Caracas has “some 11,000 houses and 80,000 inhabitants,” including its suburbs, partly because the constant revolutions have driven the population to the national capital for protection. A tyrant can do things out on the lonely llanos which he would not dare do in the shadow of his own palace. Being but three thousand feet above sea-level, it lacks many of the unique features of lofty Bogotá, Quito, or La Paz; yet it is high enough to have a cool mountain air that quickly fills the traveler in the tropics with new life. Seated in a mountain lap twelve miles by three in size, the Sierra de Avila cuts it off from the sea and high hills enclose it on all sides. The site is uneven, especially toward the range, its upper part covered with forest, over which climb the same direct trails one sees scrambling up the far more precipitous mountain face from La Guayra. Here and there the town is broken up by quebradas and several small streams, of which the Guaire is almost a river; yet Caracas in its lap of green hills is not itself hilly, but merely undulating, its streets rolling leisurely away across town, with a considerable slope from north to south, so that every shower washes the city, and the tropical deluges to which it is sometimes subject make rivers of the north-and-south streets. The Venezuelan capital has little of the picturesqueness of several west-coast capitals. There are no Indians with their distinctive dress, no paganish street-calls, no quaint aboriginal customs. On the other hand, it is well put together, with good pavements and sidewalks, instead of cobbled roads with flagstones down the center, and has a more up-to-date air, as if closer in touch with the world than the loftier cities to the west, and it is at least a pretty city from whatever hillside one looks down upon it.
The houses are wrong side out, of course, after the Moorish-Spanish fashion, the streets faced by ugly bare walls, with the flowery gardens and the pretty girls within. It has by no means so many churches per capita as some of its neighbors, though many priests are to be seen, sometimes standing on the corners smoking cigarettes and “talking girls” with their layman fellow-sports. The cathedral houses a fine painting, unusual in South American churches, an enormous “Last Supper” by a Venezuelan who died while engaged upon it, so that portions are merely sketched. Beside the National Theater there is a bronze statue of Washington, erected during the centenary of Bolívar in 1883. He has no cause to feel lonely, even so far from home, for Caracas swarms with national heroes—in statues, the only muscular, full-chested men in town, unless one be misled by the splendid tailor-made shoulders in the plazas and paseos. No other city of its size, evidently, was the birthplace of so many great men. Nearly every other house bears a tablet announcing it as the scene of the first squall of “Generalisimo” Fulano or of “the great genius” Solano. Not all of these, however, are mere local celebrities; two simple old houses bear the tablets of Andrés Bello, the grammarian, whose fame reached to Chile and to Spain, and of Simón Bolívar, “the Liberator.”
Somehow, when one has been out of it for a time, the Latin-American atmosphere is almost pleasing—when one is in a mood for it. Here I found myself enjoying again the hoarse screams of lottery-ticket vendors, the cries of milk-dealers on horseback, their cans dangling beneath their legs, the bread-man with his red, white and blue barrel on either side of the horse he rides, the countless little shops where refugees, huddling under the protection of the capital, strive to make both ends meet by trying to sell something, content at least to be no longer at the mercy of government as well as revolutionists out on the little farms that have long since gone back to jungle. Caracas rises and begins business later than La Guayra, where the heat of noonday makes a siesta imperative; it is a bit less foppish than Bogotá or Quito, perhaps because of its greater proximity to the world. Here, too, are ragged men and boys who soften their incessant appeals by using a diminutive “Tiene usted un fosforito?” “Dame un centavito, caballero?” “Regálame un regalito, quiere?” It is easier to comply now and then with such requests in a city where prices have not leaped skyward, as in most of the world. At the “Hotel Filadelfia” my room and food cost four bolívares (almost eighty cents) a day. True, I found my hammock more comfortable than the bed, though the nights were somewhat chilly in it; and the impudence, indolence, and indifference of the caraqueño servant is notorious. Ask anyone, from manager to the kitchen-boy, to do something, and the reply was almost certain to be a sullen, “That’s not my work,” nor would they ever deign to pass the word on to whosoever’s work it was. Evidently they belonged to a union. As in Ecuador, hotel guests were forbidden to talk politics.
