Monday, June 27, 2005
Bylined to: Simon Farabundo Rios
South and Central America cannot free themselves from backwardness and servitude except by uniting all their states in a powerful federation. This grandiose historic task is destined to be solved not by the belated South American bourgeoisie, the completely prostituted agency of foreign imperialism, but by the young South American proletariat, the destined leader of the oppressed masses.
Leon Trotsky
Do we exist?
Where the subjectivity of objectivity is suggested and the subjectivity of the thesis is objectively outlined
Simon Farabundo Rios writes: The history of the intellect is none other than a labyrinth of portals, pitfalls, enigmas, mirrors, secret corridors and spiral staircases: Socrates taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great, who slumbered with Homer’s Odyssey and a saber under his pillow while vanquishing the empires of the Orient. And the emperors of the Orient had teachers and students of their own!
What follows, however, is not a reflection on the philosophers of the West, for our concern is with America, and moreover, the practitioners of our America.
Someone, sometime, chose to call our region the “American Subcontinent,” someone else, “Spanish America,” and still someone else, the most commonly utilized coinage: “Latin America.” But others don’t accept this.
Simon Bolivar, for his part, preferred “la Patria Grande,” where Jose Marti said, “Our America,” and the twenty-first century rebels, invoking the names of their liberators and clamoring for the same cause, are saying “pachamerica.”
The power of these words — these symbols of the collective history of the countries from Mexico, through Central America, the Andes, Amazonia, the pampas of the Rio de la Plata, and Patagonia, all the way down to Tierra del Fuego and the Malvines Islands — is the axis of this essay.
Who has the right to define us: we, the other, the foreigners?
And who determines the course of our history?
I will here present a brief reflection on the historical-philosophical continuity that culminates in the praxis of the contemporary activist, and will revolve around the thought of Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti, two original activists and definers of the post-colonial American — the mestizo, that is.
- The duet of Bolivar and Marti holds particular significance today not only because they are cornerstones to the histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, but also because they are the inspirations to the region’s two socialist governments.
In Venezuela, the popular democratic Bolivarian revolution has become the vanguard of the movement towards pan-American socialism. In the early years of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel acknowledged Marti as the author of the July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. And we will culminate with the XXI century socialism that is emerging in pachamerica, placing these two men into the context of the seismic shifts taking place.
The stories of Bolivar and Marti and the body of writing they have left us are touchstones in the study of (Latin) American affairs.
Their discussions on liberty, identity, race, and the unification of the nation states are just important today as they ever were, and to a large extent these discussions were first brought to us by Bolivar and Marti. To understand them, thus, is indispensable.
I ask: What is our American identity?
Is it European, Latin, Aymara, Spanish, Yoruba, Mestizo? Are we but mediocre disciples of the sages of Latin and Anglo Saxon democracy, lethargic and backwards on the path towards civilization, but capable of being spurned and turned around nonetheless? And how are we to structure our government and economy? In the liberal fashion like the French, the British, the or Yankees? And what of our history? Does ours begin with the Iberian conquest of the Indian civilizations, five centuries ago? Is there a distinct American identity? A literature, folklore, an epistemology, language, philosophy, intellect, art?
In his essay, Caliban (1971), the Cuban Roberto Fernandez Retamar brings us towards an answer. For Retamar, the question of whether an identity exists can be reduced to: do we exist? “For to question our culture is to question our very existence, our human reality itself, and thus to be willing to take stand in favor of our irremediable colonial condition, since it suggest [sic] that we would be but a distorted echo of what occurs elsewhere. (Retamar 3)”
Embracing this affirmation, I embark on an attempt to outline two roots of our thought. I will proceed from the following premise:
Philosophers work from the shoulders of those who preceed them, advancing from their forefathers and applying the great old ideas to the context in question. Accordingly, this essay will proceed chronologically.
In America, the anti-colonialists of the early 18th century were rooted in the intellectual agendas of the bourgeois cataclysms of France, England, and the United States. Locke proceeded Hobbes, a contemporary of Descartes, who preceded Rousseau, who influenced Jefferson, who held 117 slaves and drafted the Declaration of Independence of his country.
In Venezuela — then called Nueva Granada, a Spanish viceroyalty — there was Simon Rodriguez, who taught Simon Bolivar, who would lead the liberation of five countries and contribute to the ideological formation of America. At the end of the 19th century, Jose Marti incorporated the greatest ideas of Bolivar, placing them into a more tolerant and contemporary context while suggesting alternatives to their flaws.
We transpire in the contemporary intellectual, embodied in the minds of Retamar, Franz Lee, Heinz Dietrich, Marta Harnecker and countless others, who have the same responsibility to criticize Marti as Marti did Bolivar, borrowing from the fruits of his blossom, clipping away the dead flowers to allow for new ones to grow.
And we, the students, must do the same to our professors!
By narrowing down the principal ideas of Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Gran Colombia, and Jose Marti, hero of the Cuban revolutionary war against the Spanish, we will attempt a step in this direction.
We will attempt to address some questions while doing so:
- How much of their ideas are relevant today?
- Would they have approved of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro?
- Would they have been socialists if they were alive today? And so on…
I would like also to clarify my own position, the socialist one, which I do see as the logical and most well-articulated alternative to the rapacious socio-economic model that prevails in the modern world; and a position which I feel is consistent with the fundamental visions of Marti and Bolivar. For reasons of practical context (really the key purpose here) we will focus the latter half of the paper on the movements towards the realization of Bolivar’s Patria Grande, mainly in terms of the rhetoric and actions of the governments moving towards achieving left-wing hegemony from Venezuela to Uruguay. To begin, we will recall the liberal philosophy that delivered us into the epoch of capitalism.
The essay will be divided as follows:
Classical liberalism: A basic trace of the liberal ideologues that preceded the anti-colonial revolutions of America:
- Thomas Hobbes, (1588-1679)
- John Locke, (1632-1704)
- Rousseau, (1712-1778)
Simon Bolivar: His republic, his elitism, his dream.
- Excerpts from Letter from Jamaica (1815), Angostura Address (1819), and Message to the Congress of Bolivia (1826).
Jose Marti: On the shoulders of the liberator, identity, and Fidel
Our America, Letter to Maximo Gomez (1884), Tribute to Karl Marx (1890), and the Montecristi Manifesto (1895)
The enshrinement of Dreams: the Cuban and Venezuelan constitutions
The integration of the States: Lula and Kirchner?
Conclusion: the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.
Liberalism: from Hobbes, via the French socialists, to you and me
In our age — where the TV facilitates empire, which masquerades as lending institution—British liberalism constitutes the ideological root of the modern capitalist political economy. The British were civilized to the point of boasting an empire upon which the sun would never set. Their philosophies were equally civil and all encompassing. Ever since the bourgeoning bourgeoisie of the thirteen colonies declared the independence of the capitalist from the colonist, these notions, rooted first in the freedom of the capitalist, second in the freedom of the individual, have dominated the discourse and praxis of the Western democracies.
In 1651, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan illuminated humanity as to the true state of its nature, and why it behooves us to be governed. We are beings inspired by our appetites and aversions, Hobbes says, cynical creatures that will exist in a state of perpetual conflict with one another should we be left to our own devices: that is, if we are allowed to exist in nature. Thus, we require the state — institutional monopoly over civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers — to whom we sacrifice a portion of our liberties in order that we don’t return to the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” existence. (We will note that the economic is not included in this list of stately powers, as Hobbes believed in the freedom of the market and of the empresario.)
Hobbes believed that monarchy was the proper form of governance, the theocratic monarchy, with an uncontestable monopoly over theological doctrine. John Locke, a staunch proponent of puritanism and capitalism, proceeded Hobbes and worked off of his shoulders, but introduced the idea that the if the church did not preach tolerance, it should not be allowed in society. He also embraced Hobbes theory on the necessity of the state, only in his case, the state would be democratic — but only for white, property-holding men. For this elite section of society, Hobbes emphasized property and individual rights under the slogan of “life, liberty, and estate.”
Hobbes concluded the class diametrics that were inherent in this system as part of “God’s will,” and proceeded to separate humanity into two sections: the covetous/contentious class, and the industrious/rational class. Such a manichean framework has served to rationalize the inequites inherent in capitalism up until the present time, but could also justify the gamut of history’s binary relations: slave/master, plebeina/patrician, and proletariat/capitalist. If these divisions are part of the will of God, they are inevitable and should stand unchallenged: the subaltern class should make no fuss, raise no ruckus. Alas, their subservience is divine!
