The case of Vicente Lecuna is central to the story of Bolívar in Venezuela’s public sphere. Like Blanco Fombona, Lecuna had before him a political tradition defined by the fact of the dictatorship of Gómez as well as by Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, both of whom promoted authoritarian government, though differently. But Lecuna, who supported republican government and had his own experience on the military and political battlefield, did not follow the path of a Blanco Fombona, a Larrazábal, or a Nicanor Bolet Peraza. Becoming the symbol of a new conservativism, Lecuna quietly defended his ideas, determined to change the country from within through what he saw as his contributions as a citizen, a civilian, rather than a governmental official. His vision of liberalism was certainly different from that of the three intellectuals named, but for exiles he would be an ally.
One after another, he accepted appointments for the direction of new and old institutional sites in Venezuela. They included the Escuela de Artes y Oficios (the School of Arts and Trades) in 1911; the Bank of Venezuela in 1915, appointed by the bank’s shareholders; also in 1915, El Archivo del Libertador (the Archive of the Liberator), which he was tasked with organizing; and in 1916, the Casa Natal (Birthplace) of Bolívar, the old Bolívar homestead right off the Bolívar Plaza in the center of Caracas that in 1912 was purchased by the Sociedad Patriótica (the Patriotic Society) and donated to the state. A trained engineer who had worked on the construction of the railroad in the 1890s and who in later decades proposed that it be extended into the llanos (southern plains), Lecuna was a semi-governmental actor and modernizer. Under his direction, the Bank of Venezuela, which had been in crisis, and the Casa Natal, became highly significant in their respective spheres: finance and state culture. Not an owner of property, not a businessperson, Lecuna built up what he saw as public capital. He would be the opposite of Manuel Antonio Matos (the high finance banker of whom we have spoken) who was the treasury minister three times and president of the senate and congress. The values Lecuna understood himself to embody were virtue, honesty, and methodical and rigorous thinking in the context of the defense of the idea of a national culture. They were positivist values, coming down from the work of French thinkers like Ernest Renan, who equated society with the invented concept of a nation’s people: for Renan the French race, for those who took over the concept, the Spanish, the Italian, the Latin, and so on. Lecuna used these values as the basis for a new Venezuela with institutions that would serve and shape the public.
Lecuna had seen the worst of Venezuelan politics. He fought under Juan Manuel (El Mocho) Hernández in 1897, when Hernández sought to take Caracas by force after Joaquín Crespo stole the elections from him. In addition to the death of Crespo, Lecuna witnessed Hernández lose in battle and be placed in prison, but negotiate to have Lecuna and others under him go free. He also saw Hernández, after his release in 1902, support Cipriano Castro in the Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution), 1901–1903, then become a member of his cabinet. But his support did not last for long. Within days of the start of Castro’s post-war government, Hernández mounted an insurrection against him because he disagreed with his policies. On the subject of federalism in the 1890s, Lecuna was critical of Liberal caudillos who amassed fortunes for themselves without contributing to the state. Manuel Antonio Matos controlled the National Treasury in 1899.
In what was another kind of positivism, one defined not only by the conservative nation thinking of the nineteenth century, but also by philology—the academic practice of text preparation, ordering, and accumulation that also became important in the nineteenth century—Lecuna took possession of the written legacy in a definitive manner. In 1920, he moved the Archivo del Libertador to the Casa Natal, which he had had renovated. He was reconstituting that space so that it could function as a house museum or historic home, that of Bolívar, of the Bolívar family, and of an historical period. Through it—and not the massive slave plantation the Bolívars had once owned or something resembling it—he domesticated Venezuelan history, to use the critical language of Patricia West, author of Domesticating history: the political origins of America’s house museums.1
With the Casa Natal and the Archivo del Libertador together, Lecuna established the contours of a new social history based on the concepts of preservation and authenticity. That social history, which was both paperless and textual, was that of Venezuela’s wealthy whites, the mantuanos , of which Bolívar had been one. Opposed to the histories of Vallenilla Lanz and Gil Fortoul , it re-figured the members of that racial aristocracy as a patriotic patrician class that was still relevant for the nation, erasing from view their place as slaveholders and creators of a society based on hierarchical racial groupings. From the perspective of a nation modernizing, Lecuna gave Venezuelans a new beginning to look back upon with pride and nostalgia.
As part of this heritage project, Lecuna commissioned Tito Salas to paint frescoes of scenes from independence on the interior walls of the Casa Natal and of the buildings of the government. In the Casa Natal, where he began in 1919, Salas painted Bolívar’s epic story, including his ascent in 1822 of the Chimborazo, southwest of Quito, immortalized by Bolívar’s poem “Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo” (“My Delirium atop the Chimborazo”). For some, the veracity of the ascent and the poem has never been proven. Lecuna and Salas also included the scene of the signing of the 1811 constitution, the constitution that Bolívar denounced. He was unmistakably defending Venezuela’s constitutional tradition and creole past with whiteness a place of subjectivity for a modernizing Venezuela that would bring more than a million immigrants from Europe in the decade of the 1950s—the nineteenth-century wave of immigration the country had never had and that many in the elites had longed for. Venezuela’s elites would no longer be defined by region or political party but by an invented racial and cultural genealogy covering over the civil wars and military insurrections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a vision that ultimately would prevail, consumed by both the national and international public. Photographic images of Tito Salas’s frescoes appeared in the bulletin of the Pan American Union in the United States in the 1920s and also in the bulletin Lecuna would found.
In one of his great publishing feats in his career, Lecuna brought out in a ten-volume collection commissioned by Juan Vicente Gómez the documents in the Archivo del Libertador, with the first volumes appearing in 1929 and 1930, right at the moment of the hemispheric centenary celebrations of Bolívar’s death and of the centenary of the beginning of the Venezuelan republic. (Lecuna had already published in 1920 his Papeles de Bolívar (Papers of Bolívar) at Blanco Fombona’s Editorial-América in Madrid.)2 He methodically numbered the letters and named the correspondents. The publication was a literary event, a heritage in the making. They were volumes to own and display.
