

“Let’s leave this clear,” Chavez said during a live broadcast, “Golf is a bourgeois sport” repeating bourgeois as if he were swallowing castor oil. Then he went on mocking the use of golf carts as a practice illustrating the sport’s laziness. Chavez has found a new target: golf. He says some golf courses could be better used for the poor. His nationalizations and asset seizures have gone far beyond the oil industry to include coffee roasters, cattle ranches and tomato-processing plants. The number of courses shut down in the last three years are nine. Chavez said when he questioned why Maracay had so many slums while the golf course of the state-owned Hotel Maracay, a decaying modernist gem built in the 1950s, stretch over about 74 acres of coveted real estate: “Just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit-bourgeois can go and play golf.” Venezuela’s top ally, Cuba, is going in the opposite direction, seeking to build ten new courses in a bid to raise tourist revenues. “China has more than 300 golf courses,” said Mr. Torres, the director of the Venezuelan Golf Federation, invoking another Communist country with which Venezuela has warm ties. Chavez said he had no plans to outlaw golf: “I respect all sports, but there are sports and there are sports. Do you mean to tell me this is a people’s sport? It is not.”
(CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller on Twitter and “Chavez Loyalits Push to Close Golf Courses,” by Simon Romero, The New York Times, 11 August 2009)