Chillin’ with my boy Hugo Chávez

The events that took place on Friday night took me a few days to reflect on before writing about them. It all started when DeSuza, our supervisor, walked into our office and promptly announced, “We be limin’ tonight, pick you up at 8.30.”

Context: for the last few days the PetroCaribe Summit has been taking place here in Basseterre. This is the 6th summit for the heads of state/government members to get together and cover agenda items such as infrastructure projects related to hydrocarbons supply, exchange and endogenous development projects, execution of the offset system of the oil bill, the potential for renewable energy, to name a few. Put simply, there is an oil agreement between Venezuela and St.Kitts (and 16 or so other countries) whereby oil from Venezuela is purchased under preferential and fair payment terms. For St.Kitts this means buying oil at market prices with a 1% annual interest rate and the option of repayment in the form of raw goods.

Back to the story...DeSuza wanted to show us the parts of the city we had not yet seen. He takes us to the Marriot, just for kicks, which is where Chávez was staying for the duration of the summit. Just as we pull up next to the hotel, we see a bunch of black sedans followed by police escorts. We hurry up to the front of the hotel just as Chávez emerges, followed closely by a huge convoy of don’t-mess-with-me looking military dudes and media.

We inch our way closer through the crowd of people that had gathered and Eli extends his arm to shake his hand and the next thing we know, we’re in conversation with the president! As we talk to him a circle forms around us - DeSuza, Eli, Chávez, the translator and I. However, all the cameras, the people, the security all sort of faded into the background as we spoke with Chávez.

He spoke with us about so many different topics: politics; socialism; Les Misérables; the importance of access to education; Christianity; raising consciousness within society; Plato’s Cave; the dollar as a tool for domination and the need to trade with products instead of capital; Obama and moving with change instead of against it. We also talked quite a bit about the work we are doing here in St.Kitts, the "bottom-up" approach that BNTF uses as a guiding principle for its development work.

At some point in the conversation his crew handed us cups of Venezuelan coffee. They handed him coffee in a little espresso mug but he politely returned it and opted for a plastic cup like the ones they had given us. We went to DeSuza’s house today to meet his wonderful family and the plastic cup was in his display cabinet. Eli, too, has kept his plastic cup as a memento!

After a good half an hour we wrap up the conversation, shake hands warmly and then squeeze our way out of the crowd. The three of us look at each other in amazement. We could not believe what had just happened. Local media approached us for a quick interview, after which we headed to “the strip” (literally a strip of bars right on the beach - the place to be on a Friday night).

Walking on the strip with DeSuza and Eli, with the live calypso band playing and the moon above the palm trees felt a little too good to be true. What better way to spend a Friday night than chatting with an agreeable president and then grooving to good music on a beach under a star filled sky?

You, dear reader, probably think I’m embellishing this story, but this truly was a case of just going with the flow and experiencing the unexpected. And thus marks the end of my first week on the island.

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