Tomas Sancio has a superb piece noting the strong and growing presence of Latin American popular culture into mainstream American culture. He takes a screenshot from a Web site to show his point. I am always fond of telling my Latin American friends that when they come to big cities here in the states, they can happily get away with not a word of English and listen to all the same music here that they might listen to there. It’s new. It’s the reality. It’s beautiful. It’s perfectly dynamic. And it’s a revolution.

Which is why Hugo Chavez’s weird, insular insistence on ‘cultural purity’ – in a nation like Venezuela which is a bigtime melting pot anyway – is so hideous. The thuggish dictator just doesn’t get it. He’s mandating that Venezuelan radio stations only play a certain kind of Venezuelan music. No gringo stuff. No mixing of styles. He doesn’t want change, he wants everything to stay the same. He doesn’t understand that cultures are living, breathing things, things that must be fed and nourished from outside. He just wants to put all of Venezuelan culture into a box and dig a hole in the ground and bury it – as if it is a commodity – for safekeeping. There is no surer way to kill a culture. As the French are learning the hard way. Because culture is not a commodity, it is soul.

Hugo Chavez is advancing and accelerating Venezuela’s coming revolution through this ridiculous tinpot micromanaging repression. But we Americans know something: Once American culture becomes forbidden, it takes on a cultural premium. Suddenly everyone wants bootleg American stuff. We saw it in Eastern Europe. We saw it in the Soviet Union. We saw it in postwar Vietnam. We saw it in the Arab world. Any place that has a tyranny and bans American goods puts a premium on them. Hugo Chavez has just shot himself in the butt.