Rgis Debray

Problems of Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America

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 presented itself 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
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to those who live it in the press of events, that is to say, as one of a global correlation of forces, in which every imbalance that affects one of the 20 nations of the Continent, also affects the other 19. To be faithful to this context, let us insist at the outset on the partial and panoramic character of these notes, which set out this correlation in essentially political terms, and secondarily military ones.
Reaction: Eastern Europe and Latin America

For an answer to the question, we lack a historical study of the complex phenomena of reaction which follow the victory of a socialist revolution in a given area. Three socialist revolutions of major importance within 50 years, in Russia, China and Cuba, should make such a work a priority. A concrete study (attuned to the evidently different historical situations) of the tactical and strategic imitations which affect the revolutionary parties in adjacent countries and of the imperialist blockade 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 growing militarization of the political regimes of America, certainly cannot be considered mechanical regressions, or swings of the pendulum to previous forms of class domination, still less since they are not amenable to analysis by means of such a unilateral category as the negation of the negation. For, despite all the concrete differences in time and space, there is a salient analogy between contemporary Cuba and the young Soviet Republic. Certain declarations of 1959 and 1960, in which the Cuban leaders evoke the imminence of new revolutions on the American continent, inevitably recall speeches by Lenin in 1919 and 1920, in which he expressed his certainty that a rising of the European proletariat was imminent. An illusion which Lenin soon abandoned, by contrast with Trotsky, just asit seemsthe Cuban leaders have abandoned it today. The spontaneous repetition of guerrilla movements based on the Cuban modelnot the Venezuelan or Colombian guerrillas but others which we will discuss in a momentare no less reminiscent of the repetition of the Bolshevik model attempted by the Spartakists in Germany and by the Hungarian Commune of Bela Kun, both crushed in early 1919. Has not imperialism passed through the 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 blockade by the signing of partial commercial agreementsEngland taking the lead in both cases; finally hasty and incoherent reformism in countries contiguous to the centre of subversion. The agrarian measures taken in Danubian Europe after the Hungarian Revolution had the same rationale as the agrarian reforms advocated by the Alliance for Progress . . . and the same fate. This analogy is not a comparison, but the zero degree of a specific evaluation of the present conjuncture, which stresses what is radically new in the relation between Cuba and imperialism.
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 effervescent heroism, when guerrillay focos spontaneously appeared in Santo Domingo, Paraguay, Colombia and Central America, while in Brazil Juliao was stirring up the North-East and Brizola repulsed a military coup dtat by means of an armed uprising in Rio Grande do Sul; Peru witnessed the first occupation of estates and the first revolutionary peasant leagues in Cuzco. 1962 and 1963: years of defeat and division. In Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay the ventures in armed struggle fail; in Brazil the Peasant Leagues inspired by Juliao rend themselves in internal disputes and are unable to move to the level of a political organizationthe Tiradentes Movementwhich Juliao planned for them. In Argentina, the military frustrate the formidable electoral victory of March 18th, 1962, the date on which the Peronist Framini was elected Governor of Buenos Aires with a staggering majority, and the popular response to the coup is liquidated. In Venezuela, Betancourt succeeds in staying in power, and the revolutionary war becomes more difficult and long-term than foreseen. In Chile, Freis victory, due to the vote of women electors; in Brazil, the installation of an openly fascist dictatorship. A reactionary wave sweeps across the Continent. Today we know that none of these defeats was definitive; on the contrary they forced the revolutionary movement to move to a higher stage of reorganization. Already by 1964 armed struggle had rooted and consolidated itself, on a broad popular basis which is now unshakable, in Venezuela and Colombia. The immense explosives factory which imperialist exploitation has unwittingly installed in Latin America can henceforward do without foreign licences, imported models of revolution; it is finding its own methods of manufacture, in accord with its history, social