problems of revolutionary strategy in latin america

7/29/2019 Problems of Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America

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Rgis Debray

These notes are designed to answer the following question: how has the Cuban

Revolution modified the bloody class struggle which opposes the popular

masses to imperialism and the national oligarchies in power in Latin America?

What is the explanation for the slow tempo and apparent difficulties which

revolutionary processes are encountering in this decisive link in the chain of

imperialism? The Cuban Revolution has, from its earliest days, always presenteditself as the vanguard detachment of the Latin American Revolution, and the

Cuban people and its leaders, after six years of struggle, have abandoned none of

their proletarian internationalism. The question is consequently one of the most

vital that the Cuban Revolution poses to us and to itself, in a constant and at

times heated debate. For once, we will pose the problem here as it is presented

Problems of Revolutionary Strategyin Latin America

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to those who live it in the press of events, that is to say, as one of aglobalcorrelation of forces, in which every imbalance that affects one of the 20nations of the Continent, also affects the other 19. To be faithful to thiscontext, let us insist at the outset on the partial and panoramic characterof these notes, which set out this correlation in essentially politicalterms, and secondarily military ones.

Reaction: Eastern Europe and Latin America

For an answer to the question, we lack a historical study of the complexphenomena of reaction which follow the victory of a socialist revolu-tion in a given area. Three socialist revolutions of major importancewithin 50 years, in Russia, China and Cuba, should make such a work apriority. A concrete study (attuned to the evidently different historicalsituations) of the tactical and strategic imitations which affect therevolutionary parties in adjacent countries and of the imperialist block-ade which results from the revolution, would allow us to forge the

necessary instruments for discussion of the problem. Fascism in Europe,the wars of imperialist intervention in South-East Asia, the growingmilitarization of the political regimes ofAmerica, certainly cannot beconsidered mechanical regressions, or swings of the pendulum to pre-vious forms of class domination, still less since they are not amenableto analysis by means of such a unilateral category as the negation ofthe negation. For, despite all the concrete differences in time andspace, there is a salient analogy between contemporary Cuba and theyoung Soviet Republic. Certain declarations of 1959 and 1960, in

which the Cuban leaders evoke the imminence of new revolutions onthe American continent, inevitably recall speeches by Lenin in 1919 and1920, in which he expressed his certainty that a rising of the Europeanproletariat was imminent. An illusion which Lenin soon abandoned, bycontrast with Trotsky, just asit seemsthe Cuban leaders haveabandoned it today. The spontaneous repetition of guerrilla move-ments based on the Cuban modelnot the Venezuelan or Colombianguerrillas but others which we will discuss in a momentare no lessreminiscent of the repetition of the Bolshevik model attempted bythe Spartakists in Germany and by the Hungarian Commune of Bela

Kun, both crushed in early 1919. Has not imperialism passed throughthe same stages in its relations with the Soviet Union and with Cuba?First, a waiting game; then wars of interventionin Cuba, Playa Giron;then economic aggression; general blockade; breaches in the blockadeby the signing of partial commercial agreementsEngland takingthe lead in both cases; finally hasty and incoherent reformism incountries contiguous to the centre of subversion. The agrarian measurestaken in Danubian Europe after the Hungarian Revolution had thesame rationale as the agrarian reforms advocated by the Alliance forProgress . . . and the same fate. This analogy is not a comparison, but the

zero degree of a specific evaluation of the present conjuncture, whichstresses what is radically new in the relation between Cuba andimperialism.

Continental Time-table

The revolutionary attempts and failures in the Continent have been

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strikingly synchronized. 1959, 1960 and 1961: years of effervescentheroism, when guerrillayfocos spontaneously appeared in Santo Domin-go, Paraguay, Colombia and Central America, while in Brazil Juliaowas stirring up the North-East and Brizola repulsed a military coupdtatby means of an armed uprising in Rio Grande do Sul; Peru wit-nessed the first occupation of estates and the first revolutionary peasantleagues in Cuzco. 1962 and 1963: years of defeat and division. In

Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay the ventures in armed strugglefail; in Brazil the Peasant Leagues inspired by Juliao rend themselvesin internal disputes and are unable to move to the level of a politicalorganizationthe Tiradentes Movementwhich Juliao planned forthem. In Argentina, the military frustrate the formidable electoral vic-tory of March 18th, 1962, the date on which the Peronist Framini waselected Governor of Buenos Aires with a staggering majority, and thepopular response to the coup is liquidated. In Venezuela, Betancourtsucceeds in staying in power, and the revolutionary war becomes moredifficult and long-term than foreseen. In Chile, Freis victory, due to thevote of women electors; in Brazil, the installation of an openly fascistdictatorship. A reactionary wave sweeps across the Continent.

Today we know that none of these defeats was definitive; on the con-trary they forced the revolutionary movement to move to a higherstage of reorganization. Already by 1964 armed struggle had rooted andconsolidated itself, on a broad popular basis which is now unshakable,in Venezuela and Colombia. The immense explosives factory whichimperialist exploitation has unwittingly installed in Latin America canhenceforward do without foreign licences, imported models of revolu-tion; it is finding its own methods of manufacture, in accord with itshistory, social formation and specific character. In our language,always behind time in its metaphors, we may say that South Americalived, immediately after the Cuban Revolution, its 1905, from whichit has already emerged. This experience can today become the object ofsystematic reflection. This task, however, encounters one seriousobstacle: as the historical synchronization indicates, there is a latentunity of destiny among the Latin American nations. The demonstra-tions of solidarity with Cuba show this very well: a continental unity

was spontaneously experienced and assumed from Mexico to Uruguay.It is fashionable to talk knowingly today of twenty Latin Americas.Anyone who travels from Bolivia to Argentina, or even from Salta inthe north of Argentina to Buenos Aires, or from Lima to Cuzco, hasthe impression of moving from one world and one century to another.But this is only a superficial, geographical impression. Is not under-development and colonial distortion precisely the inequality of econo-mic and social development within one country, between the country-side and the capital? Or rather, is it not the superimposition of differentlevels of development, an enclave of capitalist and mercantile penetra-

tion combined with an interior of feudal monoproduction? Does notthis misery condition those riches, and vice-versa? If under-develop-ment is not in its turn a natural product but the result of a history, thenSouth America draws its unity from its history. If it had to exist to-gether to free itself from the Spanish yoke, today too it will have toexist together to free itself from the Yankees. If Bolivar refused toconsider Gran Colombia free until High and Low Peru were also

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liberated, Fidel Castro shows equal or greater realism in thinking thatthe liberation of Cuba will not be complete while Venezuela andColombia are still enslaved. If one has a right to speak of the LatinAmerican Revolution, it is not because of Latin America butdialecticallybecause of the United States, its common enemy. This isthe reason why Bolivars ideas have gained a new resonance in thestrategy of the revolutionary vanguards of Latin America since the

Cuban Revolution.

Balkanization and the Revolution

However,South America is still not a continent. It is Balkanized at everylevelrevolutionary organizations, information, personal contactsby the efforts of those who have converted the Continent into a homo-geneous field for their manoeuvres with the pseudo-Pan-Americanismof the OAS and Aid Programmes. Ever since the sabotage of the Con-gress of Panama, called by Bolivar in 1826 to federate the liberated

Latin American Republics, North American operations have triumphedin the Continent as a whole, in spite of the fact that Cuba has now struckan irreversible blow against them. Within each of the four naturalsubtotalities into which the Continent is dividedCaribbean-Colom-bia-Venezuela, Ecuador-Peru-Bolivia-Paraguay, Chile-Argentina-Uruguay, and Brazil (which forms a complex of its own)thepanorama is the same: confusion of revolutionary organizations, mutualignorance and dispersal of forces. An Ecuadorian Communist leader inthe underground might well not have known in early 1964 that hisparty was involved in the same division between a pro-Soviet and apro-Chinese wing as the Peruvian Communist Party; although per-haps he might not anyway have been in a position to profit by theexperience of his Peruvian comrades to avoid the same errors andsterile polemic between the two wings. Such separations are dramatic.It is urgent to overcome them, not only because they prevent the pos-sibility of a strategy, but also because the time and lives lost by thisabsence of internal links will never be recovered. If we had seriouslyknown of the experience of the Venezuelan guerrillas, said one of thesurvivors of the Argentinianfoco, we would not have made the material

and political mistakes which largely cost us defeat and, for most of us,our lives.

