The crime-ridden colonial center of Caracas was lit up in celebration, the bars packed to the nines and the streets brimming with revelers enjoying live music on a Saturday night. In the eight years I lived in this city, I never saw el centro look this way. It was a rare glimpse of what I hope someday Caracas could become, a ray of a light for a city shrouded in darkness, struggling to overcome an international reputation for violence and decay.
Sure, it's not every day this kind of thing happens. The government spruced up downtown for the bicentennial independence anniversary celebrations and paid big bucks to put on all sorts of shows and organized restaurants to join bar-crawl type events. And there were the occasional obligatory references to Chavez and the revolution that I could have done without.
But it was a unique experience in a city where street life has been drowned out by the steadily growing dominance of cars, the blatant disregard for public spaces, the crime rate that the most dire estimates show Caracas as dangeorous as Baghdad. Few foreigners care for Caracas except to make it the butt of jokes, and I found myself over the years repeated defending it to out-of-sorts ex-pats who couldn't make the place work for them. It's a city I've always wanted to hear some good news about.
On Saturday I got a call from a friend who was heading down to the Plaza Bolivar to see a group called Bacalao Men (I'd first gone to see them in 2001 and was surprised to see they were still around). The city's old colonial center looked cleaned up, the facades repainted and repointed, with enough lighting and security around that people looked geniunely relaxed. I drank stale Malbec out of a Gatorade bottle. People took pictures of each other and had random conversations with whoever was standing next to them. They even put up tanks of potable water -- a brilliant touch for people like me with ideological baggage about buying it in bottles.
This is what Venezuela's supposed to be, it struck me. People are not quiet or shy and taken to hiding in shopping malls or staying inside their houses. Venezuela's oil wealth meant it had cars and highways before most other countries in the region, which left Caracas with a plethora of malls and parking lots. But Venezuelans were born to drink and dance on the street, and there's no reason that Venezuela's colonial center can't be a thriving center of nightlife.
For as long as I can remember, it hasn't been. That plaza was overtaken by clouds of tear gas or convulsed by politically-sparked shoving matches that ended in confused gun battles more times than I could count. Its isolated and poorly lit streets were always prime territory for muggings and robberies, its sidewalks for years overrun by informal street vendors hocking everything knock-off t-shirts to bootleg CDs.
We finished watching the show and walked to a restaurant, where I used to have lunch while covering Congress, that was holding a poetry slam. The place literally has a sign that says "Dancing is Prohibited -- The Management" but it didn't seem to be bothering anyone. On the way out we ran into a parade with a live band of drums and brass and a line of people in a Chinese-New-Year-dragon-style costume walking through the streets with kinds and grandma's lined up to dance alongside.
Could downtown Caracas eventually become a nightlife center the way Rio's colonial Lapa district transformed itself from a Brazilian skid-row into the city's main night-time attraction? A decade ago, few would have believed that Lapa would be home to the city's most exclusive clubs or be a magnet for moneyed cariocas looking to see a samba show. Rio had a number of advantages, a country a thriving economy and no political polarization or ideological doctrine splitting its society in half.
I think the answer is yes. There's a lot that will have to get straightened out before that happens, a lot of which goes far beyond what the local authorities in Caracas can do. People begin taking back public spaces when they realize the advantages of doing so. Let's hope the scene this weekend will remind them that being on the street is better than hiding in your house.
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