Syria Today | Suweida Sways to the Sound of Salsa

Suweida Sways to the Sound of Salsa

Words Diego Gomez-Pickering
Photos Adel Samara

It's a regular Thursday night in Suweida; families stroll down the high street, window shopping and snacking on ice cream and shawarma. Relatives and neighbours greet each other warmly as they browse through the goods on offer. Yet the street scene in this southern Syrian town of 90,000 inhabitants is somehow different from other Syrian towns and cities.

“It’s 30 bolivares,” a shop attendant tells a young man eyeing a pair of sunglasses, giving the price in Venezuelan currency. Across the street, a Spanish sign on a snack bar window reads se venden arepas, announcing that they sell a popular Venezuelan snack made of maize flour. Wild salsa music rings out from a tape deck in the shop next door, while the supermarket down the road has decorated the premises with posters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and the nineteenth-century revolutionary leader Simón Bolivar. Such Latin undertones in this otherwise mainly Druze town could strike a first-time visitor as slightly strange. In fact, they are the legacy of many decades of migration between Syria and Venezuela.

A New Beginning

“Thinking of Venezuela brings tears to my eyes,” leh Jame, one of the thousands of Suweidans with close ties to the South American state, said. “I love that country with all my heart. Its people are like family to me, they are my brothers.”

Back in the late 1960s, when job opportunities in Syria were scarce, Jame, like many of his contemporaries, packed up his belongings and travelled to the American continent in search of a better life. “It was a different world and Venezuela symbolised a new beginning and a window to success for us,” Jame, who owns the aptly named New World shoe store in downtown Suweida, said. “The country welcomed us with open arms.”

After 20 years and five children, Jame decided to return to his native Suweida. It’s a move many other Syrians have also made over the last 10 years, pouring money into the local economy, building hundreds of new houses and giving the city a unique Latino touch. Today, the Venezuelan Embassy in Damascus estimates around 60 percent of Suweida’s population is Venezuelan, meaning they were either born in Venezuela or hold dual nationality from living there.

Despite the distance, the Venezuelan connection remains strong. “I go there every other year,” Majid, one of Jame’s sons who helps out in the store, said. “We still have businesses and lots of family to visit there.” The same goes for the rest of Suweida’s Venezuelan population who regularly cross the Atlantic, keeping the human and economic links between the two countries as vibrant as a South American carnival.

Political and economic alliances

The ties linking Syria, Venezuela and South America go back more than 100 years. Syrian migration to the Spanish-speaking country started in the late nineteenth century, when thousands of Syrian Christians and Jews relocated to the Americas. Ever since, there has been a constant flow of people between Syria and Venezuela.

Today, major Venezuelan communities can be found not only in Suweida, but also in Aleppo, Tartus and the Damascus suburb of Jaramana. Moreover, estimates by the Venezuelan Institute of Statistics indicate that around 1 million people of Syrian origin live in Venezuela, while 20,000 Venezuelans are registered at the embassy in Damascus. Many more Syrians, however, have lived in Venezuela or have links to the country.

Syrian-Venezuelans on both sides of the Atlantic have perfectly assimilated and elements of Arab and Hispanic culture seamlessly blend together. However, despite the centuries-old cultural and social connections, it was not until recently that Syria and Venezuela consolidated their relationship via a number of bilateral political and economic agreements.

After Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez came to power in 1998, the country underwent far-reaching changes as the new president launched the Bolivarian Revolution, a mass social movement designed to change the country’s social and cultural landscape. In the international arena, Chávez took a strong stance against the United States and its foreign and trade policies, criticising the superpower for its “imperialist” and “neocolonialist” stances and saying the US was “on its way down”. Chávez’s own foreign policy focused strongly on the establishment of economic and political alliances with countries like Cuba, Iran, Russia and Syria.

“Syria is to the Arab World what Venezuela is for Latin America,” Dia Nader al-Andari, the Venezuelan ambassador to Syria, said, referring to her country’s pan-American policies and Syria’s support of pan-Arabism. “Our relationship with Syria is a strategic one. Beyond cooperation and friendship, our countries share common values and face the same challenges, especially with respect to the current US administration and its policies to which we both refuse to subject ourselves.”

In August 2006, Chávez made a historic visit to Damascus where he was received by thousands of flag-waving Syrians. The Venezuelan leader met with President Bashar al-Assad – whom he later referred to as his “younger brother” – and said the two countries shared the same political vision and would “resist together the American imperialist aggression”.

The successful visit was consolidated with the signing of 12 economic and political agreements, more than were ever signed between the countries since they Damascus and Tehran in October 2007. Today, according to Nader al-Andari, four new agreements are ready to be signed. While the political and economic rapprochement looks set to continue, these developments have little effect on the thousands of Syrian-Venezuelans for whom the social and cultural ties will always remain most important. Whatever happens in the future, one thing is for sure, salsa will always appeal to Syrian ears, especially in Suweida. As Jame said: “Asi es la cosa, hermano.” That’s how it goes, my brother.