Meridith Kohut (The New York Times) writes, “The golfers still argue over handicaps. The waiters still serve flutes of Moët & Chandon. Sunlight still kisses the grounds laid out in the 1920s by Olmsted Brothers, the esteemed American landscape architects. El Pinguino bar at the Caracas Country Club, a last bastion of gracious living that President Hugo Chavez has his eye on. Many Venezuelans live in cinder-block houses blanketing the hills in Caracas. Recent flooding displaced thousands. The idyll of the Caracas Country Club, a bastion of opulence for Venezuela’s elite, still seems intact. But perhaps not for much longer.” Here are excerpts with a link to the full article below:
Beneath the veneer of tranquility, a feeling of dread prevails. A state newspaper published a study this month saying that if the government expropriated the land of the Caracas Country Club and that of another club in the city, housing for 4,000 poor families could be built on the parcels.
The idea is hardly far-fetched. After all, the government has seized hundreds of businesses this year alone, and thousands of people are homeless because of heavy rains, accentuating a severe housing shortage. At the behest of President Hugo Chávez, flood victims have already moved into hotels, museums, the Foreign Ministry and even his own office. [. . .]
“We are waiting,” said Manuel Fuentes, 69, the country club’s vice president, in the English he learned as a teenager while studying at the New York Military Academy. “It would be a tragedy for the city to lose such an icon, but it’s a scenario we’ve been forced to acknowledge.”
In many ways, it is remarkable that such a club still exists here at all, given the expropriation of so many private companies this year, whether cattle ranches or construction firms. Some of the seized assets were owned by members of the Caracas Country Club, but somehow the club and its leisure pursuits, like show jumping, seemed to escape unscathed. The club embodies the contradictions of Venezuela and its Socialist-inspired revolution, in which the moneyed elite still lead lives of luxury, even if their cloistered existence is often marked by resignation and fear. Members say the cost of joining, once $150,000, is now down to about $100,000, reflecting, in part, anxiety about belonging to a club in the government’s crosshairs. Like a relic of an earlier time, the club stands for so much of what Mr. Chávez is against. But while many of its members chafe against the government’s attempts to exert greater control over the economy, some have seen their fortunes grow through quiet deals with Mr. Chávez’s government.
Adding to the rub, the club’s ties to one of Mr. Chávez’s favorite foils, the United States, are so deep that a former American ambassador, C. Allan Stewart, died of a heart attack while golfing on its greens and the names of its founders, including a cadre of American oilmen, are inscribed on its walls.
After this uneasy coexistence, Mr. Chávez called on this city’s golf courses last month to “put their hand on their hearts” to assist or house flood evacuees. If not, he said in a not-so-veiled threat, “we’ll put their hand there for them.”
[. . .] Club directors responded by saying the 18-hole course was exposed to flooding, too, making it impractical to pitch tents for evacuees on the premises. They said they were already providing employees and their families, many of whom live in nearby slums, with assistance during the floods.
To arrive at the club, one must drive through a leafy district of private mansions called (in English, of course) Country Club. Once inside the grounds, it is easy to bump into prominent members of the upper crust that Mr. Chávez derides, like Peter Bottome, 72, one of the owners of RCTV, a television network critical of the president that was forced off the public airwaves in 2007. [. . .] Elsewhere, servants dashed about under the chandeliers. Macaws screeched from their perches in the samán trees. Bon vivants, dressed in blazers as per club rules, sipped whisky and puffed on cigars in El Pingüino, the club’s air-conditioned bar, in a scene that would not have been out of place in pre-revolutionary Havana.
[. . .] The emergence of a new class of magnates — called Boligarchs for their quick accumulation of wealth and their ties to the government, which reveres Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberation hero — also brought change to the club’s doorstep.
Some Boligarchs, like Wilmer Ruperti, an oil tanker tycoon, bought mansions close to the club, even if they never joined it. Another pro-government businessman, Diego Salazar, is a member. A senior public official or two are even occasionally glimpsed on the club’s grounds. Their presence captures the rise of one elite and the decline of another, and the sometimes awkward dance between these groups as this process unfolds.
Vanessa Neumann, a writer whose grandfather was a major industrialist here, described a recent show jumping competition at the club attended by Alejandro Andrade, a former military official and now Venezuela’s national treasurer. She said the fawning around Mr. Andrade, a noted horse aficionado who moves with ease in such rarefied circles, was more entertaining than the show jumping itself. “You see the government apparatchiks paying private homage to the oligarchy they publicly ridicule, and vice versa,” Ms. Neumann said of the atmosphere at the club that day. “The former out of a desire to belong, the latter out of a desire to survive.”
[Many thanks to David Labiosa for bringing this item to our attention.]
For full article, see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/world/americas/28venez.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
Also see http://www.caracascountryclub.org/