The state was celebrating 1830. In the formulation of the Gómez administration, Venezuelan independence from the Gran Colombia in this year was an act of refounding of the First Republic (1811–1812), not a brand new beginning. Lecuna was not the only scholar to produce tomes of a monumental nature at this moment. So did Gil Fortoul , who re-published his work, Historia constitucional de Venezuela of 1907 and 1909. But Gil Fortoul’s volumes were not an updated version, but a work with new theoretical principles that organized it. Aligning himself more closely to Vallenilla Lanz, Gil Fortoul uses a new race-based vision of positivism to tell the history of Venezuela from its indigenous beginnings to the present. In the original volumes, he had spoken of race in his discussion of colonial Venezuela and in his discussion of the racial groups during the period of independence. This, then, is hardly the future edition hoped for by Hiram Bingham, one with extensive notes to reflect the source work, but tomes that tell the history of Venezuela from the perspective of the Gómez state. Assigning Bolívar a philosophy in the new age of national ideology and the critique of liberalism that was the 1920s, defined as such by Lenin (Soviet Union), Mussolini (Italy), Paco de Rivera (Spain), and, yes, Vallenilla Lanz (Venezuela), Gil Fortoul speaks of him as a figure who believed that only by his own action could independence be achieved. Gil Fortoul purposefully chooses the word “believe” to signify the power and simplicity of Bolívar’s ideology, which was his self. Ideology, after all, is a belief. It is the belief that Bolívar had in his mission, which is so strong for him that he cannot submit to the actions of congresses, such as the 1821 Cúcuta Constitution that privileged the legislative branch and that was, Gil Fortoul reminds us, not of Bolívar’s making. In addition to portraying a Bolívar with little respect for congresses, he also moves him from the stage of hemispheric governance to that of national. He revises his own narrative of the Gran Colombia, underlining Bolívar’s political acuity on the subject of the future of his state, which includes his understanding, already visible in the early 1820s, that the Gran Colombia will not last and that the real challenge for Latin America is not defeating the Spanish but creating successful independent states. Emphasizing that Bolívar is Venezuelan, Gil Fortoul offers that Bolívar would have been eminently successful as the Venezuelan head of state had he elected not to create a large state or go south. The perfect national leader, he would have carried out the contemporary positivist project. For Bolívar’s political vision, Gil Fortoul states, was always that of a constitutional monarchy, but with himself not as king, rather as perpetual or lifetime leader. Gil Fortoul holds on to Bolívar’s Bolivian Constitution in this way, but he is drawing closer to Vallenilla Lanz’s notion of the constitution as a non-constitution that legitimizes the personalistic leader. He had not insisted on the president for life in the original 1907 volume, though he had suggested it as a solution to the nineteenth-century reality of Venezuelan executives seeking and securing extended terms. The Bolivian constitution would give a constitutional form to that reality.
In his new effort to reconstruct Bolívar in the strict positivist space of the nation, Gil Fortoul finds ironies in Venezuelan state formation, ironies that show that Bolívar’s philosophy is in fact the one that succeeded. In this way, he creates a new space in which to represent continuity between his figure and the Venezuelan state.
The Congress of Valencia in 1830 accused Bolívar of betraying the 1811 constitution. But it, too, Gil Fortoul states, betrayed the revered foundational charter, adapting the constitution to the needs of the oligarchy, just as Bolívar had adapted it to his authoritarian political vision. First, the congress centralized the state; second, it created voter restrictions. Bolívar was right when he said no to federalism in 1812 and later when he created constitutions that were executive-centered with a lifetime president.3 Unconsciously, the drafters of the 1830 constitution were affirming what Bolívar had first perceived, the insufficiency of the 1811 constitution and the need to revise it.
Indeed, this is not the Gran Colombia that comes to an end amid the political confusion caused by Bolívar’s physical and mental decline and realization that it is not viable, replaced by the Venezuelan state. Rather it is a Gran Colombia that has no foundational value, different in its constitutional form from that called for in Bolívar’s Angostura Address and Bolivian Constitution. In the final years of the Gran Colombia when Bolívar was defending it, he was no longer, we are told, the true Bolívar, having descended into a kind of decadence. The cause is not that in his weakened physical state he had been led astray by advisors, as Gil Fortoul said in 1907, but that he was unable to accept that the only practical reality for Latin America is the nation state. The fact that order in the different territories of the Gran Colombia depends on the presence of his person, that in his absence they fall into anarchy or secede, is proof that his grandiose impulses, which allowed him to liberate the continent, now prevented him from seeing the facts on the ground. Those facts on the ground are the nation state as defined by positivism’s linkage of race, the economy, and the state in the context of a teleological vision of history. With regard to race, Gil Fortoul announces that the future of Venezuela belongs from the time of independence forward to mestizo Venezuelans, the whites in the colonial period unproductive, having lived off their estates. By mestizo, Gil Fortoul means people who are a mixture not only of white and indigenous ancestry, but also of African. He is perhaps adapting the category from the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos’s race theory essay of 1925, “La raza cósmica” (“The Cosmic Race”). But for Venezuela to progress, a wholesale reconstruction of the economy via capitalism must take place before republicanism can be contemplated.4
Here were two major works with different ideological visions. Gil Fortoul had done nothing less than rewrite his classic history to justify authoritarian rule in his country as well as in Latin America to Venezuelans and the world. But the centenary celebration of 1930, in Venezuela, was fraught politically. It occurred right on the heels of the 1928 protest against Gómez by Venezuelan students and intellectuals and the crackdown that immediately followed, with many either going into hiding, being imprisoned, killed, or fleeing the country, and immediately after the attempted military invasion by exiles for whom the repression was the last straw. Those imprisoned served their terms in La Rotunda, most not gaining release until the death of Gómez in 1935. Among those who escaped imprisonment, going into exile, was a young Rómulo Betancourt, the same figure who in the decades ahead served twice as president of Venezuela and who in so doing was locked in battle with the military leader Marcos Pérez Jiménez. The individuals of different ages who were victims of the repression would be known as Venezuela’s Generación del 28 (Generation of 1928). They could not have looked kindly on Gil Fortoul as they wallowed in their jail cells and struggled to make their way in exile. In his history as well as in that of Vallenilla Lanz, they were either offshoots of an extinct social class whose republican institutions did not serve the nation or so many threads of a collective racial formation in the making that only the state could name. Gil Fortoul brought out additional editions of his Historia constitucional de Venezuela after the death of Gómez, editions in which he sought to explain himself. He had been defining history. Now he was trying to keep up with it.
In 1950, Lecuna had occasion to have an exchange with the distinguished general who in response to the repression mounted a military insurrection in 1929 in coordination with Venezuelan exiles, the Paris-based Junta Suprema de Liberación Nacional (Supreme Council of National Liberation) of which Rufino Blanco Fombona was secretary. This was General José Rafael Gabaldón Iragory, who lost to Gómez’s military after battling for two months and who then spent two years in prison. His son, historian Joaquín Gabaldón Márquez, when honoring Lecuna in 1970, 16 years after his death, tells of several episodes in his life, including an exchange of letters between Lecuna and Gabaldón Iragory.
Lecuna had received from the father a letter thanking him for his new three-volume history of Bolívar that he had sent to him at his estate as a gift. Gabaldón Iragory told of how much he enjoyed the volumes, praising its author as the country’s brilliant historian of Bolívar and a man of impeccable character. Lecuna wrote back, saying that he wished the father had been able to influence the course of Venezuelan history. He also reflects on the arbitrariness of power and leadership:
To rise to power, talent and virtue are not sufficient. Favorable circumstances that do not always benefit the most worthy or the most useful are necessary. This is what history teaches and we ought to resign ourselves to that fact. The ancients represented fortune as blind.5
In addition, the son tells of the events of 1929, of how Lecuna courageously supported his father after he learned that his own name, Vicente Lecuna, had appeared on a list of honorable and respectable men who could vouch for his character. Gabaldón Iragory had included the list in a letter he sent to Gómez in the moment of his decision to surrender, understanding that he had no chance to prevail and that the Paris-based assault could not be successful. Lecuna, without delay, conveyed to him a note in a Bank of Venezuela envelope stating “Very grateful.” The son explains that others on the list, rightfully fearful of being targeted by Gómez, did not acknowledge the presence of their names on it.6 To be a friend of Gabaldón Iragory was to be an enemy of Gómez, as many thought the dictator would conclude, particularly if one gave Gómez reason to think that he was in fact offering support. Lecuna was brave.
