When will the Lights go out in Venezuela?
My friend Jose tells me that the electrical outages haven’t so far had too great an impact on him and his family in Merida, Venezuela. I’d asked if the food in his refrigerator spoiled more quickly and he laughed. “Well, you know the ‘fridge stays cold for a while without electricity,” he said. “And besides, these days, there’s very little in the fridge.” He’d just come from spending eleven hours in a line: from 3 a.m. until 2 p.m., to get just two bags of flour, the first he’d had in some two weeks. Food was clearly a bigger concern than lack of electricity.
