Gustavo Cisneros, one of the central figures of Venezuela's political and business life, honored at ICS

Buy, improve and sell. This is one of the maxims that guided the professional life of Gustavo Cisneros, a successful Venezuelan businessman, leader of companies such as Pepsi-Cola, Venevisión and CADA, who passed away in 2023. This was recalled by Rafael Arráiz Lucca, professor at the Universidad Metropolitana de Caracas, expert in Venezuelan history, at the tribute held at the ICS of the University of Caracas. Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra. In a dialogue with Pablo Pérez López, scientific co-director of the ICS and Full Professor of Contemporary History of the School of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Navarra, they reviewed the main milestones of his career.

"Cisneros was a central figure in the political and business life of Venezuela and the first Venezuelan businessman to internationalize," said Arráiz. Jaime García del Barrio, director general of the ICS and the Museum of the University of Navarra (MUN), opened the tribute, which was attended by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, wife of the businessman and one of the most important art collectors in Latin America. The meeting, framed in the cycle Leaders of Latin America Today, was attended by a hundred people, including dozens of students.

"He was a deeply international man, with great profile researcher ", has valued García del Barrio, who has advanced that work is already underway with the archives of the Cisneros Foundation. In addition, in 2018, Phelps de Cisneros donated 49 works by Ibero-American photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries to the MUN.

Cisneros, heir to the family holding that brought together companies such as Pepsi-Cola, Helados Tío Rico and Venevisión, was able to lead a new and decisive stage in Venezuela, starting in the 1970s. To this end, he made a decisive bet on internalization, with the support of U.S. tycoon David Rockefeller. "If you don't sell when you have to, your business will soon cease to make sense because the world is changing," said Arráiz, recalling the perspective with which Cisneros approached his business: "He had a great capacity for anticipation.

Meetings with Clinton and Fidel

In his speech, Perez also stressed that the Venezuelan businessman was "a man of action and reflection", who "experienced firsthand the most recent changes in Latin America and the world". In this sense, Arráiz recalled the relationship that Cisneros established with important figures in the political arena throughout the years, such as Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, Rómulo Betancourt and Hugo Chávez, and even in literature, such as Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. For example, he was an interlocutor core topic in the recovery of Venezuela's relations with Castro's Cuba during Rafael Caldera's mandate. "It is a revealing historical episode. He had the political skill and the flexibility and capacity of understanding with those who thought differently", the expert has underlined. This is one of the episodes narrated in the biography Gustavo Cisneros y Venezuela. Conversaciones a la orilla del mar, written by Arráiz. The attendees received this book, together with Los retos de nuestro negocio. How to Adapt and Succeed in a Century of Challenges, written by Cisneros himself, courtesy of the Fundación Cisneros.

test of his open-minded and proactive nature was his drive to establish relations with China to finance new projects. "Cisneros did not do business there, but rather sought sources of financing, as he did in the United States, to develop projects in Latin America," said Arráiz. He also pointed out that one of the keys to the Venezuelan businessman's business model was his focus on people: "His emotions were always more focused on people than on companies".