Texts can both paper over and reveal key historical moments. Lecuna, whose 1930 edition could not but participate in the glorification of the Gómez state even when that was not his intention, just a few years earlier had brought out two massive volumes of Bolívar’s and Sucre’s letters in relation to the creation of Bolivia for the anniversary of the Battle of Ayacucho of December 9, 1824.7
The two volumes entitled Documentos referentes a la creacíon de Bolivia (Documents Regarding the Creation of Bolivia) were not simply a collection of texts of historical significance. They appeared with a lengthy historical narrative entitled “Resumen de las guerras de Bolívar” (“Summary of the Wars of Bolívar”), which reconstructs Bolívar’s campaigns as a military epic pitting a resilient and tenacious republican leader against the Spanish.
Lecuna’s strategy in his historical narrative was clear to view. It was to use the military figure to redefine Bolívar and independence as representing republican liberty. It was also, with the Ayacucho centenary as a platform, to re-establish independence as an international war. Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz folded both Bolívar and independence into strictly national constructs for the purpose of managing and defining Gómez’s Venezuela. Republicanism was a stage—an international one signifying the Enlightenment—that was the product of an aristocratic world—that of the mantuanos —that had failed. Venezuela had learned the lessons of history—Venezuelan history—namely that the new contemporary moment required an extra-constitutional leader and an administrative elite. Lecuna, with these volumes as with the previous books plus the heritage project that was the Casa Natal, was methodically building a cultural edifice to oppose to that of his rivals while preparing the way for the new national liberalism that would become dominant after Gómez’s death in 1935 though with military figures continuing to control the state. Gómez understood that the path to stability, as historian Judith Ewell has written, was not by playing Europe and the United States off each other, as his predecessor, Cipriano Castro had, but by cooperating with the United States while surrounding himself with impressive intellectuals, following in this way the example of Páez.8
Gómez knew whom he had in Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, but did he know whom he had in Lecuna who was inventing new institutions for Venezuela? Did he or Gil Fortoul or Vallenilla Lanz understand Lecuna’s legacy project? Did they comprehend that he was creating professional relationships to scholars in the international arena, scholars with whom to dialogue about Bolívar? Did they grasp the significance of his project of publishing the documents of the Archivo de Libertador? Did they see that collecting and editing were also political acts?
The reception of Lecuna’s 1930 ten-volume collection of Bolívar’s private letters commissioned by the government of Vicente Gómez in 1928 to celebrate the centenary of the Libertador’s passing just as had been the second edition of Gil Fortoul’s Constitutional History of Venezuela could not have been more successful internationally, with academics from different nations praising the philological meticulousness with which Lecuna approached the task.9
In the United States, an important oil ally of the Gómez government, major historians reviewed the edition from William Spence Robertson to Joseph B. Lockey to A. Curtis Wilgus. These scholars listed for readers previous editions or collections of Bolívar’s writings, reducing what in many cases were political interventions to moments in the single cumulative story they imagined of texts being assembled for historical research with Lecuna’s volumes being something of a pinnacle.10 Lecuna had pushed the production of knowledge about Bolívar away from Europe, with its race and sociological models, to the United States where a new cadre of historians with expertise on Bolívar and Latin America had emerged. They would see in Lecuna a partner just as he would see one in them.
The glowing reception of the edition, then, was part of a larger phenomenon in the United States, where there was already an audience for things Latin American, and in particular Bolivarian, this the result of Pan Americanism, which had acquired a new ideological force with the 1910 completion of the Pan American Union building in Washington, D.C., and, as we have discussed earlier and will continue to discuss in subsequent chapters, the 1930 centenary of Bolívar’s death. Lecuna, for whom the United States was more than just one of the nation states in the hemisphere, traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1916, to participate in a Pan American meeting, right at the beginning of his project to make the Archivo del Libertador into a center piece of the Venezuelan nation and along with this to produce edited volumes of his writings. During that visit, he could have visited the historic home of George Washington, Mount Vernon, learning more about this kind of building with his new appointment as director of the Casa Natal.
Lecuna consolidated his cultural authority immediately after Gómez’s death. In 1937, he and former Gómez general and collaborator, Eleazar López Contreras, now president of the country, founded the Bolivarian Society. López Contreras had been elected president by the Council of Ministers the year before and had wasted no time in passing a new constitution that outlawed communism. The measure was not only to suppress Venezuela’s communist party, founded clandestinely in 1931, but also to manage the return of exiles who had established communist affiliations outside the country, as in the case of Rómulo Betancourt, who was exiled again upon his return, then allowed to come back after renouncing his affiliation. In a clear statement of his rejection of Gómez, López Contreras razed La Rotunda, Gómez’s infamous jail that dated back to the late 1840s when it was begun by Carlos Soublette and completed by José Tadeo Monagas, modeled on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.
Lecuna defined the Bolivarian Society through the values of honor, loyalty, and authenticity. For this purpose, he adopted the figure of the Liberator’s first and perhaps most authoritative biographer, the Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel Florencio O’Leary, of whom we have already spoken. Lecuna went back to the beginnings, so to speak, sources that in this case portrayed Bolívar as a liberal. Calling on O’Leary just as Blanco Fombona had, Lecuna uses his voice to defend Bolívar against his critics, whom he referred to as his so-called slanderers or calumniators. Calumny, misrepresenting another to harm that person’s reputation, was a category that was familiar in public discourse in nineteenth-century Latin America, as it was in the discourse of these times in the United States and Europe, with political leaders accusing one another of damaging their reputations. It became the organizing category for the Bolivarian Society.
The polemic that his multiple acts and decisions generated both in his own times and after, such as his War to the Death, Bolívar’s constitutions, and his vision of a lifetime president, first spoken of in the Jamaica Letter, were set aside. The history of the uses of Bolívar now centered on Bolívar as a human subject who was a genius and a model of virtue whose reputation and honor had to be defended. Forget Venezuela’s rejection of Bolívar and the recuperation of his figure by the Liberal Party, and then, the river of ink sp ilt in a tradition built upon competing claims on his figure, which most recently included those of Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz. It was as if the society was the first entity since O’Leary to lay claim to the proper understanding of Bolívar’s figure. Representing Bolívar’s intellectual production would be as simple as collecting and reproducing what was already there.
The contrast with Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz could not have been more apparent. These historians had presented Bolívar’s writings as an object to parse through in order to reveal the figure who meets the needs of the authoritarian present they defend. Lecuna and the Bolivarian Society presented them as objects to be appreciated, artifacts through which to establish a foundation for their heritage-building project. In the hands of the society, they acquire, then, value in and of themselves—objects to be collected and displayed. Everything now is re-publishable, from miscellaneous texts of his to major ones, with the society dutifully celebrating Bolívar’s most important writings on the dates associated with the moments of their production—whether Bolívar’s 1812 Cartagena Manifesto, his 1815 Jamaica Letter , his 1819 Angostura Address, his 1826 Bolivian Constitution, or others—and also honoring them with special issues. Heritage building through reproduction of his writings together with letters and responses from illustrious individuals intersected seamlessly with new academic fields harnessed to celebrate his figure. French positivism’s notion of the social organism is no more. It has now been replaced by an understanding of history based on the individual, Hispanic culture and literature, classicism, as well as by other interpretive practices in which textual criticism is practiced.
