The dissolution of the Soviet bloc sent a triumphal wave across the West and a shudder through Cuba. The Reagan and Clinton administrations’ euphoria led to greater certainty that Fidel’s days were numbered. Lost in the self-congratulations, however, was any recognition of a salient contradiction: Cuba bore little resemblance to the remote-controlled Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe and thus was less susceptible to falling from within. The hawks and neoconservatives were frozen in their doctrine that communism always equaled totalitarianism, which meant that populations were oppressed entirely and that no reforms were possible from within. The anticommunist think tanks were more faith based than factual in their assessments.
Nonetheless, Cubans had good reason to worry. According to Gott, the Cuban economy, though under a depressing Stalinist influence, had benefited from Soviet aid during from a period in “the sunny uplands of economic growth”; from 1975 to 1985, Cuba’s growth rate was slightly more than 4 percent, in contrast to Latin America’s 1.2 percent.1 Soviet oil flowed to Cuba, and Cuba sent back tons of sugar, all beyond the embargo’s claw. That came to a crashing end amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more importantly, so did Moscow’s security guarantees against an American invasion. Cuba, however, did not collapse, only quivered alone; did not surrender to the northern Colossus, but began a careful and urgent reappraisal.
RICARDO: The economic blow we suffered was tremendous. It was like the beginning of the American blockade again. My generation has passed through the same experience twice, goods suddenly disappearing just when you’d gotten used to them.
Ricardo had noticed a change in Soviet behavior before the fall, as they shifted heavily toward détente with the United States.
RICARDO: The Soviets were becoming different, trying to imitate the Americans. They had lost their stamina and diplomatic skill. There were very important changes in their diplomacy; Russia could have remained the same [after the fall of the Soviet Union] but they abandoned socialism. During the Yeltsin period they were acting like puppets of the United States. Their behavior was not that of a big power, it was more like that of a second-class regime. (Now, by the way, they have a sense of recovering dignity.)
Ricardo, who was the only Latin American diplomat to address the Soviet Duma (parliament) twice, observed problems early on.
RICARDO: Even when Mills went to a Soviet sanatorium in 1962 [for heart treatment] it was an incredibly bureaucratic process. Any Cuban who got a cold in Moscow would want to return to Cuba.2 They were an advanced economy but also very backward. A peasant superpower. The result of a particular history that I respect but was not what the original revolutionaries had in mind.
The Europeans always thought socialism would come in Germany or France. Marx would have been surprised that a socialist regime was established in his name in the Old Russia.
The last bilateral agreement between Cuba and the USSR, if you compare it to the very first in which they bought sugar and we bought oil, showed the difference. They were also buying Cuban medical equipment, pharmaceutical expertise, and Cuban advice. We were no longer the poor developing country dependent on advanced socialism. This was in 1990–1991. We had to spend lots of resources on national defense and we counted on them for weapons. We didn’t have to go through the experience they did in 1919, of arming themselves without any foreign friends. That distorted their socialism. They saved us from that experience. So we could develop much more in education, health care, culture, and social services. And there was a different cultural background. We have both African and Western civilizations. Even the Cuban peasantry was different from theirs. It was more of a rural proletariat, with tens of thousands of workers in the industrial part of producing sugar and tobacco, not a traditional isolated peasantry.
What happened with our Soviet friends? I was the ambassador at the UN in 1992 and a member of the Security Council. At first you had seating labels like “USSR” and “UKRANIAN SSR,” “BYLORUSSIAN SSR,” etcetera, but according to the UN Charter there are only five permanent members. One day when I arrived there I saw “RUSSIAN FEDERATION.” In the beginning they referred to me as “Tovarich” [comrade]. Then one day it was “Gaspadin,” a word something like “sir.” For those who were wanting to join the capitalist bloc it was amazing that still the majority of the Russian officials called me “Tovarich,” because it meant they were trapped in the middle of the turnaround. The worst time of Russian diplomacy was with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The diplomats all started speaking English! With Gromyko before, you could talk about Shakespeare in English, but this was new. I never have understood Russian. The only guys who couldn’t speak Russian were the Romanians, who used French. “Bonjour, Camarade.” But the meetings of Socialist ambassadors were always in Russian before.
