Chávez should have stayed home where there’s a disaster brewing. His country is developing a striking resemblance to the Libya of 20 years ago, when that oil-rich country practically starved. Back then, another firebrand revolutionary was eager to rally his people – in the name of Pan-Arabism, rather than Chávez’s Pan-Latinism. Muammar al-Qaddafi was exporting revolution, wearing the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, ever popular anti-American mantle.

But the similarities reach far beyond ideology.

As was the case in Libya, while its leader prances around in symbolic outfits and poses, Venezuela is falling apart. After eight years in power, Chávez has yet to use his country’s huge oil revenues to invest in infrastructure. And at the same time capital, both foreign and local, is either fleeing or being ejected. It takes no more than a day in Venezuela to see the problems.

I had not visited the country in several years, and although I had heard the claims of the anti-Chávez crowd, I saw the situation for myself. The similarities to a Libya visit I made almost exactly 20 years ago were eerie. Upon my arrival at the Caracas airport, the up escalator was out of order – making it tough to carry heavy luggage to the next floor. On my attempted flight to Maracaibo, the airport gate signs were active but none was even remotely accurate, neither for destination nor time. Gate assignments were changing by word of mouth. Announcements were made only in Spanish, again echoes of the Arabic-only announcements at the Tripoli airport then.

I asked about an ATM machine and the airline agent looked at me with incredulity. “You want to change dollars?” And then and there he offered me 3,000 Bolivars to the dollar, way above the official 2,150. Soon I found out he had actually short-changed me. The going rate is 4,000 and last month went as high as 5,000.

While the official inflation rate is 20 percent, it is probably a lot higher. For food items, especially staples such as sugar, milk and meat, it is at least double that. Food shortages and the ubiquitous lines, often created by rumors, spring up everywhere. The government, in denial, exacerbates the situation by mandating price controls to “help” the people.

Chicken is supposed to sell for $3 per kilogram but one cannot find any at that price. Paying the gouging $10 per kilogram is the only way to get one, my random co-passenger in the airplane explained. Food production in the country has all but died and food is imported mostly from Argentina and the hated United States. En route from the Maracaibo airport, the highway is decrepit, the victim of maintenance neglect, a far cry from its condition just five years ago.

To be sure, the Chávez personality cult is everywhere. Practically every billboard, from soccer tournaments to commercial projects, beams his face. He is president, revolutionary, but also a Latin dandy. I had hopes that checking into the venerable Del Lago hotel, for years a city landmark and run by the Intercontinental chain, would offer a reprieve from the day’s earlier impressions, but these evaporated quickly. I was informed that “a truck ran into the phone lines” and that we would have neither telephone nor Internet “until Tuesday.” And that’s when I found out that the hotel is now under management by Venetur, Venezuela’s new national tourist agency. This was too much, because the “truck” (I am not making this up) had also destroyed the phone lines of my Libyan hotel 20 years ago.

That’s the problem with revolutionary fervor everywhere. It has a historically nasty habit of not being able to feed people. In Venezuela’s case, $75 oil can plaster over crying needs and allow a lot of pompous puffery. Declining prices, even slightly declining ones, could bring even more misery, exactly as they did in Libya in the 1980s.