command for an ideal of human excellence, obliging those who survive to finish their work," wrote Rómulo Betancourt in the Prologue to the first edition of "Venezuela: Oil and Politics". The book published in Mexico City by Editorial Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1956 was prohibited from circulating in Venezuela. Despite being effectively censored, Betancourt persisted. Second term as president A decade later, after Pérez Jiménez was ousted, Betancourt was elected president in the general election of 1958, becoming the first leader of the Punto Fijo Pact. Having inherited a well constructed country but with the need to give more education to its people, Betancourt nevertheless managed to return the state to fiscal solvency despite the rock-bottom petroleum prices throughout his presidency. In 1960 two important institutions were created by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, Betancourt's minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons: the Venezuelan Petroleum Corporation (Corporación Venezolana del Petróleo — CVP), conceived to oversee the national petroleum industry, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the international oil cartel that Venezuela established in partnership with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. Considered a radical revolutionary idea at the time by its opponents, but essential to Venezuela's independence and fiscal solvency by a visionary nationalistic Betancourt. At an annual oil convention in Cairo, Venezuela's envoy, fluent in Arabic, convinced oil producing Middle Eastern countries to sign a secret agreement that promoted unity and control of their own national oil resources; under the noses of the British and American corporations that dominated the oil industry globally and had funded the event. Planting the seed for OPEC that was founded in September 1960 at Baghdad, Iraq. This movement was triggered by a 1960 law instituted by American President Dwight Eisenhower that forced quotas for Venezuelan oil and favored Canada and Mexico's oil industries. Eisenhower cited national security, land access to energy supplies, at times of war. Betancourt reacted seeking an alliance with oil producers of Middle Orient and North Africa as a pre-emptive strategy to protect the continuous autonomy and profitability of Venezuela's oil, establishing a strong link between the South American nation and the OPEC countries that survives to this day. On a scenario of suspended economic guarantees, special situation derived from the Castro-communist armed insurrection, Betancourt adopted the CEPAL model of substitution of imports in order to achieve a fast track to development through industrialization that succeeds in replacing imported