Chávez's "revolution" isn't yet visible on the streets

by Andres Oppenheimer

CARACAS - When I arrived here earlier this week for Sunday's referendum on President Hugo Chávez's rule, the biggest question on my mind was whether I would find this country turned into a 1980s Nicaragua or a Cuba. At first sight, it's neither, at least not yet.
Chávez, a leftist populist former coup plotter who prides himself on leading a ''Bolivarian revolution'' against ''U.S. imperialism,'' has not yet done the first thing revolutionary leaders do -- change street names.
In Cuba, most streets or public squares have names such as ''Che'' Guevara, Ho Chi Minh or those of largely unknown Marxist guerrillas fallen in long-forgotten African wars. During the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, parks were renamed Marx and Lenin. Even in Mexico, where a self-proclaimed ''revolutionary'' party ruled for seven decades until 2000, the capital's biggest avenues still carry names such as ''Reform,'' ''Revolution'' or ``Proletarians of the World.''
But Chávez has done very little of that. Granted, one of the first things he did upon taking office in 1999 was change the name of the country to the ridiculously sounding ``Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.''
That's like having a U.S. president decide to rename the United States ``the Washingtonian Republic of the United States of America.''
But in Caracas' affluent neighborhoods like Los Rosales, Altamira and Chacao, things look pretty much the same as they did the last time I visited here, shortly after Chávez took office.
''Chávez hasn't dared mess with this part of town,'' a friend explained matter of factly. In fact, he hasn't done much name changing in poorer neighborhoods such as Catia, Petare or El Centro, either, despite the fact that he has deployed to those areas some of the 17,000 Cuban doctors and dentists who are manning government-run social work programs around the country.
Theoretically, Chávez could have renamed the city's biggest avenues if he had wanted to, because most of them run between city districts and are thus outside local mayors' jurisdictions, Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña told me.
So why has Chávez left street names intact?
Teodoro Petkoff, a former leftist guerrilla leader and former planning minister and now editor of the independent daily Tal Cual, says the absence of revolutionary icons is due to the simple fact that there hasn't been a revolution here.
The only revolution that has taken place in Venezuela is in Chávez's mind, and the minds of a few ''widows of communism'' in U.S. and Latin American colleges, he says.
''Other than passing a land reform law that was never even enforced, he hasn't done anything,'' Petkoff told me. ``He hasn't established a one-party system, nor has he suppressed the opposition, nor has he nationalized companies.''
Petkoff says a ''Cubanization process'' in Venezuela is highly unlikely, if not impossible, because unlike in Cuba, Chávez has not been able to create a party or military apparatus to control the population.
But Alberto Garrido, a columnist with the daily El Universal and author of several books on Chávez, says it will be only a matter of time until we see street names change.
''What we are going through here is what Chávez himself has called a transition period,'' Garrido said.
``Chávez has not created a new state, but is slowly co-opting an existing state: He has already taken control of the electoral council, Congress, the Supreme Court, etc.''
Chávez himself wrote a long manifesto from Yare prison in July 1992 in which he said it would take 20 years from the moment he took power to install a revolution, Garrido says.
''Only four years have gone by,'' he says. ``From the outside, the institutions and the street names look the same as before. But don't fool yourself.''
Who's right? My common sense tells me there is a grand design behind Chávez's slow-moving revolution, and that little by little he is taking control of all Venezuelan institutions.
But when I see the economic disaster Chávez has caused in this country and the amazing number of people one meets on the streets who openly mock his ''revolution,'' as I've seen here in recent days, I wonder whether he can stay in power much longer without breaking all pretense of democratic rule.
We may find out Sunday.