Where Hobbes and Locke fundamentally agree is in their belief in the market society, and in their conviction that humans must be kept in check by government for we are innately evil. Like that of Locke and Hobbes, the project of Jean Jacques Rouseeau worked under the paradigm of the state of nature theory, which attempts to determine humanity’s characteristics in their most essential state: untouched by society or civilization. But unlike the Brits, Rouseeau’s human nature was benevolent, based primarily in our instinct for self-preservation and our empathy for pain wrought upon other living things—commiseration. Hence, he conceives the “noble savage.”
Rouseeau’s understanding of the social contract embraced by his predecessors—which revered property as an unalienable right that the state must defend—was of utter rejection, as private property will negate individual freedom. Perhaps borne of his belief in the magnanimity of humanity, Rosseau viewed the Lockean social contract as a mechanism which operated in the interest of the propertied class, the narrow sector of society with ownership over the instruments of production. So, as this inherently antagonized the working majority, it was wrong. Moreover, it was the classist social dynamic, and not any innate human tendency, that would keep society in a perpetual state of war. It stands to reason then, that Locke’s and Hobbes’ cynical view of human nature, evil and prone to a continual state of battle, was not a reflection on human nature. Rather, Rosseau argued, it was a reflection on the nature of humans inculcated since birth with the beligerant values of the market society. Locke and Hobbes’ cynicism came not from a review of the history of humanity, Rouseeau argued, but from a review of the 17th and 18th century British citizen.
The free market and liberty struck Rousseau as irreconcilable like oil and water. Considering the division of wealth as a zero-sum game: the wealth of one inevitably is borne of the poverty of another — the property of one, the landlessness of another — how can one be free to cultivate one’s talents, nurture one’s creativity, if the distribution of land and the means of production obliges the property-less majority to toil on the terms of the bosses?
Property however was not the problem, for according to Rousseau, a small plot of land would allow freedom from this “wage slavery.” Where the problem lay was in the accumulation of vast land holdings and colossal bank accounts, which would give the mass of society only one freedom: starve or sell your labor to the bosses. To the French socialists, this existence was unacceptable.
Fundamentally there exist two branches of classical liberalism, the right wing of which is consistent with the modern “conservative,” and left wing with the modern “liberal.” The hegemonic modes of Western governance of the proceeding centuries and up until the present have embraced the ideas of the free market and the dichotomy of classes, and British liberalism has thus prevailed. As for the left wing — which, advancing from the French socialists, would depart from liberalism, resulting in Marxism and its manifestations in the form of Chinese and Soviet socialism — the ideas have been all but erased from mainstream political discourse. Nevertheless, it will do us good to recall that revolutionary change never comes from the status quo.
From here we advance to Simon Rodriguez and his student, The Liberator.
Simon Bolivar
1783-1830
December 17, 1830: Simon Bolivar dies yellow, pallid and disgraced on the Magdalena River in Venezuela, the same river the conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada followed 300 years before when he founded Santa Fe de Bogota. Bolivar’s dream of a united America has disintegrated, Ecuador and Venezuela have withdrawn from Gran Colombia, and slavery continues in spite of laws to the contrary. Not for over a hundred and fifty years would posterity — though always reverential to the Liberator in the form of words — honor his legacy in deed.
At thirteen Bolivar was the richest orphan in Spanish America, owner of mansions, plantations, and a thousand slaves. Teach and you will have people who know; educate, and you will have people who do, said Bolivar’s educator, Simon Rodriguez, who in addition to being a theoretician, conspired against the Bourbons and called for the liberation of the slaves. Rodriguez was well versed in and persuaded by the teachings of the French Socialists. He expounded notions of education which fell on Criollo ears like shattering stained glass; Christianity was absent, the gentlemen was replaced with the renaissance man, and browns blacks and whites, along with boys and girls, would be taught the same lessons in the same classrooms. (Galeano 82)
In turn, little Simon would brandish the sword of freedom; stoke the flames of liberty that were afire in the works of the Socialists, particularly Montesquieu and Rousseau. In a letter to Rodriguez, Bolivar wrote: “You molded my heart for liberty, justice, greatness, and beauty. You cannot imagine how deeply engraved upon my heart are the lessons you taught me.”
In 1797 his maestro was forced into European exile for treason against the Spanish crown, and Bolivar’s tutorship under Rodriguez, who was 12 years his senior, came to a halt. During his exile he “was a friend of the Socialists in Paris, London, and Geneva; he worked with the printers of Rome, the chemists of Vienna, and even taught elementary lessons in a small town on the Russian steppe.” (131-2) Rodriguez would spend 25 years in Europe before returning to South America to again profane the educational doctrines of the aristocracy.
A gentleman of piercing eyes and a stature as slight as Bonaparte was short, Bolivar settled in Madrid in 1799 during the culminating phase of the French Revolution. The same year, Napoleon, soon to proclaim himself “Emperor of the Earth,” overturned the French Directorate and the pillars of feudalism began to crumble through Occidental Europe. In Spain, Bolivar delved into his academic pursuits with concentrated abandon. Studying mathematics, classical and modern literature, history, and the French language, the young man was swept into the whirlwind of revolutionary liberalism. This invoked in him dreams of a republican Venezuela free from the aristocracy, and a liberated slave free from the overseer. In 1805, eight years after Rodriguez was forced from the hemisphere, pupil and teacher reunited in Italy in the month of August. Bolivar pledged to Rodriguez his unwavering dedication to the liberation of America.
The following year, Francisco de Miranda lands on the Gulf of Coro after a 36 year British exile. He has sailed from New York with two hundred volunteers, occupying a few towns, then fleeing to Trinidad before 5,000 Caracan soldiers are able to crush the insurrection (97). Bolivar, catching wind of the developments in his country and bound by oath to his mentor, sails back to Venezuela in 1807. The next year, on the 5th of July, the proclamation of Venezuelan independence is made. And thus begins the war for the independence of the Nueva Granada vice royalty — the rest will fall like dominoes.
This year, 1808, is of fundamental importance for another reason: Napoleon crowned his brother Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain, and a guerilla rebellion (in fact, the first time this term was used) against the Napoleonic occupation was ignited. Once master of history’s largest empire, Spanish dominion over Latin America — the three hundred year plunder of the minerals and people from the Rio Bravo to the Straights of Magellan — was on the eve of its collapse. A liberal revolution in Spain in 1820 furthered this cause, rendering the revolutions in all of the viceroyalties invincible.
In 1810 Bolivar was appointed by the Venezuelan junta as representative to the British. His first hand observations of the functioning of British institutions enkindled in him zealous awe, later driving him to tout the English constitution as the modern age’s “most perfect model for a kingdom, for an aristocracy, or for a democracy (Bolivar 114).” This, in spite of the fact that only four years prior the British empire, if only briefly, vanquished the port of Buenos Aires, and proclaimed its aims to take Montevideo, Valparaiso and Vera Cruz.
The remainder of Bolivar’s military adventures are a labyrinth of victory and defeat, subversion and treason, revolution and counter-revolution. The purpose here is to place his ideas into a philosophical-historical context, with the hopes of deepening our understanding of the current atmosphere, and why Bolivar’s name is evoked. After all, the pan-American revolution is the “Bolivarian Revolution,” so we must be clear on what the man stood for. We will outline three of the fundamental concepts of the Liberator’s philosophy: One, his ideas on republicanism. Two, the European elitism that permeated Bolivar. Three, his dream of the unification of the states of America.
A Republic refuted?
A recent conversation with an anarchist in Boston brought to the table, among other things, the question of the state. History, he said, proves time and time again the inevitable malevolence of those who exercise authority over a country’s political economy and people. I agreed uncontroversially that this is the history of the state; one is hard-pressed to find examples to the contrary. According to my contra-locutor, this fact absolutely discredits any state, whether it acts in the interest of the bosses or the workers. Under this logic, Fidel’s Cuba is fundamentally the same as Bush’s US. This cynicism stems from the histories of virtually every liberal democracy of the West and pseudo-socialist state of the East. This state, however, is the apex of Bolivar’s dream for “the full and absolute enjoyment of sovereignty, independence, and freedom (101).” But if history has discarded the state as a path towards these ecumenical goals, what good can it do to study Bolivar, a pedigree liberal?
