"Rafael Grooscors begins to walk in the letters. He will write beautiful poems, he will publish beautiful books. But he will always have in the best of his affection those poems to Bolivar, full of fervor for the subjects that better deserve the offer of the spirit. And as time goes by, his best poem will undoubtedly be the constancy he puts in the loyalty to those themes. Thus he will pick up the purest flags from the hands of those who have remained faithful to the youthful voice of the days of the 28th. Which is the same, for the poet and the patriot. Andrés Eloy Blanco. Cuernavaca, February 1950". I give you his first poems, which should remain for posterity as the greatest proof of love that a Venezuelan can have for his nationality (see in Spanish Three Songs to the Homeland and Bolívar, in https://tinyurl.com/mrx5fmz2).
Thus concluded the so-called "Poet of the People", Andrés Eloy Blanco, the poet of all Venezuelan poets, 71 years ago, the presentation of the first poems of the twenty-year-old poet Rafael Grooscors Caballero, who yesterday gave his soul to the Creator. I could not but bid farewell to my dear friend and Master of Venezuelan politics Rafael Grooscors Caballero, Don Rafa, as I affectionately called him, to begin by placing first his condition of poet and politician, which is how he called himself, and who was tutored since his early youth by the hand of those who were the builders of the Venezuelan democratic ideology.
That connection with Venezuela's political past that Don Rafael Grooscors Caballero meant to me was more than unique. I knew that at some point he would leave us because of his advanced age and ailments but I always hoped that God would leave him a little longer in this world because I selfishly enjoyed immensely the gatherings and conversations with that character that transported me to a different Venezuela, when political leaders and leaderships truly sought the welfare of citizens through ideals that they defended with their lives. Don Rafa was one of them when he started his political career at a very young age.
In a certain way Don Rafa also reminded me a lot of my father, who shared with me in recent years his political adventures and his invaluable advice translated into pills of knowledge. There was no article for which Don Rafa did not give me an advice, a comment loaded with deep political and human knowledge. How I will miss that from now on!
The hustle and bustle of losing family and friends for various reasons in these hard times, makes it more difficult to get through the tragedy in which we live, and the way I find to cope is to share as I have done on other occasions with other extraordinary friends who have gone, a small piece of the experience lived with that very special human being who was Don Rafael Grooscors Caballero and part of what I knew of him and his perspective of the political life of Venezuela.
I met Don Rafa in this struggle, as I have met many valuable people since I started writing: he simply wrote me an email without knowing me more than 10 years ago, on July 22, 2011...: "I have just read your brave, forceful, almost heroic article about the violation of our privacy that is being attempted with the next population and housing census already announced. In this regard, I am enclosing a text of my work, approached from another point of view, but related to the same subject. It would be necessary to organize, truly, as indignant people, a national crusade against this census and that should be manifested by NOT OPENING the door and NOT RESPONDING to the official pollsters. NO TO THE CENSUS, NO TO THE TASCON LIST, NO TO CUBAN PENETRATION. It is a question of sovereignty that involves us all. Rafael Grooscors Caballero". I replied that he was not a "hero" but a citizen who knew his rights. From that moment a friendship began that we deepened and that does not end today with his death, but is reaffirmed in the values that I was able to appreciate and admire and that I will treasure until the day I have to leave too, and see people like him who are still needed in Venezuela and have left, perhaps before their time.
When I first presented the Proyecto País Venezuela to Mr. Rafael Grooscors, he was already back with his unique thesis entitled "The Rebellion of the Regions": "The rebellion of the regions would save Venezuela, prey, since Independence, of a Caracas without productive capacity and that lives, luxuriously, on the effort of the other 25 million Venezuelans that inhabit the interior.... A strategy of struggle that awakens the conscience of "regionality" in function of a democratic union, pointing out all that an independent and autonomous State can achieve, building its own means of advancement and transformation, its infrastructure, its use of comparative advantages, the disposition of its people to conceive the future and convince themselves that they are going to assume it as their own, "beating" "the one next door", competing with productivity and success, would replace the weakened submission of the "province" to the dictates of the ruling tribes in the capital, where in each one hides a "caudillo" who will require the peace and silence of "the others" to take for himself, absolutely, the absolute power of the Colony in democratic disguise". (see in Spanish The Rebellion of the Regions, in http://elrepublicanoliberal.blogspot.com/2013/10/rafael-grooscors-caballero-la-rebelion.html).
