Did You Know This About Venezuelan Fathers?

You often hear wonderful things said about Venezuelan mothers (I am the first who never stops praising them), and people say that Venezuela is a matriarchal society, that mothers provide for their families on their own, and so on. But while praising them, some people have the bad habit of speaking ill of our fathers, lumping them all together and saying they are “lazy, drunks, womanizers, irresponsible” and so on.

So today, with Father’s Day only a few days away, I am going to stand up for the many men who have known how to be excellent fathers and grandfathers.

Since it will be very hard to sum up the virtues of our fathers and grandfathers in a single article, I am going to divide it into two parts. The first will cover the forties through the eighties; the second will speak of the fathers and grandfathers of the turbulent nineties up to now.

If I wrote only about the generation of immigrant fathers who came to Venezuela in the forties and fifties, I could put together a book of more than a thousand pages. Those Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Lebanese and others who came by ship to save their families from war, hunger and suffering… and who ended up being a fundamental part of building our nation.

The great majority of them came with no money and no schooling. They came with great needs, and with a unique intelligence and capacity for work, which they used to create fabulous businesses and companies out of nothing.

They showed us that you don’t need much schooling to help build a country; and yet they wanted study to come first for their children and grandchildren, because they knew very well that with discipline and study you can go very far.

Their greatest joy came on the day they saw their children graduate from our wonderful universities, and I imagine that at that moment (when they needed their handkerchiefs) a film must have played in their minds of all the hard work they went through to see their children graduate. There are no words a child or grandchild can say to thank them for what they did!

Besides those immigrant fathers, thousands of native-born Venezuelan fathers did the same. Those who could not study themselves, but worked as hard as anyone so they can say today, with great pride, that their children are professionals. There were more privileged fathers who were able to send their children to study abroad, and thanks to that, a wealth of knowledge came to Venezuela (in medicine, science, art and more), which they later passed on to millions of young people in the excellent Venezuelan universities that have been our great pride, and where the children of EVERYONE have been able to study.

Those fathers also taught their children something even more important: values. Those “heads of the family” showed by example what good manners, effort, perseverance, responsibility, honesty, sobriety, respect, love and the value of faith were…

And what can I say about the fathers and grandfathers who fought against the dictatorship and who, from prison or exile, wrote true historical and educational testaments to their wives, their children and their country!

They fought like titans (regardless of prison, torture and humiliation) so that the new generations could live in a better nation.

Years later came the fathers from Colombia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and elsewhere, who showed their great love for work, for their families and for Venezuela.

Our country has been blessed, and built, by thousands of fathers who have given the best of themselves to their wives, their children and their homeland, whether by birth or by adoption. And they love Venezuela so much, so very much, that for many it has taken blood, sweat and tears even to think of leaving here, from the turbulent nineties up to now, which I will write about next.