formation and specific character. In our language, always behind time in its metaphors, we may say that South America lived, immediately after the Cuban Revolution, its 1905, from which it has already emerged. This experience can today become the object of systematic reflection. This task, however, encounters one serious obstacle: as the historical synchronization indicates, there is a latent unity of destiny among the Latin American nations. The demonstrations 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 in the north of Argentina to Buenos Aires, or from Lima to Cuzco, has the impression of moving from one world and one century to another. But this is only a superficial, geographical impression. Is not underdevelopment and colonial distortion precisely the inequality of economic and social development within one country, between the countryside and the capital? Or rather, is it not the superimposition of different levels of development, an enclave of capitalist and mercantile penetration combined with an interior of feudal monoproduction? Does not this misery condition those riches, and vice-versa? If under-development is not in its turn a natural product but the result of a history, then South America draws its unity from its history. If it had to exist together to free itself from the Spanish yoke, today too it will have to exist together to free itself from the Yankees. If Bolivar refused to consider Gran Colombia free until High and Low Peru were also
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liberated, Fidel Castro shows equal or greater realism in thinking that the liberation of Cuba will not be complete while Venezuela and Colombia are still enslaved. If one has a right to speak of the Latin American Revolution, it is not because of Latin America but dialecticallybecause of the United States, its common enemy. This is the reason why Bolivars ideas have gained a new resonance in the strategy 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 every levelrevolutionary organizations, information, personal contacts by the efforts of those who have converted the Continent into a homogeneous field for their manoeuvres with the pseudo-Pan-Americanism of the OAS and Aid Programmes. Ever since the sabotage of the Congress of Panama, called by Bolivar in 1826 to federate the liberated Latin American Republics, North American operations have triumphed in the Continent as a whole, in spite of the fact that Cuba has now struck an irreversible blow against them. Within each of the four natural subtotalities into which the Continent is dividedCaribbean-Colombia-Venezuela, Ecuador-Peru-Bolivia-Paraguay, Chile-ArgentinaUruguay, and Brazil (which forms a complex of its own)the panorama is the same: confusion of revolutionary organizations, mutual ignorance and dispersal of forces. An Ecuadorian Communist leader in the underground might well not have known in early 1964 that his party was involved in the same division between a pro-Soviet and a pro-Chinese wing as the Peruvian Communist Party; although perhaps he might not anyway have been in a position to profit by the experience of his Peruvian comrades to avoid the same errors and sterile polemic between the two wings. Such separations are dramatic. It is urgent to overcome them, not only because they prevent the possibility of a strategy, but also because the time and lives lost by this absence of internal links will never be recovered. If we had seriously known of the experience of the Venezuelan guerrillas, said one of the survivors of the Argentinian foco, 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 a weapon consciously used to break up national unity by the Federal State which controls the whole country. The day a revolutionary action is concerted between Rio Grande do Sul and Pernambuco, to cite the two states best prepared for a struggle of this kind, will mark the beginning of a new political era in Brazil. Such a thing has not been possible till now, since the separation imposed by distance has been complicated by a historical disjuncture at the level of political organizations: the Brizolist movementrooted in the South of the country gained strength above all after 1961, by which time Juliaos Peasant Leaguesrooted in the North-Easthad fallen into political decadence. An example of the Balkanization of a nation: a student and a working-class trade-unionist in So Paulo, questioned about the NorthEast, 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 of white terror; but beyond that they had no two pieces of information which agreed with one another. The press is silent or systematically mendacious. The student confesses his malaise: the North-East is for him a Third World, myth and remorse. For the worker, the NorthEast is our Algeria, a country from which the bosses import cheap labour to lower wages, if they get a chance. In a word, for the citizen of Sao Paulo the inhabitants of the North-East constitute virtually another nationality.
