By Hugo Chávez Frías

Today, November 8, 2009, is the 85th anniversary of the death in prison of Pedro Pérez Delgado, called by the peoples of the immense plains “the last horse rider.”

That is the way my memories are going to run over in today's Lines. Memories merge, though, with the present history, the living history that beats in the heart of the Homeland.

Today, after almost half a century, I vividly remember the day I heard it, when playing in the backyard verged by the forest of big mango trees through which one could join the black road in the distance.

That was the big house of my great-grandmother, Marta, away, in the banks of the Caño 'e Mata River, in the border of the old forest of Mijagual that lets itself go in the arms of the impetuous Apure River.

Yes, we heard it clear. We were a group of 6 to 10 year old children: Adrián, Guillermo, Chiche, Adán, Nacho… and me, one of the youngest, with the blond jumble curly hear, I was called “bachaco”; another “bachaquito”, to say the truth; in those plains all races mixed.

We heard it from the kitchen, the place where the adults of the family, among them my parents, cooked, had coffee and talked. It was sudden. “That was an assassin,” somebody said. They talked about Pedro, my mother's grandpa. Pedro Pérez, Maisanta. Pedro Pérez Delgado.

I dragged that condemn for many years, “that was an assassin,” and I never new why. I always felt that burden on my shoulders, like a thorn in mi children heart.

I felt alleviated when I heard my Godfather, Eligio Piña, tell his old stories, in his unforgettable chair in the corner of “El Llanero” street. He said that a warrior lived in Sabaneta, few blocks from “Madre Vieja”. The warrior was said to ride a black horse calles “Bala,” and to have gone away to Apure, rebel against General Gómez, who governed from Caracas. He was called Maisanta or the American. Once he, mi godfather, told me, when I was rushing to sell spiders in “Calle Real”: Hey bachaquito, through your veins flows the blood of Maisanta. Your mother is daughter of Rafael Infante, one of the sons of the Black Horse Warrior. “That was a revolutionary!”

I run over Calle Real and when I asked mamá Rosa whether he was an assassin or a revolutionary warrior, she told me that many things were said and that at the end no body new the truth.

Well, almost fifty years have passed and life gave me the chance to find the truth:

¡That was a revolutionary warrior!

Today, we use the words of Fidel: Maisanta, history will absolve you!

II

Man, woman, youngster, boy, girl, you compatriot who read me. I want to invite you, thoughtful as I am, under the torrential rain of this afternoon, to place ourselves in the perspective of time. By this, I recall Mézáros and his book The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century.

The challenge we have to face today is really big, using the words of Mézáros, because it is about articulating, from the theory but mainly from the concrete practice of the people's life as a collective constituted by individuals, within “the limited time of the individuals and the radically unlimited time of humanity”

It has been proved a thousand times: the individuals or groups of individuals possessed by the so called logic of capital, are unable to see beyond a short-term perspective and the egotistical view that places the EGO and the PRESENTIS over the US and the future in construction.

Only the consciousness (and the consciousness as for Victor Hugo “the cumulus of science in ourselves”), frees the human been from the tyranny of the “time with no future.”

It can also be said that: there is a force as powerful as consciousness that is called love, in the words of Christ, when we love one another, the human being is able to get over the miseries of egoism and the chains Short-termism.

Today, November 2009, it is necessary to be conscious that we are just in the middle of this constitutional term.

In only one month, three years will have passed from that overwhelming victory in the presidential elections of 2006. In January 2010, we will begin the second half of the term. Years 2010, 2011 and 1012 will be a powerful offensive that will permit us to continue solving the numerous problems that still affect Venezuela.

They will be three years of battle, for the continuity of the elevation of life level of the whole people, fulfilling its most profound needs.

That will only be possible, I repeat, through Socialism.

In the perspective of historical time and its challenge, this, your government, our government, will continue deploying with you, the heat of the social spirit, with the unbeatable fuel of people's love, facing all the difficult tasks coming along in the way.

That is the essential objective of the socialist revolution, to give every one greatest possible amount of happiness, as Bolivar said.

Today, Sunday, we will be, for instance, in the state of Portuguesa an important number of houses to community of that state of the plains. They represent a part of amore than 80,000 new houses that the revolution is building so far.

Housing for our people!

Big 70 and 80 squared meter apartments, with all the services and a very human urbanization, for less than 84,000 dollars, less of the half of the prices in the capitalist system. Moreover, the government subsidizes part of the cost at an interest rate of 4.5% payable in a 30 year term...

You complain that you neighbor received the house first, well, the answer is in the consciousness and the challenge we face as the burden of our historical time!

And the answer is also in the government, with the boosting of housing programs and the increase of the efficiency and revolutionary quality.

Maisanta, it is a lot!!

Maisanta, we shall overcome!

Hugo Chávez Frías has been the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela since taking office in February of 1999.

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