In Brazil, distancePorto Alegre is 4,500 kilometres from Recifeis aweapon consciously used to break up national unity by the FederalState which controls the whole country. The day a revolutionaryaction is concerted between Rio Grande do Sul and Pernambuco, tocite the two states best prepared for a struggle of this kind, will mark thebeginning of a new political era in Brazil. Such a thing has not beenpossible till now, since the separation imposed by distance has been

complicated by a historical disjuncture at the level of political organiza-tions: the Brizolist movementrooted in the South of the countrygained strength above all after 1961, by which time Juliaos PeasantLeaguesrooted in the North-Easthad fallen into political deca-dence. An example of the Balkanization of a nation: a student and aworking-class trade-unionist in So Paulo, questioned about the North-East, replied that they only knew that the repression there had been

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massive since the putsch of April 1964 and that there had been a sort ofwhite terror; but beyond that they had no two pieces of informationwhich agreed with one another. The press is silent or systematicallymendacious. The student confesses his malaise: the North-East isfor him a Third World, myth and remorse. For the worker, the North-East is our Algeria, a country from which the bosses import cheaplabour to lower wages, if they get a chance. In a word, for the citizen of

Sao Paulo the inhabitants of the North-East constitute virtuallyanother nationality.

The Colonial Pact

By contrast with the internal divisions of Latin America, national andinternational, North American imperialism considers South America asingle primary producing zone, a field for political manoeuvres which,if they are not always homogeneous, are at the very least coherent.Through the Alliance for Progress, the Inter-American Development

Bank (IDB) and other specialized organisms, imperialism sovereignlyplans the exploitation of the Continent, while through the Inter-American Defence Council, and the Organization of American Statesit ensures its politico-military protection. Let us recall the form whichthe economic relations binding South America to North America take.

Fundamentally, the Colonial Pact continues to exist intact: exchangeof primary products for manufactured goods, petroleum for gasoline,cocoa for chocolate, iron for automobiles, etc. According to the UNCommission for Latin America, ECLA, the worsening of the terms oftrade caused an indirect loss of2,660 million dollars for the whole ofLatin America in 1961, which with repatriated foreign profits1,735million dollarsand funds exported to amortize debtsanother1,450 million dollarsmake up a total three times as large as thetheoretical import of funds for aid and investment promised to theContinent by the Alliance for Progress, that is, 2,000 million dollars.

Behind its resplendent promises, what was the strategic plan of im-perialism when it launched the Alliance for Progress in 1961, at Puntadel Este? Its aim was to conceal the traditional Commercial Pact andthe military dictatorships which this presupposed (whose prototypewas the rgime of Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, decorated in his time byEisenhower) by a simulacrum of national industrialization, artificiallyfuelled overnight by a massive export of North American capital,mostly privatecapital which is logically attracted by cheap manpower,an enormous reserve army of labour, the free exchange which allowsrepatriation of profits, the absence of tax controls, and a rate of profitmuch higher than that of the us itself. Thus the origin of this capitaldetermined the canalization of investment into the most profitable

branches for the monopolies, that is to say, mainly extractive industriessubordinating these, moreover, to the strategic plans of exploitationof primary products by the USA, all over the world. For example, theBolivian tungsten and antimony minesvery substantial oneswerekept as reserves, because the USA has no need of them for the momentand their use would lower prices on the world market. An economicinitiative of this type might have been presented under national guise,

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with mixed pseudo-companies, directors boards full of nationalbourgeois, and nomenclature in Spanish. A new class of nationalco-administrators would have evolved, serving as a screen for foreignexploitation. This stratum could have liquidated feudal relations of pro-duction in the rural zones, which are the cause of the explosivepolitical situation among the peasant majority of the nation (rent inkind, serfdom or peonage, latifundism, uncultivated lands, very low

productivity per hectare) and started a timid capitalist development.But these advanced forms of imperialist penetration ran the risk ofterminating the Colonial Pact, and allowing the growth of transformerindustries processing primary products; the national bourgeoisiesmight then have traded with all states, putting an end to the com-mercial monopoly of the USA.

The Alliance for Progress

The Alliance for Progress, aware of these dangers, kept the majority of

its aid for unproductive investments: roads, hospitals, schools and soforth, which avoid the creation of competitive industries. It relied onthese to cure the dangerous symptoms of under-development, andhide its causes. It was, in effect, a political manoeuvre with an economicpretext. Its own promoters now admit that the plan has been an utterfailure, and we will later see the political consequences of this failure.The plan failed because the liquidation of agrarian feudalism requiredthe transformation of the relations of production as a whole, sinceagrarian feudalism is an integral moment of the development of the

commercial and agrarian-export bourgeoisie, and even of the industrialbourgeoisie, as in Colombia and Brazil. There may exist contradictionsbetween these two fractions of the dominant class, but these contradic-tions will besecondary and ultimately surpassable in the struggle againstthe main enemyrevolution. For the process of inflation has provokedgrowing unemployment, lowering of wages, and a brusque economiccontraction. This inflation is not compensated by a an increase in pro-duction, since this would only mean over-production because of thelack of an internal market, which in turn could only be created by aradical transformation of semi-feudal relations of production, turning

the peasant masses into consumers. Hence inflation can only be com-bated by new foreign loans, repayable at short notice, which close thevicious circle of under-development: get into debt to pay your debts.Aid programmes, it should be said, have never delivered so much ashalf the amounts promised when they are launched.

Let us now focus the nature of these famous aid programmes of theAlliance for Progress. These programmes are undisguisedly a specificform of capital export. Fowler Hamilton, director of Foreign Aid,stated to a group of North American businessmen: Every dollar that

leaves our pocket should come back to the United States after havingbought goods with the import of a dollar.

1. The Alliance for Progress, in effect, ensures the conquest of newmarkets or the consolidation of old ones. In most cases, the funds whichare lent have to be used to purchase US manufactured goods, at prices50 to 200 per cent above the world market level. In Colombia and the

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Andes, grants in kind (powdered milk, tinned butter) distributed by thePeace Corpsyoung Yankees who volunteer to serve as a combina-tion of intelligence agents and boy scouts in South Americaare usedas instruments of political penetration and blackmail in the peasantpopulations.

2. The export of agricultural surplusses (decree 480) fulfils two func-

tions: a) it ameliorates the crisis of national overproduction in the USA;b) although they are payable in local currency, transport, distributionand packaging are expenses of the recipient country, to the greaterprofit of North American freight companies, who charge astronomicrates.

3. Every country aided by the Alliance for Progress has to assure, forits part: the maintenance of an enormous apparatus of North Ameri-can functionaries and technicians, with a scandalously high mode oflife (imported foods, membership of golf and gambling clubs, servantsand so on); the public works (construction of roads, clearing offorests, installation of aqueducts and electricity) in zones where NorthAmerican companies are operating and where future capital invest-ments will be located. These works are contracted, of course, to NorthAmerican engineering firms, who decide on their own plans andpremises, with their own equipment and technicians: an ingeniousmethod of reducing the costs of exploitation, by making them fall onthe exploited.

To sum up: the Alliance for Progress regulates, conceals and reinforcesthe process whereby the undercapitalized countries of South Americanourish and increase the accumulation of capital in the United States ofAmerica.

National Liberation and Continental Solidarity

Balkanization, an objective legacy of the intra-continental wars of the19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, thus corresponds to theneeds of North American strategy, even if it is only to block or control

commercial exchanges between South American countries in order tokeep a trade monopoly, or to organize low-cost Holy Alliances orpolitical cordons sanitaires. Two months before the Chilean elections ofSeptember 1964, there was a mysterious resurgence of Boliviannationalism and anti-Chilean sentimenta relic of the Pacific War of1879, in the course of which Bolivia lost its access to the sea. Simultane-ouslya surprising coincidenceArgentina began to claim territoriesin Patagonia from Chile (between Chiloe and Chubut), and reservetroops were mobilized in both countries . . . until the electoral victoryof the Christian Democrat Frei stopped these propaganda campaigns

short.

Ecuador against Peru, Peru against Bolivia and Chile, Bolivia againstParaguay, Chile against Argentina: there are no lack of grounds fornationalist claims (often very justified, as in the cases of Ecuador andBolivia) and frontier conflicts. Balkanization thus facilitates the coloni-zation of small nations in the most cynical fashion. An example:

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Bolivia. On August 22nd, 1963, the government of Paz Estenssorosigned a commercial treaty with the United States, which obliged it tobreak trade relations with Europe and neighbouring countries and toimport solely from the United States, in exchange for funds from theaid programme of the Alliance for Progress.

Let us be quite clear: the existence of separate American nations, even

mutually hostile ones, is an irreversible fact, and revolutionary struggletoday can only be a struggle for national liberation. To require ofnational revolutionary processes in South America the previous con-dition of continental unity is to postpone them to the Greek Calends.During the recent upheavals in Panama, provoked by the Yankees ofthe Canal Zone, some Trotskyists wanted to launch the slogan: Giveback Panama to Colombia. The same elements frequently vociferatethe watchword of the ageing Trotsky: United Socialist States ofAmerica. But neither a purist return to the letter of the historical past,nor the evocation of a mythical future (as the United Socialist States ofAmerica is today) can dissolve the presentfact of Balkanizationshortof betraying the actual struggles of every nation by referring them un-ceasingly to the absent unity of all the American nations. Caribbeanrevolutionaries, who have not forgotten their ancient dream of aFederation of the Antilles, are very well aware that this great visionfinds its practical translation in mundane, fragmented and insulartasks. Once again, as in Bolivars day, a flame has sprung up in Vene-zuela and Colombia and is burning southwards; but it is not serious toexpect it to conquer at one blow a disintegrating Empire, from the

sands of Cartagena to the plateaux of Bolivia.