In one instance, the pseudo-science of graphology or handwriting analysis that had come into being after World War I acquired relevance, with a US scholar in this field analyzing Bolívar’s first known letter from 1799 and drawing conclusions on the topic of what the 16-year-old’s letter said about his person and character at the time of the production of the document. According to the US scholar, this young Bolívar showed a certain esthetic sensibility by virtue of how he spaced the margins. But he was just an ordinary kid, displaying no clear signs of his future self.11 The scholar was paying tribute to Blanco Fombona’s 1942 Mocedades de Bolívar (Youthful Deeds of Bolívar), where Blanco Fombona in fact makes reference to the badly written letter, stating that it is interesting that this young man who showed his inner spirit when he challenged the viceroy in 1779 in Mexico City still does not know how to write a letter. “Soon he will learn. Because he carries within himself the seed of the love of books and writing; and he possesses a vibrant and fine vigor.”12
Lecuna was not the first to make use of the concepts of virtue and honor in the context of the Venezuelan state’s management of Bolívar’s letters. So had Vallenilla Lanz, who deployed the concepts in his 1914 review of El imperio de los Andes (The Empire of the Andes) by Carlos A. Villanueva at the time that he was director of the National Archive (1913–1915).13 He presents the author as having committed an error of interpretation. Villanueva, who published the book in Paris, at a safe distance from Venezuela, had written it in response to the new Gómez political order.14
In the review, Vallenilla Lanz accuses Villanueva of misreading a letter written by Bolívar to Santander and of using that purported misreading to assert that the only reason Bolívar did not seek to become emperor was the example in Mexico of Iturbide, executed by his own people.15 Villanueva drapes Bolívar with all the illiberal affiliations handed down over the decades by supporters and critics alike, including that of his identification with Napoleon, presenting him not only as a wannabe monarch or emperor, but also as a figure who took without attribution ideas that become central to his own intellectual persona, including from Miranda the concept of the Moral Branch, and from the French consular constitution of 1799–1804 the idea of the lifelong president.16 Vallenilla Lanz, not willing to abide the view that Bolívar had a dictatorial spirit or as being intellectually irresponsible, goes for what in Venezuelan polite society would have been seen as the jugular, calling Villanueva a disgrace to his family’s name. But Vallenilla Lanz had to show, of course, that he was right. With the apparent totality of Bolívar’s texts behind him, The Archivo del Libertador having been in existence for more than two decades, he argues that no single text is sufficient as a portal to the truth of an author and that, furthermore, all texts must be read in the context of the larger corpus, that is, the author’s. Affirming the need, then, to be methodologically rigorous, which he equates with the possibility of seeing Bolívar in the light of the totality of his writings, he not only drowns out the individual letter in question by presenting it as part of the larger corpus of which he was in possession. He also presents Bolívar through the European sociology and race models he had mastered during his stint in Europe in the first decade of the new century as a positivist or sociologist avant la lettre who understood society as developing slowly under the direction of an administrative elite.17
Vallenilla Lanz is using the concept of honor to construct a form of patriotism. In subsequent years, in addition to his written work, he presided over centennial ceremonies commemorating the battles of Boyacá (1819), Carabobo (1821), and Ayacucho (1824), finding in these dates on which victory over the Spanish was achieved in New Granada, Venezuela, and Peru, respectively, symbolic beginnings for a Latin America he wanted to imagine without constitutions. As if shadowing him, Lecuna, with his editions, kept the liberal tradition alive.
In his 1930 edition, Gil Fortoul speaks of Bolívar’s family as having African blood and attacks Venezuela’s creoles even more strongly than he had in 1907, detailing how for centuries they fabricated their whiteness. Examining and exposing the mechanics of that social class structure, as he had done in the first edition but now expanding upon this, he ridicules and attacks the elites. He underlines the utter lack of foundation for their claims of white racial purity and the unreliability of skin color in itself as a sign of race. He states that mixing among races was the custom in Venezuela from the times of the adventurous Spanish noblemen, as he called them, who, knowing no rule or limit, “satisfied their amorous urges with Indians, mestizas (mixed race), and blacks as well as zambas (Indians mixed with blacks)” and who often entered into what he called sexual union with Indians, which, he states, was allowed. Using Bolívar to drive home his position that pure whiteness among the elites was a fiction, he states that Bolívar’s family had mestizo blood by the end of the colonial period. “Later,” he writes, “it is a known fact that a sister and niece of the Liberator married pardos .”18
This was the vision of the mantuanos that Lecuna had been contesting in the racial politics of the era. The promise of a mestizo Venezuela meant authoritarian government. For this reason, Lecuna fought back, defending his white patriotic patricians while not substantiating the fact of mixing—the reality that more than half the population of Venezuela was pardo and that mixing was, ironically, the rule even among the mantuanos who had to document that they were 100% white. Building a racial fort, he refused to recognize Venezuela’s multi-cultural and multi-racial colonial society, defined by continuing immigration and the associating of peoples of different racial backgrounds, with, as Rodríguez O. tells us, new lower-class whites from the Canary Islands finding community and bonds among pardos . For Lecuna, who is playing a game of custodianship of the past against the hard-hitting realism of Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, defending virtue, a social class and the archive all became one. Calumniators, though, were not only at home, they were also abroad.
The moment was the 1940s and the context was a dispute concerning the publication, in 1940, of San Martín y Bolívar en la entrevista de Guayaquil , a la luz de nuevos documentos (San Martín and Bolívar at Their Meeting in Guayaquil, in the Light of New Definitive Documents) by Argentine ambassador to Peru, Eduardo Colombres Mármol.19 With this edition, Colombres Mármol claimed to offer to the world a set of letters explaining San Martín’s abrupt exit from the liberation process and why, despite this, he continued to be important during the last two years of the war through his legacy, letters he claimed to have found in an archive in Lima, Peru that included three authored by Bolívar, Sucre, and Santander, respectively. The most important of the letters found, however, was one that had been at the center of a national discussion in Buenos Aires, a letter supposedly sent by San Martín to Simón Bolívar, dated August 29, 1822, and of which only a French language copy of the “original” had been in circulation. A French sailor by the name of Lafond published it in 1826.
As the story went, Lafond met San Martín on his transatlantic crossing, during or after which San Martín gave him the letter to copy. In the letter, San Martín laments that Bolívar refused his military assistance for the campaigns in Peru, accuses him of being less than truthful about the reasons why, intimating selfish if not nationalist motives related to the Gran Colombia of which he was president in absentia, and announces his decision to leave Latin America in order to allow Bolívar to exercise complete authority over the remainder of the independence process. Some Argentines, pleased to have a document explaining their national hero’s untimely departure, insisted that the letter had to be authentic for the simple reason that its veracity had been attested to by the esteemed Argentine historian of the nineteenth century, Bartolomé Mitre. If an historian of Mitre’s stature did not question the letter’s validity, they reasoned, on what authority could an historian in the twentieth century do so?
