Episode Summary
In this episode of The Expat Files, Johnny Mueller delves into his experiences and opinions on Hugo Chavez and the political and economic situation in Venezuela. He shares a personal anecdote about being targeted after criticizing Chavez's policies, which led to his tires being shot out. He also critiques Oliver Stone's documentary 'South of the Border,' which he believes is overly favorable to Chavez. Mueller highlights the economic challenges faced by expats in Venezuela, particularly the forced conversion of currency to 'boulevards' and the resulting financial losses. He also delves into Chavez's admiration for historical figures like Simon Bolivar, Mussolini, and Fidel Castro, suggesting that these figures were part of his political strategy and that Chavez's actions were driven by a belief in his own historical significance.
Johnny Mueller discusses the perception of Hugo Chavez in Latin America, comparing him to historical figures like Mussolini. He argues that the label 'Latin Mussolini' is not due to fascist tendencies but rather because of his immense popularity among the common people. He explains that Chavez's political platform was akin to Robin Hood's, promising to take from the rich and give to the poor. However, Johnny critiques the poverty statistics cited by Chavez's government, pointing out that Latin American governments have a different definition of poverty compared to the first world. He highlights the significant inflation and the high cost of living in Venezuela, suggesting that the reported reduction in poverty is misleading. Johnny also touches on the cultural and economic differences between Latin America and the first world, emphasizing that the working poor in Latin America have a much lower standard of living than their counterparts in the United States.
The podcast segment discusses a story about an obese, unwed American woman who ends up in the emergency room, is informed she is pregnant and about to deliver triplets, and is on public housing. The segment highlights the extensive government support she receives, including hospital care, home care services, and a new subsidized apartment. Johnny Mueller and his friend Eddie express disbelief and criticize the system, while the Latin women in the room are amazed and see the welfare system as a positive, even though they have relatives in the U.S. who are undocumented.
Johnny Mueller discusses the lack of awareness among Latin Americans about the financial and social crises in the first world, attributing this to the influence of U.S. cable TV and the American Dream narrative. He contrasts the earlier aspirations of Latin immigrants to the U.S. for work with the current perception of the U.S. as a land of welfare and freebies. Mueller also critiques Hugo Chavez's policies, highlighting the disconnect between the expansion of public education and the lack of job opportunities for graduates, as well as the political motivations behind the support for Chavez in other Latin American countries, which he attributes to Venezuela's oil wealth.
In the final segment, Johnny Mueller discusses the political and economic relationship between Venezuela and Argentina, focusing on how Argentina's leaders, including Cristina Kirchner and her husband Nestor Kirchner, maintain close ties with Hugo Chavez despite the economic instability in both countries. He highlights the mutual admiration between the leaders and the economic challenges faced by both nations, such as Argentina's recurring financial crises and Venezuela's poor credit rating. Johnny also explains how Venezuela's purchase of Argentine bonds helps Argentina's economy, even though it's a risky investment. He compares the high returns on Argentine bonds to safer investments in other countries, emphasizing the risks involved. Additionally, he mentions a specific instance where Chavez allegedly contributed cash to Kirchner's election campaign, illustrating the political influence and corruption in the region.
Topics
Hugo Chavez, Venezuela, Expats, Economic policies, Political figures, Oliver Stone's documentary, Hugo Chavez's political legacy in Latin America, Comparisons to historical figures like Mussolini, Poverty statistics and definitions in Latin America, Cultural and economic differences between Latin America and the first world, Welfare system, Public housing
Chapters
00:00:00 Opening 00:00:35 Hugo Chavez: A Polarizing Figure 00:01:06 Caracas: The Most Dangerous City in Latin America 00:02:39 Oliver Stone's Documentary: A One-Sided View 00:06:26 Why Chavez is Called the Latin Mussolini 00:06:49 Chavez's Impact on Poverty in Venezuela 00:09:28 The Reliability of Poverty Statistics in Latin America 00:11:59 The Woman's Situation and the Emergency Room Visit 00:12:30 The Cost of Care and Public Aid 00:13:21 Eviction and the New Subsidized Apartment 00:14:30 The Cost of Care and the System's Impact 00:15:30 The Latin Women's Perspective on the Welfare System 00:17:20 Johnny and Eddie's Disbelief and the System's Impact 00:17:43 Lack of Awareness About First World Crises 00:19:00 Shift in Latin American Perceptions of the U.S. 00:19:30 Critique of Hugo Chavez's Policies 00:22:57 Political Motivations Behind Support for Chavez 00:23:11 Argentina's Close Ties with Venezuela's Chavez 00:23:58 Venezuela's Poor Credit Rating and Economic Mismanagement 00:25:43 Argentina's Sucking Up to Venezuela for Economic Reasons
Transcript
Automatically transcribed from the original recording; names and wording may contain errors.