But if in many regions of the Continent consciousness of this objec-tive solidarity still is unequal to it, where has South America gained anAmerican vision of itself till now? Political leaders frequently con-demned by repression to travel abroad think the answer is Europe,bridgehead to Africa and Asia, and more recently, Cuba. From WesternEurope, such a vision will be more difficult to attain than ever, forobvious reasons. In Cuba, we should not forget that continental con-sciousness has an advantage over the mainland itself. On the mainland,

important social groups, in particular the urban petit-bourgeoisie,have undergone a massive intoxication by the radio, cinema and presscontrolled by imperialism. Breaking of diplomatic relations with Cubaby all governments except Mexico; closing down of all the offices ofthe independent news agency Prensa Latina; systematic censorship ofall information; grave threats to anyone who travels to Cuba: there isno denying that imperialism has succeeded to a certain extent in itsaim of insulating Cuba. But this has only worked at the summitinthose social sectors accessible to its propaganda, notamong the peasan-try. In 1965, it is much easier for an indifferent Parisian to follow the

course of the Cuban Revolution than for a revolutionary militant ofLima or Bogota, where the circulation of the independent left-wingpress is strictly limited or actually underground.

In this context, the difficulty of the theoretical and practical work ofnational liberation for Latin Americans emerges much more clearly.South-East Asia has available today the immense base of influence and

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theoretical development represented by Peoples China and theDemocratic Republics of Vietnam and Korea. Africa has the inspira-tion of the new Algeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Ghana and Zanzibar.Between the vanguards of these two continents, there exists solidfraternity and certain common forms of action, of which the Afro-Asian Conferences are proof. America, by contrast, is dissociated andisolated from this global movement. In spite of Cuba, many revolution-

ary organizations in Latin America still continue to be under theideological influence of the European working-class movement, oftenforeign to its true problems.

Revolution Revolutionizes the Counter-Revolution

Thus the backwardness and division of revolutionary parties in LatinAmerica is a perilous phenomenon. For whether they like it or not,they are being unified by force, from the outside, in their situation andtheir strategy. The Cuban Revolution has sealed this unity, in spite of

itself and them. History would not be truly dialectical if the enormouslesson which a revolution constitutes for the people who have made it werenot also equally instructive for continental counter-revolution. Fromthe Rio Grande to the Falkland Islands, the Cuban Revolution has, to alarge extent, transformed the conditions of transformation of Latin America.

A socialist revolution also revolutionizes counter-revolution. This is whysince its birth and by the very fact of existing as a revolution for im-perialism (as well), Cuba condemned to failure any mechanical attemptto repeat the experience of the Sierra Maestra, with an equally rapid

tempo of action, with the same alliances and the same tactics. To sumup: the door which Cuba opened by surprise, under the very nose ofimperialismsocialist revolutionhas been solidly bolted from withinby the national oligarchies and from without by imperialism, alwaysready to intervene. How will the brother peoples succeed in forcing thedoor open once again? Either by exercising a stronger and more dur-able pressure, or by themselves opening a new door, every nation adifferent one, in the least defended sector of the wall.

What has been the transformation caused by Cuba?

1. Cuba has brusquely forced the class struggle in Latin Americaonto a higher level, for which the exploited classes and their van-

guards were not prepared.

On the practical plane, we all know that Cuba has liquidated the geo-graphical fatalism which, together with Browderism,1 exercised a greatinfluence on the Latin American Communist Parties immediately afterthe World War. Today it is possible to win power and keep it. Takenseriously, this phrasewhich controverts so many habits of thought

still provokes a shock in Latin America. It was not assimilated over-

1 Earl Browder was the Secretary of the North American Communist Party during theSecond World War. He was responsible for a Right deviation when CommunistInternational was dissolved by Stalin in 1943he urged the transformation of theCPS in the Western Hemisphere into discussion clubs open to everyone. The devia-tion was routed Jacques Duclos after the war, in a letter which is still famous amongLatin American militants.

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night. Even in the fiercest moments of the Colombian Civil War (194957), this idea was as alien to the Colombian CP as it was to the Left ofthe Liberal Party, when they controlled a veritable peasant army, ex-haustedit is trueby internal struggles. The Brazilian CP alone,after the failure of the insurrection of 1935, decided to aim for theseizure of power in its Manifesto of1950an expression, however, ofsectarian and leftist tendencies more than a proper strategy. (The PCB

tried to create bases of a revolutionary army among the peasantry, innorthern Parana and Goias, of which some traces still survive in theFormosa region of Goias.) Since the Cuban Revolution, the Chilean CPhas set itself the goal of conquering power by legal means, through theballot-box (12th Congress, in March 1962). The Argentinian CP took asits banner the slogan launched by its Secretary-General Codovilla inMarch 1963 (12th Congress): Towards the conquest of power throughthe action of the masses. In its 3rd Congress (1961), the VenezuelanCP had been the first to consider seriously the establishment of ademocratic and popular power, leaving the course of revolutionarypractice itself to decide what road it should take. Because of the re-pression unleashed by Betancourt, the road was none other than armedstruggle. The same evolutiontaking some three years on averageis occurring in Colombia where the CP, after the initiation of guerrillastruggle in Marquetalia, is abandoning its peaceful line in order tocounter the repression; thus as the Colombian comrades had long pre-dicted, the self-defence of the masses transformed itself into offensiveguerrilla tactics.

But at the very moment when the existence of Cuba proved that theconquest of power was not a priori unrealistic, the unilateral repercus-sions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the general orientation thenadopted by the international working-class movement, led the CPs totake the line of national democracy, of United Front with the Bour-geoisiea peaceful road the same as that defended by the ColombianParty a short time before (9th Congress, 1962), the Mexican Party (13thCongress), the Bolivian Party before its scission (2nd Congress in 1964,in which the peaceful road was considered the most probable), theChilean Party (13th Congress), the Argentinian Party and the Brazilian

Party. The example of the Brazilian CP is revealing. Under the directinfluence of destalinization, it made a 180-degree turn in 1958, verymuch within its tradition, and in March of that year called on Com-munists to form a United Nationalist and Democratic Front whoseleadership logically devolved on to the national bourgeoisie. A yearlater came Cuba. Since then, however much the CP militants convertedthemselves into docile lambs, an auxiliary ally of the advancedbourgeoisie and an electoral support of Marshal Lott, the bourgeoisieconsidered them the more dangerous the more docile they became. TheCommunist Party of Brazil (pro-Chinese) was founded, taking with it

some good cadres from Prestess party, above all in the South. A largepart of the middle classes, terrified by the Cuban Revolution, went overto Lacerda and the military. The famous national bourgeoisie aban-doned Goulart mid-way, and the coup dtatof April 1st, 1964 super-vened. The PCB was disorganized, pulverized by the repression and byinternal disputes, and hence incapable of leading the violent populardiscontent: an example among others of the historical setbacks pro-

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voked by international centralism, understood as the transposition ofslogans and tactics worked out in a different historical context.

Confronted with this impasse, Cuba gave risewithout knowing itto half a hundred revolutionary organizations on the margin of theCommunist Parties, resolved on direct action. Several years of revolu-tionary action have now made it clear that heroism is not enough, and

that ideological maturity and above all political sense, absence ofsectarianism and seriousness in preparing armed struggle, were lacking.Too young and too spontaneously formed under the inspiration ofCuba, prisoners of the Cuban model, these so-called Fidelista organiza-tions perished, at least in their initial form: MOEC (Movimiento ObreroEstudiantil Campesino) in Colombia, URJE (Union Revolucionaria de laJuventud Ecuatoriana) in Ecuador, MIR (Movimiento de IzquierdaRevolucionario) and FIR (Frente de Izquierda Revolucionario) in Peru,Socialismo de Vanguardia in Argentina (with its thousand sub-divisions), Movimiento de Apoyo al Campesino (MAC) and the Left

of the Socialist Party in Uruguay, where Sendic, the union whichorganized the sugar-workers, launched an armed struggle in theSwitzerland of Latin America. To sum up: the revolutionary front hasnot so far been able, either within the Communist Parties (with theobvious exceptionsdestined to become the ruleof Venezuela,Colombia and Guatemala) or within these new organizations withoutany past, to respond to the objective heightening of the level of therevolutionary struggle. Cuba remained alone.

