a research, often I’m there and I’m not. I confine myself there to work, I don’t answer the phone. I’m free, as free as I could never have imagined. And at the same time I’m imprisoned in the constant absence that makes impossible to understand, what life’s about: to share moments with other people. Good and bad. Absence destroyed friendships and one love. It’s a wail that many people do not understand; since I adopt a lifestyle that they would love to have (I would love too, sometimes I’m not able to believe that this life is mine). But they forget: it’s a life model that only allows one true and inseparable partner, a person and its laptop.

Absence has a stranglehold on me, the hub of missed routines are the No-Places, like airports. There I switch myself to Stand-By and allow both feelings to come, those that trigger an erratic life: elation and melancholy.

Karen Naundorf

Translation: Ralph del Valle

I’m more interested in the situation of the city where I live in, than the situation of the country. Caracas hosts between 4 and 8 million inhabitants, depending on who’s speaking; between 22 and 80 deaths per week, depending on the newspaper or on Government’s representative publishing the numbers; it has seven majors, but one, which in fact is the “major” of other five, does not or is not allowed to work, because the seventh city hall, recently created by executive power (In Venezuela, the main one), belongs to government’s political party, and therefore, is the major with bigger influence. Or not.

Anyway, it’s a huge amount of money flowing and disappearing, and I have to ask myself, as a citizen and pedestrian that it’s not too poor, neither too rich or too artist to play the political game, if resources are addressed to where they should go, or if they even arrive there. There are seven city halls, but they could be six, or five and a half. In this city, being exact is just accessory.

Each one of the five-and-a-half or seven city halls has its own preventive security system, five of them have their own police brigades, who are allowed to arrest and punish if necessary, and some of them even control vehicle traffic, even though there’s already a state department called Instituto Nacional de Tránsito y Transporte Terrestre crowded with certified inspectors to do that job. I’ve read a statement from this department’s former president in 2008, and he said that 40% of all Venezuelan cars are at the capital, and that in that year more than 2 million cars rolled daily through its streets and roads, 400,000 of them to cross from state to state. Nowadays this number should be bigger, but when counting, seems to be that there’s a car for every second person in Caracas.

Or maybe for every fourth. It depends.

Until recently, peak hour was estimated between 6am and 8am, and 5pm and 7pm. Now, we round it up: between 6am and 7pm, or even a bit later, you could be trapped in a 1 or 2-hour traffic jam. So, if you drive or you travel in surface public transport: relax, there’s not much you can do.

Caracas has lots of parks. It’s a grey city with green spots, like its huge, Caribbean Sea oriented, dyed hair look-like hill; and has a quite blue sky too. To continue with the men-like game, beard and body hair were those hills with trees, diagonal fields, waste land and scrubland: now, that’s all self made houses, made of bricks, zinc, concrete, hope and, in particular areas, with loads of fear whenever it rains, as it does.

In Caracas there are at least 35 malls. There, the biggest, those with a repeated double consonant, italic and chic name; here –all right, I’m going to explain the joke-, these malls, along with this hundred of middle-level buildings, are such a huge portion of Latin America’s Blackberry business volume, that the word “Socialism” has been undressed and runs away from our reality, too.

As in many other cities around this continent, in Caracas contrast is the rule. It’s easy to see million-dollars mansions, where ministers, government representatives, lucky heirs and business men live, some with dignity, others without it –they fearless lost it in their teens. They are maybe one hundred, one thousand or 20,000: we already know, exact numbers don’t matter. There are also millions of ranches, two, four, seven millions, where hunger is disturbing, we all know life is harder when there’s not much to eat. Quite harder.

Guns? Just in Caracas, a police force confiscated 2,166 just in 2009’s first six months. This means: twelve a day. But if you talk to somebody or if you read Op-Eds, you’ll just believe that there are millions of them, both legal and illegal. Conservatives say: there are 5 millions in the country. Apocalyptics say: 15. We’re talking about millions. Millions of guns, did you ever counted up to a million? Go ahead. Give it a try.

What does it matter three and a half, or nine thousand nine hundred? Such numbers should shame us. Best case scenario: let’s ignore it, there are so many other things, better things to focus on, like go dancing or travelling, for example, here all that’s very easy. Worst case scenario: let’s multiply guns per decades of indolence, and those decades per bullets, and now, let’s think who’s taking all that money.

In Caracas you’ll find all the best and worst things of mankind, a French friend of mine told me a couple of weeks ago. She’s been living here for two years, and she lived before in the US, Spain, Mali, Madagascar, Mexico and Brazil, and she’s been in Eastern Europe, Southern Cone and Colombia. How’s that?, I asked to her: Well, I’ve never met nicer and more supportive persons than in Venezuela, but I’ve never seen so much evil as here. Believe me, at least with her, I’ve tried to belong to the first group.

With such bipolarity, and taking my friend’s words as true, it’s easy to see that we have here more than enough cars, motorcycles, guns, mobile phones, parks, malls and liquor stores to ease the pain and celebrate that we’ve got rum, and as long as we’ve got rum we’ve got hope. We also have more than enough hairdressers and gyms to shape the figure and to straighten long hairs on a Monday morning, and enough of big pharmacy megastores where you could buy corn flour or photographic cameras and Viagra, normally sold out on a Friday evening.

They ask me: how do you see this place’s situation. There’s the answer, broadly speaking. Caracas is ugly, but somehow it charms you because of its intensity: you’ll never get bored of it. It’s like a drug that strikes, hides you from yourself, shows you that you should immediately leave before is too late. They also ask me: do you think you can influence upon it. Honestly? I was cofounder from four magazines, three of them cultural, I worked in a museum in the period, in which I thought Art could reach all people, I supported 2006 World Social Forum and Alternative Social Forum as well, which played against the first ones; I made editorials in a TV news broadcast in politically highly-polarized times, I wrote some chronicles about abandoned places in the city, I organized talks, debates and public parties. I gave a couple of workshops about what I consider good narrative journalism (Martí, Walsh, Capote, Kapuscinski, Rotker, Lemebel, Monsiváis, Caparrós, Guerriero, Salcedo Ramos, Muñoz, Duque, etcetera), and in everyone of all those things I gave my best, first thinking in myself, afterwards in my closest circle, afterwards in Caracas. Even though, I don’t think I’ve had any influence in the city, for good or for bad, further than my closest circle and in a very short period of time. I don’t think it’s possible, and sometimes I wanted to convince myself I didn’t matter, but the truth is: as long as I live here, I’ll keep trying.

Leo Felipe Campos

Translation: Ralph del Valle