cuba 2.0, publicación digital del PDC-Cuba

Anderson y Chávez en el Palacio de Miraflores, en febrero de 2008.

El periodista estadounidense, redactor de la revista The New Yorker y autor de celebrados libros sobre actualidad internacional, entrevistó en más de una ocasión al fallecido gobernante venezolano y ha seguido de cerca a la "revolución bolivariana" desde sus inicios. En esta conversación con La Segunda, Anderson anticipa un pacto político de conveniencia entre Nicolás Maduro y Diosdado Cabello, estima que la situación económica puede generar tensiones en el chavismo, cree que se notará más el alto perfil de los militares y asegura que Chávez dejó al país "al borde de una grieta, si es que no de un abismo".

El viaje era a una cumbre regional en República Dominicana, pero como tantas otras veces, el avión presidencial de Hugo Chávez hizo una improvisada escala en La Habana antes de regresar a Venezuela.

JOHANNESBURG.- Twenty years ago, I visited South Africa and got lost. I set out from my hotel in Durban in search of a small black college, where some leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) party were meeting before the country’s first post-apartheid elections. I drove around Durban’s white suburbs for hours, looking for a building that was not on my map because, technically, it was not in Durban. It was in KwaZulu, one of the black "homelands" that existed alongside but legally separate from the white neighborhoods. When I stopped for directions, nobody I asked had ever heard of the college, even though it was only a few miles away.

South Africa is so different today as to be unrecognizable. Living restrictions are gone, neighborhoods that were once all white are integrated, the homelands are no more. At a Johannesburg mall, black and white shoppers buy sneakers and eat frozen yogurt together without caring that such a thing was once unthinkable. In newly prosperous Soweto, Nelson Mandela’s house is a museum crowded with black and white tourists. Outside Pretoria, a black guide showed me around the less-crowded "Great Trek" monument, built in 1937 as a shrine to white Afrikaner supremacy. "It is a difficult history," he agreed. "But we have to know all of it."