Nothing is linear in the way it goes.
I told Ricardo about my oldest friend in Vietnam, Nguyen Xuan Oanh, a revolutionary, writer, musician, and poet whose task was to welcome, guide, and interpret events for American visitors, which required immense tolerance during visits to bombed hospitals or pagodas, or in everyday street encounters with ordinary Vietnamese. When I asked Xuan Oanh in 1965 why Vietnam drew such an absolute distinction between American government policies and the “American people” in general, he said it came from a belief that the vast majority of Americans were either innocent, or ignorant, or opposed to the war, and that he wanted to avoid hating people who might in time become friends. It was a doctrine that was Marxist, Buddhist, and Confucian in its roots, and it seems to be shared by the Cubans I ever met in Havana. And over time, the doctrine gradually proved to be essential to ending the Vietnam War and achieving reconciliation and diplomatic relations. A model both Americans and Cubans might emulate. In 2008, fifty years after Xuan Oanh and I first met, I saw him for the last time in Hanoi. He was drinking, playing the piano, and socializing with old friends, all in their eighties. When I was leaving, he held my hand at his door, looking intensely into my eyes, and said, “Nothing can be predicted.” He meant that the course of history, including the rise and fall of North Vietnam’s closest ally, the Soviet Union, was unknowable and ever changing. That ideologies or mechanical concepts were ultimately only dogmas. I told this story to Ricardo one afternoon in the Nacional. He listened but gave no response. I thought perhaps it was simply too murky. But the next day, Ricardo said he thought my Vietnamese friend was right.
RICARDO: You can see more or less one hundred yards but not one hundred kilometers. Frankly, I would hesitate to anticipate anything. Today on television it is all about gay marriage. I feel lost sometimes.3
I remember Bush even saying he was surprised by the fall of the
Soviet Union. The United States was not prepared. What they did was pass through euphoria, as drunk as Yeltsin. And a lot of people were lost on the side of the Left.
There was this theory that Cuba had to fall like the Soviet Union, based on certain fundamental mistaken viewpoints that were in fashion on all sides. The idea of the eternal immutability of their brand of socialism. The entire communist movement was convinced. What happened to the old guard Communists in Latin America and Europe, I feel pity for them. It was like a Catholic being told by the pope that God does not exist, that it was all a mistake. Fortunately we, certainly myself, were not coming from that tradition.
In Cuba I felt very sorry also for my people on the street, because they had an idea of the Soviet Union very far removed from the wrongdoings and faults. They thought the Soviet Union was the generous friend who came from the other side of the earth, a kind of celestial force. Many Cubans were educated and trained there, and we imported a lot of equipment. But at the same time some Cubans had their own critical approach.
In his time, Marx considered the idea of internationalism, the First International, in which the world’s revolutionaries didn’t really have a nationalist approach. The idea was the emancipation of the whole global working class. I have no idea what Marx would think of the events that followed. The First and Second Internationals divided, the Third came under Lenin . . . [and] it all got accustomed to being like a church. Obviously in a way it was correct to promote international solidarity, but it also had a very negative dimension with the idea that doctrine and orders should be issued from a central place.
At this point Ricardo looked out from our window at Havana’s Easter weekend crowds. “Why do you think people here respect Good Friday?” he asked without expecting an answer. The Cuban Revolution originally penalized religion but over decades has negotiated normal relations with the Vatican, a policy that would pay crucial dividends in normalization.
Today, a modest percentage of Cubans are practicing Catholics and the official government line emphasizes nondiscrimination between the several faiths on the island. The Cuban Catholic Church, the largest institution outside the government, is a force for human rights, but also opposes the cruelties of economic neoliberalism and supports Cuban-US rapprochement. As noted, Fidel, who went to Jesuit schools, has written his own positive reflections on religion, based on his contact with revolutionaries in Latin America’s liberation theology movement.4 The papal visits to the island in 1998 and 2012 were productive ones, exactly the opposite in their effects from those of Pope John Paul II’s 1989 visit to Poland, which hastened the downfall of the Communist regime. Papal diplomacy played a crucial role in the Obama-Castro December 17 announcement of normalization, and it is almost certain that Pope Francis will continue to be a major force, in sync with Latin America as a whole, in helping to move us toward a constructive Cuban-US settlement that includes lifting the embargo.