The Colonial Pact

By contrast with the internal divisions of Latin America, national and international, North American imperialism considers South America a single 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 sovereignly plans the exploitation of the Continent, while through the InterAmerican Defence Council, and the Organization of American States it ensures its politico-military protection. Let us recall the form which the economic relations binding South America to North America take. Fundamentally, the Colonial Pact continues to exist intact: exchange of primary products for manufactured goods, petroleum for gasoline, cocoa for chocolate, iron for automobiles, etc. According to the UN Commission for Latin America, ECLA, the worsening of the terms of trade caused an indirect loss of 2,660 million dollars for the whole of Latin America in 1961, which with repatriated foreign profits1,735 million dollarsand funds exported to amortize debtsanother 1,450 million dollarsmake up a total three times as large as the theoretical import of funds for aid and investment promised to the Continent by the Alliance for Progress, that is, 2,000 million dollars. Behind its resplendent promises, what was the strategic plan of imperialism when it launched the Alliance for Progress in 1961, at Punta del Este? Its aim was to conceal the traditional Commercial Pact and the military dictatorships which this presupposed (whose prototype was the rgime of Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, decorated in his time by Eisenhower) by a simulacrum of national industrialization, artificially fuelled 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 allows repatriation of profits, the absence of tax controls, and a rate of profit much higher than that of the us itself. Thus the origin of this capital determined the canalization of investment into the most profitable branches for the monopolies, that is to say, mainly extractive industries subordinating these, moreover, to the strategic plans of exploitation of primary products by the USA, all over the world. For example, the Bolivian tungsten and antimony minesvery substantial oneswere kept as reserves, because the USA has no need of them for the moment and their use would lower prices on the world market. An economic initiative of this type might have been presented under national guise,
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with mixed pseudo-companies, directors boards full of national bourgeois, and nomenclature in Spanish. A new class of national co-administrators would have evolved, serving as a screen for foreign exploitation. This stratum could have liquidated feudal relations of production in the rural zones, which are the cause of the explosive political situation among the peasant majority of the nation (rent in kind, 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 of terminating the Colonial Pact, and allowing the growth of transformer industries processing primary products; the national bourgeoisies might then have traded with all states, putting an end to the commercial 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 so forth, which avoid the creation of competitive industries. It relied on these to cure the dangerous symptoms of under-development, and hide its causes. It was, in effect, a political manoeuvre with an economic pretext. Its own promoters now admit that the plan has been an utter failure, and we will later see the political consequences of this failure. The plan failed because the liquidation of agrarian feudalism required the transformation of the relations of production as a whole, since agrarian feudalism is an integral moment of the development of the commercial and agrarian-export bourgeoisie, and even of the industrial bourgeoisie, as in Colombia and Brazil. There may exist contradictions between these two fractions of the dominant class, but these contradictions will be secondary and ultimately surpassable in the struggle against the main enemyrevolution. For the process of inflation has provoked growing unemployment, lowering of wages, and a brusque economic contraction. This inflation is not compensated by a an increase in production, since this would only mean over-production because of the lack of an internal market, which in turn could only be created by a radical transformation of semi-feudal relations of production, turning the peasant masses into consumers. Hence inflation can only be combated by new foreign loans, repayable at short notice, which close the vicious circle of under-development: get into debt to pay your debts. Aid programmes, it should be said, have never delivered so much as half the amounts promised when they are launched. Let us now focus the nature of these famous aid programmes of the Alliance for Progress. These programmes are undisguisedly a specific form 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 having bought goods with the import of a dollar. 1. The Alliance for Progress, in effect, ensures the conquest of new markets or the consolidation of old ones. In most cases, the funds which are lent have to be used to purchase US manufactured goods, at prices 50 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 the Peace Corpsyoung Yankees who volunteer to serve as a combination of intelligence agents and boy scouts in South Americaare used as instruments of political penetration and blackmail in the peasant populations. 2. The export of agricultural surplusses (decree 480) fulfils two functions: a) it ameliorates the crisis of national overproduction in the USA; b) although they are payable in local currency, transport, distribution and packaging are expenses of the recipient country, to the greater profit of North American freight companies, who charge astronomic rates. 3. Every country aided by the Alliance for Progress has to assure, for its part: the maintenance of an enormous apparatus of North American functionaries and technicians, with a scandalously high mode of life (imported foods, membership of golf and gambling clubs, servants and so on); the public works (construction of roads, clearing of forests, installation of aqueducts and electricity) in zones where North American companies are operating and where future capital investments will be located. These works are contracted, of course, to North American engineering firms, who decide on their own plans and premises, with their own equipment and technicians: an ingenious method of reducing the costs of exploitation, by making them fall on the exploited. To sum up: the Alliance for Progress regulates, conceals and reinforces the process whereby the undercapitalized countries of South America nourish and increase the accumulation of capital in the United States of America.
