New Venezuelan
documentary premiered in Havana
Con los pobres de la tierra [With the wretched of the earth], a 57-minute documentary produced by Memoria Popular Latinoamericana (MEPLA) premiered Monday in Havana on the anniversary of that fateful weekend in Caracas in April 2002. The new film documents the popular counter-coup that re-installed the democratically-elected Colonel Hugo Chàvez back in office after a brief, criminal U.S.-backed coup d'etat.
On hand for the documentary, whose title is taken from a famous poem by the renowned Cuban literary and political figure Josè MartÌ, were Cuban president Fidel Castro, newly-named Venezuelan ambassador Adan Chàvez, and several dozen Venezuelan young people studying or training in various specialties within the Cuban university and technical schooling system.
The film premieres at a time when the U.S. continues to seek ways to interfere in the internal affairs of the sovereign Venezuelan people, from a specially-maintained branch of the State Department's Office for Latin American Affairs, headed by Otto Reich in Washington.
Venezuela contains the fourth-largest known reserves of oil on the planet and remains an active member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Contrary to the norm among almost all the other OPEC member states, however, Venezuela exports increasing quantities of refined petroleum products, rather than raw crude. Its decision is independently of the desires of the oil majors who command and maintain refining capacity in the U.S., Canada and Europe who have long sought to deny any significant manufacturing role for oil-producing states.
Its markets are as controversial as Cuba and as far-flung as the Canadian province of New Brunswick.
Earlier this spring, a major scandal was whipped up in New Brunswick when it came out in newspapers operated by the Irving family that Venezuelan "orimulsion", a relatively high-efficiency feedstock for power plants, was being purchased "without a signed contract", i.e., on a handshake, and consumed in some of the main facilities of the provincial-government-owned NB Power utility.
Before
NB Power burdened the financial future of the province and its people
more than 20 years ago with the dubious Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating
Plant, the Irvings' oil refinery at Saint John, currently the most productive
in Canada outputting an average 250 000 barrels per day and still partly-owned
by the giant international Exxon-Mobil conglomerate, enjoyed a privileged
position as exclusive supplier of Bunker C oil to NB Power on unbreakable
30-year contracts.
Copyright New Media Services Inc. © 2004. The views expressed herein are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of shunpiking magazine or New Media Publications.