Bolivar argued from the premise that freedom is an instinctive desire with which we are endowed at birth. The role of government is to ensure that the realization of our freedom is possible—anything adversarial to that interest must be crushed. Civil liberty is the only liberty, for without it, the others are meaningless. For him, the establishment of a Republican state was the logical extension of this. “Only democracy, in my opinion, is amenable to absolute liberty,” however, “[absolute] democracy is inadequate in governing any form of society. (96 and 106)” Democracy in the participatory form could wreak slavery and corruption over humanity, for “an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction (93).” So, a limited democracy, a representative democracy, is needed.
In his Angostura Address, Bolivar outlined the quandary of Republicanism and what he thought might remedy it. Speaking to the Constituent Assembly of the Second Venezuelan Congress in February of 1819, representatives from Caracas, Barcelona, Cumana, Barinas, Guyana and Margarita Island heard him address this dilemma. Uninhibited democracy would be susceptible to either popular anarchy or dictatorial corruption, Bolivar told them. The models of the Romans and the British, most importantly their republican features, were examples upon which the constituent assembly could build their own constitution. The British constitution is a “body of laws [that] appears most destined to bring about the greatest possible good for the peoples that adopt it.”
However, he was “by no means proposing that [the Congress] imitate it slavishly,” rather, that it might provide a blueprint that could reconcile “the political happiness which is compatible with the frailty of human nature (109).”
Bolivar wanted to establish a state whose authority would be recognized by the people; and conversely, whose people’s freedom would be uncompromisable by this authority. In a bicameral government, constituted of Representatives and a Senate, the former would be elected, and, so not to subject the wellbeing of the nation to the whims of the masses, “who are more easily deceived than is nature protected by art,” the Senate would be hereditary. “In political storms this body would arrest the thunderbolts of the government and would repel the violent popular reaction (110).” This logic rested on the idea that the absence of the Senate’s allegiance to either the electorate or magisterial appointers, so hypothetically, neutrality would prevail.
13 years before Bolivar extolled the virtuosity of the Tory state to the congress of Angostura, the Queen of England had expressed her desire to conquer America. Though it would never happen by overt colonialism — with direct investment, ownership of resources, control over transport, communications, and banking, and the financing of border/mineral wars — the British established a system of neo-colonial domination in America. Bolivar, for better or worse, was able to look past the actions of the British government and expropriate those ideas most applicable to the needs of his country.
Bourgeois Elitism
Bolivar suggested the study of European models while recognizing the need to develop an indigenous, American alternative to the racist socio-economic order of the Spanish. “Let this monstrous edifice crumble and fall; and, having removed even its ruins, let us erect a temple to Justice; and, guided by its sacred inspiration, let us write a code of Venezuelan laws (122).” Still, his notions of “Justice” are European. For “Venezuelan laws” he proposes Western ideas; and the opinions of the blacks and browns — the hulking majority of America — are all but ignored. One sentence demonstrates the bi-polarity of Bolivar’s relevance to the revolution that carries his name. On the one hand he acknowledges the mestizo: “we are neither Indian nor European, but a species midway between the proprietors of this country and the Spanish usurpers,” on the other, he chastises one of its roots: “…In short, though Americans by birth, we derive our rights from Europe, and we have to assert these rights against the rights of the natives.” Elsewhere he mentions the Creole’s burden to dispute “with the native for titles of ownership,” thereby elevating the interests of his class — the new American bourgeoisie — over those of the inhabitants of thirty thousand years.
In Bolivar’s time, one might argue that the paralysis of mestizo identity was so overwhelming that the emulation of European ways, linguistically, politically, and otherwise, was necessary to the aspirant American bourgeois. Simon Bolivar, under this reasoning, cannot be faulted for proclaiming strictly European ideas, as he received his education in Spain during the tumult of the Napoleonic wars. The absolute and unwavering goal of Bolivar was the eviction of the Spanish from America. After this the aristocracy and the powers of the church would be erased, and a democratic polity would be erected. The precedent thus, the models the Americans could draw from, was the work of the European liberals. Coming from 19 centuries of European monarchy, these economic and social transformations were utterly revolutionary. But Bolivar’s elitism, his talk of civilizing Indians, using European models and instituting familial branches of government are reactionary and must be discarded. In Nuestra America Jose Marti does precisely this.
The history of America from the Incas to the present must be taught in its smallest detail, even if the Greek Archons go untaught. Our own Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours; we need it more… Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but we must be the trunk. (Marti 291)
We will return to Marti.
Bolivar’s Unification
The question of the unification of the American states is for us the most indispensable of Bolivar’s thoughts. “Welcome to Venezuela,” said President Hugo Chavez in March of 2004, “the land where a patriotic people has taken over again the banners of Simon Bolivar, its Liberator, whose name is well known beyond these frontiers!” We have seen the irrelevance of Bolivar’s thoughts on republicanism. We have seen the bourgeois elitism which today we reject. So we return to the question: why read the liberal Bolivar?
Here is why:
As I contemplate the reunion of this territory, my soul ascends to the heights necessary to view the mighty panorama afforded by this astounding picture. My imagination, taking flight to the ages to come, is captured by the vision of future centuries. [A]nd when, from that vantage point, I observe with admiration and amazement the prosperity, the splendor, the fullness of life which will then flourish in this vast region…I seem to behold my country as the heart of the universe, its far flung shores spreading between those oceans which Nature kept apart…I can see her serving as the bond, the center, the emporium of the human race. (131-2)
From the beginning of the conquest the subjugation of the natives and their land was hinged on divide and conquer — and thus it remains. How else could a few hundred Spaniards bring down an empire of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants but to fragment their ranks and fight them in isolation? In the West of South America, Pizzaro capitalized on divisions within the Incan empire, and with the introduction of disease, firepower and mechanical crossbows, 62 horsemen and 102 infantry were able to conquer an empire of some five million people.
First and foremost Bolivar spoke against this fragmentation. In his Letter from Jamaica, he wrote: “as these parts have a common origin, language, customs, and religion, they ought to have a single government to permit the newly formed state to unite into a confederation. (78)” At the conference of Angostura — the Eastern Venezuelan port town now called Ciudad Bolivar — the Republic of Gran Colombia was established, and Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela were federated as one. But no sooner did he become president of Gran Colombia, Bolivar set his sights on Peru and Bolivia, which were still under the yoke of the Spanish. With the aid of Gran Colombia, the liberation of these countries was made possible.
In spite of his dedication and ideals we should recognize that Bolivar did not envision the project of unification as infallible, for in truth he didn’t think it could happen. Further in the Letter from Jamaica he writes that the full unification “is not possible. Actually, America is separated by climactic differences, geographic diversity, conflicting interests, and dissimilar characteristics.” Pragmatism drives him to conclude not to “adopt the best system of government, but the one that is most likely to succeed. (79)” With much poetic zeal he touts the “grandiose” vision of a united America, but “although I seek perfection for the government of my country, I cannot persuade myself that the New World can, at the moment, be organized as a great republic. (73)” In this respect Bolivar is quoted very selectively.
Within the next few years however, these ideas would evolve. At the first congress of the Hispanic American league in 1826, which he himself convened, Bolivar proposed the unification of Latin America, calling for the creation of an international fortification that would defend the freshly-liberated republics against a Spanish attempt to re-seat the viceroys. The British government, who essentially vetoed a Franco-Russian proposal to help Spain regain her colonies, was requested by Bolivar to participate in the process. The Brits wanted nothing of it.
Galeano writes: London has no interest in the unity of its new dominions … the old viceroyalties have birthed countries tied to a new empire overseas, and divorced among themselves. The colonial economy, mines and plantation producing for abroad, cities that prefer the bazaar to the factory, opens the way not for a great nation but for a great archipelago. (133)
Both Jose de San Martin, revolutionary general of the River Plate region, and the Venezuelan leader Francisco de Miranda had proposed the establishment of a vast monarchy. Jose Artigas, hero of Uruguay (river of the painted birds in the Guarani language, but called Banda Oriental Eastern Shore under the Spaniards), had also envisioned a far-reaching republic. But the Hispanic American League was the first actual attempt at integration. Colombia, Peru, Central America, and Mexico were the only countries to show up, leaving out what was the La Plata viceroyalty and the Caribbean. Ultimately, nothing but hollow declarations were made.
The same year her founder stepped down as president, Gran Colombia was dissolved in 1830.
Bolivarianos?
The Bolivarian revolutionaries highlight the Liberator’s libertine language, where his unsavory remarks are kept quiet. Take for example his ambivalent position on the United States. On the one hand he says, “the people of North America are a singular model of political virtue and moral rectitude…reared on freedom and liberty alone, (98)” and on the other, “The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty. “ The latter is Bolivar’s most heavily quoted sentence; as for the former, unless we turn to reactionary commentators, we must go directly to the Angostura Address.
