My
stepfather Axel Hansen Tveskov arrived in Venezuela from
Denmark in 1938. He was a 42 year old mechanical
engineer and had recently been widowed. He had been
hired by a Danish company to go to Venezuela to install
the machinery in a fish canning factory in Cumaná. The
deal also included three Danish North Sea trawlers that
were to catch the fish for the plant.
The following stories come from two sources: My
stepfather himself and letters that he sent to his
brother in Denmark up till Pearl Harbor, after which
communicating by mail to German occupied Europe no
longer was possible. Fortunately his brother kept the
letters and returned them when Axel returned to Denmark
at the end of 1975. I found them in their home when my
mother died in 1989.
In preparation
for the trip Axel purchased tropical clothing from a
department store in Copenhagen, supposedly from a
cancelled expedition to Africa. The khaki outfit
included a pith helmet, jodhpurs and riding boots. Once
he got to Venezuela he found out that such clothes were
not commonly worn there at all so the pith helmet was
quickly thrown into the trash.
The trip from Denmark was on a German freighter. The
officers were Nazis and engaged in quite a bit of
propaganda. On several occasions the passengers were
confined to their cabins when confidential and secret
operations took place on and around the ship.
On arrival in Cumaná, work began and was completed.
Meanwhile, on April 9, 1940 Germany invaded Denmark and
Axel was stranded in Venezuela.
He spoke no
Spanish and had neither job nor contacts – in effect, he
had to start from the bottom.
One of the first jobs he got was as engineer on a
Venezuelan freighter, a complete bluff. While he knew
diesel engines, he had never been a ship’s engineer. On
the ship’s first departure he misunderstood the engine
telegraph and the ship rammed the flagship of the
Venezuelan navy.
Not a good career move.
Later on he worked in a number of jobs in the oil fields
around Maracaibo and at some point during the war he
even owned a fishing boat and was fishing for sharks in
the Caribbean. Sharks’ livers were used as a substitute
for cod livers in producing vitamin D rich cod liver oil
during the war. He therefore developed a good business
with the U.S. Too good, as it turned out, as
well-connected Venezuelans had his boat confiscated on
trumped-up charges of selling oil to German submarines
in the Caribbean.
He told me that
on one occasion the boat was indeed accosted by a
surfaced German submarine, but that the only transfer
was the Germans kidnapping a Venezuelan woman from the
fishing boat. As a Dane, he had little sympathy for
anything or anyone German, so the charges were
ridiculous.
While still working in Cumaná, a German cruiser came
into port. The local military commander asked Axel to
teach his band leader the German national anthem “Deutschland,
Deutschland über alles”. Axel pragmatically decided
to cooperate and whistled the melody for the band
leader, who wrote it down. The band did a fine job
during the welcoming ceremonies when the German officers
stepped ashore.
One of Axel’s pleasant memories from Eastern Venezuela
was to sail across the golf of Caríaco and visit the
ruins of an old Spanish fort. He enjoyed the beauty and
the solitude of the deserted peninsula. The ruins are
still there and are now a tourist attraction. Venezuela
in those days was much sparser populated – probably
about 5,000,000 people altogether vs 27,000,000 today -
so there were many large and uninhabited areas
throughout the country.
He spent one early Christmas as an “exile” in the
country in Maracaibo. He and another stranded Dane
decided to go to church on Christmas Eve. Axel’s father
had been a deacon and catechism teacher in a Lutheran
church in Kauslunde on the island of Funen, so he had
been brought up in an intense Protestant family and had
a very skeptical and suspicious attitude, coupled with
little real knowledge, of the Catholic Church, its
traditions and ceremonies. So the Christmas Eve mass was
confusing to him. After mass they went to a bar for
drinks to celebrate the holiday.
Axel told me
that it was first and only Christmas Eve he ever spent
in a Catholic Church and an establishment of dubious
reputation!
There were a few other Danes in Venezuela, but many more
arrived after the war. Among them were Mssrs. Aagaard
and Wiese who worked at the Delfino’s cement factory in
La Vega in Caracas, as well as Søndergaard, who was
married to a Spanish woman and was Axel’s assistant and
successor at the cement factory in Táchira.
Mr. Mogensen
was the General Consul for Denmark in Caracas, not to
forget Mr.Knudsen, a stocky, hard working salesman from
Jutland who represented the Danish food manufacturer Plumrose.