On the theoretical plane, the Cuban Revolution has rehabilitated Marxismin Latin America by its triumph in practice. For Marxism had been lostbetween two forms of discredit: APRA and mechanical Marxism, withoutcontact with national reality. It should not be forgotten that theAlianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, the Latin AmericanKuomintang, born in 1924 as a United Front at continental level ofanti-imperialist groups and parties, and transformed into a party withsections in each country in 1929, was the nursery of a whole generationof petit-bourgeois anti-imperialist movements, of Betancourt andAccion Democratica, of Perons Justicialismo in a certain sense, and of

the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionaria in Bolivia (these last twowere influenced by fascism). The Indoamericanism of the founderand leader of APRA, Haya de la Torre, carried out under the name ofMarxism the greatest historical betrayal which Latin America has knownthese 30 years. For at least 20 years, from 1930 to 1950, Haya de laTorre was the anti-imperialist guide of a whole generation of enlight-ened bourgeois and even of the proletariat (at any rate in Peru): Hegelplus Marx plus Einstein equals Haya de la Torre one of the followers ofthe Master could actually write. Aprista doctrine, wrote Haya in

Anti-imperialism and APRA (1936), signifies a new and methodical

confrontation, within Marxism, between Indoamerican reality and thetheses which Marx postulated for Europe. This confrontation led himto produce the famous notion of historical space time. From it, heargued that since in Europe socialism was to be born from the internalcontradictions of capitalism, and in America capitalism took the form ofimperialism, it was necessary to stimulate imperialist domination . . . toaccelerate national liberation. This sophism sought its theoretical

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justification in the most hypocritically mechanical materialism con-ceivable: since it appeared that stages could not be jumped, there was agood use possible for North American imperialisman idea which ledHaya after 1945 to turn himself into one of the main, and certainly themost prestigious, agents of North American imperialism in the Conti-nent. When it proved that Marxism as a universal theory of history hada true point of insertion into Latin America, Cuba simultaneously

liquidated all the falsifications of Marxism and their spokesmenHaya, Betancourt, Paz Estenssoro and the others.

But by creating a vacuum where these mystifications prevailed, Cubahasalso created a new need: for an authentic Marxism, capable of thinkingthe national experiences of South America. Not only the independenceof Cuba in the Sino-Soviet dispute, but the whole daily practice of itsleaders, both in the Sierra Maestra and in power, indicates that LatinAmerica is transforming itself into a new centre of revolutionary

thought, adapted to its own conditions. Cuba has also shown, withoutknowing it, that this theory has still to be developed in many parts ofthe Continent. For since the death of Jose Carlos Mariategui, founder ofthe Peruvian Communist Party and author ofSeven Essays in the Inter-

pretation of Peruvian Reality, the most important Marxist work producedin Latin America before the Cuban Revolution, most Marxist leadersand theoreticians imported prefabricated strategies and concepts fromEurope. Before Fidel Castro and before the Venezuelan and ColombianRevolutions, Marxism had never found its correct articulation with asocial reality so atypical, by European standards, as Latin America.

The true weight of the Cuban Revolution is perhaps felt with greatestforce within the revolution itself. It puts an end to revolutionary models,whether Soviet, Chinese or even Cuban, to the sterile comfort of schemasand formulae, to separation from the masses, and to the cult of or-ganization for the sake of organization. In this sense, Cuba hasdemonstrated in practice that the old Marxism was no longer any good,that it was necessary to recover the revolutionary inspiration ofMarxism-Leninism and to submit Marxism once again to reality of

class action. This need is felt everywhere, but it is still not satisfiedeverywhere. Thus Latin America, which today seeks its revolutionaryroad, knows by the example of Cuba that it must invent that road fromits own experience. The Second Declaration of Havana did not springout of the heads of the Cuban leaders one exalted night, nor was itabusively promulgated to the Latin American masses in the name ofany mysticism: it was the product of the convergence of all the latentaspirations and experiences of the exploited masses of the Continent.The resistance which may crop up to its effective discussion and dis-tribution does not come from the demand of revolutionary organizations

for independence, but from the traditional torpidity of certain suivisteleaderships. Unfortunately Fidels bitter comments in his speech to theWomens Congress in 1962 are still not anachronistic: it will be re-membered that Fidel contrasted the presence of objective conditionsin almost all Latin America with the absence of subjective condi-tions in the vanguards to match the opportunity of the historicalsituation.

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2. Cuba has raised the material and ideological level of imperialistreaction in less time than that of the revolutionary vanguards.

If imperialism in the short run has extracted more advantages than therevolutionary forces from the Cuban Revolution, this is obviouslynot due to its superior intelligence. Imperialism is in a better position toput the lessons which it has learnt from the Cuban Revolution into

practice rapidly, because it has at its command all the material means oforganized violence, as well as the nervous ferocity constantly whippedinto action by its instinct of self-preservation.

At the material level, the extraordinary reinforcement of the repressiveapparatuses beginning in 1960 cannot be over-emphasized. The otherside of the gilded medal of the Alliance for Progress is military aid tothe Latin-American governments of a new intensity and nature. Amonth before Dillon launched optimistic plans in Punta del Este fortransforming Latin America into a paradise of golden latrinesplans

whose inevitable failure was analysed by Che Guevara at the timeKennedy submitted to Congress in July 1961, a special military pro-gramme designed to guarantee the internal security of Latin Americaagainst subversion. According to theNew York Times of July 4th, the pro-gramme represents a radical modification in the military programmesfor the western hemisphere. Until now the principal objective hasalways been to equip some air and naval units for the combined defenceof the Hemisphere against exterior attack. Now, greater importance isattached to internal defence against subversion. During 1961 alone, 21million dollars were spent on anti-subversive forces. Thousands ofyoung officers from the Latin-American police forces now pass throughthe counter-insurgency school in Panama every yearthe exact figureis a military secret. Battalions of Colombian anti-guerrillas, Ecuada-dorian paratroopers, Peruvian commandos, Bolivian rangers, Argen-tinian gendarmes (equipped with heavy armaments) and many othermilitary formations are organized and trained by US military missions.Before the Cuban revolution, these existed only in an embryonic state.Today each can claim the liquidation of an insurrectionary foco in itsown country. But it is in the terrain of information and infiltration that

US aid has been strongest. In Brazil no one, with the exception ofBrizola who ordered the burning of the police archives in Rio Grandedo Sul when he was governor, denounced the fact that the FBI and CIAcontrolled the secret dossiers of the political policeeven at theheight of a government of the national bourgeoisie. With a populationof20 million, Argentina has seven different and rival political policecorps. In Venezuela, Sotopol, Digepol, SIFA and PTJ compete againsteach other without counting the agents recruited by the CIA. Twentyyears ago, said an Ecuadorian military information officer, we werestill innocent. When students demonstrated in the streets we shot at

them, with disastrous results. Today we know that of the hundred waysof stifling a revolution, firearms should be the last. Sure enough: six orseven important guerrillafocos proclaimed in Latin America since 1959have been annihilated or pre-empted by delation or more frequently as aresult of infiltration into the revolutionary organizations. The theoreti-cal affirmation that the social question is not a police matter is of littleuse; for those who each day have to make history on the basis of prior

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conditions, it is better to distrust such affirmations which may be validfor the historian a hundred years later. The role of clandestine warfareis all the more important because in oppressive political rgimesrevolutionary politics often has no other choice than that of armed orclandestine struggle.

Put another way, there are at the moment no military or political ex-

periences that are unilateral, and the raising of the level of revolution-ary warfare is being perfected in both directions. The Venezuelan WarMinistry published Ches Guerrilla Warfare in 1961, annotated andanalysed on the right-hand pages. This document is now in the handsof the Venezuelan guerrillas in Falcn. A regular army officer who hadbeen through the counter-insurgency school in Panama, reached theguerrillas in Falcn with this document, and on the basis of his anti-guerrilla training, annotated the annotations. This is one exampleamong others of the double spiral of apprenticeship in which the naturaladvantage that the popular guerrilla has over the armysurpriseis indanger of dwindling.

At the political level, the triumph of the Cuban revolution tends toradicalize, organize and unify the different tendencies of the bourgeoisiein a single counter-revolutionary front more rapidly than the revolu-tionary organizations are radicalized and unified. Cubas rapid trans-formation into a socialist country has been used by imperialist pro-paganda to frighten the so-called national bourgeoisies and theeducated sectors of the middle classes. Hence the growing difficulty of

certain political leaders in perpetuating the old myth of an alliance withthe national bourgeoisie in order to direct popular pressure on theprogressive wing of bourgeois governments (Goulart in Brazil,Belande Terry in Peru, and up to a point Illia in the Argentine re-ceived the support of the reformists). The paradox of an originallybourgeous-democratic revolution like the Cuban is that it has focusedand consolidated the vacillating class consciousness of the neigh-bouring national bourgeoisies (in the equivocal mode of a revelation-production) especially where these exist as a social classin Chile, theArgentine, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia. But this negative value contains

naturally as its reverse a positive value: the revelation of democratic andrevolutionary bourgeois who, as individuals, were able in differingdegrees to join the revolutionary camp: Brizola in Brazil, perhapsMichelsen in Colombia, Lechn in Bolivia, etc.