But how important is it to take Bolivar word for word?
Can we ignore his archaic and vacuous writings while waving banners of the man and reciting his anti-imperial phrases by heart?
In Caliban, Retamar fervently hoists Marti’s mestizaje and selectively quotes Bolivar to vindicate his case. He also criticizes Jorge Luis Borges who, at one point praised the conquest of Mexico and the Pinochet dictatorship; but earlier in life, praised the Bolsheviks and wrote, “I want to speak to the creoles — to those who fell their existence deeply rooted in our lands, not to those who think the sun and the moon are in Europe. (Retamar 26)” As with the popular connotation of Bolivar, as uniter and anti-imperialist, we could selectively quote Borges to bolster our mestizaje and our socialism. And why not?
A Haitian friend remarked that the Bolivarian revolution has taken that name not because of Bolivar the liberal, the Burgher, the elitist: (after all, in spite of receiving vital support from Haiti, Bolivar never recognized the sovereignty of my friend’s country). To the contrary, the Bolivarian revolution assumes its name out of the universality of his example as liberator, as thinker, and as eternally committed revolutionary for the freedom of America—our America, as Jose Marti calls it.
Jose Marti
1853-1895
It is the eve of the twentieth century. Over the next hundred years the United States will plant their flag on the moon, global communication will lap the speed of light, and hundreds of wars will devour hundreds of millions of humans. A slight, baldheaded Cuban named Jose dreams the dream of Bolivar: a united America, and the unequivocal eviction of the Spanish from the Americas.
It is widely acknowledged that the legacy of Jose Marti is not just as revolutionary, but also of multifarious wordsmith. With the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario, (who called Marti maestro) he ushered in the modernist movement in American literature. It is beyond the scope of this essay to delve into his literary contributions — instead, we will quote Marti at length — but it is worthy of note that the man was as good a writer, as unique and sharp a thinker, as Simon Bolivar was a military tactician. Marti is a beacon in the pantheon of American literature and philosophy. (Though we shall see that Marti would have reproached me for the Greek allusion.) His work ranges from poem to essay to article, and covers myriad themes: from the erection of the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island; to the lynching of Italians in New Orleans and homages to Whitman and Marx. We culminate with the social and political writings, which concern us here.
For Marti, the pen was mightier than the sword. “A vital idea set ablaze, before the world at the right moment can, like the mystic banner of the last judgment, can stop a fleet of battleships. (Marti 288)” But he knew that in the sword’s absence, the pen was powerless. His progeny, manifested in the likes of Fidel Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, and , realized the same.
“It is easier for a man to die with honor than to think in an orderly way,” Marti writes in an auto-prophetic, perhaps self-deprecating critique. He would defy the orders of the seasoned commanders only to be cut from his steed by Spanish bullets in 1895. After oscillating as a reporter in New York City, a lecturer in Venezuela, an Uruguayan diplomat, and a prisoner in Cuba, he was martyred and laid to rest in his homeland. He had been in Cuba for barely a month.
But Marti’s blood was not spilt in vain, and to the contrary fertilizes the soil of the Cuban Revolution. Now, 52 years after the attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago and 46 after the flight of Batista, he stands as a pillar of our America.
His political ideals
The essence of Bolivarianism — like elements of Marx’s critique of capital and Darwin’s theory of evolution — apply universally and are cornerstones of Marti’s thought. But he and Bolivar acutely contradict one another in the political realm. The former felt that governance should be a strictly civilian affair. The latter — avid writer of constitutions, general, and president of countries — didn’t. Marti’s profound distrust and contempt for the authoritarian system was not pedantic, for his criticisms stemmed from the history of the previous five decades, inundated with territory wars and dictatorships. The Liberator’s visions of quasi-lordships and elitist republics thus were subjected to the test of time, and we can conjecture that Marti’s democratic idealism stemmed partly from this.
Marti dreaded the prospect of Cuban liberation resulting in a national dictatorship of some form, especially considering that the dictatorship would be legitimized by its homegrown identity. In a letter to General Maximo Gomez, distinguished Dominican hero of the Ten Years War for Cuban independence (1868-78), Marti expressed his disgust over his comrade’s aspirations:
[It] is my determination not to contribute by one iota, out of blind love for the idea that is consuming my life, to bringing a regime of personal despotism to my land, a regime that would be even more shameful and calamitous than the political despotism it now endures, and more serious and difficult to eradicate, because it would be excused by certain virtues, and established upon an idea which it embodied, and legitimized by triumph. (258)
With General Antonio Maceo, another hero of the decade-long war, Gomez had come to New York in 1884 to plan the final theatre in the overthrow of the Spanish. The three met through the summer and fall of that year. “Marti’s greatest political achievement,” writes critic Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria, “was to bring together the disillusioned and fractious veterans of the Ten Years War by convincing them of his own and the new revolutionaries’ commitment. (xiv)” But this letter to General Gomez signified a break between he and Marti, and it would be another ten years before the revolution would happen.
In the meantime Marti traveled ceaselessly up and down the east coast of the United States and through the Caribbean and Central America, touting the cause of independence, and agitating exiled Cubans and sympathizers for the coup de grace. He wrote pamphlets and gave poetry readings; delivered speeches and purchased arms, and in 1892, the Cuban Revolutionary Party was established. Marti was elected president.
The Montecristi Manifesto, enacted in the Dominican Republic en route to Cuba, outlined the intentions of the rebels: equality for all (even well-intentioned Spaniards), and the “invincible, indivisible” objective of freeing Cuba. The letter was signed by both Marti and Gomez, who by this time had resolved their differences. Neither Maceo, nor Marti or Gomez would live to see the liberation of Cuba. But the war they began on the 24th of February 1895 signified the beginning of the end of the Spanish in the hemisphere.
The Manifesto also evoked the menace of the superpower 90 miles to the north. Having lived in the states for several years, recounting eloquently the barbarity of US society but also its potential merit, Marti was well aware of the military and economic danger “this greedy, authoritarian republic,” posed to his country. (332) His diatribes against the United States foreshadow the neocolonial apparatus that would repress Cuba for the following fifty years. Just as the Cuban rebels were on the verge of victory in 1898, the United States, with Teddy Roosevelt at the helm, interjected to abort the real liberation of the country. By the next year, the stars and stripes waved over Havana, “The schools are teaching English; and the new history books speak of Washington and Jefferson and do not mention Maceo or Marti. …The market is opened without conditions to capital hungry for sugar and tobacco. (Galeano 251)”
Reading Marti, one gets the sense that he knew precisely what was to come:
A free nation, where work is open to all, positioned at the very mouth of the rich and industrial universe, will without obstacle and with some advantage replace…the shameful nation where well-being is obtained only in exchange for an express or tacit complicity with the tyranny of the grasping foreigners who bleed and corrupt it. (340)
Here, and not only here, he forebodes the two antagonistic epochs that would become the history of 20th century Cuba: Batista’s fascism and servitude to the mafia/business class of the United States; and pachanga socialism, antithetical and fatal to its predecessor and incorrigibly anti-imperial. Given the prophetic nature of these writings, and also the libertine optimism abound in the pages of Marti, we begin to understand the reverence he demands in contemporary Cuba.
Elitism/Identity
Where Marti negates Bolivar most strikingly is with his ideas on the development of on American, indigenous, mestizo identity. “Imported forms and ideas that have, in their lack of local reality, delayed the advent of a logical form of government, (292)” must be uprooted, with mestizo ideas and forms put in their place, Marti writes in Our America. Written in 1891, Marti speaks of the categorical necessity to start looking to American identity, and quit imitating the Europeans and the Yankees.
What a vision we were: the chest of an athlete, the hands of a dandy, and the forehead of a child. We were a whole fancy dress ball, in English trousers, a Parisian waistcoat, a North America overcoat, and a Spanish bullfighter’s hat… We wore epaulets and judges’ robes, in countries that came into the world wearing rope sandals and Indian headbands. (292)
Considering the esteem of Bolivar the Liberator, one can only assume that such talk from Marti is a backlash to his predecessor’s elitism. We recall the Liberator’s comments on asserting European “rights against the rights of the natives,” and on building Venezuelan constitutions based on the Magna Carta. Then we turn to Marti:
The new Americans are on their feet, saluting each other from nation to nation, the eyes of the laborers shining with joy. The natural statesman arises, schooled in the direct study of Nature. He reads to apply his knowledge, not to imitate. Economists study the problems at their point of origin. Speakers begin a policy of moderation. Playwrights bring native characters to the stage. Academies discuss practical subjects. Poetry shears off its Zorrilla-esque locks and hangs its red vest on the glorious tree. Selective and sparkling prose is filled with ideas. In the Indian republics, the governors are learning Indian languages.