[00:00] South of the border down Mexico way That's where I fell in love when the stars above came up to play and now as I wonder My thoughts ever straight Hi everybody I'm Johnny Mueller and you're listening to the expat files Living in Latin America the show that tells you what it's really like to live work play and or retire in Latin America I tell it just like it is so let's get started Okay now by unpopular demand I've got to talk about someone that you either love or your hate who go Chavez or I should say the former Hugo Chavez Now I admit I've said a lot of rotten things over the years about Hugo because well
[00:46] I have no love lost for Venezuela in general and the way Hugo ran things down there Since a few years back when I was doing a little report from Margarita Island Venezuela Which is actually a very nice place since it is a vacation spot island off the mainland So it doesn't have near the crimes the problems and the troubles of mainland cities like Caracas Which is considered the most dangerous city in all of Latin America even after 14 years of promises by uncle Hugo to clean up the place And that means for us expats Caracas is not recommended for any expat activities at all Anyway last time I was there I guess I upset a few of Hugo's ardent followers because when I got back to Caracas I got the tires shot out of my car while I was driving it now
[01:31] That was an adrenaline rush and you know it sounds funny now But back then all I was doing was reporting exactly what expat homeowners were telling me regarding their business and housing Investments on Margarita Island the fact that Hugo's monetary policies Forced them to change all their euros and dollars into boulevards for any property or business sale And you had to change your dollars or euros into boulevards at the official government rate not at the street rate Which is like a third lower than the government rate in other words if you bought a house on Margarita Island for a hundred grand Us and you lived in it for let's say five or ten years and now it was worth a hundred and fifty grand And you got some sucker or person to buy it well when he wrote you a check for that hundred fifty grand Which of course you'd deposit in a local bank the bank would switch it over to boulevards at the official rate
[02:19] And you'd lose one third instantly So as you might imagine that made for a lot of very unhappy expats And I did an international report on that and got my tires shot out now for any of you Who've seen that Oliver Stone documentary that was mostly on Hugo called South of the Border don't you like that title anyway? If you've seen South of the Border by Oliver Stone, which I do recommend just to get the alternate viewpoint It's kind of a love poem to Chavez Oliver Stone says nothing But nice things about Chavez and his regime in fact it's almost unbelievably one-sided in the favor of Chavez and Basically you can only chalk that up to the fact that Oliver Stone Obviously has never lived in Venezuela and probably only had boots on the ground for two or three weeks in his whole life
[03:06] While making that documentary and being treated like a Hollywood star by all the worthless Politicians that he interviewed who'd say nothing bad about Chavez because obviously they've made oil deals with him for under market price So of course there's gonna be a whole lot of ass-kissing going on now that old Hugo is in a so-called better place he could be right this second pow-wowing and shooting the breeze with his dead heroes and by the way his heroes are Mussolini Carl Marks Simon Bolivar and Henry Aaron who's not actually dead yet And of course, we can't forget uncle Fidel if you ever watched Latin cable TV You'd know that Chavez sucked up to Fidel any chance he could get the ass-kissing there was embarrassingly obvious Now the question on so many people's minds these days is what in the hell is gonna happen to Venezuela?