For the new Bolivarian Society, Colombres Mármol’s publication was a first-order act of besmirchment of the historical record. After years of going back and forth in the press, Lecuna brought out in 1948 El mitin de Guayaquil : Reestablecimiento de la verdad histórica (The Guayaquil Meeting: Reestablishment of the Historical Truth). In the lead essay of the volume, his associate, Venezuelan intellectual Vicente Dávila, performed the labor of debunking the authenticity of the letters, going through them point by point. With regard to the Lafond letter, he states that at the time of the Guayaquil meeting, it would not have occurred to San Martín to insist that troops were desperately needed in Peru since his own far outnumbered the Spanish. On the important matter of who was responsible for the victory at Ayacucho, Dávila asks: why would Sucre, as the new letter attested to, write to San Martín before he wrote to Bolívar to deliver the news of the Ayacucho victory? Would he really have thought to credit him with the victory for the reason that some troops under his command had been trained by the Argentine leader? What of the letter attributed to Bolívar? When there was ample evidence that the only signature used by the Libertador in the latter part of his career consisted just of the surname, “Bolívar,” was not the signature that appeared there, including also his first name, “Simón,” a dead give-away that the document was inauthentic?20
Lecuna himself was biting and sarcastic. Colombres Mármol had accused Venezuelans of having destroyed San Martín’s original letter. From Lecuna’s position now of national scholar, the new Renan of Venezuela in the post-Gómez period, having replaced Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, he writes: “We have not reached the cultural level of other countries. We have still not learned to falsify historical documents, nor to remove them from the archives.”21
Lecuna had brought the Venezuelan and the Argentine nations into a duel of sorts. A man’s word was at stake. Lecuna was that man. In the course of the debate over the veracity of the Lafond letter in the 1940s, Lecuna was on the attack, harnessing the archives he had been assembling since the 1910s, not only that of the Libertador but those of other leaders of the independence movement as well, to respond to the claim made by Colombres Mármol that a new archive had been found with letters contained by no other in the world. If for the Venezuelan banker, historian, and editor, as well as for many other philologists from the time, the labor of securing, organizing, and holding on to the documents of the past had the status of a foundational truth, for Lecuna here was an opportunity to put his Archivo del Libertador into action. Lecuna was transforming his rhetoric of honor into the honor of the nation. To question his understanding of Bolívar and independence was to question Venezuela. But what about Bolívar the state builder? Lecuna did not address the debates that historically had swirled around Bolívar’s idea of the state and vision for the executive. He spoke of the 1811 constitution, not of his Gran Colombia or of the 1826 Bolivian Constitution, or the lifetime president. Bolívar was a leader of independence, a military man who was a strategist, and a noble white patrician.
The military coup of 1945 sent into exile López Contreras, who had passed the presidency on to another general in 1941, some praising him for ensuring that the transition entailed no violence. Marcos Pérez Jiménez, an enemy of Gómez and therefore of López Contreras, had taken power. Lecuna, though, remained, as he always did, identified with a form of cultural capital that was usable by each new iteration of the post-Gómez state. Did Lecuna help preserve the liberal tradition in the face of fascism? If there were doubts about where he stood on the matter of government, one edition he put out shed much light. This was a 1947 leather-bound tome, requested by the 1945–1947 Trienio Adeco (Adeco Triennium), led by the new political party Acción Democrática (Democratic Action), political leader Rómulo Betancourt, and General Pérez Jiménez. Through it—the signature Bolívar alone on the cover to draw attention to Bolívar the letter writer—Lecuna gives the public a modern Bolívar who stands for democratic values.22 But with the free elections of 1948 that saw the writer Rómulo Gallegos win the presidency, Venezuela in the eyes of the military had gone too far to the Left. Betancourt, head of the Left-leaning Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, the AD), would be forced into exile along with Gallegos. Once again, Lecuna remained, just as he had when the AD and the military came into power in 1945.
A Conservative Elite and a Hemispheric Order in the Age of Oil and the Cold War
In 1969, writes Germán Carrera Damas in El culto a Bolívar, the Venezuelan Congress established a law prohibiting so-called vulgar uses of Bolívar’s effigy while in the same year ordering the distribution of 80,000 oil prints, the visual medium that to the minds of its members, we can think, was most proper for representing him.23 What provided this congress—heir to a new political process begun in 1935 though interrupted by military dictatorship from 1948 to 1958—with the ideological grist to promulgate such a law was the Bolivarian Society. Supported by the oil-rich state, with its own budget line, the society increasingly provided a space for social, political, and academic actors from the center and the right to make claims for their top-down visions, actors who used Lecuna’s Bolívar to draw and contain the borders of the liberal state against its critics in the context of an international order underwritten by the United States, the Pan American Union the United States oversaw (1910–1948), and the Organization of American States (OAS) (1948–). In the 1950s, the society became international in scope as it set up sister societies in the Americas and Europe, with Bolívar’s mentor Simón Rodriguez’s pedagogic project in Bolivia promoted as one example of the international reach of the Bolívar legacy. A 1953 issue of its bulletin was dedicated to the new Bolivarian Society in Hanover, Germany, another in that same year to the Bolivarian Society in Haiti. Included in the bulletins—inspired by those of the Pan American Union of which we will speak in a later chapter—were scholarly pieces and essays written by both Venezuelan and non-Venezuelan actors, notices of state-sponsored programs, correspondence of Bolívar and his interlocutors, including a letter from US President Andrew Jackson telling Bolívar he could not accept a gift from him on account of US emolument laws, pieces detailing the history of monuments honoring him, and information about descendants of Bolívar who were in need of financial assistance and whom the society was helping.24
Venezuela, as Lecuna had hoped, was using the project of heritage building for ambitious state purposes, particularly its foreign policy, channeling its oil wealth and power to create a hemispheric zone of influence. What Lecuna had first conceived of to defeat Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz and then continued in an expanded form with the creation of the Bolivarian Society in 1937 endured and gained force through the country’s changes, the elites now maintaining their position as members of the state’s seemingly oldest institution—all of them patriots.
Here is a quick sketch of the content of the bulletin from the 1950s to the 1970s, its hemispheric ideological ambitions in the context of authoritarianism, liberalism, and the Cold War in evidence.