Marti’s discussion on the mestizo is, I think, his fundamental contribution to our struggle. Indeed, imperialism is not strictly an economic or political matter, but also cultural and idiomatic. It isn’t enough to resist George and Laura Bush, but also Mickey and Minnie Mouse. We mustn’t merely criticize CNN and Univision, we must present alternatives: Telesur, Indymedia, and so on.
We recall Bolivar’s invocations of Montesquieu and Icarus, Rome and London; and turn to Marti who invokes Taino saints, calls for the European academies to bow to the American academies, and clamors in favor of mestizaje: “Make wine from plantains; it may be sour, but it is our wine…! The young men of America are rolling up their sleeves and plunging their hand into the dough, and making it rise with the leavening of their sweat. (294)”
Jose, meet Fidel
We advance half a century. Virtual US colonialism over Cuba has been done away with and with their tales between their legs, the crime families of the north are evicted from their “playground.” Havana, where gangster Santo Traficante owned the Riviera and Meyer Lansky owned the Capri, is no longer the number one source of revenue for the United States mafia. Fulgencio Batista — born the year before the Yankees ended their colonial hold of the island, disgraced the year before the Cubans ended the neocolonial hold — has fled the country under the uncontainable force of the Rebel Army. The tyrant has returned as an exile to the motherland, Spain, and the barbudo guerillas begin the new year, 1959, by taking power. Soon the revolutionary government declares the expropriation of all private property.
1962: Fidel Castro — by way of law school, prison, and three years as a guerilla leader in the Sierra Maestra Mountains — boldly climbs onto the shoulders of Marti, declaring the Cuban Revolution Socialist and taking Americanism to a planetary level. “What is Cuba’s history but that of Latin America? What is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa, and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the cruelest exploitation of the world by imperialism?”
Here arises the question of whether Jose Marti would have advocated the Marxist-Leninist character of the Cuban Revolution. For obvious reasons, we resort to deductive reasoning. Marti writes that Marx was “a titanic instigator of the wrath of European workers but also a profound seer into the causes of human misery and the destines of men, and a man consumed with the desire to do good. (132)” This excerpt is from Tributes To Karl Marx, Who Has Died. Aside from this Marti wrote nothing of Karl Marx. Though eloquently flattering of the man at points, he occupies the majority of the article with confused visual descriptions of a memorial meeting to Marx in New York City. Marti demonstrates not a profound understanding of the writer of Capital, organizer of the First International, but rather, an almost complete ignorance of his teachings.
Is it a contradiction then, that the Cuban Revolution, the world’s longest-enduring Leninist experiment, is based fundamentally on the ideas of Marti, but also on Marxism?
Miami Cubans wale foul when the Barbudos quote Marti, extolling him for their own counter-revolutionary objectives. Their patrons in the State Department even invoke Marti:
The dream of a free and prosperous Cuba — the island paradise of Cuban national hero Jose Marti’s hopes — is far from dead… The machinery of repression has tried to quiet those voices, but in vain. Years of deception cannot hide the truth, either from the people or the international community.
Instead of commenting on this silliness, we will look at a Cuban’s take on Marti and the development of Cuban Marxism. In a 1992 article, Cintio Vitier wrote that the “ideological vacuum,” following the fall of the Socialist Bloc, coupled with the blockade and the ending of Soviet aid, would put a swift end to the Cuban Revolution: or so thought the capitalist intelligentsia. Marxism-Leninism is a tool for the Cuban Revolution. The “national tradition culminating in Marti, would not be subsidiary to Marxism; rather, the reverse.” Figures like Manuel de Cespedes, Antonio Maceo, Alejo Carpentier, Roberto Retamar, Che Guevara and Fidel are the pillars of Cuban socialism, not just Soviet and Western thinkers. Jose Marti, whose principles “suffice to give a foundation to our socialism and our democracy,” is the touchstone.
Vitier writes: It is not that Cubans are more Marxist than anyone else but rather that our way of assuming ‘what is’ Marxist in the intuitive popular interpretation has those ancillary [secondary, supplementary] characteristics that the collapse brings out into the open and leaves intact…The defense of Socialism has thus been the defense of the country itself, a slogan that would be untenable at this point in history if it didn’t have a real foundation in a national project in which all previous failed efforts are accumulated. (252)
It has been argued that even if he agreed with the ideas of Marx, his dedication to the mestizo would have stopped Marti from accepting Marxism, for though it would result in immeasurable utility to the Cuban cause, it is a European and not an American philosophy.
“[I]deas,” he writes in an article titled, The Truth About the United States, “like trees, must be grown from deep roots, and must be adapted to the soil in which they are planted in order to grow and prosper, and that the newborn is not fed the strong spices of adulthood only because the mustache and sideburns of adulthood are playfully hung on his soft face.
Monsters are created thus, not nations: we must sweat out our own fevers. (331)”
But I contest that this is a double-edged sword. On one blade our mestizaje is affirmed. We remain independent of the “cannon” of philology and philosophy, which, in addition to its historical class-bias, originates not from Oaxaca or Tacuarembo, but from Cambridge and Oxford, where the scholars study in ivory towers built from the exploits of empire. Similar to what Retamar pointed out, the right wings of these towers devise vindications for the new, politically correct methods of colonialism; and the supposed left wings pretend to guide us with pious solicitude but never from the wrong side of the tracks. But this is not to dismiss the relevance of Western thought to our American struggle, for on the reverse blade of the argument, tremendously liberating ideas have their roots in the conquering centers. If we were to follow Marti to the T we would be forced to reject some of the most important teachings of history; namely, the scientific critique of the political economy, fundamentally applicable under all capitalist systems, and, as Cuba has shown, especially utile to those countries recovering from colonialism. An Argentinean medical student, though he may be a Bolshevik, won’t dismiss the findings of leprosy research because the studies were commissioned by an imperial government. Perhaps this rejection of foreign ideas, and the absence of a discussion on a socialist alternative is where Marti comes up short.
The works of Marx and Lenin, and Marti for that matter, don’t constitute a rigid framework for the Revolution. Better, they are microscopes that allow for a contextual analysis of the political economy — binoculars that allow the Cubans to comprehend the trajectories of capitalism, socialism, and their historical position. Jose Ernesto Schulman commented that in contrast to the blight of Stalinist austerity that marked the Eastern Bloc, the Cuban Revolution demonstrates, “in Spanish, with mulatas, rum and palm trees, a joyful socialism; that inspires us to live as part of it.”
Cintio Vitier spoke about the great ethical, political principles of Marti: “anti-imperialism, solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, the Republic of Workers, and ‘the integral exercise of self, and the respect, as a kind of family honor for the integral well-being of others.” These, Vitier continues, “suffice to give a foundation to our Socialism and our Democracy. (251)” We note Vitier’s use of our, here, similar to Marti’s in “our America,” to clarify that Socialism and Democracy in the American sense, is not the Democracy of Bush, or the Socialism of Khrushchev, in essence appropriating these Greek and French concepts and adapting them to our America.
Dictatorship of the Proletariat?
What sort of governmental apparatus would constitute the logical extension of Marti’s philosophy? With regards to his views on the use (or overuse) of authority, we will place them into the contemporary context. “Nations must continually criticize themselves,” Marti wrote, “for criticism is health, but with a single heart and mind. (294)” This in mind, what would he have made of the censorship, the political homogeneity, and the caudillo-style regime that Fidel has reigned over for nearly half a century? Or the mass-roundup of homosexuals, the execution of hijackers, and the jailing of dissident journalists and activists?
For Jose Marti, would the ends justify the means?
Would — universal healthcare, education and housing for the Cuban people; multiplied by 30,000 doctors in Venezuela, the Cuban expansion of the Ho Chi Minh trail, schools in Haiti, indispensable military solidarity with the liberations of Angola and Nicaragua; (and Silvio Rodriguez) — legitimize the presence of a police state whose citizens aren’t free to leave the country as they please? We could never answer these questions for certain. We can, however, deduce the likely positions Marti would have taken from the writings we have.