[03:55] But before I get into that I should explain why those four guys were Chavez's heroes His main hero was Simon Bolivar and Chavez picked him as his hero because well Bolivar is kind of a mythical saintly figure In South America because he was the great liberator He fought revolutions in South America to free those countries from Spanish colonial rule basically He's there George Washington So Chavez linked himself early on to Bolivar in a great PR move in fact every time he did a press conference He'd sit under a grand old portrait of the guy and get this he spent a hundred and fifty million bucks of Venezuelan's oil money to create a gigantic Monument to Simon Bolivar that houses all of his artifacts and skeletal remains So Bolivar was an obsession with Chavez because the rumor has it that Chavez visited some fortune tellers when he was young and they
[04:47] Said he was the reincarnation of Simon Bolivar and for him to spend 150 million bucks of Other people's money of course to glorify the guy he must have certainly believed it and by the way a hell of a lot of middle and lower class Venezuelans believe it too and There's the voting block that Chavez made all his promises to the guys that put him in office But Chavez's obsession didn't end there during official meetings when he could pull it off Chavez would place an empty chair next to him and tell everyone that it was occupied by the ghost of Simon Bolivar And he was dead serious about it now I'm asking you guys up in Boston and Cleveland and Seattle would you even vote for a guy for dog catcher who pulled a stunt? Like that well, I guess I take that back We have voted in quite a good number of insane delusional and even psychotic politicians ourselves
[05:37] I guess then we're not that different from Venice away lands So was Chavez delusional bottom line Chavez was really smart because he knew even the name Simon Bolivar Demands a kind of hushed respect with practically everyone in Venezuela. No one I mean no one This is him or ever makes fun of him It's like being in Cuba and making fun of Castro or torturing the American flag now I mentioned Mussolini as another one of Chavez's heroes Well, that's because certain intellectuals in South America have called him the Latin Mussolini and not because Chavez was a fascist in any way Far from it He was a quasi-socialist and not because he made the trains run on time like Mussolini did He never even came close to doing that in fact That's an impossible mission anywhere in Latin America to get anything to run exactly on time. Nope
[06:26] They call him the Latin Mussolini because he was absolutely loved and revered almost like a god by the common people And that's because basically his political platform was that of a Robin Hood, you know Take from the rich and give it to the poor that basically was his entire campaign slogan But yeah have to understand you read this stuff on the internet and you hear this stuff all the time at parties and things down Here in Latin America that Chavez cut poverty in half and extreme poverty by 70% since he took control of the oil fields in 2004 but then again people up in the first world to talk about that and the occasional British or French tourists You meet down here who are basically closet socialists They still believe Chavez is a man of the people and they cite those reduced poverty figures
[07:11] I just mentioned but what they don't realize like I've said before Latin governments have a Completely different definition of poverty than first world governments now You probably know that in the states the poverty cut-off line for a family of four is about $22,000 a year and about 11,000 for a single person, but down in Latin America Their cut-off line for poverty for a family of four is defined as a family that can just make the basic living expenses for the month, which is called the canasta basica, which means the basic basket of goods and services now according to recent Venezuelan newspaper articles canasta basica for a family of four is now over 1300 bucks a month which is more than double than the most of the rest of Latin America and that's because of that sustained 35% inflation rate they've been running year after year throughout Chavez's term now Venezuelan newspapers point out
[08:04] That it now takes four point two average Venezuelan minimum wage salaries to cover the cost of that canasta basica each month So think about it for each family of four in Venezuela every single family member husband wife kids and babies We'll have to pull down a minimum wage job just to make ends meet and about 60% of Venezuelan working-class people Hold minimum wage jobs. So why doesn't someone explain to me how they can say that poverty has been reduced by 40% It's that old adage that statistics lie and here's another one that lies Remember I said earlier that Venezuela claims to have reduced extreme poverty by 70% well You know what the definition of extreme poverty is according to the United Nations a person who lives on less than two bucks a day That's less than 60 bucks a month now according to that definition
[08:51] Which is used by policymakers everywhere if a person last month made and lived on 60 bucks a month Then he was considered in extreme poverty But if this month he was lucky enough to make $60 and one cent Well, he would be statistically pulled out of the ranks of the extreme poor and simply considered run-of-the-mill poor So accordingly if Venezuela has reduced extreme poverty by 70% That means almost three-quarters of the people who were making and living on two bucks or less a day Are no longer in such dire straits because now they're making and living on at least two dollars and one cent a day And what this all means is that you should never believe the poverty statistics coming out of a government especially Latin American governments because you know the average poor person in the States has a refrigerator a TV a microwave maybe even a car and
[09:42] Air-conditioning and a poor person in Latin America doesn't even have hot running water and they cook with wood And you know what down here in Latin America They do not even have a definition for the working poor like they do up in the first world You know people who make minimum wage up in the States the ones that work at McDonald's and such and minimum wage up There's over seven bucks an hour, which is considered working poor Well down here in Latin America if you ask any expat He'll tell you that although 90% of Latin Americans would appear to be the working poor But if they were to make US minimum wage of seven bucks an hour or so They'd consider themselves upper middle class, which is one of the main and basic forces that drives illegal immigration to the States now Allow me to veer off a little bit here like I haven't already now some weeks ago I was at expat Eddie's big house in Salvador and we were all sitting around in his living room watching his big-screen TV