1953: an issue carries a news release from the Colombian military detailing the establishment that year of a required course on Bolívar in the nation’s schools, the military in the eyes of the Bolivarian Society waging a just war against members and descendants of the Liberal Party in the middle of the period called La Violencia (1948–1958).25
1969: an issue features, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the 1819 Angostura Address, an essay by the Colombian writer Germán Arciniegas, a well-known critic of military governments, and by this time, of communism. In an intervention reflecting the critical stance he had been giving voice to since the early 1950s, a victim of censorship in his country and elsewhere in Latin America (in Colombia, ironically, at the hands of the same military previously celebrated by the society), he presents Bolívar’s Correo del Orinoco (Orinoco Post) from the period of the Third Republic and the Gran Colombia as an example of the principle of freedom of the press.26
1974: an issue reproduces a political speech given by the president of the Dominican Republic and long-time strongman and anti-communist Joaquín Balaguer. Telling the Dominican people of the discovery in the nation’s cathedral of the remains of a far-removed ancestor of Bolívar, a member of the colonial administration of Santo Domingo, Balaguer uses a version of Bolívar’s genealogical tree to legitimize the racial and political hierarchy he continually defended. Bolívar is described as descended from a family of white Basque ancestry, whiteness a category of great importance to this actor who had served under Rafael Trujillo, and is said to represent a model of governance that reconciles the values of order with those of liberty, a model in absolute harmony, he tells his audience, with the principles of the Organization of American States.27
And also in 1974: Venezuelan historian José Luis Salcedo-Bastardo, on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Balaguer but standing against the established Left, in a formulation perhaps stretching credulity presents Bolívar’s support of seizing the wealth and assets of fleeing royalists to redistribute to Independentist soldiers, “the poor of the time,” as evidence of his progressiveness.28
In 1954 Lecuna produced an oversize volume detailing the restoration of the Casa Natal and the contents of the Archivo. It was created for delegates to the Tenth Inter-American Conference held in Caracas in that year, right in the middle of the military dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez that was now technically a presidency and the moment the famous Simón Bolívar Towers opened.29
In the volume, Lecuna puts on display for the visiting inter-American diplomatic corps his scholarly and cultural achievement. We see him celebrate the late colonial period in Venezuela by reproducing through photography the objects on display in the Casa Natal, objects that Venezuelan elites and the public at large had long been consuming. The volume includes photographs of household pieces in the Casa Natal, some, we are told, originals, having been used by the Bolívar family, others objects acquired from the collections of scions of distinguished families from the colonial period. The borrowed objects are carefully attributed, accompanied by photographs of portraits of the individuals from whose estates they have been taken, members, we know, of the so-called mantuano class whose position in society depended on their claims to whiteness. Never mind the violence of the casta distinctions of those centuries to which José Martí points in his reflection on Bolívar in 1893 or the critical reflections of Vallenilla Lanz and Gil Fortoul on the racial politics of the mantuanos and Venezuelan slave society. All we see are the objects and faces presented in the photographs, the same objects and faces at the center of the project of the Casa Natal and of the Bolivarian Society, and that had been reproduced in the latter’s bulletins along with other images of the interior of the Casa Natal, including the frescoes of Tito Salas: all this to create a noble patrician past and story of independence to serve as a platform for current and new occupants of republicanism, honor, and whiteness. The delegates to the Tenth Inter-American Conference who opened the book could think they were seeing Venezuela when what they were viewing was a cultural artifact, the result of one person’s will to make a nobility that was exclusionary and fictitious. The power of an historic home to create a national story!
Lecuna produced the volume to perform not only an external function, but also an internal one. He wanted to send a message to Pérez Jiménez and to his advisors in a moment in which the city was considering razing the historic district of the Casa Natal and the Bolívar Plaza. In a decade in which Caracas was being remade, its oil money the foundation for this, and the site of massive state-sanctioned immigration from Europe in what was an explicit whitening project, Lecuna, who advocates passionately against these municipal plans in letters, equates the reconstruction of the district with the diminishment of a heritage and identity that the state had long used to promote its interests. Lecuna wanted to hold on to the symbolic space that he had helped carve out by re-creating the Casa Natal and establishing the Bolivarian Society. He had produced for Venezuela a usable national culture for a country that had been racked by civil war and that had been defined by fascist ideology. Destroying the historic center was tantamount to destroying his project.
The National Pantheon would still be available as a site to exploit. Would that be of interest to him? Probably not. Lecuna, who was Catholic and who defended Catholicism as part of his virtuous Venezuela, would have seen it as something monstrous, an act of sacrilege on the part of the anti-Catholic Guzmán Blanco who rebuilt the church only to use it for a secularizing mission. What would there be to conserve and hold on to?
Pérez Jiménez did not raze the historic district. But Lecuna had been dealing with another problem. This was a major biography written by a well-known exiled Spanish intellectual and former diplomat who had been given access to the Archivo del Libertador in Caracas by Lecuna, Salvador de Madariaga. In 1951 Madariaga brought out at a Mexican press a massive two-volume biography, Bolívar,30 and the following year in English a shorter version.31 Talk about dishonor. This was treason. The book attacked the Liberator and by extension, perhaps, Lecuna. Evidently, Madariaga had not approved of the racial and social hierarchies over which the Bolivarian Society presided. He portrays late-colonial Venezuela as an institutionally rich society that hardly was calling out for independence. What had become of Venezuela outside the bounds of the empire in which it had once thrived? Who was Bolívar and who were his custodians? These questions were aggressively asked by Madariaga who had fought for liberalism in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s as well as for the League of Nations, to which he had been Spain’s delegate, and who since 1936, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, was in exile in Britain and was a fierce critic of Francisco Franco.
Beginning in the 1940s, constitutional monarchy for Madariaga was now the answer for a Spain that had been unable to preserve the Second Republic (1931–1936) brutally overcome by fascism.32 Fascism and communism taught him that personalistic leaders who strive to impose entirely new political orders must be taken down.
Lecuna and his colleagues dismissed the book, as did many others in Latin America. In one instance he took issue with a reviewer who agreed with Madariaga’s claim about the racial identity of the leaders of independence. Responding to the reviewer’s characterization of them, Lecuna writes that Madariaga misrepresents the leaders as mestizos instead of as whites.33 At a time of wide hemispheric interest in Bolívar, Madariaga assails the country at the center of that phenomenon using a wide selection of sources including those used by Marx for his devastating account of the leader. He lists in his prologue all the cities in Latin America to which he has gone to acquire documents, presenting Caracas as but one. He explains that he has had to travel to the archives himself as such a task cannot be delegated when so much can be ascertained by handling the material oneself. The archival authority claimed by Madariaga is immense. But in reading him, one does not feel the presence of documents, as it is as if one were reading a novel, the story line about Bolívar’s flawed character front and center—the work a page turner. Lecuna and Madariaga exchanged cordial but pointed notes, with Madariaga stating that he understands his anger as it was that of the “patient who had just undergone an operation.”34 The issue did not go away for the society. Following Lecuna’s death in 1954, it continued to be concerned with Madariaga’s biography of Bolívar, publishing a collection of articles in 1967 that rebutted it.
Madariaga’s volume was the third in a trilogy, the first about Columbus and the second about Cortés, all claiming to present the unseen figure. In exile in London, he wrote many of his works in English, publishing at presses in the United States, though for this one, as we have stated, he penned it in both Spanish and English. For this work he creates a racialized system to analyze Bolívar in behaviors he links to his racial makeup as Spanish white, pardo , and mestizo , the latter two “in small proportions.”35 He speaks of three races: Spanish white, black , and Indian, each important for the identities indicated. Bolívar, according to Madariaga, was black for three reasons: his physical features; his behavior, particularly in regard to his sensuality and sexual conduct, these racist stereotypes of the time; and his periodic lack of concern for fighting Spain—Africans having been transplanted to the New World through “the crime and cruelty of the whites” in the course of history and having not developed a sense of Spain as the enemy because “the black knew that in Spanish lands his brethren were treated better than under any other banner in the New World and could gain their liberty more easily.”36 Finally, we are told that Bolívar is mestizo or Indian in the sense that he embodies the resentment of the indigenous communities against the Spanish conquerors.
