One of the most famous things ever said about Hugo Chávez, who died on Tuesday, was written by the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez after accompanying him on a flight from Havana to Caracas in 1999, just before Chávez took office as Venezuela's president for the first time.
"I was overwhelmed by the feeling," Márquez wrote, "that I had just been travelling and chatting pleasantly with two opposing men. One to whom the caprices of fate had given an opportunity to save his country. The other, an illusionist who could pass into the history books as just another despot."
Two days after Chávez's death, Márquez's words still hold the key to any serious assessment of the late president. Chávez was, of course, only one person. But the two men whom Márquez discerned cohabited within him to the end. They helped to make him such a complex and divisive figure. And they ensure that any verdict on Chávez can never be an absolute one.
Chávez
was a Latin American revolutionary populist of a very particular kind.
His light, or a form of it, may shine on in Bolivia or Ecuador, though
it may soon be flickering in Cuba. But it does not shine in Bradford or
Brent, never mind in Buckinghamshire. The chavista model is as distant
from Europe as Bolivar and Chávez both insisted that European models
were from Latin America. To think otherwise is just revolutionary
escapism of a kind of which most of us are well rid.
Chávez's
strength, which he consciously drew from his hero Bolivar, was to be
politically inventive and distinctive. No one can deny him that tribute.
And inventiveness is certainly needed in British and European politics.
But it will have to be of a wholly different and vernacular kind, owing
little to the vast currency reserves and natural wealth that financed
Chávez's reign, and everything to the relative global decline and
increasingly beleaguered social model that is our continent's modern
reality.
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