He was known to the Danes as “Plumrose Knudsen” and
traveled all over the country by public transportation,
wearing a suit and a tie, and definitely put Plumrose on
the map after the war. One could buy canned Danish hams,
butter and many other products in most major cities.
Harald Hansen,
another engineer and friend of Axel’s, settled in Mérida
where I used to visit him on my free Sundays while in
high school in that beautiful city. He lived quietly
with a soft spoken Venezuelan woman and their several
brown-skinned blue eyed children. He introduced me to
Cuba Libres, good Venezuelan rum with Coca Cola!
Other close
friends were the Rondón family. Fernando “Freddy” Rondón,
a Venezuelan educated in the US, was an agronomist
working for the Rockefeller Foundation. On
several occasions as a teenager I accompanied him on
horseback into the monte to visit campesinos. His wife
Betty was American and from Cape Cod. They lived in
Táchira and eventually moved to Caracas.
So Axel’s reputation and contacts grew.
He built and managed an electric plant for a Canadian
company in Barquisimeto in the mid 1940s during the
presidencies of generals Lopez Contreras and Medina
Angarita.
He wrote in his
letters of driving the company’s jeep to a place called
Rio Claro to enjoy the beauty and peace of the place. At
that point as during the rest of his stay in Venezuela,
he also had a large German shepherd dog as a companion.
In 1947 he left Barquisimeto and returned to Denmark for
the first time. His thoughts had been to stay there, but
he found the culture shock too much and the weather too
cold, so he decided to return to Venezuela.
The trip to Europe was via a soon-to-be-discontinued LAV route
to Madrid. The plane – an early model Lockheed
Constellation - had to be serviced in New York,
allowing the passengers a 24 unplanned layover. This was
Axel’s only visit to the US and he took the opportunity
to see “Show Boat” with Paul Robeson on
Broadway while there.
Traveling by
air in Venezuela before the advent of pressurized
airplanes and radar was an adventure in itself,
especially in the Andes.
Axel told us
about a time when he was on one of the early twin
engined Lockheed
Electras on what was to have been an inaugural
flight of some sort out of Maiquetía. Evidently everyone
had been celebrating prior to the flight and the pilot
decided to take off from the taxi strip. The plane belly
landed and everyone got out without a scratch. However,
most of the passengers were not even aware that they had
survived a plane crash!
An American
friend, Edmund Church Getty, had flown C-47s for the
USAAF during WWII. On one flight in a LAV
DC-3, both pilots were somehow disabled and he had
to land the plane in Maiquetía. Sounds like and could be
an “urban myth”, but I had no reason to disbelieve it
when Ed – who lived with his wife Evelyn in San
Cristobal - told me the story.
Jack Jumper, an
American that worked in Anaco died when hitching a ride
on a cargo plane that crashed in the Andes.
My own boss in
Anaco, as well as – it seemed – many others in that
area, had been a US Navy fighter pilot and was an
absolute wreck when we would fly the AVENSA Convairs to
Caracas. He was sitting on the edge of the seat “flying”
the plane every moment of the flight and making comments
about what was going on. My attitude was more
philosophical and I accepted the fact that the pilots
without a doubt were as interested in getting to
wherever we were going as we were.
Probably one of
the worst events had to be when Fidel Castro’s
Venezuelan communist terrorist allies in the sixties set
off a bomb in the forward cargo compartment of a DC-3,
blowing off the plane’s cockpit. The plane kept flying
for quite awhile before crashing. One can only imagine
the terror among the passengers.
While in Denmark he met my mother at my cousin’s
confirmation – Axel had been my uncle’s room mate in
college and was thus an old friend of the family – and
once back in Venezuela they began corresponding.
On his return to Venezuela he built a cement factory in
LaBlanca near Palmira in Táchira. The equipment was
Danish and the company Cementos Táchira belonged
to the Delfino family from Caracas. Once the plant was
up and running he was asked to be the director and
operate it, which he accepted. There had been a long
cement commercial relationship related to cement between
Denmark and Venezuela. The building of the Colegio
de San José in Mérida, where I went to school for
two years, was built with imported Danish cement during
the Gomez years. That cement had been shipped to Mérida
from the coast on the back of mules!