Whether the reviewer to whom Lecuna responded understood that Madariaga was inventing a racialized interpretive framework and was using it to undercut historical actors—whether pardos or creoles (Bolívar, for instance, fights the Spanish not because he is defending creole interests but because he is being driven to do so by the injustices of the conquest and colonization)—is not important for our purposes. We are interested in the reaction on the part of Lecuna, which is telling when there was more he could have said, and he did. But if Lecuna could not bear to imagine a mestizo Bolívar in the context of his defense of whiteness as first conceived in his battle with Gómez’s imposing regime theorists, what Madariaga asserts is indeed incendiary, namely that Bolívar was nothing but a megalomaniac who was willing to do anything to seize and hold on to power and who—as if this were the greatest affront to the European humanist—had no deep interest in philosophy or the classics, simply making use of them as he needs to. Madariaga writes, “[W]e must bear in mind that the chief influence on Bolívar’s thought was that of Bolívar himself.”37
To attack Bolívar’s intellectual genealogy, Madariaga distinguishes between the collective psychological past and the unique psychological present, the first defined by racial legacy, the second by ego. How does he find content for the part of his formulation pertaining to his discussion of Bolívar’s ego? He examines Bolívar’s correspondence, which he represents himself to have constituted as no one has ever before. Placing letters at the center of his narrative while making them into a portal into Bolívar’s consciousness, he simultaneously tells of Bolívar’s extraordinary acts while revealing the selfish intentions behind them through analysis. Bolívar goes to battle against Spain, produces the Angostura Address where he announces abolition of slavery, both incorporates pardos into his army and keeps the pardo movement down, not because of his commitment to the public good—building a new political community free of Spain and inclusive of peoples of different races with creoles in the dominant position—but because of his own will to power. Neither the Classics nor Enlightenment thought is what motivates him but rather his own ego, which activates the wellspring of longue-durée racial legacies that are within him, legacies that in the absence of a sound motivation to activate and channel them become nothing but props, and independence the stage Bolívar creates to realize himself and only himself. Latin America did not need independence. Bolívar did.
Historians beyond Venezuela responded, saying that independence was historically necessary, that Bolívar was concerned with the public, that he was an Enlightenment thinker and a classicist. They did not focus on Madariaga’s use of Freud and psychology, the major cultural critical paradigm of the moment, as we will also see in a later chapter in our discussion of the 1951 biography of Bolívar of the US American Waldo Frank. Those also familiar with Madariaga’s critical writings on the United States could not have missed the European prejudice behind the author’s statement presenting Bolívar as a self-interested dilettante.
The house museum that was the Casa Natal, and that perhaps had inspired Madariaga to see independence as a stage, permitted the society more than the possibility of reconstructing a social class. It also allowed for an in-depth exploration of Bolívar family lineage off-site, in the pages of the bulletin. Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz had traced the history of Venezuela’s leading families tying them to the oligarchical order of the 1830s to the 1850s and to the violence of the political parties. For Vallenilla Lanz, no one was who he said he was on a political level. All were defined by biological, family inheritance as was Antonio Leocadio Guzmán, founder of the Liberal Party, whose father was a Spanish royalist. How could Guzmán be a Liberal, never mind the founder of the Liberal Party, with such a past? Vallenilla Lanz, like Madariaga, was a master of revealing the invisible.
On the one hand, the bulletin features the ancestors, relations contemporary to Bolívar and descendants, all assembled as the nation’s first family. With regard to third- and fourth-generations of that family, it documents, as noted earlier, financial assistance provided to them by the society. For the tracing of lineage, the bulletin incorporates information provided by Blanco Fombona in Mocedades de Bolívar (Youthful Deeds of Bolívar). In the 1920s, he had acquired research by Bolívar genealogists in Madrid on the Palacios and Bolívar family lines. Palacios is the last name of Bolívar’s mother.
Bolívar’s family lineage was now itself an object of reflection made to provide an intimate and in-depth experience of Venezuela’s patrician class. With images of Bolívar and his extended family and photographs of members of the Bolivarian Society running through the issues of the bulletin, whiteness is represented without being represented—the images duplicating what was purportedly there and real. In addition to the Bolívar family, there was also the national family that the Bolívar lineage made possible. Included are leaders connected to the Bolívar epic and Venezuela’s nineteenth century. José Tadeo Monagas was one such figure, though there is no discussion of the Guerra Federal. He enters the society’s pantheon as an important Venezuelan individual, no more, no less.
A social class that decades before had been known through the lens of instability, insurrection, and exile now has an invented past to constitute its protagonism and impose its hegemony. But the society does not only use the Bolívar family to re-domesticate Venezuelan history. It also takes advantage of Bolívar’s private life including his sexual conduct, which it includes in its project to disseminate Bolívar’s figure among the Venezuelan middle and upper classes and the world at large. Addressing the well-known matter of the many lovers in Bolívar’s life after the passing of his wife, a member of the mostly male society wrote in 1953 that Bolívar was a gentleman who was discrete in the way he pursued his love life. He is refuting a suggestion made by another member that Bolívar in Bogotá in 1828 could have enjoyed the city by riding with his companion, Manuela Sáenz, in a landau, a luxury carriage for city use. But, evidently, he could never have done such a thing, keeping, as he always did, his affairs private, an achievement when one considers all the women who were apparently drawn to him.38
Manuela Sáenz, his most important companion from 1822 until his last months, belonged, the reader is told, to that private sphere. Gentlemen like Bolívar certainly do not “exhibit” their lovers. In the decades ahead, Bolívar’s private life continued to be an object of interest in a male-centered world that continued to want to reconcile the fact that he had multiple lovers with the idea of the gentleman. This formulation had to do with his fidelity to Manuela Sáenz. As one society member submits in an article from 1983, “Anti-don Juan, Bolívar does not deceive, does not mock, does not dishonor. In his last letters to Manuelita running is a small fountain of regrets and sorrows.”39 The expression of regret by the man apparently redeems him in the eyes of both parties in the heterosexual relationship. Honor can be recovered, asserts the society member.
This heteronormative tradition of reflection on Bolívar’s libertine private life that presents Bolívar as honorable, though, would be disrupted when Venezuelan novelist Denzil Romero in 1988 takes on the mores propagandized by the Bolivarian Society by moving away from Bolívar’s libertine life to that of Manuela Sáenz in his erotic novel, La esposa del doctor Thorne (The Wife of Dr. Thorne).40 Beginning the novel with the scene of Bolívar’s August 1828 dictatorship—with words parodying the leader’s many titles and deep lineage—Romero provides his audience with a sexually defiant Manuela Sáenz who questions heteronormativity through her alleged bisexuality and through her own sexual escapades that rival if not surpass Bolívar’s.41 Gay sexuality is affirmed and the matter of sexual orientation goes from a private affair to a public one. The question Romero asks is, who are we as sexual beings?