This inverse radicalization of the present forces (dominant class moreto the right, exploited classes more to the left) benefits imperialism atthe moment because of the changes which have taken place in thefollowing three historical tendencies, since the Cuban revolution:

I The bourgeois leaders of the former mass parties, APRA in Peru, ADin Venezuela, MNR in Bolivia, etc, have passed with arms and baggageinto the imperialist camp (and in their baggage went important sectorsof the peasants and sometimes workers).

II The Pre-Cuban Communist leaders who, for lack of theoreticaland practical means, were unable at the apogee of these petit-bourgoeis

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mass parties, to contend with them for the control of the popularmovement, have still not been able to do so for various reasons.

III The young Fidelista movements which sprang up rapidly andwhich tried spontaneously to fill this flagrant absence of leadershipimmediately after the Cuban revolution, have in very few cases beenable to maintain themselves. Spontaneity, underestimation of pre-

paration and theoretical study, problems of organization, volubility oflanguage account for the immediate failures of the Apra Rebelde inPeru, MOEC in Colombia, the Peasant Leagues in Brazil, Socialismo deVanguardia in Argentina. Taught by their first failure and sustainedby their revolutionary passion, numerous Fidelista organizations arenow working to achieve new levels of action.

These confused changes still leave open a central void in numerousareas, a space empty for a revolutionary vanguard, although they havealtered the role of the vanguard. A void all the more surprising because

Latin America is a mine of solid revolutionary cadres, determined andready for sacrifice but who have not been able to coagulate in an or-ganized vanguard. For many young militants this vanguard is waitingto be built, and it is an exhausting task. Ah, if only there were a man ora party we could follow. . . The phrase is repeated again and againamong the thousands of young militants from Panama to Patagonia.Among all the panoramas of misery and neglect which Latin Americahas to offer, perhaps none is as absurd and anguishing as this: thesemen abandoned to themselves, hopelessly trapped by 50 years of the

powerless ratiocination and blind formulas in vogue among the mostconsecrated of their predecessors.

From one day to the next Cuba has transformed the language, thestyle and the content of revolutionary action with youthful verve. Thisrenovation has an astonishing sounding-box in the Continent: demo-graphic pressure. Half the population of Venezuela is under 20: thisyouth without memories will only follow those whom it sees fightingby its side. In the whole of Latin America, and especially at the level ofpolitical behaviour, there is a dramatic divorce between generations. In the

semi-colonial countries of South America the pyramid of age groupsshows clearly enough that this divorce reflects an objective situationthat is going to become pronounced.

The Bankruptcy of Social-Democracy

As far as the so-called generation of1920 is concerned, this clan ofsocial-democratic leaders who grew up together in exile, in the shadowof the revolutionary sacrifices of their respective peoples, has happilyliquidated itself without even waiting for its natural death. The Cuban

revolution, which they have betrayed, has publicly unmasked them.Haya de la Torre, Figueres and Betancourt, Munoz Marin and Arevalo,Frondizi, Paz Estenssoro and the others came to power because of theSecond World War, and then controlled and contained the whole Latin-American anti-imperialist movement until three years ago. Cuba hasexpelled them from the revolutionary stage on which, until quiterecently, they awakened popular illusions. The frustrated sentiments of

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these petit-bourgeois leaders who were brought to power by theirrevolutionary phraseology are evident. In the 1950s Betancourtcould still believe himself to be leading a popular anti-imperialist re-sistance; after Fidels lightning visit to Venezuela in 1959, Betancourtknew what his role was to be. In the rabid insults Betancourt shortlyafterwards launched against Castro-Communisman expressionwhich swept the Continentand in his paranoiac unbalance there

speaks, in fact, a small and expended politician condemned to an ar-moured car and solitude, who, one day in 1959, in the Plaza del Silencioin Caracas allowed his role and accoutrements to be confiscated fromhim before 500,000 people. The Fidelista movement, the point ofdivorce between two generations, is born between two historic mo-mentsthe bourgeois and the socialist revolution. The unforgivablefact about the Cuban revolution is that it spanned these two momentsas though this were the most natural thing in the world. The cul-mination of one epoch and the beginning of another, Cuba fixed forever the moment in which a tradition is inverted and becomes its con-trary. Over-determined par excellence, the historic fortune of the Cubanrevolution was to have been able to win the material and moral aid ofthese old liberal politicians whom Fidel and Raul Castro, CamiloCienfuegos, Ernesto Guevara and Almeida, young men without a poli-tical past but with lan and honesty, were soon to sweep away. A singularfusion of contradictions. In the most intense moment of the clandestinestruggle the July 26th Movement could collect funds in New York inthe name of The Rights of Man; accept the material aid of PepeFigueres, president of Costa Rica, for the defence of democracy; receive

official monetary aid from Venezuela which had recently been liberatedfrom the Perez Jimenez dictatorship, as well as a plane-load of arma-ments from Larrazabal, president of the Democratic Junta; and assureitself a world-wide protective publicity thanks to the capitalist press,

Life and Paris Match. None of this detracts from the extraordinarymerits of the July 26th Movement but it is necessary to recall it inorder to evaluate what has changedin the equivalent movements of today.Do you think that a Hubert Matthews would come out to interview us,or that Figueres would send us revolvers? the leader of a Colombianindependent republic a few hours from Bogota asked me ironically. The

peasants were preparing to meet an offensive by the regular army whichhad been planned for several years in collaboration with the Yankeemilitary mission, and they lacked everything. Remoteness of the inter-national centres of aid, poverty in money and arms, systematic cam-paigns by the national and international press to discredit its objectivesand the meaning of its struggle, solitude and hungerthese are thebitter obverse of the call to courage which is ineluctably imposed ontodays revolutionaries: rely only on own strength.

The sacrifice in human lives, the length of the revolutionary war and

its complexity have all increased since the Cuban revolution. It is lesseasy today to establish a wide liberation front, when every anti-imperialist attitude is immediately labelled Castro-Communism anddriven from legality, than it was five years ago. It is much less easy toforge a popular army today when regular armies have for the past fiveyears been training psychologically and militarily in irregular warfare,and police forces have been infiltrating clandestine networks, and

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intensifying their work of information and repression. The time hascome to change our language and perspectives, in Europe and otherareas, when we attempt to understand the difficulties confronting thecomrades in this part of the world.

Venezuela: From Town to Jungle

The commentaries (or their absence) in the objective Western presson the Venezuelan Revolution show one thing quite clearly: whoeverignores the Cuban model will not understand contemporary history.What has the FALN done in adopting its new strategy of the long war?It has taken into account the new situation created by Cuba, which ismuch more evident in Venezuela than in any other country. More thanhalf the total US investments in Latin America are in Venezuela, whichin consequence is not only the most deeply penetrated by the US but themost carefully watched. The Venezuelan Revolution, after the failureof its urban insurrectional form, which was not appropriate for it, has

undoubtedly found its second breath, its definitive equilibrium, inthis long-term task: to move from a guerrilla army to a popularregular army in the interior of the country. It thereby leaves to thecity all its political importance, in order to safeguard the possibilitiesof legal mass action and audacious alliances.

Meanwhile in the interior, more than in Caracas, mass work is directlyarticulated to the armed struggle. This evolution recalls the Chineserevolution, which was often thought to be close to death after thebloody failures of Canton and Shanghai in 1927. But it was only thenthat the Communist leaders were able to surpass the Bolshevik modelof revolution and to find an authentically Chinese form, victoriouslydefended by Mao against Li Li-san. Born of defeat, the withdrawal tothe countryside with the Long March and the creation of revolutionarypeasant bases, signified victory. But the blood shed in Shanghai or inCaracas, if ever it is possible to draw up the cost of the sacrifices made,must not be inscribed in the deficit column of the revolution, as thoughit were the result of an error of judgment. On both occasions, thetheoretical proof that an isolated urban insurrection cannot achieve

victory in a semi-colonial country which is predominantly peasant, hadto be made in practice. If the proof of revolutionary theory were of atheoretical order, a few good theoreticians would be sufficient to makegood revolutions merely by deduction and without useless diversions.The strategy of the long war, carried from the countrys interior to thecities, although tacitly adopted by the commanders of the guerrillafronts since 1962, had to wait for the confirmation of events in order tobe guaranteed by the urban leaders two years later; till then there was adisjuncture between the plans of the urban and rural leaders.