RICARDO: [Marxism] was represented by a set of concepts from the outside. One element that is missing in conversations about the Cuban Revolution is that a fresh and highly critical approach emerged, even among the old communist movement.
We started going back to a sort of new New Left in Latin America, a new approach to socialism. The positive dimension [of the Soviet demise] was not having to have a point of reference like a Vatican or a Socialist Church. It made you go back to the socialist idea which was not represented by either the Soviets or the Chinese. We were fortunate that history continued, and that Latin America evolved.
Everybody talks about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but nobody talks about Caracazo.
In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and with it the regimes of communism, a new and different dialectic was emerging in Venezuela and across Latin America, one stirred in large part by the earlier Cuba-inspired guerrilla movements that had been defined as failures at the time. In the wake of communism’s demise, America’s higher powers embarked on a plan to rid the world of capitalism’s new enemies: third world nationalists, labor unions, and environmental and social movements that stood in the path of “free market capitalism,” or neoliberalism, the rollback of any government “interference” that protected sovereignty, working people, public health, consumers, or the environment. This radical right-wing counterrevolution was inspired by Ayn Rand’s individualist ideologies of the Far Right, drafted by libertarian and conservative academics, and backed by the presumed unipolar power of the United States in a postcommunist world. Adopting the neoliberal formula, the Venezuelan government imposed unaffordable hikes on bus fares and petrol, without so much as a warning to the hard-pressed public. As Gott, the author of a history of Cuba, wrote then in his book on Venezuela, “The peoples of Latin America, in spite of the surface opulence of the middle-class sectors of cities, are much closer to the breadline than their counterparts in Eastern Europe.”5
As for the Venezuelan rich, their lives seemed scripted on the Roman Empire model, an out-of-touch, debauched elite long aligned with the United States. The “Caracazo” Ricardo is talking about—loosely translated as the “smashing” or “big one” of Caracas—began with the shantytown poor descending on central Caracas in rebellion against the higher fares. According to the official figures, security forces shot and killed at least three hundred people in five days, while independent estimates put the death toll far higher, as many as one thousand. The Caracazo reverberated across the region as suddenly and unexpectedly as the Arab Spring revolts in this generation, signaling a powerful progressive shift in continental politics. The Caracazo also inspired a young Venezuelan military officer, Hugo Chávez, to quicken his plans for a coup against the corrupt Venezuelan regime. Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro would become the closest of friends, and powerful strategic allies.
Chávez, after time in prison for a failed progressive coup in 1992,6 was elected in 1998 by a 56 percent margin, and succeeded electorally in eighteen of nineteen subsequent campaigns until his early death from cancer in 2013. While he was vilified by liberals and conservatives in the United States for personifying a Latin American caudillo—“Hugo Boss” read a sarcastic Foreign Affairs headline over a photo of Chávez attired in a dress suit—Chávez was deeply popular among the poor not only in Venezuela but across the continent.7 That he and his allies were reelected on multiple occasions, under the eye of Jimmy Carter and other international election observers, only caused US security thinkers to question electoral democracy itself, not America’s long alliance with privileged elites. One of their favorite formulations was that Chávez was a democratically elected “dictator.” The implications were ominous: that Chávez was illegitimate despite his popular vote total, and therefore that Venezuelan-style democracy could be justifiably subverted by externally funded “democracy” programs. This mentality sent a message to Cuba that if US “democracy” programs were part of subverting an elected government in Caracas they were even more likely to be justified toward Cuba. And if a pro-Castro figure was elected in a future Cuban election, even with international observers, he or she might not be considered legitimate by the White House either.
Indeed there are authoritarian strains in Venezuelan politics from left to right, not unlike Chicago’s historic politics. Hugo Chávez was a charismatic authoritarian personality whose speeches, which I listened to in Caracas, went on far longer than I could bear in my older years. But Venezuela was their country, and Chávez clearly had a majority electoral mandate and an admirable record of improving the lives of the country’s long-forgotten poor.