We begin from the premise that liberty and equality are inextricable to each another, and to a happy existence. Additionally, that in order for these to be realized, the population must have access to certain “fundamental human rights,” namely: education, healthcare, food, and shelter. Third, that in order for this to happen in the nations of America, there must be some measure of integration amongst the countries — both for national development and resistance to imperialism (again, two inextricable notions).
I would suggest that if kept aloof of the forces conspiring against and encircling the revolution, Marti would have been abhorred. But to see one-dimensionally obstructs the reality. The United States and its myriad institutions, since the Spanish American War and the enactment of the Platt Amendment in 1902, have without deviation acted chauvinistically, parasitically, and malevolently against the Cuban people and in favor of US business and Mafia interests. This includes the financing and training of death squads, cooperation between the CIA and the Mafia in the name of counter-revolution, multiple incompetent assassination attempts against Fidel, the harboring of terrorists and jailing of counter-terrorists, a 20-year long propaganda campaign through the slovenly Radio and TV Marti (which Congress allocates an annual $23 million for, but is scrambled by the Cubans), and, most devastating, the economic blockade against the country in place now for nearly a half century. (Considering every other Latin American country has the US as number one trading partner, without going into detail we can imagine the catastrophic implications of the embargo.)
In light of all this, the rationale for the authoritarianism of the Cuban state becomes apparent. In Cuba, as we shall discuss further, the materiel utilities are provided to each and every Cuban. Were this not the case — considering that the resources were available and, due to governmental corruption or incompetence, not distributed — we could argue that the primordial ideals of the revolution have died. As Milan Kundera has suggested, if this were the case the revolution itself would be dead. But this is not so.
By no means do I advocate a blind acceptance of the authoritarian state, or any of the unsavory, un-human actions by the Cuban government, simply because the state provides the existential utilities. A consistent Leninist perspective views the state as an intermediary between bourgeois democracy and worker democracy, which will wither away under socialism, as, since there no longer exists a tension between classes, its purpose becomes negligible. Furthermore, the socialist project aims for popular participation manifested in federated and decentralized grassroots organizations and unions, worker control of the factories, and the delegation of regional spokespeople accountable to the will of their constituents and subject to recall at all times. The socialist state is not a utopian entity, for the idea that the state can live in perfect harmony with the citizenry is oxymoronic. The worker state is not an end, rather, a historical nexus connecting capitalism with communism. Thus, the actions of the Cuban state must, to the greatest possible extent, reflect a constant movement towards these grand trajectories.
Early in the revolution, speaking to a conference of academics and intellectuals, Fidel laid this maxim: “dentro de la revolucion todo, fuera de la revolucion nada.” Inside the revolution everything, outside the revolution nothing. This platform is harmonious with the afore-quoted, “Nations must continually criticize themselves,” Marti wrote, “for criticism is health, but with a single heart and mind.” Officially, this has since remained a staple of Cuban policy, and was codified in the current constitution, enacted in 1992.
Citizens have freedom of speech and of the press in keeping with the objectives of socialist society. Material conditions for the exercise of that right are provided by the fact that the press, radio, television, cinema, and other mass media are state or social property and can never be private property. This assures their use at exclusive service of the working people and in the interests of society.
The aforementioned jailing of “dissidents,” then, is entirely congruent with Cuban law. After all, an “idea set ablaze…can stop a fleet of battleships.” This applies not only to marauding Yankee armadas but also to the immeasurable advances of the revolution. Advances threatened perpetually by the “prisoners of conscience,” briefed, financed, and empowered by the United States Pentagon. Now we see that “freedom of the press” has an entirely different meaning. I concede that to either a) legitimize the anti-democratic measures of the Cuban state, or b) chastise them, is a precarious proposition, as doing so would demand an objective understanding of the Cuban reality. This highlights the necessity of critical analysis, oblivious of neither imperial sabotage or Cuban nepotism, that holds the government accountable for its actions to assure they remain consistent with the popular will, and with the egalitarian Socialist vision.
One hundred and fifty years after the birth of Jose Marti, on the dawn of the conquest of Iraq, Fidel Castro addressed the International Conference for World Balance, held in honor of Marti. His “immortal ideas rose up from his ashes, like the Phoenix, so that almost half a century after his death, an entire people took up a colossal battle, confronting the most powerful enemy any large or small country had ever faced… From him we also learned his inspirational patriotism and a higher concept of honor and human dignity than anyone in history could have ever taught us.”
I do not portend to have the objective tools in order to construct a firm opinion on whether the Cuban government has been as true to Marti as is possible. However, I feel safe concluding that those things provided by the Cuban state — first, the biological necessities, second, the intellectual and cultural opportunities — are creating the objective and subjective circumstances necessary for the foundation of a society in accordance with the great libertine values extolled by him, the author of the Cuban Revolution.
From here on in, I want to depart from the writings of these two men, and focus on current attempts at integration, and the actualization of the great dreams of Bolivar and Marti.
…the fulfillment of dreams…
Rights
- to shelter, medical care, nutrition, and education
Freedom
- from tyranny, from pollution, from taxation without representation
Protection
- from virtual and actual bondage, exploitation, and violence
Liberty
- of expression, of assembly, of political organization
Access
- to arable land, employment, and to the media of communication
Democratic recourse
- as regards the fiscal, military, and political activities of the patria
A body politic representative of the needs and desires of a country’s citizenry will recognize these notions as unalienable, and enshrine them into a national constitution. In theory this is the definition of a democracy. But the cumulative history of the modern representative democracy — from the Weimar to the United States of America to the People’s Republics and virtually all those of American history — demonstrates almost without deviation that “democracy” functions adequately only for about five or ten percent of the electorate. This is not what Jose Marti or Simon Bolivar were envisioning when they spoke of the great American republic.
Here it will be useful to distinguish the Republic of Workers, which Marti called for, from the Republic of Bosses, which is liberal democracy. Where the latter has resulted in a veritable dictatorship over the working class, worker democracy, (e.g. Cuba, and increasingly in Venezuela) is dictatorship over the forces of exploitation, chauvinism, and the pathological power of the market.
The dichotomy is simple: democracy for capital versus democracy for people.
We come full circle to my anarcho-friend who categorically refutes the state, and vindicate 95% of his argument. But with the praxis of Fidel and Chavez, we refute the remaining five percent. For Bolivar, the Panama Congress in 1826 and the dissolution of Gran Colombia resulted in a dream deferred, and before he passed away, cynical and defeated, he said: “America is ungovernable; those who served the revolution have plowed the sea.” But in 1999, almost 200 years later, a constituent assembly was formed in Bolivar’s homeland to draft the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. What resulted was one of the most progressive, eloquent, and emancipatory documents in the history of our America. The Bolivarian constitution recognizes the rights of the indigenous to their land, their beliefs, their culture, and their existence. It recognizes the right of every Venezuelan to a habitable habitat, and the right of the housewife to social security and a government pension. In the preamble, which invokes the Liberator from square one, the new democracy is delineated.
…to the supreme end of reshaping the Republic to establish a democratic, participatory and self-reliant, multiethnic and multicultural society in a just, federal and decentralized State that embodies the values of freedom, independence, peace, solidarity, the common good, the nation’s territorial integrity, comity and the rule of law for this and future generations; guarantees the right to life, work, learning, education, social justice and equality, without discrimination or subordination of any kind; promotes peaceful cooperation among nations and furthers and strengthens Latin American integration in accordance with the principle of non-intervention and national self-determination of the people, the universal and indivisible guarantee of human rights, the democratization of imitational society [sic], nuclear disarmament, ecological balance and environmental resources as the common and inalienable heritage of humanity; exercising their innate power through their representatives comprising the National Constituent Assembly, by their freely cast vote and in a democratic Referendum, hereby ordain the following:
But the drafting of a constitution is a merely theoretical act, an exercise in political verbosity. What counts is the implementation of these titanic ideas to the benefit of Venezuelan society — revolutionary theory innately demands praxis. In Venezuela, the Bolivarian circles, the new left trade unions, the coop movement, the popular and multifaceted grassroots initiatives, and the social “misiones,” are doing precisely this. The misiones can be divided into four main areas: education, vocational training, nutrition, and health care. The world’s fifth largest oil reserve — despoiled since its discovery by the national oligarchy and multinational firms, but now, under Chavez, legitimately nationalized—is allowing Venezuela to maintain these programs. Petroleos de Venezuela, the national oil company, spent $4 billion on popular programs in 2004 alone. This has permitted the Venezuelan arabesque between the interests of the capitalists and the interests of the people. On one hand is, a) the servicing of prodigious debt and the existence of a private sector; and on the other, b) endogenous social investment and national development. In essence, the fulfillment of b amounts to the actualization of the constitution, but notwithstanding Venezuelan hydrocarbons, it is hard to imagine this possibility while a is also satisfied. At the 2004 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Chavez commenced a socialist discourse, a marked departure from the “third position” stance he previously maintained.
