Oil — the Venezuelan Connection

Those are the bare bones of the life story of many a young man drawn to the promise of steady, well-paid work in a foreign land. But Venezuela wasn’t always foreign. When Trinidad was a department of the Spanish colony of Venezuela and Spanish was spoken on both sides of the Gulf, Port-of-Spain lived up to its name: it was the principal port from which cotton, cocoa and tobacco were shipped from Eastern Venezuela as well as the island of Trinidad, to Spain — or were smuggled, with more profit, to Britain or France.

Some plantation owners with property on either side of the Gulf thought of themselves as Venezuelans even while they chose to live in the cool, healthy valleys of the Northern Range, in Diego Martin, St Joseph, Maraval.

After the British conquest during the Napoleonic wars, Trinidad, as we have seen already, became a safe place for Venezuelan patriots to hide out when the tides of the Wars of Independence were running against them. We’ve seen, too that it was from Chacachacare that the first, successful revolt was launched and the armies supplied with men and war materials.

In the time of the "Caudillos" Venezuelans wanting to get rid their country of dictatorial government fled persecution at home to take refuge in Trinidad. Then, as English replaced Spanish as the official language in Trinidad, and due to the growing power and influence of the United States and the extent of the British Empire, many Venezuelan families, feeling their children would get a head start in life if they could speak and write English, sent their sons to school here for a British education.

Just as, in parts of the remote countryside of Trinidad, people spoke Spanish patois long after the rest of Trinidad forgot that language (until parang was revived to remind us of our Spanish heritage), anthropologists studying small communities on the Venezuelan shores of the Gulf of Paria met older people who still practised traditions and customs long abandoned in the rest of the country, but still very much alive in Trinidad.

When British and Dutch oil companies began prospecting for oil around Lake Maracaibo and the town of Cabimas in Western Venezuela, the oil industry was already well established in South Trinidad. The hunt for Venezuelan oil took almost ten years of continual disappointments — and a considerable amount of money. But the rewards for a find of "Black Gold," even in the early 1920s, were such that prospectors persisted in drilling.

Finally, on December 14, 1922 a well being drilled at Barroso, near the town of La Rosa, not far from Cabimas, erupted in spectacular fashion. Thick black oil gushed 200 feet into the air. News of the find spread like wildfire. It seems in no time at all Venezuelan peasants scratching a living from the land deserted their crops to head for the oilfields and a better life.

Writing about the politics of race in Venezuelan oil fields from 1920 to 1940, Professor Miguel Tinker Salas notes that: "News of the oil bonanza also attracted Americans and hundreds of musius, as Venezuelans called foreigners." The oil bonanza attracted roustabouts, roughnecks, riggers who came to Venezuela from the US to strike it rich in the oil industry.

The oil companies themselves might have Venezuelan names such as Standard Oil of Venezuela but the parent companies of these "newcomers" in the oil industry were in the US or Britain or Europe. Professor Tinker Salas points out that five companies involved in the Venezuelan oil industry had staging areas in Trinidad and Curacao where they hired labour.

Why did oil companies hire Trinidadians to work far from home in Venezuela when they were being besieged by Venezuelans all looking for work in the oil fields? The answer, of course, was language. The bosses all spoke English, the Venezuelan peasants didn’t — but Trinidadians, Tobagonians and Grenadians did.

Only someone who has struggled to make himself (or herself) understood when speaking a foreign language can appreciate the problems and the dangers that can arise, especially in an industry where misunderstandings and accidents can cause major disasters.

When one thinks of men going to work in the oilfields, one thinks straightaway of roustabouts and riggers in heavy overalls, boots, industrial gloves and safety helmets guiding drilling equipment into place, securing giant-sized locks and standing back to admire their work. There were Trinidadian roustabouts and riggers in plenty, however, the oil companies needed office staff as well as hands at the well head.