Anyone who went to the rural fronts before the elections of 1964could testify to the strategy of Douglas in Falcon, and Urbina andGabaldon in Lara: guerrilla struggle in depth, taking political morethan military forms. The patient creation of support cells among thepeasants in each hamlet or village, the daily talk of propaganda andcontacts, the cultivation of new lands in the jungle, the methodicalcampaign to achieve literacy among the combatants and peasants, the

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reinforcement of the organization to maintain contact with villages andtowns, the supply and information networksall this work of politicalorganization culminated in the creation of a fixed revolutionary basewith its school, its own jurisdiction and its own radio centre (alreadyestablished in Falcon). Tasks of subterranean implantation of which thepress sees only the militaryand less essentialaspects. While theurban guerrilla wore itself out in a war of attrition in which, given the

balance of forces in the towns, time was against it, the rural guerrillasilently and calmly used this same time to establish the political infra-structure of its future military actions. In the euphoria of recent popularvictories, political underestimation of Betancourts government andAmerican imperialism prevailed in the ranks of the urban militants whohad not yet experienced, for obvious reasons, the new, post-Cubanconditions of struggle. Hence they underestimated the governmentsrepressive power and the military strength of imperialism which ex-plains the unexpectedly rapid dismantling of the legal and illegalpolitical organizations of the revolution in Caracas and the statecapitals. Thus the Venezuelans were the first to experience, in thecountry most directly colonized by the US because of its oil and iron,what the peoples war has become in post-Cuban conditions. Theypaid dearly for their pioneering role. Now that the failure of the refor-mist experience, attempted in Peru, Brazil and in Chile, appears in-contestable to everyone (indeed the fact is not always critically assessed)it is good to see the revolutionaries of fraternal countries return to theimmense store of experiences in Venezuela, experiences which even intheir errors are of use to everyone.

Chile: The Fate of the Electoral Road

Recently much has been said about Chile. It is a fact that this country iscurrently in the vanguard of reformism, as the recent Christian Demo-cratic electoral victories show. This partys advanced political positionscertainly reveal the level to which the mass movement of these lastyears has been raised there. The policies pursued by the working-classmovement in that country, after being restored to legality by Ibaez in1958, may in some measure explain, not the victory of reaction, but the

fact that the latter could surprise and baffle all the reformists of theContinent.

It is not necessary to have read Clausewitz to know that the basis ofevery tactic, whether revolutionary or not, is to fight on ones own ter-rain, or (wherever there is a bourgeois rgime) not to allow a battle tobecome decisive when it is on the adversarys terrainin this case,the terrain of representative democracy, whose class character is evenmore marked in Latin America than in Europe.

Although in this respect Chile is distinguished by a genuine particular-ism (parliamentary tradition, eclipsed role of the army, very secondaryimportance of agrarian feudalism, etc. . . .), the decisive importance ofthe Catholic church (Freis 400,000 vote plurality over Allende weregiven him by women as the separate count of ballot papers by sexrevealed), the total control of the large newspapers and all the the prop-aganda media by the dominating class, the freedom of action which

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the charity organization Caritas enjoyed to buy votes among thecallampas (the working-class areas of Santiago) by the free distributionof foodstuffs from the Alliance for Progress, the impressive anti-Cuban campaign carried out by the United Statesall these guaranteedthe electoral supremacy of the bourgeoisie from the outset. Althoughprior to September 4th, 1964, there were some working-class sectors inChile which were sceptical of the possibility of a popular victory on this

terrain, FRAP (Frente de Accion Popular) took care to convince them tothe contrary.

1 From the start of the election campaign all working-class demandswere suspended, in spite of inflation and growing unemployment, so asnot to frighten the middle classes. The democratic parties, whollyconverted into electoral machines, assured their militants of SalvadorAllendes victory, thus diverting the attention of the masses from thequestion of taking real power to that of the nature of the electoralmajority to be wonwhether it was to be relative or absolute. An

electoral majority was assumed in practice to be power itself. Threemonths before the election, alarmed by the military mobilization ofArgentina, Bolivia, and Peru and the rumours a military coup dtatinthe event of a popular victory (lent credence by the Brazilian putsch),FRAP was obliged to take hurried and formal measures, behind thebacks of the masses, to protect its leaders and to prepare the road toclandestinitymeasures which did nothing to raise the level ofpopular consciousness and preparation.

2 The presidential election was conceived by FRAP in terms of analliance with centrist and frankly reactionary parties, and concessionsto deserters from the Liberal and even Conservative partiesin short ofa policy of local notables. This went to such an extreme that the frontpage ofVistazo, the Young Communist review, made a large display ofa banquet offered for Allende by the Grand Lodge of the ChileanFreemasonswhich includes the best names of the Chilean commercialbourgeoisie. Finally, very little separated Freis Christian Democratprogramme from that of Allende, with the exception of the lattersproposal for the progressive nationalization of the copper mines while

the former proposed their Chileanization. But Frei was able to usemore direct means to get across to the masses.

3 Since all working class offensive actions were postponed untilafterwards, even the adversarys aggressive actions were not countered,in order not to frighten the electorate. Chile is the only country inLatin America where the breaking of diplomatic relations with Cubadid not provoke mass demonstrations. When, shortly before the elec-tions, this diplomatic rupture took place, FRAP contented itself with acommunique in which Allende, its presidential candidate, declared that

if necessary he would submit the case to the World Court in the Hague.Instead of affirming its solidarity with Cuba, FRAP never stopped takingits distance from the Cuban revolution, as well as from the other revo-lutionary movements in being. It did not answer the torrent of re-actionary accusations against the bloody dictatorship of Fidel Castroand in consequence numerous popular strata thought that there was, infact, no answer and that Cuba was indefensible.

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4 It is one thing to use a bourgeois weapon like an election in abourgeois representative democracy; it is another to use such an elec-tion in a bourgeois manner. It is one thing to defend the honesty of agiven election and respect for the Constitution in a given conjunctureagainst reaction; it is another to take the fervent defence of bourgeoislegality and the letter of the Constitution as an absolute, abstractedfrom any class position. During the Chilean electoral campaign, the

Left competed with the Right in pacifist declarations and humanitar-ian condemnations of violence, in general. Thus one can read in theChilean CP programme, approved at its 12th Congress in March 1962:

The thesis of the peaceful road is not a tactical form but a propositiongeared to the very programme of the communist movement. . . (thepeaceful road) wholly corresponds to the interests of the march to-wards socialism and the eminently humanist character of Marxist-Leninist theory. The present correlation of national and internationalforces has increased the possibility of achieving revolution without

armed struggle.

Leaving aside the irrational optimism of such a thesis in Latin Americafive years after the Cuban Revolution, it is still surprising to see howthe theoretical humanism of Marxism serves to justify the abandon-ment of all political and theoretical rigour.

It would obviously be unjust to explain the reactionary victory in theChilean presidential elections, and later in the last legislative elections(March, 1965) solely by mistakes in revolutionary practice. This victory

is to be explained by the general situation of South America after Cuba.The explanation of revolutionary mistakes lies elsewhere. Taking intoaccount the present imperialist superiority and the extreme uncertaintyof electoral terrain for popular forces even in such a country as Chile,the rub of the matter is that an electoral result which represented anelectoral victory unequalled in Latin America by any other democraticmovement, was turned into a revolutionary defeat. It succeeded inobtaining an equal number of votes among men voters, less subject toconservative and clerical pressures than women, and forced reaction tothe ultimate limits of pseudo-socialist demagogy in order to retain

power. If reformist elements had not spread illusions among the masses,if they had not wanted to transform the Chilean election in the eyes ofall Latin American militants into a crucial test, they would today un-doubtedly be in a position to return to the attack on a new basis.

The Chilean experience has two lessons:

a It is impossible for a developed Latin American country, either inthe Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay) or in Central America(Costa Rica) to escape the determinate structure of the Continent as a

whole, which is imprisoned completely in the meshes of the imperialistnet. Dominated by a veritable superiority complex that tended to over-estimate the specific characteristics of an advanced democracy, theChilean working-class movement tried to put in parentheses the LatinAmerican national liberation movements and the conjuncture alreadydescribed which the Cuban Revolution had created in the wholeContinent.

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b Opportunism has a common trait in Latin America with left-wingadventurism: underestimation of North American imperialism, despitethe proliferation of military putsches in recent years.

It was widely known in Cuba and other countries, that given the lack ofpreparation of the Chilean democratic organizations, an electoralvictory by Allende would have brought no fundamental change in the

structure of the state apparatus, and that neither the Chilean rulingclass nor the imperialist forces were going to be cast into oblivion bypopular action.