[10:33] It was me expat Eddie expat Eddie's girlfriend Her sister and her cousin who were both about 21 years old and Eddie's girlfriend's mother you got that Now expat Eddie and I weren't exactly watching the program We were talking about something who knows what it was But the girls they were watching this program on the discovery home and health channel a cable channel from the states in English and subtitled In Spanish now you guys up there might know this program I didn't until then but it was a program called I didn't know I was pregnant Which is actually a pretty nutty and unbelievable title for a show and with all those hundreds of cable choices I don't think there's a single guy in the universe that would watch a show like that unless he was forced to at gunpoint But that day these Latin ladies were absolutely glued to the set
[11:20] So like the title says that show is all about ladies who find out Very late in the game that they're actually pregnant now normally Eddie and I would have never paid attention to the thing but Eddie and I started listening when we heard the comments and opinions coming out of Eddie's girlfriend her mother and her sister and her cousin because you see This particular story was all about a very obese American woman who'd made her way to the emergency room because she was feeling faint I believe the emergency room was at a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia Anyway, this woman who was maybe 300 pounds was put through the emergency room protocol and all that and was informed to her shock and surprise That she was pregnant and she stayed put because she was ready to deliver ready to deliver triplets
[12:06] Okay unusual enough right but get this she had two other very young kids that she dragged along with her So now this unwed mother on public housing But no job is looking at a family of five But it gets even crazier the rest of the show of course followed her through her delivery and the three kids did come out All right, but they did need special care for about two weeks in the hospital Total hospital bill slightly over a hundred grand free for her of course because she's on public aid But that's not all because there's no guy around She's got two young kids and now suddenly has triplets the health and welfare services Kindly provided her with her very own full-time shift of live-in aids To help her with the problem of having three tiny babies to take care of and the cost of that service to you the taxpayer
[12:58] about three thousand dollars a week for however long is necessary and Regarding the home care a social services rep discussed on the program that she'd need that personal home care Help for at least a year or more But it gets better for her that is but for the taxpayers definitely not now get this it turns out that the day She delivered her kids was the day She was to be evicted from her subsidized housing because you see she'd been a bad tenant and pretty much Let her friends and family destroy the place they didn't go into too much detail on the show about that But the way the case was presented you got the idea that she and her family were a landlord's worst nightmare Anyway, ta-da Health and social services to the rescue again now
[13:44] She can't be out on the street with three little babies and two in tow They allowed her to move into a completely subsidized brand new four-bedroom apartment complex I'm talking brand new and probably in that area would run 12 to 1,500 bucks a month And of course she and her family and friends were ecstatic judging by the open house party She had at the new place where she invited all her friends her boyfriend and his friends and the rest of the members of her Obese family now as you might imagine expat Eddie and I sat there the whole time staring at the screen Shaking our heads in disbelief and our eyes really bugged out when they mentioned the tab actually It was the new mother who mentioned it in passing in kind of a throwaway phrase I mean if you're not the one paying for it who cares right?
[14:30] Now at that point the tab was already over a hundred fifty grand and that was the cost for just the first few weeks Who knows how many hundreds of thousand if not millions? It'll take at taxpayers expense of course to raise those kids up to and beyond their 18th birthday But like Eddie says by then the system will have long since crashed and burned But now while expat Eddie and I were grinning and nodding and congratulating ourselves that we no longer lived up north in that mess But we were lucky enough to have escaped when we did well just as we were congratulating ourselves We couldn't help but overhear what the ladies in the room were saying it was like they were watching a completely different Version of the show they were enthralled with every minute of it and not just the triplets
[15:16] They were saying things like wow you mean if you're in the United States And you don't work you get a beautiful apartment like that for nothing And when you have more babies and your family grows they give you an even bigger place how absolutely Marvelous it must be to live in the USA yep That was the consensus with the ladies all right and they were shocked and amazed to see that babies too could stay in intensive care unit in the hospital 24-7 as long as it takes and it doesn't matter if you have a job or not The system will take care of you and the ladies were just amazed to see that the government would provide a free Shift of nurses aides that come to the house every day to take care of those kids feed them and change their diapers So with these Latin ladies who've never seen anything like that the consensus was like Eddie's girlfriend's mother said
[16:07] Isn't US government and the welfare system Wonderful and all those medications in that wonderful new apartment and on and on and all of that whether you've got money or not Or even a job well to tell you the truth that program was the best marketing for a US Welfare that I've ever seen in fact in the end every one of those ladies felt a little sad that They couldn't get over the border and get in on the spoils though every one of them had friends and relatives up in the states Who had and all of them sneaking in illegally of course But when you talk to Latins down here about their relatives up in the states They never mention that fact unless you ask them It doesn't seem like an appropriate point to bring up when you're having a conversation, you know I mean like you don't want to say at a party. Hey Carlos, how many illegal relatives do you have up in the states?