National Liberation and Continental Solidarity

Balkanization, an objective legacy of the intra-continental wars of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, thus corresponds to the needs of North American strategy, even if it is only to block or control commercial exchanges between South American countries in order to keep a trade monopoly, or to organize low-cost Holy Alliances or political cordons sanitaires. Two months before the Chilean elections of September 1964, there was a mysterious resurgence of Bolivian nationalism and anti-Chilean sentimenta relic of the Pacific War of 1879, in the course of which Bolivia lost its access to the sea. Simultaneouslya surprising coincidenceArgentina began to claim territories in Patagonia from Chile (between Chiloe and Chubut), and reserve troops were mobilized in both countries . . . until the electoral victory of the Christian Democrat Frei stopped these propaganda campaigns short. Ecuador against Peru, Peru against Bolivia and Chile, Bolivia against Paraguay, Chile against Argentina: there are no lack of grounds for nationalist claims (often very justified, as in the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia) and frontier conflicts. Balkanization thus facilitates the colonization of small nations in the most cynical fashion. An example:
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Bolivia. On August 22nd, 1963, the government of Paz Estenssoro signed a commercial treaty with the United States, which obliged it to break trade relations with Europe and neighbouring countries and to import solely from the United States, in exchange for funds from the aid 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 struggle today can only be a struggle for national liberation. To require of national revolutionary processes in South America the previous condition of continental unity is to postpone them to the Greek Calends. During the recent upheavals in Panama, provoked by the Yankees of the Canal Zone, some Trotskyists wanted to launch the slogan: Give back Panama to Colombia. The same elements frequently vociferate the watchword of the ageing Trotsky: United Socialist States of America. But neither a purist return to the letter of the historical past, nor the evocation of a mythical future (as the United Socialist States of America is today) can dissolve the present fact of Balkanizationshort of betraying the actual struggles of every nation by referring them unceasingly to the absent unity of all the American nations. Caribbean revolutionaries, who have not forgotten their ancient dream of a Federation of the Antilles, are very well aware that this great vision finds its practical translation in mundane, fragmented and insular tasks. Once again, as in Bolivars day, a flame has sprung up in Venezuela and Colombia and is burning southwards; but it is not serious to expect 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 objective solidarity still is unequal to it, where has South America gained an American vision of itself till now? Political leaders frequently condemned by repression to travel abroad think the answer is Europe, bridgehead to Africa and Asia, and more recently, Cuba. From Western Europe, such a vision will be more difficult to attain than ever, for obvious reasons. In Cuba, we should not forget that continental consciousness 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 press controlled by imperialism. Breaking of diplomatic relations with Cuba by all governments except Mexico; closing down of all the offices of the independent news agency Prensa Latina; systematic censorship of all information; grave threats to anyone who travels to Cuba: there is no denying that imperialism has succeeded to a certain extent in its aim of insulating Cuba. But this has only worked at the summitin those social sectors accessible to its propaganda, not among the peasantry. In 1965, it is much easier for an indifferent Parisian to follow the course of the Cuban Revolution than for a revolutionary militant of Lima or Bogota, where the circulation of the independent left-wing press is strictly limited or actually underground. In this context, the difficulty of the theoretical and practical work of national 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 the Democratic Republics of Vietnam and Korea. Africa has the inspiration of the new Algeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Ghana and Zanzibar. Between the vanguards of these two continents, there exists solid fraternity and certain common forms of action, of which the AfroAsian Conferences are proof. America, by contrast, is dissociated and isolated from this global movement. In spite of Cuba, many revolutionary organizations in Latin America still continue to be under the ideological influence of the European working-class movement, often foreign to its true problems.
