How Venezuela Became One Big Casino
Photographs by Lexi Parra
The monkey entered the casino after midnight. It clung to the arm of a short man with a military haircut. The man stood and watched the action at the roulette tables while the monkey, a capuchin with a brush cut like its owner’s, swiveled its head from side to side. A waiter fed the animal a cold french fry. Once, between spins of the wheel, the monkey leaped onto the baize table and then back into its owner’s arms.
It was a Friday night, in an affluent Caracas neighborhood called Las Mercedes, and inside the casino, which had opened a few weeks earlier, gamblers pulled crisp $100 bills off thick rolls of American cash. The same silent older women who populate casinos everywhere fed $10 and $20 bills into video slot machines. The national currency, the bolivar—named after The Liberator, Simón Bolívar, the country’s anti-imperialist founding father—was nowhere in sight. A group of men roared over wins and losses at a roulette table where the brightly colored chips cost $1 each. What passed for the high rollers in the place convened at another roulette table, where the croupier swept away as much as $1,000 in chips after each spin.
I struck up a conversation with a man who had geometric tattoos on his right forearm. We talked about how the casinos had been banned for years by Venezuela’s self-proclaimed socialist government. I asked why, all of a sudden, in the midst of the country’s catastrophic economic collapse, the government had allowed casinos to operate again. He was a gambling man—perhaps he’d had a bad night—and he gave a wry laugh behind his blue paper face mask. “For our loss,” the man said.
When I left the casino I stood for a moment on the sidewalk out front and looked up at the three large video screens mounted high on the building’s brick facade. A computer animation played over and over. It showed packs of $100 bills raining from the sky until they filled up the screens.
This is the new Venezuela, where games of chance substitute