[16:55] That's a little too personal, you know, but man everyone down here has a few So anyway that day an expat Eddie's living room I mean it these girls were practically salivating and when the show was over They actually seemed a bit depressed and that's when Eddie turned to the girls and said ladies Let me explain something here. Then he stopped for a second look back at me Then he turned back to them again, and he said Never mind which was just as well because he and I knew anything that we might have said We'll never convince them that what they just witnessed is part of what's bringing the first world to its knees and they actually have no clue that the first world is and has been on its knees for quite some time because you know what Latins of all social classes and education are
[17:43] Completely clueless about what's happening to the financial systems and the social systems in the United States and Europe In fact only maybe one out of a thousand Latins even knows there was a real estate blowout in 2008 and probably only one in ten thousand Latins realizes that there was a massive financial bailout of first world banks To Latins the first world has always been the land of milk and honey and u.s. Based cable TV shows that have made it down here heavily reinforced that fantasy And I'll tell you 20 years ago when I first came down here. These cable stations did not exist You could not flick on the TV and see u.s. Channels like that translated all they had was local Spanish stuff and Spanish soap operas called Telenovelas which are totally in fantasy land themselves, but that's another story anyway back then 15 or 20 years ago
[18:35] Common Latins that I talked to that wanted to go to the United States They wanted their chance at the American dream by finding a job and working for it They really did go having the desire to work and make money back then no Latins I ever talked to spoke about going up to the United States for the social programs or the welfare Getting a job that was enough But in the last five or ten years so many Latins are hooked into these u.s. Television cable programs that they're all tuned in to the welfare system and all the freebies way before they end up slipping into the u.s. Illegally not to mention they've all got relatives up in the states that report back just how this system can be scammed So sure a lot of illegals go up there still for the jobs But for many of them the real pot of gold are the government freebies
[19:24] But I was talking about Hugo Chavez wasn't I and by all reports coming out of Venezuela He did expand health care and university education and reduced inequality and provided tons of public housing But what they don't tell you is that when you graduate from that basically free university education there are few jobs for university graduates in their field and there's a very impenetrable glass ceiling if you happen to be an Indigenous or dark-skinned person and when pulled three out of four public University students who've graduated say they can't get jobs in their field They either have to work a lower-class menial job or stay unemployed or partially employed and that's why so many of them are trying their damnedest to get out of the country and
[20:11] Guess where they want to go to the first world the United States or Europe of course But that's a very long way and takes a lot of money so most talk about it But never do it instead they go for plan B They go to their next-door neighbor Colombia Which is much more cosmopolitan with a much higher percentage of educated people which is quite ironic because Colombia and Venezuela have always been enemies But the fact is Colombians almost never emigrate to Venezuela Whereas there's a constant flow of Venezuelan's into Colombia, which is illegal of course, but they do it anyway So what does that tell you about Hugo's policies? So on one hand you have Chavez providing basic public university education But the graduating students can't get jobs and they want to get the hell out
[20:58] Oh and another thing about reports of Chavez's regime reducing inequality Well, Venezuela like Costa Rica and Argentina is a very classist and racist society Practically the only places you see high-ranking indigenous or black people are in government positions in the private business sector It's very unusual to see indigenous and racial cultural mixing in upper management and administration positions again As any indigenous or black person will tell you there the only surefire way to advance in business and society is to be an entrepreneur yourself one another claim by the Venezuelan government is that the Chavez administration created tens of thousands of new jobs and In fact, he did but guess where he created them in the government sector sound familiar
[21:45] In fact under Chavez both the public payroll and the number of government workers more than doubled That's not sound economics But it's sound politics because those government workers are all dyed in the wool Chavez supporters Naturally, so the question is why do so many South American country? Administrations stick up for him. Why do they always praise him in the news and in the media? Well, a lot of first-world gringos and expats believe it was the way he spit in the face of Bush in the United States And I gotta admit I rather like that about him, too In fact I'm sure you'll agree that Bush and Cheney have the kind of faces that are just begging to be spit on and besides Castro Chavez was one of the first Latin leaders to do it and get away with it The fact is Venezuela had so much oil that Chavez never had to play ball with the US at all
