Caracas Chronicles

December 1957: the trumpets of the New National Ideal

It was a time of spiking oil business, of fighting communism, of building highways and concrete behemoths, and dancing to Big Band music. Born in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean under the influence of American jazz orchestras, the Latin Big Bands of Havana, Santo Domingo, Mexico City and Caracas developed a songbook that is pretty much alive, with standards like “Besame mucho” or “Yo quiero ser como Ariel.” In Caracas, the most famous Big Band was Billo’s Caracas Boys, established since the early 1940s by Dominican musician Billo Frometa. 

Billo’s elegant, well-executed dancehall music incarnated the spirit of 1950s Venezuela: it was predictable, with no inappropriate hints in the lyrics or the way to dance it, and included the main genres of the moment, such as Dominican merengue, Cuban guarachas and boleros, Colombian cumbias, Spanish pasodobles for the abundant immigrants from Canarias and Galicia, and a few merengues caraqueños. This score dominated the radio waves and the live galas on black and white television and a hallmark of Christmas parties. 

But Billo’s was also the soundtrack of Marcos Perez Jimenez’s military regime. It was so associated with the parties at Circulo Militar and the aesthetics of the Nuevo Ideal Nacional that, after the fall of the dictatorship in January 1958, the band was banned from playing in Venezuela for a couple of years. 

By December 1957, when Perez Jimenez launched a flawed plebiscite that forced people to vote for him for more years of rule, Billo’s music was key for injecting that “everything’s fine” feeling that the regime needed, even when there was unrest in the universities and the barracks. 

They even had a song about a military parade, which remains very popular today. And the illusion of grandeur and solid peace that came from Billo’s music in those Christmas parties of the 1950s instilled the habit of listening to it in the half century that followed. 

December 1960: in hallacas we trust

The second year of Venezuelan democracy was everything but quiet and reassuring. There was terrorism from the far right and the far left, a permanent danger of falling back into the hands of the dictatorship toppled in 1958 combined with the red ghost of the triumphant Cuban revolution, plus economic anguish and social anxiety about education, immigration and the rule of law. And things would go even worse in the next few years. 

Betancourt knew that December is when Venezuelans are more Venezuelan: more gregarious, more festive, more hedonistic and more eagerto eat what was being established as the December menu.

President Rómulo Betancourt had to prove every day that his government would survive the pressure and get ahead with its agenda of land reform and institutional reinvention of the country. He had to suffocate a military rebellion in Táchira in April, and in June he almost died when a bomb exploded under his cavalcade during an event in Paseo Los Próceres. Then, in September, another coup attempt was controlled in Caracas, while the ruling coalition started to unravel.  

Betancourt knew how to use words—along with Rafael Caldera, he remains as the only president with a solid written work—and as part of his New Year’s Eve message in mass media he coined a word that is still remembered. He said that everyone would be happy to enjoy the “multisápidas hallacas,” his Homeric way of saying that there are multiple flavors in our Christmas beloved dish. 

Betancourt knew that December is when Venezuelans are more Venezuelan: more gregarious, more festive, more hedonistic and more eagerto eat what was being established as the December menu. 

With the migration from countryside to cities, European immigration and the emergence of a middle class, the hallaca had completed the journey from its sort of obscure origins in Colonial times to the family tables of oil rich modern Venezuela. Betancourt was selling the hope for stability through that dish that we are obsessed with, which became easier to prepare in that decade of 1960 with the invention of precooked corn flour and the availability of all ingredients across the expansion of supermarkets.  Still, some people call hallacas “las multisápidas,” those of many flavors, to reference that night when a leader under siege was doing whatever he could to reach the next year in power. 

December 2002: the reappropriation of Christmas

“They want to steal Christmas from us!”

Such a claim was uttered by people like Juan Barreto and other pundits from the left during the first weeks of the oil strike. The year 2002 was bizarre, even to Venezuelan standards, and was poised to finish in a bizarre manner, with half of the country paralyzed with a national strike that would fail to topple Chávez after the crisis of April and the individual calls to arms of military officers against the government. 