Before, education was privatized. That is the neo-liberal, imperialist plan, health systems were privatized, that cannot be, they are a fundamental human right. Health, education, water, energy, public services, that cannot be given to the voracity of private capital, that denies those rights to the people, that’s the road to savagery, capitalism is savagery. Every day I’m more convinced, less capitalism and more socialism.
For my part, I am more convinced every day that the logical extension of Bolivar’s — and for that matter, Rousseau’s, the Cartesians’, etcetera—thought is the socialist mode of production.
The Cuban Model
If the Venezuelan constitution of 1999 is progressive, the Cuban constitution of 1992 — “guided by the ideas of Jose Marti and the political and social ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin,” and based on “proletarian internationalism, on the fraternal friendship, aid, cooperation and solidarity of the peoples of the world, especially those of Latin America and the Caribbean” — is revolutionary.
Cuba is an independent and sovereign socialist state of workers, organized with all and for the good of all as a united and democratic republic, for the enjoyment of political freedom, social justice, individual and collective well-being and human solidarity.
In article nine of the constitution, the role of the government is outlined:
[The State]
a) carries out the will of the working people and
– channels the efforts of the nation in the construction of socialism;
– guarantees the liberty and the full dignity of man, the enjoyment of his rights,
– the exercise and fulfillment of his duties and the integral development of his personality;
– consolidates the ideology and the rules of living together and of conduct proper of a society free from the exploitation of man by man;
– directs in a planned way the national economy;
b) As the power of the people and for the people, guarantees
– that every man or woman, who is able to work, have the opportunity to have a job with which to contribute to the good of society and to the satisfaction of individual needs;
– that no disabled person be left without adequate mean of subsistence;
– that no sick person be left without medical care-that no child be left without schooling, food and clothing;
– that no young person be left without the opportunity to study;
– that no one be left without access to studies, culture and sports;
c) works to achieve that no family be left without a comfortable place to live.
As in the Bolivarian constitution, the tenets of the Cuban revolution are enshrined, and in accordance with Cuban law, acted upon as such.
The essential distinction between these two constitutions is that one recognizes private property as a violation, where the other recognizes it as a right. Again, it is difficult to predict whether this contradiction in Venezuela will be sustainable far into the future. It is not the role of the socialist state to maintain the inevitable antagonism between the classes, but rather, to do away with them. Specifically, private property, i.e. capital in the hands of individuals and corporations, is abolished as an institution as are the economic rights and therefore existence of the bourgeoisie, who operate at the helm of the liberal republics. Until this happens, and in spite of the great gains made so rapidly, Venezuelan socialism will be only rhetorical and superficial. The rank and file can only rally for and demand further expropriations and nationalizations by the Bolivarian government, or, more ideally, do it for themselves. If the great constitutional promises are to be materialized — if shelter, medical care, nutrition, and education are made available for all citizens — it is prerequisite for the government to identify the historical radix which has deprived, and will continue to deprive, society’s forgotten class of these “fundamental human rights.”
In any case, Bolivarian socialism, as with any legitimate form of socialism, is hinged on its international nature. The country with the greatest number of doctors per capita is Cuba; the country with the greatest oil reserves in the hemisphere is Venezuela; Argentina has more cows than humans; Uruguay drinks more whiskey per head than any other country; and Brazil is on the brink of surpassing the United States as the world’s #1 agricultural producer. These figures are enormous, even standing alone, but united they multiply exponentially.
Only together is it possible to confront the international financial institutions (IFI) and their Washington Consensus.
Brazil and Argentina: a prisoner’s dilemma?
The Lula administration stands at a defining crossroads and must turn left. It appears that he and his finance ministers have placed the interest of the IFI over the interest of the indigenous, landless, and poor. Capital remains in the hands of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, the IMF and the US are satisfied (thought not thrilled), and the plot of the neediest has remained untouched. Unlike Venezuela, Brazil cannot afford to maintain the antagonism between the two adversarial sectors. Last month the government announced it would end seven years of loans with the IMF, an encouraging sign, but the fulfillment of Lula’s campaign pledges and his standing with the marginalized sections of Brazilian society will demonstrate his intent.
Similar to Brazil, Argentina, since 2001, has stood firm against the Fund and the so-called Washington Consensus. When the IMF speaks, the president, who has one eye on us and the other on the empire, responds unequivocally: “This type of tutelage we really don’t want; we’ve suffered enough already,” reported The Miami Herald in March. Elsewhere he said: “There is life after the IMF, and it’s a very good life … being in the embrace of the IMF isn’t exactly like being in heaven.”
Writes one liberal commentator: Kirchner and his economy minister, Roberto Lavagna, appear to have swiped three-quarters off the value of $100 billion in private bonds (barring the 24% of holdouts), forced the renegotiation of over sixty contracts with privatised utilities, and reduced the International Monetary Fund to a whimper. Kirchner even took the liberty of comparing IMF chief Rodrigo Rato to the devil hours before they met to review the debt burden in late 2004.
But in spite of the language, and the stability of key economic indicators (which are very much an effect of Kirchner’s progressive economic nationalism,) social improvement has been slow at best. In a 2004 article measuring Kirchner’s words against his deeds, Raul Bassi commented that, based on the principle that ‘if Argentina can pay we are willing to pay,’ Kirchner has negotiated a repayment scheme set at a minimum of 3% of Argentina’s gross domestic product. As a result, almost 40% of the increase in the national budget will go to pay the interest on the debt. The increase in spending on social security and social development will be only slightly more than 2%.”
Additionally, the Argentine and Brazilian governments have expressed no interest in re-nationalizing the multitude of industries privatized under the neoliberals. This is profoundly problematic.
Most fundamentally, it seems what is at stake here is the willingness to raise a firm fist to the bankers, the investors, and their institutions. An expansion on the prisoner’s dilemma — a tactical game devised by the Rand Corporation during the Cold War to deduce appropriate nuclear strategies — provides a telling theoretical framework for the situation. The game goes as follows: In its most basic form, two individuals, a and b, are each faced with the possibility of either cooperating with each other, or defecting from one another. If a defects and b cooperates, a is rewarded the highest sum, and b gets nothing. Should they both cooperate, they each receive more than if they both defect, but less than player a received in the first instance. Lastly, the total maximum payoff is produced when both players cooperate. The moral: the greatest collective good is achieved when there is mutual cooperation: a moral resolution; the greatest individual good is achieved when one party is fully beaten and deceived: an immoral one.
Now, augmented and put into context — with two countries at play and the presence of a third party, empire — matters are compounded a bit. So not to stray from our topic, let us continue with Brazil and Argentina. I would like to start from the premise that defection (liberation) from empire is only possible when their exists cooperation among the subaltern states, and that cooperation with empire will, insofar as the empire seeks to fragment nations, necessarily entail defection with the fellow subaltern. Therefore, Brazil can successfully defect to empire so long as Argentina does so too. In other words, if they cooperate they are both allowed to defect to the empire, where if either of them does not, they effectively defect to one another and to their own self-interest. So, the only best way out of this national dilemma is first cooperation, and second, resistance.
We mention Argentina and Brazil, the largest countries in South America, precisely out of Bolivarian internationalism, and sketch their status with the IMF because of the understanding that if the economies of the south are to experience development in any real sense, it is indispensable that they release themselves from the choke hold of imperialism by working together.
The integration of the states: from the Rio Bravo to the Straights of Magellan
The dictates of the IFIs and Yankee intervention (which between 1898 and 1994 resulted in 41 changes of regime) are the two tentacles of imperialism that, like cancer, must be curtailed before they turn malignant. To the idealist, the dark age of neoliberalism has germinated the soil for the “twenty-first century socialism” that is arising like a tsunami over the forces of empire. Although, as Bolivar said, the states of America differ greatly from one another geographically, industrially, minerally, and otherwise, the region tends to follow a common economic and political path. Since the middle of the twentieth century this has particularly held true.
Two recent examples are the “Tango effect,” and the “Tequila effect,” economic crises that hit the American states, stemming from Argentina and Mexico respectively.
