Diplomacy and superstition seldom go together, but it is tempting to wonder if fate ordained that Fidel Castro and Bernardo Álvarez Herrera died within a few hours of each other. In all the years that I spent in Washington as this newspaper's representative writing on foreign affairs for the better part, there were two resident diplomats there whom I admired the most. One was Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who was the kaleidoscopic ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States of America for an incredible 22 years. The other was Bernardo Álvarez Herrera (picture), who almost single-handedly prevented relations between the US and Venezuela from falling into the abyss that relations between Washington and Havana descended into in the 1960s, depths from which they did not recover for half a century.
An erudite professor who easily made the transition to diplomacy as Hugo Chávez's long-time ambassador to the US, Bernardo, 60, died on Thursday night less than 24 hours before Castro's death last week ended an era in diplomacy, the effects of which were felt across the globe when I was growing up. Bernardo's house on Washington's Embassy Row was a magnet for leftists, gays, lesbians, free-thinkers, artists, poets, progressive film-makers and anarchists in the George W. Bush era, when "liberal" was a pejorative term and no effort was spared to criminalize homosexuality.
Tariq Ali, hero of the "New Left" in the turbulent 1960s, youthful as ever now in his 70s, passionately spoke in praise of democracy taking root in Latin America in the new millennium in the "Bolivarian Hall", a portion of his house, which Bernardo converted into a venue for such meetings, beautiful concerts and art exhibitions. In this portion of Bernardo's house, I once met an American Catholic priest who gave up his vestments in protest against church policies in Latin America. He was later picked up by the Associated Press as its correspondent in Caracas because he knew so well the impoverished barrios of the Venezuelan towns where the Bolivarian revolution once brought hope and new life for the people. That those hopes now lie in ruins and ashes make no difference to the excitement of those days for a foreign correspondent.
Howsoever hard the Bush administration tried to get rid of Bernardo from Washington, they could not succeed. Bush declared Bernardo persona non grata and gave him only a couple of days to leave the US in 2008 after he had completed an unusually long term of five years as ambassador. Two Venezuelan diplomats were in my house having dinner when Bernardo called to cheerfully announce that Bush had expelled him. Like the Indophile British journalist, Mark Tully, during the Emergency, when he was expelled by Indira Gandhi, Bernardo said he was not going anywhere for very long. He left the country for home, of course, as protocol required, but was back in Washington soon again as Chávez's ambassador. In fact, Chávez never replaced him and did not even bother to name another ambassador.
It was Barack Obama's turn to expel him a second time, in 2010. I was present on more than one occasion at that time when officials from the Obama administration told him that they were doing so reluctantly because Chávez had left them with no option. The Venezuelan president had expelled the US envoy, Patrick Duddy, charging Duddy with plotting a conspiracy against the Bolivarian revolution. In addition, Chávez made it clear that agrément would be refused for Duddy's successor. Once again, Bernardo told us, his friends who were sad to see him leave Washington, that he would be back with us soon. Chávez posted Bernardo as his ambassador in Madrid: Spain is among the three most important foreign-policy priorities for Venezuela, the other two being the US and Cuba.
I did not see Bernardo after that, but I knew he was back in Washington, this time as Venezuela's ambassador to the Organization of American States, which, like the United Nations, is a multilateral body where the US state department cannot decide accreditation of ambassadors as a bilateral matter.
At the time of his first expulsion, coincidentally on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it could be reasonably surmised on a matter of scale, that Bernardo was more popular across America than the country's own president, George W. Bush.
In the last quarter of 2008, as many as 75 per cent of Americans disapproved of Bush, according to Gallup, which has been continuously monitoring the president's popularity. In that year, especially in the bitterly cold winter months of January and February, Bernardo constantly travelled to inner cities along the length and breadth of the US to be gratefully received by poor Americans because of a free heating oil programme that was conceived when he was ambassador. It was promptly approved by Chávez.
Many Americans were sad to see Bernardo go in 2008 because at that time, exactly half of the states in the US were availing themselves of the Venezuelan free heating oil programme for those who would otherwise have been freezing in their homes in successive winters. In the poor New York borough of Bronx alone, where the US Congressman, José Serrano, took Chávez in 2005 to observe the conditions of America's poor people, 75,000 residents stayed warm in winters because they got free heating oil from Venezuela at the apex of this programme.
A master stroke was to persuade Joseph Patrick Kennedy II, eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy, to head the free heating oil programme for poor Americans through a non-governmental organization, Citizens Energy Corporation. Because Joe Kennedy was a one-time Congressman from Massachusetts and also nephew of John F. Kennedy, the programme had credibility. Financial muscle - rather, oil muscle - for the programme was provided by Citgo Petroleum, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., known universally only by its acronym of PDVSA. Bernardo always insisted on projecting Citgo's identity as an American oil company, underplaying its Venezuelan ownership, at the same time, claiming credit for its successes and its well-publicized initiatives in corporate social responsibility.
When relations between the Bush administration and Chávez's presidential palace were at its nadir, Bernardo was self-effacing in Washington, but pushed Citgo forward into soft diplomacy. The oil company organized art exhibitions, which seemed to be above politics, but had a subtle message that caught the attention of the American people and endeared them to Venezuela, notwithstanding its politics.
Bernardo's great strength was that he could put the foreign ministry in Caracas in its place and go directly to Chávez to get things done. At the diplomatic mission that he headed in Washington, he laterally inducted diplomats - Venezuelans who knew America instead of allowing career diplomats from Caracas who did not even speak English to be posted in the US by way of dispensing patronage by the mandarins of the foreign office. One such recruit was Patricia Abdelnour, who headed the cultural wing of the embassy. She studied music in famous conservatories in New York and Boston and was part of America's music scene when Bernardo recruited her during his first tenure in Washington.
It helped that she had a revolutionary pedigree as well. Her father, the late Héctor Abdelnour Mussa, was a Venezuelan army officer who flew a plane packed with arms to Fidel Castro in 1958 as he prepared to give the final push for his revolution. Fidel, Che Guevara and their comrades used those arms in the final battle that led to the exile of the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, on New Year's Day in 1959.
Enriched by this diplomatic experience, Patricia later became the chief organizer for overseas programmes of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, the most potent Venezuelan instrument of soft diplomacy during the lifetime of Chávez. When she brought the orchestra to Kennedy Center in Washington during one of worst phases of diplomatic spats between Chávez and Obama, even those hard core American conservatives who wanted to crush the Bolivarian revolution with American power queued up for tickets to see Gustavo Dudamel, the famous Venezuelan violinist and director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conduct an evening's programme. The power of soft diplomacy!
