Fiesta of Good Works

Venezuela proudly showed off some of the marvels that $2 billion, poured into the country's economy in the last five years, can work in an under-developed but oil-rich land. In a festive "Dedication Week," Venezuela (pop. 5,000,000) got its first big up-to-date hotel, a super-highway more expensive per mile than any other in the world, and hundreds of lesser public works and engineering projects. By night-and-day speedups, the whole fat package had been brought more or less to completion at the same time, and President Marcos Perez Jimenez inaugurated the "good works wholesale.

Grand Hotel. At a $75,000 white-tie party last week, the President formally opened the 400-room Hotel Tamanaco in the capital city of Caracas (pop.: 800,000). Two thousand guests drank champagne and Scotch, nibbled at 6,500 lbs. of meat and fowl. They were entertained by Parisian Chanteuse Patachou (who got $10,000 for a week's work). Colonel Perez Jimenez, dressed in a braid-crusted white tunic and black trousers with a crimson stripe, himself danced the first rumba.

The Tamanaco cost $8,500,000--half from the Venezuelan government, a quarter from local private capital and a quarter from the U.S. Export-Import Bank. For the U.S. salesmen who swarm to the booming capital, it offers comfortable rooms at $8 a day; for luxury-seeking tourists it has suites for up to $100.

Great Highway. More significantly for Venezuela's economy, Perez Jimenez snipped a silk ribbon to open the spectacular new motor speedway running from mountain-girdled Caracas to the sea. The journey to the capital from its seaport, La Guaira, and the neighboring airport Maiquetia, has traditionally been a fatiguing, sometimes hair-raising ride over an insane 18 1/2-mile highway with 311 curves. The $60 million, four-lane autopista is Venezuela's most daring piece of engineering. It sweeps up to the capital in 10 1/2 miles, tunneling mountains and leaping deep chasms on graceful, concrete-arch bridges (one of them 1,000 ft. long). The superhighway has cut travel time from 90 minutes to around 20; on the first day, 10,000 cars rolled over it.

Other presents from the nation to itself, bought mostly by the million-plus dollars daily in petroleum royalties that Venezuela gets as the world's biggest oil exporter, included:

P: An underground station for 600 buses and a garage for 1,600 cars at Centre Bolivar, a half-completed development of skyscrapers and apartment buildings often compared to New York's Radio City.

P: A housing program that has replaced 45 blocks of Caracas slums with low-rent apartment houses.

P: Sixty-three schools, 32 hospitals, clinics or dispensaries, 39 electric plants, 58 public buildings, 107 water systems, 1,400 miles of secondary roads.

P: A 170-mile dredged channel in the Orinoco, built (and paid for) by U.S. Steel to let ore ships reach the upriver iron mines, but destined to open southeast Venezuela to commerce.

In all this, the military officers who helped President Perez Jimenez win and hold power were not overlooked. At a televised ball, they inaugurated what is unquestionably the finest officers' club in the world. A vast building in south Caracas, it blends long wings, which appear to float on piles, with Spanish colonial stucco fac,ades and austere stonework. Inside, it has an art gallery, a gymnasium, a 450-seat movie theater. Public rooms are decorated in Louis XIV, Spanish baroque, Empire and modern styles. Although there are only 50 guest rooms, the club reportedly cost more than the Hotel Tamanaco.

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