Venezuela

Here’s something to watch next time you’re visiting Venezuela, if you can avoid getting murdered while you’re there – a ballet based on the life of the glorious late president Hugo Chavez: ‘The piece, From Spider-Seller to Liberator, is roughly based on a series of personal reminiscences culled from the late president’s speeches and his weekly TV show Aló Presidente. A team of Cuban journalists combed through thousands of hours, selecting the folksy childhood anecdotes which he would drop in among state decrees and political announcements. The work begins with a recording of Chávez’s voice saying: “I was like a seed which fell on hard ground,” before a female character

As would-be dictators go, Hugo Chavez was on the clownish end of the repressive spectrum. By the end, however, the joke was wearing thin. He was, as Rory Carroll aptly describes him, an “elected autocrat”. But if you judge a man by the company he keeps, Chavez’s legacy takes a darker turn. In the name of sticking-it-to-the-man (that is, the United States) Chavez chummed himself to most of the world’s ghastliest leaders. And, of course, his hero and father-figure was Fidel Castro, governor of the world’s sunniest island gulag. Meanwhile, in Britain and Ireland, his death has been mourned by George Galloway (who deems Chavez a “modern day Spartacus”), Ken