Cathy Ramos

5 June

The day is being rounded up. There is a deceleration, a slow down of tasks coming up. Peace, one hopes, or rather the promise of peace. A household knows no peace, there is always another thing to do. Yet, if it would not be for that time, that time when things get calmer, I could not live. Even if it’s more a wish than reality, I need those pauses and slow downs, perhaps to believe that me and my days are -or will become- different and better. For example, of late I have started to play guitar, and the day slow down is my cue to take a break and go through the scales, the few songs that begin to take shape.

Guitar. I take my guitar by the neck, and I always, or almost always, remember Cathy Ramos. She had that way of getting her guitar at the end of the day, that softness. Cathy was always busy, she always organised herself and us and our dreams and projects and work and life. She seemed always be capable of one more task that would make the life of us easier and kinder. Also, she always could find that moment in the day, when things got slower and calmer, to play guitar.

I am not sure that I can remember from Cathy one specific anecdote or tale that makes more sense that any other, I am not sure if I can describe her well and accurately. I suppose that it is like that with the persons that have formed us. They are interwoven in our lives of today, in who I am now, even if we have not see them for years and years.

I met Cathy in my first year of university, back in 1986. Me coming from a left wing family escaped from the Argentinian genocide of the seventies, I could not but participate in the student union. Sooner that I realised I was member of a student political party, called Formate y Lucha (Educate yourself and Fight). People around it understood that in the university it made sense to study, and to study well. Our country needed professional people as much as it needed workers, so politics at student time was to study first. Still our group was corresponsable for introducing teacher’s evaluations, curriculum changes, student services and many other reforms along the years of their existence. This, I learned from Cathy, the organiser. And I also learned, even if I was much much later able to put it in practice, that you can not lead and organise people if you don’t care for them, at least as deeply as Cathy cared for us.

So I remember, for example, her explanation on using a vegetable slicer to prepare the salads that we sold in the salad bar that we created to serve a better lunch to our fellow students. I also remember her assigning places in her car to the ones of us that were too new to know to ask to be included in the weekend outings. I remember a sunday morning, waking up in a beach, and seeing Cathy already having started a fire, busy with cooking arepas and scrambled eggs for all of us.

And most certainly I remember her playing guitar at the falling of the day, singing with a voice that the years have not erased.

Eventually I switched from being a student of physics to graduate as a biologist, like her. I worked for a PhD in Switzerland and stayed in The Netherlands, looking from the distance the slow and tragic destruction of the country that saved my family and educated me. Cathy didn’t go anywhere. All these years she gave her days to every government that would accept her. She worked, indeed, for the first cabinet that Chavez put together. Not as a high level politician, but as a great organiser. Eventually, being first row witness of the incompetence of the Chavismo, she started working for Vente Venezuela, nowadays the better positioned opposition party. There she did not become a public figure neither, but a organiser in the ground. I do not share a single comma from the ideals of Vente Venezuela, but I know that the work of Cathy supported young people studying abroad, I know that she helped organise many -many- of the communities of that disgraced land of grace, Venezuela.

That is why I know that the last cruelty of the regime that rules Venezuela today is only that, a gross cruelty.

Cathy has been detained and maintained in an undisclosed location, without access to family, friends or lawyer by the government. A government that days after her disappearance declared that her association with a well known and reputed Human Rights organisation -PROVEA- qualify her as a terrorist. In the eyes of this government, human rights are source of terror.

Yet we know. We know that what really terrifies the regime that rules Venezuela is the existence of people like Cathy. People that love and care for others, people that is capable, through simple hard and coherent work, of organising others.

And that is why Cathy Ramos is a terrorist. Because the Venezuelan government is terrified of her.