The failure of Venezuela’s ‘cultural revolution’

When asked if it was a cultured place, he responded: “In conventional terms, yes. There are six large concert halls that are always full of people; four elite museums and a dozen smaller museums devoted to safeguarding national memory; seven universities and around 10 institutes of higher education; six symphony orchestras, more than 20 theaters, and a Babylonian festival – the best in the world.”Several decades later and after a long history of government crises – which have intensified since the election of Nicolás Maduro in 2013­ – there is little left of the country that seduced artists in the 1940s and 1950s, including the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, the young journalist Gabriel García Márquez, the great Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama, as well as a couple of decades later Tomás Eloy Martínez himself. More…