Professor Tinker Salas tells of Cecil Aleong (a good Trini Chinese name if ever there was one) who worked as a bookkeeper for Creole Petroleum for 29 years before retiring in the late 1950s. Eduardo Elcock worked for many years as a "nurse" in oil camps that had no doctors or clinics, and where he was known as "El Brujo" (the magician) because of his skills in using bush medicine to cure his patients.

Stephen Joseph, yet another Trinidadian, went to Venezuela in 1927 where he worked the rest of his life in the materials department of the metals shop in Creole Petroleum with fellow Trini, Theophilus Wickham Jones.

Few, if any, of those who emigrated to Venezuela to work for the oil companies knew more than a word or two, if that, of Spanish. In 1929 Gordon Wilman of Port-of-Spain landed in Venezuela knowing no Spanish at all yet he got a job straight away as a telephone operator in Lagunillas, then in the electrical department and later as a despatcher in the materials warehouse.

Many wives of US and British oil executives couldn’t speak Spanish and had no desire to learn the language. However, as wives of important men with positions to uphold in society — or at least in the oil camp itself — they couldn’t be expected to do their own housework in the heat and humidity of Maracaibo. To solve their domestic difficulties they came to Port-of-Spain to hire domestic help.

Bachelor establishments, too, preferred a housekeeper who could speak English. Gladys Jones came from Trinidad to keep house for five European bachelors sharing a house in Caribbean Petroleum oil camp.

Life in the oil camps was far from easy for a domestic servant. We’re told few houses had servants’ quarters; English-speaking housekeepers, cooks and laundresses imported from the Caribbean were expected to find their own accommodation, such as it was, in the shanty towns that grew up around the oil camps. Some drifted into prostitution, one, Dona Lola, ran a most successful brothel in Caripito.

Caribbean men didn’t abandon their ties to the islands; they formed cricket teams with one oil camp playing teams from another camp, eventually forming a league with championship tables and trophies for the winning team.

Although they lived and worked so long in Venezuela, those who could afford to do so and had kept in touch with their families, sent their children to school here and eventually retired back home to Trinidad. Others, who went to Venezuela as bachelors, married Venezuelan girls (or, in the case of unmarried domestic servants and office staff) Venezuelan men, raised families, and stayed to become naturalised citizens of Venezuela.

As happens so often when waves of immigrants flock to a country where they can find work or enjoy a better standard of living, tensions arose between Venezuelan workers and immigrants from the Caribbean. Government were concerned about the numbers of Asian and coloured workers.

Professor Tinker Salas relates that "in 1929 when the Government ‘officially’ ordered the expulsion of all Afro-Caribbean and Chinese The London Times reported that ‘The President of Venezuela has decided forthwith to prohibit coloured immigration into Venezuela,’ even when immigrants are provided with passports. Coloured foreigners already domiciled in the country are obliged to carry a certificate from local authorities."

Yet that did not deter Trinis from seeking work in Venezuela and some of those in authority winked at those, like Luis Lampp of Trinidad, who was working as a carpenter in Venezuela, and asked permission to have a friend join him in Maracaibo. Trinidadians continued to seek, and find work as roustabouts, as office and administrative staff, and in skilled occupations.

The Second World War put a brake on the flow of Trinidadians to the Venezuelan oilfields. Labour Unions agitating against foreigners made life unpleasant for many. Yet, with time, the wounds healed, Trinis were either assimilated — or returned home — like His Excellency Hector

Cassy Azocar, the second generation born of Caribbean immigrants in Venezuela grew up speaking Spanish as their first language while, perhaps maintaining ties with cousins in Trinidad - or not, as the case may be.

Sister Marie Therese Retout, gazing across the Gulf, found Venezuela so near, yet so far. One wonders whether those who resisted the siren call to work for black gold still keep in touch with those so near yet far away. Do ties of kinship still bind many a Trini family to cousins across the water who went to seek their fortunes in the oil camps of Venezuela?

Next week begins a series on the Second World War in Trinidad.