The Foreign Service Journal, April 2019

40 APRIL 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL murder and mayhem; and the Cubans, who got instant resi- dency on touching American soil, wanted to join those who had fled Castro earlier on. It is a tragic irony that it is now the turn of Venezuelans to flee to those very same countries because their own country’s economy and democracy have been destroyed. Even more galling is that the Chavistas—and so-called Boligarchs among them, who had a hand in the demise of Venezuela—are not emigrating to their much-loved Cuba, but to the Imperio : the United States. Warning Signs As good as life was in sunny Venezuela in 1987, however, the warning signs were already there. Shortly before my arrival the currency collapsed to its real value—from about four bolivars to the dollar to more than 20. This was great for young diplomats earning dollars, but a shock to the Venezuelan middle classes who had become accustomed to vacationing in Florida, and more so to the poor, who had no dollar reserves stashed abroad. Venezuelans’ refrain in Miami shopping malls— esta barato, dame dos (it’s cheap, give me two)—rang no more. Already most available crevices along the streams flowing down into Caracas from the beautiful Avila Mountain range were filled with the shacks of the poor, and the ranchitos , as they are called, had started their inexorable march toward the coast. The divide between the rich eastern parts of the city and the poorer west was growing; and while the ranchito -dwellers may have had a better view than many of the rich in their sealed-off apartment complexes, their resentment was growing. More ominously, Venezuela had a bad case of “Dutch dis- Homes of the poor, called ranchitos , populate the steep hillsides of Caracas. PROCSILASMESCAS/CCBY2.0 I saw the developing problems personally during the “Caracazo” of February 1989, when hundreds of people protesting a rise in Venezuela’s ridiculously low gasoline prices were killed.