Those Who Stay

CARACAS, Venezuela — Over the past four years Venezuela has become practically synonymous with crisis. Images from the Caribbean nation depict drawn faces, lines for subsidized food, hospitals without supplies, and riots.

Tent cities have sprung up at the country’s borders with Colombia and Brazil. They are packed with weary travelers who are fleeing the country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world — though that fact can be easy to forget.

Hyperinflation has fueled their flight.The official value of the “bolívar fuerte,” as the Venezuelan currency is known, is 10 bolívars to the dollar; on the black market, which reflects the bolívar’s value on the street and international exchange, the rate reached 2 million to one this week.

The International Monetary Fund projects inflation to reach 13,000 percent by year’s end. These distortions and price controls have created an environment ripe for corruption. While some of the richest Venezuelans hide their wealth, as detailed in the Panama Papers, the country’s minimum wage earners must spend most of a month’s income on kitchen staples and still struggle to keep food on the table.

Thousands of young Venezuelans have left for cities with stronger economies and more opportunity — Lima, Peru; New York; Bogotá, Colombia; Barcelona, Spain — creating a rapidly growing diaspora.Many of those who remain are anchored by financial limitations and family obligations. Still others have chosen to hone their crafts in Caracas.

Juan Carlos Ramos, who goes by the nickname Koji, started his clothing brand, Era, in January 2016. He was a self-educated designer (hours of YouTube tutorials paid off) and business owner with few overhead costs, but inflation and weekly increases in the cost of materials made production difficult and breaking even nearly impossible. After that first year, protests broke out across Caracas, and Era went dark.

In early 2018, Ramos revived his brand of printed T-shirts and hand-painted jackets, emblazoned with names and quotations written in English that often speak to the complex context and urban tropical culture of Caracas: a denim jacket that says, “Revenge is Wild Justice”; a patch that reads. “Venezuela, fierce town.”

In the current economy he can make more selling these clothes directly to consumers on Instagram than he could making an hourly wage in most other industries.

On a hot afternoon at his home, Ramos bent over a sewing machine making a patch while his girlfriend, Ana Cartaya, prepared to give him a tattoo: a knife design in black line work.

He spoke about the future. “The dream would be to go somewhere and get to a point where I’m making enough money that I could come back here and live well, but everything,” Ramos said, trailing off, “everything is very complicated right now.”

Cartaya, 21, is a consummate multihyphenate — a fashion student, dancer, model and tattoo artist — still undecided about which to fully pursue. Her dance troupe stopped rehearsing a few months back, and she keeps busy with modeling, tattooing and school for now, but says she feels stunted by the lack of opportunities.

“I feel like I’m always reaching for something that I can’t have. I feel like I’m in a prison,” she said. “For a long time I’ve felt like I never could achieve any of what I could have achieved if I’d left a while ago.”

The sprawling, tense center of Caracas receded as people danced beneath multicolored string lights hanging from trees at a house overlooking the city. “I feel like there is more need than ever for parties,” said Maria Betania Chacin, the DJ, who goes by the name Mabe, from behind a set of turntables. “The people have to discharge all the tension.”

On this particular occasion, her tension was the loss of her truck, which had been stolen the previous night. “Now I need to work more than ever, and have all the more reason to distract myself,” she said.

A few days later, during an interview at the home studio she rents from a friend who left the country, Mabe talked about Venezuela’s push factors:the economy and the subsequent crime. “I think young people these days feel this enormous pressure that they have to graduate and get out of here because that’s all you hear,” she said. “The media are always repeating that here there is no future. I don’t share that opinion. That’s why I live here.”

At a gym in Altamira, an upscale neighborhood lined with tropical foliage in the affluent eastern part of Caracas, Carolina Jimenez and Luis Itanare were locked in an apparent stalemate as they wrestled on the floor during a training class for Brazilian jujitsu.

Jimenez, an international mixed martial arts champion, was the only woman in the room. Her sinewy body and quick movements kept Itanare, who is also her boyfriend, at bay. By the end of their training session both were glistening with sweat.

Later that day at Itanare’s tattoo studio, they watched through the window as an older woman fed a flock of blue and gold parrots on her balcony. Jimenez took photos of the birds with her phone. Despite the hardships of being a professional athlete here, she is quick to focus on the positive.

“One of the best things about being a professional athlete in Venezuela is the level and quality of the coaches,” Jimenez said. “Any day, training with a world champion of boxing or wrestling or other disciplines is at your fingertips. But on the other hand, the socioeconomic situation has forced a lot of athletes to abandon their training because of the lack of resources and sponsors.”

Last year, Jimenez won a major victory at Lady’s Fight Night in Poland, an important competition on the women’s mixed martial arts circuit, after running a successful crowdfunding campaign to cover the expenses of getting there.

Afterward she was signed by an agent, but the next steps for her career in this increasingly isolated country are uncertain. She trains twice a day and, for the time being, tries to stick to a high-protein diet in a country where people are increasingly living on yucca and pasta as the price of meat soars.

“A lot of people have to be more focused on looking for how to live than how to create,” said Yarua Camagni, a dancer with the Fundación Compañía Nacional de la Danza, during a rehearsal. She supplements her performance income by teaching classes in dance, Pilates and yoga. “Those who stay, continue and struggle out of love for their profession. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s possible to keep on dancing in Venezuela.”

In his studio, Itanare prepared to tattoo a design he has named “Barrio Imposible” on his friend Victor’s ankle. The name refers to Venezuela’s hillside communities where the homes of the working class stack together in a tapestry of colors and upward reaching shapes. His interpretations of the barrios in Caracas include staircases and structures that defy gravity, a world where García Lorca meets Escher.

He pulled out a book containing his recent work: “tropicornios,” where palm trees grow out of the foreheads of unicorns, and “ranchusos,” in which barrio-style “ranchos” become the handle of a “chusos,” or prison shanks, visual symbols of the country’s violence.

When asked whether he thinks he and Jimenez will leave, Itanare said, “For now, we don’t know. I have my studio, Caro has her training, anywhere else I could charge more but we’d also both be working two other jobs just to get by. Eventually maybe we’ll have to go, but we’ll have to wait and see.”