Although in the sixties we never envisioned a charismatic strongman as a model candidate, Chávez’s program nevertheless carried seeds of the participatory democracy philosophy of the SDS Port Huron Statement. In Chávez’s own exaggerated rhetoric, “the concept of participatory democracy will be changed into a form in which democracy based on popular sovereignty constitutes itself as the protagonist of power. It is precisely at such borders that we must draw the limits of advance of Bolivarian democracy. Then we shall be very near to the territory of utopia.” 8 Based on his own experience, including the masses in the streets who came to save him during the 2002 coup, he meant participatory democracy as a mobilization of “popular power,” which alone could confront institutional elites. The “territory of utopia” for him was the appearance of the silent impoverished majority finally entering the stage of history. But he also endeavored to structure empowerment of the poor at the base, through community councils, cooperatives, and the frequent use of referenda.
It is far from clear, however, that Venezuela’s electoral process can sustain the social and class warfare that continues within. On the Chavista side, no one forgets the 2002 coup, when the conservative Right seized Miraflores and physically spirited Chávez away. Why he was not assassinated remains unknown, but only the force of public opinion transported him back into power. That event, supported to some extent by the Bush administration, hardened the Chavistas’ doubt about a constructive and peaceful transition to what they call twenty-first century socialism. A core of the Chavista opponents were anything but the “loyal opposition” typically seen in peaceful democracies, where two different party coalitions contend back and forth for the center. The right-wing core in Venezueula simply would not accept a social revolution backed by an electoral majority. Instead, many would conspire against the Chávez regime in every possible way, seeking US support directly and indirectly. In turn, the Venezuelan government would use force against those elements of the opposition they deemed “subversive,” setting in motion an spiral toward chaos.
One doesn’t have to accept the Chávez revolution uncritically to recognize that Chávez represented a healthy, democratically elected counterbalance to US hegemony in the region. As I write, it has been fourteen years after Chávez’s original election. A new, less charismatic president, Nicolás Maduro, was elected on a Chavista slate by a slender popular majority of 1.6 percent in the 2013 election; his ticket won the December 2013 municipal elections by 10 percent. Venezuela remains sharply divided along race and class lines, with the opposition constituencies generally representing 45 percent of the vote. The country is racked by chronic inflation, crime, and corruption, which cannot be blamed entirely on North American imperialism or a decadent Caracas bourgeoisie alone. That these crises preceded the Chávez era doesn’t exempt the Chavistas from their failure to lessen them. Nor can the failures erase the historically important achievements in reducing poverty, and expanding literacy, education and health care for millions of Venezuelans. Now in the wake of December 17, Obama has signed an anti-Venezuela sanctions bill promoted by Cuban American legislators in Washington. The Cuba link is troubling. The Cuban Right is shifting its anti-Havana agenda toward Caracas, in the hope of undermining Cuba by cutting off the one hundred thousand barrels of oil sent daily to Cuba. The politics are dangerous, threatening a deeper divide in Venezuela and fuel shortages in Havana. The Cuban Right, in combination with American neoconservatives, tends to favor chaos, even civil war, in their battle with Venezuela and Cuba (as they succeeded in doing in the Middle East wars). At the same time the conflict has revealed differences in the approaches of Venezuela and Cuba, with Venezuela being the more confrontational, in ways similar to an earlier phase of the US-Cuban conflict. Margarita Alarcón, for example, criticizes Hugo Chavez’s 2006 UN speech comparing Bush to the Devil as “disrespectful.”
The intimate ties between Cuba and Venezuela go beyond the massive quantities of subsidized oil sent from Caracas to Havana. The alliance has helped advance Cuba’s role in Latin America. Tens of thousands of Cuban medical workers, education specialists, and technicians have opened facilities to improve health care, schools, and basic literacy. The Venezuelans also have been central to another Cuban dream, the greater integration of Latin American trade, economic development, security, and diplomatic policies, independent of the Big Brother to the north.
To summarize, the electoral successes of Hugo Chávez demonstrated to Latin America’s Left that a twenty-first century socialism was achievable at the ballot box, reopening the strategic possibility of achieving radical change without resorting to armed struggle. It eroded the notion of single “vanguard” parties monopolizing power as a necessary defense against outside intervention.
It caused a Cuban rethinking.