Instrumentalizations of the pairing in public discourse continued. Chávez, in striking contrast to Romero’s vision and the society’s gentlemanly understanding of one of their own, deployed the pair by harnessing it for his mausoleum project—completed just after his death in 2013—a towering modernist structure that provides not only a new, even more monumental space for Bolívar’s tomb than the National Pantheon, where it had resided for some 150 years and above which Chávez’s mausoleum rose, but also a tomb for the non-Venezuelan Manuela Sáenz. In its massive chambers reaching for the skies in the way the naves of Gothic cathedrals do and where a British-inspired guard detail dressed in red with black headwear is on duty—the requisite changing of the guard performed daily—the two were reunited, appearing as an ideal of the heterosexual faithful couple, father and mother of a nation.
The vision of an honorable Bolívar constructed by Lecuna had been repurposed. It was no longer that of a white elitist state with an esteemed society of intellectuals, senators, and business people to manage it but rather a populist one that had given a place to the excluded masses. Wanting to maintain his hold on power, just as previous Venezuelan leaders had, Chávez created a shrine to protect his Bolívar and his Venezuela. He was preserving and fortifying institutions handed down: both Lecuna’s Casa Natal, which continued to be an important space for him, and Guzmán Blanco’s pantheon, which he simultaneously reaffirmed and built over. Chávez, as we indicated in Chap. 1, redefined Bolívar’s racial identity, presenting him as mestizo . Decades of genealogical work performed at the Bolivarian Society to make him into a white patrician figure in the service of the economic elites was now put to the side if not made to occupy the space of blasphemy for a race-conscious society required now to accept the official view. Mestizo or white or pardo ? Calumniators, beware.
The influence of the society should not be underestimated, though in the mid-1950s its founder and intellectual force, Lecuna, died, and the society’s other founder and first post-Gómez president, López Contreras, was in exile in New York City along with Betancourt. In 1953 López Contreras sought to perform the role of the intellectual, drawing on the cultural capital of the Generación del 28 to present Bolívar as a freethinker who was not unlike a journalist, an individual who made use of the written word to affirm his vision.42
The Bolivarian Society’s bulletin came out regularly from July 24, 1939, the date of Bolívar’s birthday, until 1969, starting up again in 1974 after a five-year hiatus. After the free elections that saw Betancourt become president in 1959, the bulletin, as we have already seen, continued to act as a clearinghouse of sorts for the Latin American Right. It was an arm of the Venezuelan state and an extension of US and OAS interests at the same time that it was a site of important work investigating Bolívar’s letters. For instance, one scholar establishes the existence of a Bolívar letter stating his desire to take his army to Cuba. The proof was the letter of reply from Sucre. In the year Betancourt became president, the society dedicated a beautiful new equestrian statue of Bolívar in Washington, D.C., the result of its collaboration with the Pérez Jiménez government. Representing the society was its president, Arturo Uslar Pietri, a major Venezuelan writer and cultural figure who was the unnamed person of whom we spoke earlier, the party guilty of imagining Bolívar as riding in the streets of Bogotá in a landau with Manuela Sáenz. Uslar Pietri performed many official tasks of this kind. One of the most interesting was the speech he delivered on Bolívar to the Venezuelan congress in 1980.
The occasion was the 150th anniversary of Bolívar’s death. Addressing white gentleman dressed in black suits with white shirts and thin black ties, he told Bolívar’s story again, emphasizing his connections to the people and ending with Bolívar’s exile. Did they know Bolívar died in exile and penniless, he asked? The Bolívar cult was speaking morality, as it always had, and distinguished men in suits who managed the country were listening, as they had at different moments throughout their lives. With Bolívar as his moral standard, Uslar Pietri admonished the country for not using its oil revenues responsibly, for not pursuing the public good, and for having become excessively materialistic. No one was to blame but themselves, as the oil industry had been nationalized four years earlier, on January 1, 1976.43
We have seen that the Bolivarian Society promoted sister societies throughout the world, and as we observed in Chap. 1, in the case of Cambridge University, encouraged the study of Bolívar in foreign academies. It also made subventions available to presses for academic books about Bolívar, including ones to the University of Texas Press, and backed and collaborated with films. One in particular stands out. This was Alessandro Blasetti’s 1969 Simón Bolívar , which also received support from the Venezuelan Government and Armed Forces, the National Academy of History, and the Ministry of the Treasury.44
The film, which features important Italian and Spanish actors alongside the US-Austrian actor Maximilian Schell and appears simultaneously in Spanish, Italian, and English, plugs into the anti-colonial sensibilities of the 1960s. Circumscribing Bolívar’s acts to Venezuela—with Bolívar never crossing the Andes or going south—it begins in the moment of 1817, the year the Third Republic was established and two years after caudillos had begun to recruit intensely among pardos with the possibility of “military promotion up to the middle rank of the officer corps.”45
One significant early scene is the January 30, 1818, meeting between the white peasant José Antonio Páez that Gil Fortoul presents as mestizo in his 1907 and 1930 histories and that Larrazábal presents as lower-class white in Cesarismo democrático and who is played by the Spanish actor Conrado San Martín. The white-gentleman Bolívar is played by Schell. The two embrace as equals and agree to coordinate their military operations against Morillo—Bolívar now having under his command Páez’s tremendously effective forces of mixed-race plainsmen. There are several moments in which Schell’s character expounds on the movement of independence, telling the audience that it is not only independence from Spain that is sought, but also in what he describes as a revolution, equality for all Venezuelans and along with this freedom for slaves.
Race is fundamental. The film presents a white Bolívar surrounded by distinctly white generals and advisors leading loyal troops made up of pardos . Such a portrayal, we can think, was consistent with the interpretive line of the Bolivarian Society, which would have been pleased that the Spanish scriptwriters left out the figure of the pardo leader Manuel Píar, executed in 1817 by Bolívar, never mind other pardo leaders, and other controversial moments or questions such as the War to the Death, which could have been included through flashback; the relationship between Bolívar and Miranda, which similarly could have been included; and Bolívar’s precise views on government, particularly his Gran Colombia, Bolivian Constitution, and Andean Federation. For John Lynch, Bolívar’s decision to turn Francisco de Miranda over to the Spanish authorities is an act of betrayal that knows no forgiveness.
The film promised to appeal to the intended world audience of white-liberal Europeans, Latin Americans, and North Americans. That audience would have supported the emancipation of European-colonized peoples but would also have been happy to see the case of Latin American independence as a struggle of racial and social liberation led by colonial whites. Further, they would have been pleased to see that it had been successful, as the film alleges it was.
There is some truth in the army as represented with regard to the soldiers. Lynch tells us that Bolívar’s army of individuals of different racial backgrounds represented his social dream, the world he wanted to bring into being but that he could not.46 How could one man do that alone, he asks? Bolívar’s army represented his racial politics; his skin color did not. The film, then, does mirror at some level the perspective of pardos who, as we have said, became part of the forces beginning in 1815, but reached levels in the military hierarchy higher than allowed by the Bolivarian Society. But we would have to remember that, as we stated earlier with regard to Lynch’s 1973 and 2006 volumes, they found themselves marginalized in 1830, facing a reconstructed creole elite that, as seen in the 1830 constitution, exercised its social and economic hegemony through, among other strategies, electoral voting requirements.47 We would also need to remember that Bolívar, as we have mentioned earlier and will discuss in later chapters, executed not only the pardo leader Píar, but also another pardo war hero. For Lynch, it was the price to pay for unity. For Aline Helg and others, it was something else.