A baseball title unleashes the happiness Venezuelans kept bottled up for years

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — There’s happiness, and then there’s Venezuelan happiness. It feels sweeter. Louder. Deeper.

Maybe because it doesn’t arrive as often. Or because it has been repressed by security forces and self-censored to avoid jail. Or because it seems collectively and individually unattainable.

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But the nation felt it Wednesday. Its people cried, yelled, danced, hugged and drank after Venezuela’s 3-2 victory over the United States in the World Baseball Classic final the previous night brought out the emotion.

“We hadn’t expressed this happiness that we want to shout,” hairdresser Deyanira Machado said outside a beauty salon in Caracas, the capital.

Unlike so much here, the score on televisions across the country was final. It was not going to change in the coming minutes or days. It was not subject to interpretation. And the young and old, politically active or not, rich and poor, exhaled after holding their breath for years.

“We had that happiness stored away to unleash it properly one day, like last night, and even better than last night,” Machado said.

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The victory arrived after two dizzying months for Venezuelans.

They started the year seeing their authoritarian president of almost 13 years, Nicolás Maduro, spirited away in the night by the U.S. military and emerging handcuffed in New York City. Then they saw the White House work with ruling-party loyalists, not the political opposition, to try to turn the country around.

While thousands of Venezuelans abroad celebrated Maduro’s fall, nobody here dared to publicly express even a hint of approval. Brutal government repression, particularly after the 2024 presidential election, had taught them to restrain themselves from expressing facts or emotions that could be considered antagonistic.

Happiness, or dissent, was policed. People who celebrated what ample credible evidence showed to be a resounding win for the opposition candidate became government targets after electoral authorities declared Maduro the winner without presenting evidence to back their claim. Social media posts and WhatsApp statuses were…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/baseball-title-unleashes-happiness-venezuelans-080714973.html

Author : REGINA GARCIA CANO

Publish date : 2026-03-19 08:07:00

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