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Cement Factory in LaBlanca, Táchira -
Note that the stairs to the office
hardly meet OSHA standards! “My” Jeep CJ
is in the picture too.
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My mother and I joined him
in Venezuela in 1948.
During the summer of 1949 he renovated a small
hydroelectric plant near San Juán de Colón,
north of Palmira. While really a “moonlighting
job”, it was vital for the cement factory, as
they needed more electric power. He hired a
young Danish engineer, Erik Kældebæk, to help on
that project. Erik went back to Denmark to get
married when the job was finished, where he
unfortunately soon died of a tropical disease,
probably unfamiliar to the Danish physicians.
It was also my
first summer job and the occasion to learn how to drive
in the 1947 Jeep CJ. It was the summer of my fifteenth
year.
The plant was
located in the thick jungle in a deep ravine at the
bottom of a waterfall. We would park the Jeep at the end
of a jungle path and walk a path down the side of the
ravine next to the penstocks providing water to the
turbines.
All the
equipment, including three big new alternators built by
the Swiss company Oerlikon also
had to be hoisted and manhandled down the same path.
While primarily
known for its electrical equipment, Oerlikon is
probably better known to US Navy veterans, as they also
built and supplied anti-aircraft cannon to both the
Allies and the Axis powers during World War II.
Once the
alternators were installed and the water turned on, we
noted that there was a heavy vibration in one of the
alternators. We re-aligned, leveled and did everything
we could to make sure that the machine was plumb and
level and exactly lined up with the turbine. No luck.
Axel finally dismantled the alternator and found that
the shaft had been broken and welded back together at
the factory! So much for Swiss quality. Bearing in mind
that we really were out in the middle of nowhere and
couldn’t just FedEx the shaft back to the
factory in Switzerland, he had a new shaft turned in the
machine shop of the cement factory, reassembled the
generator and started it back up. It ran fine.
When the job
and my summer vacation were over, we went to the office
of the local electrical utility to collect payment. They
paid us in silver 5 Bolivar coins – thousands of them in
flour sacks! Undoubtedly this is how their customers
paid their electric bills.
We loaded the
sacks in the back of Axel’s Nash Ambassador and,
with the rear bumper dragging on the dirt road, made it
back to Palmira!
By 1951 Axel had decided to go into the contracting
business for himself and we moved to Caracas where we
had an apartment between the corners Marrón & Cují.
In the center
of Caracas addresses have traditionally been determined
by the traditional names of the corners. The brand new
apartment building – Edificio Aldomár - was
located just a few blocks from the Plaza Bolivar and a
block from the recently built Avenida Urdaneta. We lived
in the penthouse apartment and had a tremendous view of
the whole valley of Caracas.
Axel by then
had developed many political contacts, but unfortunately
they were all opponents of Pérez Jimenez and after a
failed coup attempt October 12, 1951, most of them were
killed or jailed.
So he again had to start pretty much from scratch and
soon moved to Ciudad Piár where he worked as a
contractor for the Orinoco Mining Company,
a US Steel subsidiary.
He also did
installation work at the new Venezuelan steel mill at
Puerto Ordáz, soon to be renamed Ciudád Guiana and they
lived in Ciudad Bolivar for some years at this time.
He also did
contracting work on the Island of Margarita, returning
to one of the places where he had worked during the
first few years of his exile.
On one occasion
he even did a job in the El Dorado penal colony in the
Guiana jungle. For many years this penal colony was not
accessible by road at all. My mother told me that she
was very impressed by the politeness and kindness of the
prisoners. In those days, to be sent to El Dorado was
considered a death penalty due to the horrible climate
and surroundings. This was indeed Venezuela’s “Devil’s
Island”.
At the end of 1975, now aged 79 and in poor health, he
sold his trucks and equipment. He and my mother moved
back to Denmark where they settled in the little town of
Borup south of Copenhagen.
He died in 1980.
New Years Eve at the Club Táchira
1949. Sitting left to right:
Mrs. Contreras; Axel Tveskov;
Commandante Mário Vargas, Military
Commander of Táchira; Peter Tveskov; My
Mother; Ed Getty & Evelyn Getty; Señor
Romero Espejo, Governor of Táchira;
Angel Mora; and Sondergaard.
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I
do not know who the happy guy standing
with the glass is. I remember that we
had suckling pig for dinner!
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