When the title of that memorable article was adopted by a civil society movement, when I asked him about it, Don Rafa told me emphatically: "What is important is not the phrase, but the "thesis". The Rebellion of the Regions is the new Federal War, but really won by those who conceive of federalism as a union made up (the conformation) by a succession of "nation-states" with more future than past and doing in the present what they could not do before..... I don't defend a phrase; I defend a thesis." And that was completely true and gave stature to whoever said it. The background of that thesis, beyond the phrase, was fully explained in the Prologue that Don Rafa wrote for the ANCO Project, The Great Change that the Original National Constituent Alliance, ANCO published in January 2021. (see in Spanish The Great Change, A Proposal for the Refoundation of Venezuela, Pág. 7, in https://ancoficial.blogspot.com/p/documentos-fundamentales.html).
One of the aspects that distinguished Don Rafael Grooscors was his in-depth knowledge of the electoral issue, which we always talked about in our long sessions given his condition of having been Advisor to the Presidency of the CNE in times of democracy. Once he wrote to me about what Venezuelans already know about the electoral system of Castro-Chavismo-Madurism: "Smarmatic did not exist in 2003 when the date of Chávez's Referendum was set for August 2004. Smarmatic was "born" precisely for that purpose, taking advantage of the Italian Olivetti facilities in Boca Raton, Florida. Olivetti participated in the bidding we made in February 1998, to which I was intimately linked as Advisor to the Presidency of the CNE. The system proposed by Olivetti at that time was "too automatic" to leave the manual system and I let their representative know so. The INDRA system, Spanish, with photographic memory but without dispensing with the use of the voter's vote (excuse the redundancy) with the idea of checking the legitimacy of the minutes, was and IS superior to all the "automations" and SAFER than the simply manual one. That is why it won the bid. Apart from that, Olivetti's machines were precisely the ones used in most of Europe for "games of chance", such as the lottery, totally manipulable at the convenience of their operators, from the software to the printing and transmission of the corresponding minutes. .... Smarmatic was created to make cheating possible and for Ollivetti to earn a few reais...".
But what really distinguished him was his deep love for every corner of Venezuela and his total attachment to our federal project: "Caracas, majestic single seat of public powers. Relegation or subordination of the province or the regions. If we were able to overcome the cultural limitations with singular opinion campaigns, from State to State, we would radically change the cultural positioning of opinion in the face of the challenge of usurpation. A new popular independence. The "Rebellion of the Regions", a phrase that has become so popular that even the traitors in Congress tried to appropriate it. A new popular independence. Interpreting the physical reality of each State, disclosing its scope with a rational exploitation, we could paint a Venezuela, if you will, opposite to the one we have been historically managing since 1810. Without denying Bolivar. Nor Romulo. Nor to the social-democratic intelligentsia. Thinking of the confluence of the Orinoco with the Cauta and the Caroní. In the Apure and the Arauca. In the Uribante-Caparo. In Lake Maracaibo. In the Delta and its tourist potential. All along the coast towards the Caribbean. And all that there is, here and there under the national soil. A proposal of rebellion, driving for borders of different borders, that would go towards the world, leaving to Caracas what corresponds to Caracas. The automation of the regions. The federal governments...". It is impossible not to admire that passion for a new Venezuela at the age of 90 when he wrote that.
When I met him when he was 81 years old, he wrote to me because he did not know my age: "Life passes...and it weighs. And to the extent that it weighs, death arrives and perches.... to see life passing by".....". Already the poet was beginning to be aware of the end of his life and the urgent need to transmit everything he could of that enormous intellectual capital he had. In 2019 he wrote something that left me marked: "In youth everything is abundance, until one rejects it. Later come the shadows and the wall that stops you. When silence is what accompanies you...beware of death.".
I wanted to believe that it was not physical death that Don Rafa was referring to, but to inconsequence, which is the living death of the spirit. Don Rafael Grooscors Caballero transcended beyond this life. His ideas and his deep love for Venezuela transformed him into an open book for a new generation of Venezuelans that will be born and take the reins of Venezuela after this darkness. He once told me: "Sometimes I wake up earlier and I see the stubbornness of the sun when it dawns...". A song to the stubbornness that united us for a free Venezuela, with a common cause and a road ahead. I thank God and the Universe for giving me 10 years of friendship with Don Rafael Grooscors Caballero, a Master after my father, to put into practice some teachings that I never thought I would have at this stage of my existence. It will be a great commitment Don Rafa, which I hope I can keep as you until the last day of my life...
Caracas, November 26, 2021
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