Going back to the 1950s with the the Cuban Revolution and the rise of the left-leaning Arbenz in Guatemala and Bosch in the Dominican Republic, and, until 1973, the import substitution typified by Cardenas, Peron, and Vargas and the democratic socialism of Allende; through the myriad dictators who racked up hundreds of billions in debt and planted the seeds of neoliberalism; to the debt crisis and the “lost decade” of the 1980s, and the continued neoliberalism up until the present time, where the neoliberal model is being rejected and the people are marching left, we see that loosely, the American states follow similar patterns. We transpire in the Bolivarian Revolution with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro at the helm and millions of revolutionaries at all flanks.
The current global economy, internationally aligned upon the capitols of capital, pronounces the solidarity of the global market above and beyond any talk of solidarity between the workers of Colombia with those of Venezuela — never mind solidarity between laborers in the US and laborers in Iraq! Indeed, exploitation leaches on fragmentation. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor and long time head of the Trilateral Commission, euphemizes divide and conquer tactics as “geo-political pluralism,” and encourages them in every corner of the globe. The danger of the Bolivarian movement is that, in this regard, it strikes the empire at its very crux.
- At the grassroots level there are countless groups that vary greatly but are threaded together by their common goals. The Zapatistas, the Piqueteros, the Cocaleros, the MST, the FARC, and the ELN, (to name the most publicized), are all intertwined and are inseparable from one another.
At the executive level, we have comrades (to varying degrees) in Cuba, Venezuela, Paraguay (?), Uruguay, Brazil, Chile (?), and Argentina. In Ecuador, the “Ecuadorian Chavez” who was elected magically turned into the Ecuadorian Bush, and was accordingly removed by a mass uprising; the Bolivian people did the same; the most popular mainstream leader in Mexico leans left, and the Sandinistas are expected to come to power in Nicaragua in 2006.
Apart from the surge in progressive leadership in these countries, monumental trade agreements are being put into effect between the countries. Brazil and Venezuela signed an accord in February concerning petrol drilling and the purchase of fighter jets; in May, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina launched Petrosur, an international energy conglomerate which will work to counter the disruptive effects of price speculation and other geopolitical factors; Venezuelan trade with Argentina has doubled, and with Brazil tripled; Chile and Venezuela have an oil deal; medical students from all over the continent are studying for free in Cuba; and upon the election of Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay, Chavez honored him with a replica of the sword of Bolivar.
Telesur, “the first counter-hegemonic telecommunications project known in South America,” is based on the same principles as Petrosur. The TV conglomerate, initially proposed by Chavez and now supported by Lula, Tabare, and Kirchner, is managed by the Uruguayan, Aram Aharonian. In his words: [Telesur is] a strategic project that was born out of the need to give voice to Latin Americans confronted by an accumulation of thoughts and images transmitted by commercial media and out of the urgency to see ourselves through our own eyes and to discover our own solutions to our problems. If we do not start there, the dream of Latin American integration will be no more than a salute to the flag. (8)
There exists an objective American reality, and their exists an enigma, the warped and cynical representation of what is happening. The enigma is what CNN and Telesur drum up in order to inculcate the people with acquiescence. Jorge Enrique Botero, a Colombian journalist involved with Telesur, says the independent media, the dissident press, reaches but five to seven percent of the population. What this amounts to is the capitalists’ hegemony over the masses’ understanding of the world. Telesur is groundbreaking in that never before has large-scale capital been invested in alternative media. That is to say, this will be the first time the left will get its proper space in the mainstream. When Bolivar said that “an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction (93),” he wasn’t kidding, and in our times, ignorance is spread through the television. As Aharonian said it, television cannot be left in the hands of the enemy.
There are also the two great economic blocs of South America: Mercosur, a common market between Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina; and the Andean Community, a conglomeration between Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. What’s more, the South American Community of Nations is the fledgling body that unites Mercosur and the Andean Community. Together this area accounts for 27% of the earth’s fresh water supply, and eight million square kilometers of forests. Already, 31 SACN infrastructural projects are on the drawing board and in the works, with a cost exceeding $4 billion, and their completion is expected within five years.
A pachamerican Conclusion
This revolution — this endogenous, indigenous, popular, mestizo, pachanga, Bolivarian , Martidian, international and revolutionary revolution — if fertilized with historical precision, theory/praxis, and the humane instincts of the peoples of the earth, will be a mortal foe to cynical forces whose greed binds our history. “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil,” wrote renowned red Albert Einstein, in a 1949 article titled Why Socialism? If anything, Einstein’s feelings have been further vindicated since 1949: the fissure between rich and poor is wider, and the antagonism between human and animal; industry and nature; and first and third world is only more acute. The neoliberal/neoconservative model of globalization, capitalist and vertical, its roots soaked in the blood of slavery, its branches mangled in the slavery of property, has got to be leveled onto its side, re-appropriated, modulated by the consensus of humanity and nature — the map must be leveled from its north/south verticism, turned sideways, horizontal, and made socialist! This is to place the liberty of Rousseau, hands down, over the liberty of Locke. To place the liberty of the worker over the liberty of the capitalist to exploit him.
In the words of the man who replaced Newton’s law of gravity and on whom the FBI kept a 1,400-page file, Einstein continues:
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
In our terms this signifies an America where Yankees forge the Rio Bravo not to build maquiladoras, but to build community centers and siblingly relations; where pachamericans forge the brave river not to labor in the hotels and chili fields, but to teach Spanish and Nahautl to their northern neighbors and exchange ranchera progressions for 12-bar blues scales. In this new world, capital will no longer be in private hands, wasted on the decadent exploitation that is irreverent of the earth and her peoples, but instead, used for the development of equality and solidarity between nations, the advancement of the arts, sciences and independent journalism, and the extension to all the people the right to cultivate our personal talents and nurture our collective creativity.
We as pachamericans are rooted in and oscillate betwixt the histories, tongues, and arts of three peoples. The Africans brought to the New World in the bellies of slave ships; the indigenous who comprised the civilizations of the Inca, the Maya, and the Aztec; and also, we mustn’t forget, the Portuguese and the Spanish, who introduced guitars and the theory of music. What we seek is the integration of these elements.
Perhaps the Pachamerikan can be paralleled with Puck in A Midsummer Night’s dream. Agile with his verbosity, enchanting with his mystics and sorcery, Puck pendulates through the three realms of Shakespeare’s imagination — that of the aristocracy, that of the fairies, and that of the playmakers. But, we have our own Shakespeares, just as England has her own Garcia Marquezes!
Pachamerika is not the world of Lysander, Bottom the Weaver, and Tatania the fairy queen. Ours is the land of Macondo. With Melquiades the Gypsy, and Julio Cortazar and Borges as our magicians; with Ursula Iguaran, and Rigoberta Menchu and Eva Golinger as our nurturers; and with the Colonel Aureliano Buendia, and el Che and Bolivar and Marti as our liberators. Today we emblazon our banners and refer to our land with the proud title of pachamerica: “pach,” meaning Earth in the Quechua tongue, and America, the colonial label.
the end
As an appendix, I would like to look at the realpoetik of the new emerging era. On the 28th of April, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA)—a fair trade alternative to the Free Trade Area of the Americas — was put into effect. We look to the Final Declaration from the First Cuba-Venezuela Meeting for the Application of the ALBA:
Year of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas
In view of the historical privilege of making this Final Declaration public in the presence of President Hugo Chavez and President Fidel Castro, both delegations formally pledge to spare no effort until the dream of Bolivar and Marti of a united and integrated Latin America and Caribbean is attained.
As the Joint Declaration expresses: “…we fully agree that the ALBA will not become a reality with mercantilist ideas or the selfish interests of business profitability or national benefit to the detriment of other peoples. Only a broad Latin Americanist vision, which acknowledges the impossibility of our countries’ developing and being truly independent in an isolated manner, will be capable of achieving what Bolivar called “…to see the formation in the Americas of the greatest nation in the world, not so much for its size and riches as for its freedom and glory,” and that Marti conceived of as “Our America,” to differentiate it from the other America, the expansionist one with imperialist appetites.
In his memorable June 11, 1892, article in the magazine Patria, Jose Marti wrote: “Our enemy obeys one plan: to inflame us, disperse us, divide us, suffocate us. That is why we are obeying another plan: to show ourselves in all our stature, to tighten up, join together, to evade him, finally making our homeland free. Plan against plan.”
This, which we are approving today, is that of Bolivar and Marti.
¡Hasta la Victoria Siempre!
Simon Farabundo Rios
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