In the search of a category to synthesize the current situation of Venezuelans, our Jesuit colleagues from Centro Gumilla use the term “anthropological damage” to describe the depth of the deterioration. The phrase is not original since it has been developed in Cuba to specify the depth of state intervention in social relations and the psyche of the people.
Raúl Fornet-Betancourt affirms that anthropological damage occurs when, in addition to the deterioration in the social, political, and cultural order, fundamental damage to the human condition takes place. Nora, a reader of Uruguayan newspaper El País, expressed her view that “anthropological damage occurs when a person stops feeling appreciation for his own life, when he loses consciousness of himself as the owner of his destiny and abandons himself to the opinions of the dominating forces, leading him to behave and think in a directed way. Even more, he is forced to stop thinking.”
Pondering his own experience, Dagoberto Valdés Hernández exemplifies the term with the Cuban who had a large portion of his internal freedom blocked and who sees his responsibility systematically supplanted by the State’s paternalism, transforming himself into a perpetual civic adolescent. “He suffers a blockade,” he assures. “His projects of independent life get blocked, leaving his soul crumbled and existentially discouraged.”
Francisco Javier Muller quotes the book “Cuba and its future” by Luis Aguilar León and groups 6 types of specific anthropological damages: 1) Subservience, 2) Fear of repression, 3) Fear of change, 4 ) Lack of political will and civic responsibility, 5) Hopelessness, uprooting, and exile within the country and 6) The ethical crisis.
To adapt the term to our context, the Gumilla thinkers orbit around the implosion of the life project of the majority of Venezuelans, and how their presence in the country has been irreversibly changed for the worse.
The difference between Chávez and Maduro on this matter is that the first focused on the damage to his adversaries, establishing discrimination as a State policy, while the second “socialized” the anthropological damage to the entire population, including his followers. This was bitterly discovered by the fifth migratory wave made up of chavismo officials and militants like Alejandra Benitez, who tweets about the evaporation of her dreams as a consequence of the international isolation of the dictatorship. The rest of the country, the majority, buried their reveries deep in the freezer.
Not only have individual destinies been disrupted, but the self-image of Venezuelans, their identity, the meaning of their country. Chavismo demolished history, putting in its place not the “new man” but a great desolation. Margarita López Maya and I concluded that an urgent task, within so many pending tasks, is the reconstruction of the memory -in uppercase and lowercase- to answer many of the questions of the Venezuelan people during the eventual transition. In the absence of a narrative, we need to start working from the margins, in three imaginaries that summon everyone born in Venezuela: Sports, gastronomy, and music.
Unlike the moles in the Mining Arch, we are barely digging into the surface of the extension and depth of the rupture of our associative tissue. But contemplation and discernment must go hand in hand with proposal and action. Despite the decline of academic thought and the exile of most intellectuals. Despite the weakening of the civil society and the near disappearance of the underground fabric of mutual support.