The Strategy of Reformism

This radical underestimation of imperialism appeared all the moresharply in the case of the reformism of a section of the Brazilian revo-lutionary movement. If ever there were historic proof of the futility of

reformist efforts, it was in Brazil. As the limits of this article do notpermit an analysis that would require a separate study in itself, we needonly note that the Brazilian Communist Partyas its present self-criticisms indicateabandoned its class independence in exchange foran alliance with the national bourgeoisie represented by Goulart. Thisopportunist line provoked its mechanical opposite in a large sector ofBrazilian revolutionary forcesa petit-bourgeois radicalism which dis-dained patient work among the masses, in some sectors influenced byFrancisco Juliao and in others by Brizola. Thus if the fascist coup metno resistance, one of the reasons was that it took the Communist Party

completely by surprise in full legalistic euphoria. The only sectors pre-pared for the struggle preferred to postpone it, not wanting to come tothe defence of a corrupt and impotent rgime now, and not yetable tounite the masses on a revolutionary platform which was still inexistent.

Let us merely ask why, some time after the Cuban Revolution and inspite of all its lessons, illusions about a peaceful step towards socialismpersisted among the political leaderships of various countries. Perhapsthe secret of this mysterynot much of a secret, actuallymust besought in the general conception which current reformist tendencieshave of the Latin American Revolution. Let us reproduce the argumentswhich a highly qualified representative of these tendencies was goodenough to develop for us, in an Andean nation where a popular in-surrection existed in a latent state while he spoke:

The aim of our action in Latin America is to consolidate the states ofnational democracy like Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and Brazil (this was inGoularts time) so that they can serve one day as poles of attraction forthe less advanced neighbouring states. These national states can only

fortify themselves effectively at the expense of North American im-perialism, which tends to eliminate competitive national economiescapable of escaping from its commercial monopoly. North Americanimperialism is the natural enemy of the national bourgeoisies. Thus theonly chance for these national bourgeoisies to develop economies in-dependent of foreign control and to start an accumulation of capital, isto resort to the disinterested economic aid of the socialist camp, which

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is given without political conditions. This is why theprimordialduty ofthe socialist camp is to continue to build up its economic power un-ceasingly. There are two reasons for this. First, it will then be able tosupply long-term loans and technicians to countries in Latin Americathat is to say, weaken or restrict the zones of North American influence.Secondly, the revelation of the material and cultural progress of thesocialist countries will increase the prestige of socialism and attract the

states of national democracy ever more towards it.

For the moment, then, we have to wait for the national bourgeoisies tomature, since it is obvious that they cannot spring up overnight. Thegrowth of a national bourgeoisie is the simultaneous growth of twocontradictions: the first with imperialism, which ceases to exercise itsprevious exploitation, and the second with the nascent proletariat,which it begins to exploit. A strong bourgeoisie produces a strong pro-letariat. We must rely fundamentally on this double contradiction. Aslong as the national bourgeoisies are still too weak, there is no pos-sibility for a revolution. The weakness of the working-class and itsparties should not lead us, however, to fall into a sectarian policy ofisolationto which, incidentally, the inexperience of many leadershipsmight incline them. We must be able to forge the broadest alliances,without fearing that the middle class takes the lead in them. Manysmall and middle bourgeois have excellent political attitudes. Today,they are the only realists. International conditions now play an in-creasingly determinant role in revolutionary triumphs. It is better notto hurry, since every year that goes by changes these international

conditions in favour of socialism: the Cuban economy grows, theeconomy of the socialist camp grows, new socialist countries arise inother parts of the world and so on.

In this situation, to attempt a revolution by launching armed struggleagainst the representatives of the national bourgeoisie which is nowforming in power, would only delay or compromise the advent ofobjective conditions for advance. The most progressive elements ofthe government and the bourgeoisie would be thrown, ipso facto, intothe arms of the North Americans. The defeat of the insurrection would

allow the most retrograde elements to become uppermost once againand perhaps annul the simulacrum of a land reform and even denationalizethe mines. The USA would demand the shutting down of the Soviet Em-bassy which we have kept in existence with great difficulty, despiteevery provocation, and the departure of the socialist economic missions.The greatest dangers in Latin America today are impatience and jacob-inism. They lead to a deterioration of objective conditions and thesacrifice of a safe future for illusions.

The partisans of a reformist strategy are now dwindling every year in

Latin America, for the simple reason that their analysis does not resistthe test of the facts. The reformist strategy presupposes that states ofnational democracy under the leadership of the bourgeoisie candevelop in Latin America, not aligned with the United States and cap-able of becoming increasingly independent of imperialism. However,the history of the last 20 years has shown that there is a fatal and insol-uble dilemma for all such bourgeoisies.

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1. Demo-bourgeois Fascism

The party of the national bourgeoisie confiscates a popular revolutionand seizes power, as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional did inMexico, Accion Democratica in Venezuela and the MovimientoNacionalista Revolucionario in Bolivia. This progressive petit-bourgeoisie does not possess an infrastructure of economic power

before it wins political power. Hence it transforms the state not onlyinto an instrument of political domination, but also into a source ofeconomic power. The state, culmination of social relations of exploitation incapitalist Europe, becomes in a certain sense the instrument of their installationin these countries. In a short-circuit characteristic of semi-colonial coun-tries, the state transforms itself from a juridical expression of the givenrelations of production in a society, into an instrument for producing,to some extent, relations of production which are not already given inthe society. The proliferation of public prebends sole source of employ-ment for thousands of followers without work, serves as a substitute for

the development of an apparatus of production. Without the control ofthe state apparatus, this bourgeoisie is nothing economically; politicalpower means everything for it, and it is capable of everything to keepit. The specific form its class consciousness takes is police vigilance. Aparty card is the pre-requisite of public employment. In Venezuela,every single secretary in a Ministry has to pay dues to Accion Demo-craticabefore so much as learning to type. Party dues are deducteddirectly from the salary of the public functionaries, just as trade uniondues for the official unions are deducted from workers wages. Aninflated and cynical mass of higher and middle echelon bureaucrats,private secretaries, crooked lawyers, businessmen, police agents,officers involved in reselling arms, drug-addicted diplomats, tradeunion leaders living off the Ministry of Labour, are parasites on a stateapparatus that is in turn a parasite on the society.

It is matter of life or death for these creatures to maul or strangle any-one who comes near their particular prize. Threatened by populardemands, this bourgeoisie of nouveaux riches immediately betrays thenationalist ideology which at the beginning characterized its leadership

of the masses (above all the peasants, hypnotized by the constantly re-newed promise of a genuine land reform), turns coat and devotes it-self to collaborating ever more shamelessly with imperialism, whoseinterests it undertakes to administer on the spot. Give and take: oil,mining and commercial concessions in exchange for some royalties andgrants in aid, which are rapidly invested in private motorways andswimming pools. From this point of view, the Venezuelan and Bolivianrgimes (with or without Paz Estenssoro) show extraordinary simi-larities. The same agrarian reforms, scandalous land deals in Venezuelaand division into private lots of uncultivated soil in the East of Bolivia,

the same populist demagogy, which ensures the good name of thergime abroad: periodic electoral frauds, maintenance of a sort ofparliament, public mise en scne to demonstrate the support of the work-ersall designed to give it a democratic appearance. Surrounded by thepeople in arms, that is to say, mercenaries recruited from unemployedworkers and lumpen (in Venezuela, the half-dozen legal and extra-legal police corps, in Bolivia the militias of the MNR, composed of

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illiterate Indians and railwayworkersthe only working-class tradeunion in which governmental terror produced results), this bourgeoisiehas to defend its political power against those who gave this power toit in the first place: the workers and students led by youngnationalists and Communists, who in Venezuela struggled againstPerez Jimenez for 10 years and Gomez for 20, and in Bolivia sufferedthe long calvary of massacres in the mines and insurrections crushed

by the Roscathe tin-oligarchy. At the end of this evolution, thergimes of national democracy give birth to a monster which mightwell be called demo-bourgeois fascismunique exception to the rule thatthere is no teratology in history: a supreme transformation of thecontradictions into which a bourgeois rgime without a bourgeoisclass, a liberalism without liberals, inexorably enters.

Such is the first horn of the dilemma: pure and simple betrayal of thebourgeois-democratic revolution. . . by itself.

2. The Military Putsch

When a bourgeois politician, or a fraction of the national bourgeoisie,refuses to betray its national vocation and sell itself to the United States,it tries to achieve bourgeois-democratic reforms: an authentic anti-feudal agrarian reform, extension of the vote to illiterates, establishmentof diplomatic and commercial relations with all countries, control ofthe profits of the great North American companies, and so on. To re-sist the combined pressures of the US ambassador (the Ecuadoreanscall him the Viceroy), the journalistic campaigns, the juridical ob-stacles always opposed by a parliamentary majority which is the fruit ofelectoral fraud and co-option within the ruling class, the President isforced to resort to the popular masses and ask the support of working-class parties and trade-unions, and if necessary (as in Brazil) of PeasantLeagues. From then on, the rgime is constantly blackmailed with thethreat of an army coup.