Revolution Revolutionizes the Counter-Revolution

Thus the backwardness and division of revolutionary parties in Latin America is a perilous phenomenon. For whether they like it or not, they are being unified by force, from the outside, in their situation and their strategy. The Cuban Revolution has sealed this unity, in spite of itself and them. History would not be truly dialectical if the enormous lesson which a revolution constitutes for the people who have made it were not also equally instructive for continental counter-revolution. From the Rio Grande to the Falkland Islands, the Cuban Revolution has, to a large extent, transformed the conditions of transformation of Latin America. A socialist revolution also revolutionizes counter-revolution. This is why since its birth and by the very fact of existing as a revolution for imperialism (as well), Cuba condemned to failure any mechanical attempt to repeat the experience of the Sierra Maestra, with an equally rapid tempo of action, with the same alliances and the same tactics. To sum up: the door which Cuba opened by surprise, under the very nose of imperialismsocialist revolutionhas been solidly bolted from within by the national oligarchies and from without by imperialism, always ready to intervene. How will the brother peoples succeed in forcing the door open once again? Either by exercising a stronger and more durable pressure, or by themselves opening a new door, every nation a different 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 America onto a higher level, for which the exploited classes and their vanguards were not prepared. On the practical plane, we all know that Cuba has liquidated the geographical fatalism which, together with Browderism,1 exercised a great influence on the Latin American Communist Parties immediately after the World War. Today it is possible to win power and keep it. Taken seriously, this phrasewhich controverts so many habits of thought still provokes a shock in Latin America. It was not assimilated over1

Earl Browder was the Secretary of the North American Communist Party during the Second World War. He was responsible for a Right deviation when Communist International was dissolved by Stalin in 1943he urged the transformation of the CPS in the Western Hemisphere into discussion clubs open to everyone. The deviation was routed Jacques Duclos after the war, in a letter which is still famous among Latin American militants.
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night. Even in the fiercest moments of the Colombian Civil War (1949 57), this idea was as alien to the Colombian CP as it was to the Left of the Liberal Party, when they controlled a veritable peasant army, exhaustedit is trueby internal struggles. The Brazilian CP alone, after the failure of the insurrection of 1935, decided to aim for the seizure of power in its Manifesto of 1950an expression, however, of sectarian and leftist tendencies more than a proper strategy. (The PCB tried to create bases of a revolutionary army among the peasantry, in northern Parana and Goias, of which some traces still survive in the Formosa region of Goias.) Since the Cuban Revolution, the Chilean CP has set itself the goal of conquering power by legal means, through the ballot-box (12th Congress, in March 1962). The Argentinian CP took as its banner the slogan launched by its Secretary-General Codovilla in March 1963 (12th Congress): Towards the conquest of power through the action of the masses. In its 3rd Congress (1961), the Venezuelan CP had been the first to consider seriously the establishment of a democratic and popular power, leaving the course of revolutionary practice itself to decide what road it should take. Because of the repression unleashed by Betancourt, the road was none other than armed struggle. The same evolutiontaking some three years on average is occurring in Colombia where the CP, after the initiation of guerrilla struggle in Marquetalia, is abandoning its peaceful line in order to counter the repression; thus as the Colombian comrades had long predicted, the self-defence of the masses transformed itself into offensive guerrilla tactics. But at the very moment when the existence of Cuba proved that the conquest of power was not a priori unrealistic, the unilateral repercussions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the general orientation then adopted by the international working-class movement, led the CPs to take the line of national democracy, of United Front with the Bourgeoisiea peaceful road the same as that defended by the Colombian Party a short time before (9th Congress, 1962), the Mexican Party (13th Congress), the Bolivian Party before its scission (2nd Congress in 1964, in which the peaceful road was considered the most probable), the Chilean Party (13th Congress), the Argentinian Party and the Brazilian Party. The example of the Brazilian CP is revealing. Under the direct influence of