As I said to some of the doctors of the 1995 UWI Medical School graduating class on Friday, 30 years is a long time to stay in touch and celebrate their achievement. They can celebrate the occasion. I graduated from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) 54 years ago and when the fiftieth anniversary of that achievement came around, we graduates of the 1971 UCV class were not able to get together because of the situation in Venezuela.
I haven’t been back to Venezuela in over a decade and I would like to return. My mind is filled with memories of the old times when we lived in American petroleum camps but mingled freely with Venezuelans, sons and daughters of the people who worked at the camp. And my mind is filled with wonderful memories of times in medical school and the amigos and amigas I studied and worked with.
My Venezuela is filled with young llaneros on horseback with smiling teeth and glowing smiles.
My Venezuela is filled with young medical students who drank beer until late hours of the night with me.
I would, if it were safe, return to Venezuela tomorrow. I would love to rent a car and drive around Caracas and Venezuela, visiting all the places we lived, see old friends, the few members of my class who have not emigrated, and enjoy the pleasant memories of when I was a medical student in Caracas in the sixties.
I want to walk the streets of Caracas, from Chacaito to Altamira, the ones which I walked with my wife-to-be, hand in hand. Or take the bus down Sabana Grande to Plaza Venezuela and walk into University Hospital, where I learned medicine and decided I want to take care of children, Venezuelan children who gradually morphed over time to Trinis and Tobagonians. And then go into one of the many bars that dotter the landscape around the Central University and drink with my old friends.
Caracas bella Caracas went the song by Billo’s Orchestra, which played at every Caraqueñan wedding I went to and Caracas was beautiful in those days, three thousand feet above sea level, chilly and clouded in mist on a December morning but near enough to the Caribbean sea to enable you to drive down to Macuto after lunch, take a dip with a senorita and get back up in time for the 7 o’clock Creole News on TV.
Then, if I could, I would head west, through the fertile, cocoa-filled valleys of Aragua, to the beaches of Puerto Cabello, where my grandfather used to manage a coconut estate and where, while learning to drive with my uncle, I drove a jeep into a chicken coop wall and me and the chicken had was to jump out and run from his wrath.
From Puerto Cabello it’s a short trip across the llanos (plains) into the mountains of the eastern branch of the Andes, which actually end up as the low hills of Monos Island.
To get to Merida, the main Venezuelan town of the Andes, one has to drive up, up the Transandean Highway, a branch of the Pan-American Highway to Pico el Áquila at just over 4,000 metres (13,000 feet), where there used to be an inn that cooked the best lake trout you could have for breakfast.
Pico Bolivar at 16,000 feet, the highest mountain in Venezuela and perpetually covered with snow, is the showplace of Merida. You can walk up to the top. We took the cable car, which is the second highest and second longest cable car in the world.
From Merida, it’s back down to drive east across the Llanos, home of the llaneros or cowboys. In 1956, we were living in Campo Mata and my father was gifted a chestnut colt with a white streak down his nose. I immediately called him Streak and rode him bareback and on saddle over the plains and into rivers, with my llanero buddies, for about a year before we moved to Caracas on January 1, 1958, the same day the dictator Perez Jimenez was removed from office and the difficult history of democracy in Venezuela began.
From Mata, I might head south to the Brazilian border and into the tabletop mountains or tupui country of Bolivar state, where the gods of the world’s highest waterfall reside, or north through Maturin to the lonely palm-fringed beaches of Venezuela’s eastern Caribbean coast.
Venezuela has it all and not only oil and gold. Skyscrapers, traffic, beaches, rugged, snow-capped mountains, cable cars, immense plains where wild horses roam, undiscovered mineral riches and some of the most generous people in the world.
If I speak too much of the Venezuela I knew, “es para llorar ... is to cry.”