Cornered between the workers and peasants whose enthusiasm he hasstimulated, who pressure him behind, and the army mobilized by theinjured oligarchy and the winks of the State Department, which blockshim in front, the President totters, seeks an escape from the situation,tries to win a breathing-spell, compromisesbut it is already too late.Alerted by the precipitate march of events, the whole ruling-class hasperceived that the mechanism now set in motion leads to its downfall.The victory of a policy of national independence requires socialistmeasures: this truth, once discovered, provokes panic. The bourgeoisieimmediately abandons its apprentice sorcerer. Little does it care if theconstitutional legality whose champion it was against subversion sorecently, is trampled under foot by the military. At any pretextin

Brazil it was Goularts pardon of the sailors who had mutinied againsttheir officersthe prefectures are occupied, the provincial garrisonsfail to answer telephone calls from the Presidency, tanks move towardsthe Presidential Palace, and the streets empty: the putsch has come. ThePresident and a handful of advisers are left up in the air. Preciselybecause constitutional legality has been respected throughout the pro-cess, there is no possibility of opposing another type of army to the

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military, much less of arming the peoplea last-minute measure, con-demned to be merely symbolic, like the small popular demonstrationswhich flare up here and there, and are rapidly dispersed at gun-point.Incapable of opposing a serious counterforce to the armed representa-tives of his own class and of the State Department, the President takes aplane to Uruguay or Panama.

Such was the fall of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 (when the NorthAmerican Army trained, equipped and organized the mercenary troopsof Castillo Armas), Bosch in Santo Domingo in 1963, Goulart inBrazil in 1964, not to speak of Arosemena in Ecuador, Arevalo andVilleda Morales in Central America and so many others who have beenreplaced by military rgimes or juntas. There are no exceptions to thistragicomedy in the history of the Bonapartist variants of the nationalbourgeoisie, such as Vargas in Brazil (1954) and Peron in Argentina(1955). The order of acts and scenes never essentially changes: as thisrepetition indicates, the history of the heroes of bourgeois reformismhas the truth of a religious myth. Reformism, an inverted dogmatism,imprisons itself in a cyclical time in order to shut its ears to the lessonsof history. Like the beautiful phoenix, it dies one night, to be rebornthe next morning. The luckless heroes of bourgeois progress have sostrong a preference for romance that their tragedy always ends incomedy.

Such is the second horn of the dilemma: a bourgeois (an individual or agroup of individuals), even if he is brave enough to take the nationalist

ideology professed by his class literallyalthough not enough to breakwith itand even if he undertakes to convert his class to fidelity toitself, that is to say, to a bourgeois reform of feudal society, is invariablystrangled by his own class, which turns against him its instrument ofpolitical domination, the army. Far from being inconsistent with itself,the national bourgeoisie in so doing only reveals the distance whichseparates what it isa bourgeois ally of agrarian feudalism and foreigncapitalfrom what it claims to benational and anti-imperialist. Thebourgeoisie likes to be thought unfaltering, but only up to a certainpoint. In politics, as in everything else, the golden mean is the bour-

geois virtue.

Bourgeois Revolution and Socialist Revolution

What explains the dilemma? The explosive situation which in LatinAmerica has produced the Cuban Revolutiona proof of it to itselfand to the world. For this situation is the following. As it has been saidof Russia before 1917, Latin America today is pregnant with two revo-lutions, the bourgeois-democratic and the socialist revolution, andcannot release one without releasing the other: at the birth of the first, itcannot withhold the second.2 Thus it is perilous to count on thenational bourgeoisieeven in those countries where one is develop-ingto make a bourgeois-democratic revolution, since it is well awareof the process which it would be unleashing. To say that it has fallen to

2 Louis Althusser, Contradiction and Over-Determination, published in New LeftReview 41, January-February 1967.

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the proletariat and to the peasantry to accomplish the historic tasks of thebourgeoisie is to say that the alternative today is not between (peaceful)bourgeois revolution and (violent) socialist revolution, as the pro-moters of the Alliance for Progress claimed, in agreement with thereformists, but between revolution tout courtand counter-revolution, asthey admit today. Recently the mild souls of the New Frontier have putaside their mildness (they had this advantage over many reformists) and

deliberately welcomed counter-revolution, as the Mann Doctrine ofrecognition of de facto military governments witnesses. For today, ineffect, imperialism has only two tactics: either to avoid the birth of thebourgeois democratic revolution (military coup dtat) or, when the birthhas occurred inadvertently, to empty it of its content (demo-bourgeoisfascism). If the creature is already there, cage it; if it is not yet born,abort it. No matter what reformist Communists or Christian-Democratsbelieve in Chile, there is no third solution. More; since Cuba put anend to inadvertencethe democratic Mexican (1910) and Bolivian(1952) revolutions are the belle epoque of US nonchalance before theCuban Revolutionabortion manu militari is the rule today. The proofis the chain of military putsches in the last two years.

The result of the dilemma: whoever persists in playing at revolution,whether liberal or socialist, from above (without a popular armedorganization), within the rules of constitutional legality, plays a strangegame, in which there is only a choice between two ways of losing.Either the player is sent to prison, exile or the grave (military coup); orhe is put in power as an armed demagogue, charged with sending

revolutionaries to prison, exile or the grave (demo-bourgeois fascism).Either the fate or Arbenz (Guatemala 1954) or Betancourt (Venezuela1959): betrayed on betrayer. In both cases, the peaceful and bourgeoisrevolution will pay the cost. When the day of the genuine confronta-tion comes, which will be much later, all that will be necessary will be afew more rifles. By a supreme irony of history, in Latin America thesurest road to a future of blood and tears has been baptized the peace-ful road to socialism.

Brazil: Capturing the State from Within

The Brazilian experience of basic reforms, attempted by the Goulartgovernment, combined the optimum conditions for victory: a power-ful mass movement supported by the central government, one of thestrongest Communist parties in the Continent installed in the stateapparatus itself, and an army penetrated from top to bottomor so itwas believedby a strong democratic or even revolutionary movement.It logically crystallized the hopes of all those in Latin America whothought it more economical to seize control of the bourgeois state

from within. The fall of Goulart, exemplary in its purity, ruined these

hopes almost everywhere. As ill luck had it, Goulart brought the Com-munist Party down with him, whose secretary-general had said todisquieted friends a few days before the coup: Dont worry, we arealready in power. The party, which had infiltrated the network of thebourgeois state apparatus without succeeding in dominating it com-pletely, thus allowed reaction to kill two birds with one stone. Atpresent, its militants cannot contain their rancour. The PCB now seems

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to be drifting and divided in a bitter struggle of different currents,mutual accusations and retrospective analyses: the forcible awakeningis as painful as the dreams were beautiful.

Colombia : Co-ordination of the Struggle

For the implacable course of the real class struggle ends by making

itself heard. The Colombian Communist Party, under the leadership ofits secretary-general Vieira, has known how to adapt itself to the ob-jective demands of history, openly joining the cause of the besiegedpeasants of Marquetalia.

It may be assumed that by co-ordinating their action with that of theVenezuelan guerrillas of the Andes and Lara zones, and extendingtheir armed struggle across the unguarded plains which unite the twocountriesas they are trying to dothe Colombian guerrillas havesingularly accelerated the liberation of two neighbours, Colombia

and Venezuela. Thus that unity of national struggles which waspreached by Bolivar and without which America will stagnate for along time, has already been achieved. As for those, every day lessnumerous, who persist in refusing to make a radical critique of theirfailures (Peru, Chile and Brazil), their own silence condemns them,throwing into relief its equivocal justification: patience. This cardinalvirtue of revolutionaries ceases to be respectable when it is erected intoa theoretical argument against all the arguments of reason and reality.By contrast, anyone can denounce the impatience of the young Fidelis-tas when they peremptorily decree the means and ends of the revolution.But who has noticed the paradox whereby the very parties of Patienceare those which deliver themselves over to blind realism and unprin-cipled alliances for electoral purposes (like those Peruvian revolution-aries who voted for the Christian Democratic candidate in the munici-pal elections in Lima in 1963, abandoning the candidate of the Libera-tion Front), in other words to a policy of short-run gains and long-runlosses? Does not true revolutionary patience, on the contrary, consistin building up the fundamental force of the revolution by long-termwork, distinguishing once and for all the different class banners (which

does not exclude any alliances, of course) and grouping the exploitedabout a revolutionary nucleus which grows irreversibly like the July26th Movement in Cuba, the FALN in Venezuela and the self-defencemilitias in Colombia, changing into a guerrilla army before becoming aregular army? The impatient, for their part, show the most surprisingtactical flexibility, forge the broadest alliances without compromisingtheir principles, and calmly confront the prospect of a long war.Fidelista impatience does not say: Let us seize power tomorrow, but:However tortuous and long the road, and precisely because of this, letus never lose sight of our final aim of destroying the semi-colonial

state. In that way we will avoid useless detours.

Peaceful Genocide

This passion for efficacy and the direct blow against the foundationsof the State, its army and police, is not shared by thousands of militantsf

problems of revolutionary strategy in latin america

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