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$2.40 Martinis. On its face and pace, Venezuela is a fabulous country. From the ranks of oil-well derricks in the greasy waters of Lake Maracaibo and the "Christmas trees" of valves spotted across the surrounding scrubby, flat land, a great flood of oil pours into the silvered storage tanks of foreign oil companies, including the world's largest petroleum producer, Standard-controlled Creole Petroleum Corp. Hard-hatted workmen spin the valves that channel the flood to docks where tankers simmer in the sun and to refineries where wastes flare in smoky orange flames.
Caracas, 300 miles to the east, consumes the oil money with gaudy flamboyance. At night, searchlights turn the circular Hotel Humboldt to a tower of golden glow at the end of its cable car, 4,000 feet above the city on Mount Avila. Inside the red-plush walls of La Belle Epoque restaurant, the oil lawyers and the air-conditioner distributors hoist $2.40 martinis and down $20 dinners. Visiting businessmen snap on black ties and pad down the corridors of the jammed Hotel Tamanaco, bound for nightclubs where sleek performers dance the traditional, twirling, fast-stepping joropo to the sound of harps twanging like guitars.
By day, fleets of bulldozers and an army of sweating workmen chew at midtown Caracas to connect bending ribbons of concrete into a superhighway cloverleaf of supreme complexity. Even before sidewalks are in and the lawn is seeded, self-service elevators begin humming in the flat-fronted apartment buildings that shoot up steadily at the eastern end of the city's valley. On the slopes to the north and south, concrete flows into forms to make walls, patios, retaining walls and swimming pools for low, clean-lined mansions that can cost as much as $3,000,000. Overnight, packing-case houses with stone-weighted corrugated roofs rise on the hills that ring the city, as the ever-worsening shortage of housing forces slums down the hillsides toward the houses of the rich.
Away from the coast, Venezuela is a varied land of goat-ridden droughtland, snowy peaks, Amazonian jungle and the lofty, remote eastern mesas where Sir Walter Raleigh looked for El Dorado. Bone-chilled peasants tend their flocks of goats on the slopes of a spur of the Andes; cowboys ride through the tough, chest-high grass of the llanos—Venezuela's central prairie—driving herds of bony cattle before them. In one of the few spots in Venezuela that are radically changed—a cooperative sugar farm on the estate of a Pérez Jiménez crony long since fled—a harvester puts down his machete for a moment to talk about his life in a Venezuela freed of military dictatorship. "Before, I didn't have a chance," he says. "Now I can make a little money."