Some of the principal streets were lined with gambling houses of all classes, from two-cent-ante workmen’s places to sumptuous parlors with pianos playing and the doors wide open to all, even to a penurious “gringo” who came only to watch the heavy-eyed croupiers and the other curious night types who make their living by coin manipulation. Though “the cheapest thing in Caracas is women,” they are seldom seen on the streets. Illegitimacy, like illiteracy, is more prevalent than its opposite, but it is not the Spanish-American way to flaunt social vices. American influence is more in evidence than in any other South American country; Caracas is the only city on that continent where I saw native boys playing baseball. Germans control much of the commerce and the longest railway in the country, from Caracas to Puerto Cabello, but with these exceptions the English hold most large enterprises, including electric-lights, telephones, and street-cars, and are reputed to be clever in keeping out American competition.
Like Santiago de Chile, Caracas has a limited number of “best families,” who form the “aristocracy” and to some extent an oligarchy, though intermarriage has produced among them some of the ills of European royalty. There are good-looking, not a few pretty, and even occasionally beautiful women in this class, though the casual visitor sees them only behind the bars of their windows or promenading in carriages and automobiles around El Paraiso across the Guaire on Sunday afternoons, and at the evening band concerts in the Plaza Bolívar. On the whole, this so-called higher class is more corrupt and worthless than the workers, especially those of the llanos, who at least are laborious and long-suffering, even though ignorant, superstitious, and often victims of the same erotic influences as the rich and educated. It is natural that the political power in Venezuela should have been wrested from this weak “aristocracy” by hardier types from the interior.
The most notorious of these, the chief founder of that military dictatorship which to this day holds Venezuela in a tighter grip than any other country in South America, was Castro. Charles II of England would have felt at home with this fallen tyrant, a degenerate who made use of his power and government riches to corrupt the maidenhood of his native land. His subordinates, especially the governor of the federal district, were chosen less for their ability as rulers than for their success in coaxing young girls to visit the tyrant in a house across the Guaire, where he carried on his amours almost publicly. In those days Caracas was overrun with saucy little presidential mistresses in short skirts. Force, or anything else likely to lead to public scandal, however, was not included among Castro’s amorous weapons—for there was a Señora Castro before whose wrath the highest authorities of Venezuela were wont to flee in dismay. The terror which Castro himself still evokes among the masses of the country is such that his name to this day is almost never openly spoken. In Ciudad Bolívar I sat one evening, reading an exaggerated tale of the tyrant’s lust, a book proscribed in Venezuela but stacked up in the book-stores of Trinidad, when the hotel-keeper paused to ask in a trembling voice how I dared have such a volume in my possession.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Ah, it is true,” he answered, turning away, “in the great United States there are no tyrants to make a man fear his own shadow.”
Aside from his patent faults, however, Castro was a man of strength and native ability; though this was offset by his provincial ignorance, a misconception of the unknown outside world which led him to believe he could easily thrash England, France and Germany combined, so that he took pains to alienate foreign governments. It is an error into which his successor has been careful not to fall.
General Juan Vicente Gomez is an andino, like Castro—that is, a man from the mountainous part of the country near the Colombian border, with considerable Indian blood and a primitive force that overwhelms the soft-handed “aristocracy” of Caracas which once ruled the country. Like Castro, he is ignorant, strong, coarse, and shrewd—fond of young women, too, though with strength enough to put them into the background when they interfere with more important matters. Years ago he mortgaged his property to help Castro, but the latter treated him like a peon, even after appointing him vice-president. Gomez, however, knew how to bide his time. By 1908 his dissipations had left Castro no choice but to go to the German baths or die, and he delegated his power to the obsequious vice-president and went. A few days later Gomez set out at four in the morning for a round of the military barracks, called out the commanders, thrust a revolver into their ribs, and requested them henceforth to bear in mind that he was president of Venezuela. This was his first “election.” During his seven-year term he brought about some improvements, particularly in roads and the army, not to mention acquiring immense properties, while the exiled Castro was losing his to former victims who were suing him in the Venezuelan courts. The constitution stated that a president could not be elected to succeed himself. Toward the end of his term, therefore, Gomez nominally resigned, put in a temporary figurehead, and had congress “elect” him again. At the same time he had a new constitution made in which there is no mention of reëlections, with the understanding that it was to come into force when he took the oath of office.