Thursday, August 13, 2009
(photo: Lotus Head)
Golf is not proletarian enough for socialist leader Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. In a televised rant last Sunday against the sport, Chavez said “golf is a bourgeois sport,” which prompted supporters of the president to close down two of the country’s best-known golf courses, in Maracay and in the coastal city of Caraballeda. The course closings were not the first in the country, which has seen its golf courses dwindle in number from 28 to 18, many of which were located in oil regions where Americans used to work before Chávez began his anti-U.S. campaign.
Julio Torres, director of the Venezuelan Golf Federation, has been beside himself over Chávez’s ideological crusade against golf. He points out that Cuba is allowing Canadian and European investors to build as many as 10 new courses in that socialist country, and that China has more than 300 golf courses spread out across its Communist territory.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
(by Simon Romero, New York Times)
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