[22:35] I mean, there's tons of examples of US bullying coming down knocking off regimes and putting in their own puppet stickmen Like Pinochet and Noriega. There's a dozen examples. Just look them up But where the US staged these coups the countries didn't have big oil like Venezuela Anyway, the real reasons of course why so many other Latin American countries are sticking up for him Especially their leaders is all about the oil, too. You think they'd jump on Chavez's bandwagon if he didn't have it I mean if you were a banana Republican, he offered cut-rate oil cheaper than world market prices. You'd kiss his ass, too I mean take the case of Argentina. They're not a banana Republic anymore, but they're always sticking up for Chavez President Cristina Kirchner and the ex-president Nester Kirchner her husband are so buddy buddy with the guy that when you see him together
[23:26] It's like a mutual admiration society. And in that case, it's not only about the oil So here's another little something you didn't know now as you probably know the Argentine economy Implodes about every 10 or 15 years. They have a terrible financial disaster and occasionally default on their government notes Which never inspires confidence and makes anyone holding Argentine bonds very nervous And in fact, Venezuela has a pretty crappy credit rating on their bonds, too Simply because their economy is so mismanaged and they're carrying so much debt In fact Moody's and Fitch give Venezuela a b-plus credit rating on their bonds and they're gonna downgrade that rating shortly, too And even a b-plus is four levels below investment grade For example, guess what other countries have that very same bond rating b-plus just like Venezuela the African Republic's of Ghana
[24:18] Kenya and Zambia Believe me not places you and I would ever consider visiting much less putting one investment dime into So even with all that oil and future earnings Why has Venezuela's bond market been so depressed massive financial mismanagement, of course but speaking of Argentina and why they Continuously support Chavez and how both president Kirshner's Christina and her husband seem to go out of their way to suck up to Chavez In public every chance they get well if you look at the big picture They need to do that since their bonds have been in the crapper since 2001 and they still owe massive amounts of money to investors that they defaulted on and never repaid from back then that makes their bonds
[25:07] Very high risk much more so than Venezuela's. In fact, their bond market is in a shambles They're risky. So the returns are very high like around 11% right now I mean compare those returns for example to German bonds, which you could get about a 3.7% interest and Spanish bonds are running about 6% or more and we all know that Spain's about to crash and if you have the US Treasury bonds, you're only gonna get about one and a half to maybe 2% interest and Japanese bonds are paying less than 1% So here's what you didn't know. The reason why Argentina continuously sucks up to Venezuela under Chavez and the new president and by the way The new president was Chavez's vice president Nicolas Maduro
[25:52] Anyway, all that ass-kissing by Argentina's Christina Kirshner is due to the fact that Venezuela buys huge quantities of Argentine bonds when no one else will and here's something else You probably didn't know Chavez actually buys the loyalty of Latin politicians in neighboring countries in 2011 customs officials in Buenos Aires opened a suitcase stuffed with nearly a million dollars in cash and the Venezuelan who was carrying that suitcase confessed that it was a campaign contribution from Hugo Chavez to Christine Kirshner's election campaign Hmm. No wonder there's a whole lot of South American ass-kissing going on
[26:38] Oh and I forgot in the beginning of the program I mentioned that Hugo Chavez had his heroes and one of them was Hank Aaron, you know Home-run King number 44 Milwaukee Braves and Atlanta Anyway, like Fidel Castro Hugo Chavez's greatest ambition was to become a Professional baseball player that is to get scouted drafted and get sent up to a professional US ballclub You probably heard that story already about Castro in Fidel's college days He was a pitcher for the University of Havana and was dying to get scouted out by a US Major League team But never did the same with Chavez He actually signed up for the Venezuelan Military Academy because of the star reputation of its baseball team
[27:24] He too dreamed of being spotted by a Major League scout and in the end Hugo and Fidel did play in the Major Leagues You've been listening to the expat files living in Latin America Coming to you each week from somewhere south of the border and don't forget you can email me on anything at all about Latin America the expat files at gmail.com See you next time Ah, she was a picture