CARACAS: Hugo Chavez is so sick with cancer that he won't show up for his own inauguration for a new term this week. But the cottage industry that lives off Chavez merchandising is quite healthy.
You name it, and the bombastic Comandante's face can be found all over it: T-shirts, baseball hats, jackets, earrings and much, much more.
In a small market in central Caracas not far from the National Assembly, Elisa Flores de Moreno says she has travelled from Merida in far western Venezuela -- sent by colleagues to stock up on Chavez gear as the country waits to see if he will pull through his fourth round of cancer surgery.
The 58-year-old Chavez, who was first diagnosed in mid-2011, underwent his latest operation on December 11 in Havana and has not been seen in public since.
He won a new six-year term in elections back in October, and was supposed to be sworn in Thursday.
But Chavez cannot return home in time for his inauguration and so will take the oath of office at a later date before the Supreme Court, the government announced on Tuesday.
Flores de Moreno, 67, says she is mad about Chavez and prays every night for his recovery.
She spoke as she filled a large bag with T-shirts, hats and jackets for colleagues who are equally nuts about Chavez, the garrulous populist and champion of the poor who also irks the United States regularly with anti-imperialist tirades and alignment of his oil-rich country with Iran, Syria, Cuba and other nations not in Washington's favor.
Some of the articles bear the letters PSUV, the Spanish acronym for the ruling socialist party. Others show the president's face by itself, or Chavez with South American liberator Simon Bolivar or revolutionary commander Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
But the hottest seller these days is a T-shirt with a rectangle surrounding a black and white image of Chavez's face.
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