The “Minister” Ricardo Molina never imagined that his words would make him famous. His father, the renowned Manuel Isidro Molina Gavidia, was for most of his life a tireless fighter against what his son now represents: an abominable regime that “does not care at all about labor laws.” How could the “Minister” Molina, having had a father like that, who personally suffered persecution for political reasons, express, with such conviction, the unfortunate statements that propelled him to “fame”? This is a question my wife and I have been asking ourselves at home for the past few days.
Since I met the Molina family, through Fidelina Molina and her husband Rómulo Hidalgo (friends of my father), when I was 14 years old, I have always been struck by the evident divorce between their so-called leftist political positions and their lifestyle. There was no such discrepancy in the case of Manuel Isidro Molina Gavidia, who lived frugally, almost ascetically, regarding materialism. But some of his children, like Fidelina, and certainly his grandchildren, did not seem to understand the message. A person who adopts communism as a political ideology, as they claimed to have done, cannot, rather should not, pursue the accumulation of wealth as an ultimate goal, which is supposedly characteristic of capitalism.
I was about 14 or 15 when in a conversation I said to them: “What the hell are you talking about communism and Cuba as the great panacea, while you sit here comfortably eating barbecue in this house in La Mara, with two cars parked in the garage, a business, etc.? Why don’t you go live in Cuba and see if you can do what you do here?” Urban communists.
This hypocrisy has always bothered me, but I understood that adopting such a political stance was not the result of study or personal conviction, but a reflection of what they had always heard the “old Manuel” say, who was a source of family pride, a bastion, a self-taught intellectual, a great entrepreneur, “a walking library,” as some of his grandchildren used to say.
In the last years of his life, Manuel Isidro Molina Gavidia lived pleasantly in a cabin on the outskirts of Mérida. There, my wife (granddaughter of Manuel Isidro Molina Gavidia and thus niece of the “Minister”) and I were welcomed many years later when we decided to start a small business in that city. In the company of the “old Manuel,” we spent many delightful hours, during which I constantly asked him about various facts or figures from contemporary Venezuelan politics. But above all, I pressed him on communism. By then, 1997-1998, the failure of the Castro dictatorship experiment was well known to anyone even marginally informed and objective. So, during conversations, I asked him how a regime that stifles freedoms like Castro’s Cuba could be an object of admiration and support; “How can someone somewhat intelligent defend such a thing?” I would say. Until one day he told me, with the expression of someone who has lost something dear, something like, “If I had known in my youth the cost, the human price of communism, I would have never supported it.”
Now we see how one of his sons, the “Minister” Ricardo Molina, asserts with absolute conviction and clarity that laws do not matter at all if someone dares to express a political position different from the regime he is part of. Both his father and he lived through many hardships precisely for adopting a political stance contrary to the status quo of their time. Like in the case of Jorge Rodriguez, the victim becomes the perpetrator. And this is perhaps Hugo Chavez’s worst legacy: having exacerbated hate, having made hate a political stance, worthy of cheers of “This is how you govern!” turning hate into the central element of his so-called revolution. From such a ilk, from such an intellectual lumpen, it’s impossible to expect anything but radicalization, violence, and violations of human, civil, and political rights; as said: they “do not care at all.” These guys represent a step back, a regression to the times of Boves and his army of resentful lowlifes, and they were not defeated that first time precisely by votes.
The silver lining in all of this is that the revolution is being broadcast in all its dreadful glory. The chavista scum is a star, a focal point, magnified by millions of text messages, videos, on Twitter and Facebook, in world news agencies, on the internet, crossing cultural and linguistic barriers, and that’s the good part, that the 15 minutes of infamy of the “Minister” Ricardo Molina are now part of the contemporary history of Venezuela. The “Minister,” without doubt, lacks the intellectual capacity to grasp the seriousness of his fascism. But others do have that capacity, and we will ensure it’s remembered. The children of many parents who are currently enduring the hardships imposed by castro-chavismo will remember his words and actions, just as the “Minister” remembers what his father suffered at the hands of the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. That will endure, he knows it, even if he does not understand the dimension and consequences of his radical and degenerate stance.