It was strange to see a government that boasted its Marxist influences accusing the opposition of trying to steal Christmas. During its “revolutionary” phase, chavismo had sort of ignored Christmas: it was too Catholic, too bourgeois and above all too American for the Bolivarian ethos they were trying to impose from 1998 to 2001. 

Like Pérez Jiménez, Betancourt and Chávez, and every other ruler in modern Venezuela, Maduro needs Christmas to pause social unrest, but not through parties and shopping, but state terror, the only resource available for what’s left of the Bolivarian revolution.

In December 1999, when approving the Bolivarian constitution was priority over anything else, including the disaster in Vargas and other areas impacted by extreme weather, Christmas was a nuisance for the official discourse. 

It was the revolution and nothing other than the revolution that should be celebrated. Chavismo was taking over the state and attempting to do the same with the culture; some walls said “eat arepas, not bread,” because corn is more akin to the Venezuelan essence according to that 1960s-inspired official anthropology, and Christmas was not in the canon. 

However, by 2002 things had changed. The government’s approval rates were very low, and the scarcity that arose with the oil strike meant an opportunity to blame the opposition for any hardship the population was about to suffer. So it was logical to switch the stance on Christmas. From then on, chavismo learned to use December to sell the idea that with them in power everything will be fine, and it was the subversive opposition who menaced the peace and tranquility of the people. The same tropes used during the democracy and the military regime of the 1950s. 

December 2024: impossible normalization

If Chávez had to let his people use Christmas as bread-and-circus, Maduro would need to be a bit more creative. In 2013, during his first November in power, when the country was realizing the petrostate was broke and the economic collapse had started, Maduro opened dangerous gates: he invited people to storm Daka, a chain of appliances stores. The “Dakazo” was consistent with the legend that chavismo ignited Caracazo in 1989, and with the radical chavista menace during the oil strike of December 2002: “negocio cerrado, negocio saqueado.” It was a desperate measure from a regime that was no longer able to sponsor the crazy shopping spree of the bonanza years from 2008 to 2012, and a message to the private sector: follow the rules or the rage of the masses will be deployed on you. 

With Dakazo, Maduro tried to associate his first December as president with abundance. Now, in 2024, the ambiance is quite different. Maduro wants no sacking of stores, many of which belong to people close to him. He can’t afford anything that might disturb order in the streets. His government is on edge, entrenched with a criminal paranoia after the electoral fraud, bracing to weathering the international pressure that might arrive after January 10th, surveilling its ranks and in a war against society. 

Like Pérez Jiménez, Betancourt and Chávez, and every other ruler in modern Venezuela, Maduro needs Christmas to pause social unrest, but not through parties and shopping, but state terror, the only resource available for what’s left of the Bolivarian revolution.

With inflation rising again and abundant proof that a solid majority wants him out, Maduro can’t do much more than forcing the public sector to cover itself in holiday decorations, decreeing a Christmas in October that made the rounds in the global press for its absurdity. The paradox is that this measure supposedly conceived to instill a sense of normality is constantly sabotaged by its own government, when it induces the cancellation of concerts and refuses to release political prisoners (as even Chávez and Maduro has done in previous Decembers). Maduro handed the defense of his rule to the most radical of his allies, Diosdado Cabello, and repression is what weighs the most in the balance, more than the illuminated avenues or the lukewarm effort to restore power in Margarita before the holidays. 

Maduro bets everything on brute force because he must have acknowledged that he can’t convince anyone that things are fine. People can’t turn the page of what happened on July 28 and can’t ignore that the economy is worsening and blackouts are increasing. Most of all, this Christmas is reminding everyone of the most harmful of collective wounds: the shattering of family life, the center of the December traditions, due to massive migration, political exile and even state violence. 

No Billo’s, no hallacas and no gifts would bury the ire of a nation that’s been treated as an enemy to extort, incarcerate and kill by the armed forces, the police and the civil servants of a brutal and incapable dictatorship with no legitimacy. The ancient political habit of using Christmas as a collective tranquilizer won’t work this time.