Before Chávez in Venezuela, Chile under Salvador Allende was the best-known model of socialism being created through free democratic elections. Allende’s 1970 mandate, after several failed campaigns for the presidency, came with only 36 percent of the votes in a sharply polarized country, and his government was destabilized immediately and overthrown by the CIA, the Nixon administration, and General Augusto Pinochet in September 1973. Those like Ricardo Alarcón, who might have preferred an electoral opening, saw any such possibilities crushed by the rise of Pinochet—and the swift killings of three thousand opposition activists that came with it. After Pinochet came a long period of military rule and death squads across the continent. Then came Chávez in 1998 (and his reelection in 2012); Ricardo Lagos, elected in Chile in the wake of Pinochet in 2000; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) in Brazil in 2002; Néstor Kirchner in Argentina in 2003 (his widow Cristina Fernández Kirchner in 2007 and 2011); former guerrilla leader Tabaré Vásquez in Uruguay in 2005 (followed by José Mujica); Bolivia’s Evo Morales, the first indigenous president in the county’s history, elected in 2005 and again in 2009; Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, elected in 2006; Michelle Bachelet in Chile in 2006; Mauricio Funes in El Salvador in 2009 (and Sánchez Céren in 2014); and the return of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, democratically elected in 2011 (nearly three decades after their first victory at the ballot box in 1984 was contested and undermined by the US-supported Contra War). Leaders in the Caribbean nations of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and the Grenadines also aligned themselves with the new direction. Several electoral victories were short lived or thwarted: Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Honduras’ s Manuel Zelaya, and Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo were overthrown with US assistance. One country, Colombia, remained under full US dominance, with an expanded number of US military advisers and drug-war bases. The greatest setback for progressive Latin America occurred in Mexico, where stolen, or at least heavily disputed, presidential elections prevented the electoral success of the Left in 1988 and in 2006, and the US-backed Mexican forces blocked a revolutionary challenge from the Zapatista movement based in Chiapas.9 Accompanying these setbacks for the Left was the imposition of an American drug war apparatus as a steel rim of counterterrorism operations on America’s southern perimeter. It should be emphasized, however, that even the most conservative bloc of Latin American countries is united in recognizing Cuba, despite and contrary to US objections.
The late eighties—roughly the same time as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War—was a period of remarkable transformation in Latin America, away from the previous eras of colonialism, the Monroe Doctrine, and the right-wing military dictatorships of the decades after the Cuban Revolution. Ricardo was paying close attention. Marxism itself was being reexamined.
What was profoundly new was the way in which social movements created a relatively peaceful electoral dynamic where candidates of the Left became presidents and parliamentarians. While there was a common pattern of peaceful democratic transition in all these countries throughout Latin America, they did not follow a single monolithic blueprint. Each country’s political revolution exhibited its unique cultural and national qualities. None were led by a classic industrial working class, although unionized workers played important roles in some cases. None were led by vanguard Communist parties, although Communists often were integral to their success. All were based on what some called their “vernacular revolutionary traditions,” meaning that respect was paid in each country to the histories of their indigenous people, descendants of slaves, original spiritual traditions, differences of gender, color and language, their own legacies of heroism, defeat and martyrdom, etcetera. The movements weren’t necessarily Marxist, but a varied brew of liberation theology, revolutionary nationalism, Marxism, indigenism, and anarchism, with deep strains of environmentalism and feminism. 10 What they held in common was a belief in pluralistic participatory democracy, not simply at the ballot box, but through the greater empowerment of local people in the decisions affecting their lives. While the Marxists among them naturally sought to reclaim a universal Marxism, the founding figures of this renewal were Latin American icons differing from country to country in terms of their politics and self-identification. This was a return to the vision of José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian Marxist, whose works Ricardo found so refreshing when he discovered and recovered them from dusty archives. Chávez too was influenced by Mariátegui and his rejection of carbon-copy European ideology in favor of the “heroic creation” of things to come. Bolívar was restored as an icon after having been derided historically by both Karl Marx and most Marxists. Simón Rodríguez, the Venezuelan philosopher who taught Bolivar, wrote around the year of the 1848 Communist Manifesto from quite a different perspective: “Spanish America is an original construct. Its institutions and its government must be original as well, and so too must be the methods used to construct them both. Either we shall invent or we shall wander around and make mistakes.”11