destalinization, it made a 180-degree turn in 1958, very much within its tradition, and in March of that year called on Communists to form a United Nationalist and Democratic Front whose leadership logically devolved on to the national bourgeoisie. A year later came Cuba. Since then, however much the CP militants converted themselves into docile lambs, an auxiliary ally of the advanced bourgeoisie and an electoral support of Marshal Lott, the bourgeoisie considered them the more dangerous the more docile they became. The Communist Party of Brazil (pro-Chinese) was founded, taking with it some good cadres from Prestess party, above all in the South. A large part of the middle classes, terrified by the Cuban Revolution, went over to Lacerda and the military. The famous national bourgeoisie abandoned Goulart mid-way, and the coup dtat of April 1st, 1964 supervened. The PCB was disorganized, pulverized by the repression and by internal disputes, and hence incapable of leading the violent popular discontent: an example among others of the historical setbacks pro22

voked by international centralism, understood as the transposition of slogans and tactics worked out in a different historical context. Confronted with this impasse, Cuba gave risewithout knowing it to half a hundred revolutionary organizations on the margin of the Communist Parties, resolved on direct action. Several years of revolutionary action have now made it clear that heroism is not enough, and that ideological maturity and above all political sense, absence of sectarianism and seriousness in preparing armed struggle, were lacking. Too young and too spontaneously formed under the inspiration of Cuba, prisoners of the Cuban model, these so-called Fidelista organizations perished, at least in their initial form: MOEC (Movimiento Obrero Estudiantil Campesino) in Colombia, URJE (Union Revolucionaria de la Juventud Ecuatoriana) in Ecuador, MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario) and FIR (Frente de Izquierda Revolucionario) in Peru, Socialismo de Vanguardia in Argentina (with its thousand subdivisions), Movimiento de Apoyo al Campesino (MAC) and the Left of the Socialist Party in Uruguay, where Sendic, the union which organized the sugar-workers, launched an armed struggle in the Switzerland of Latin America. To sum up: the revolutionary front has not so far been able, either within the Communist Parties (with the obvious exceptionsdestined to become the ruleof Venezuela, Colombia and Guatemala) or within these new organizations without any past, to respond to the objective heightening of the level of the revolutionary struggle. Cuba remained alone. On the theoretical plane, the Cuban Revolution has rehabilitated Marxism in Latin America by its triumph in practice. For Marxism had been lost between two forms of discredit: APRA and mechanical Marxism, without contact with national reality. It should not be forgotten that the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, the Latin American Kuomintang, born in 1924 as a United Front at continental level of anti-imperialist groups and parties, and transformed into a party with sections in each country in 1929, was the nursery of a whole generation of petit-bourgeois anti-imperialist movements, of Betancourt and Accion Democratica, of Perons Justicialismo in a certain sense, and of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionaria in Bolivia (these last two were influenced by fascism). The Indoamericanism of the founder and leader of APRA, Haya de la Torre, carried out under the name of Marxism the greatest historical betrayal which Latin America has known these 30 years. For at least 20 years, from 1930 to 1950, Haya de la Torre was the anti-imperialist guide of a whole generation of enlightened bourgeois and even of the proletariat (at any rate in Peru): Hegel plus Marx plus Einstein equals Haya de la Torre one of the followers of the 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 the theses which Marx postulated for Europe. This confrontation led him to produce the famous notion of historical space time. From it, he argued that since in Europe socialism was to be born from the internal contradictions of capitalism, and in America capitalism took the form of imperialism, it was necessary to stimulate imperialist domination . . . to accelerate national liberation. This sophism sought its theoretical
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justification in the most hypocritically mechanical materialism conceivable: since it appeared that stages could not be jumped, there was a good use possible for North American imperialisman idea which led Haya after 1945 to turn himself into one of the main, and certainly the most prestigious, agents of North American imperialism in the Continent. When it proved that Marxism as a universal theory of history had a true point of insertion into Latin America, Cuba simultaneously liquidated all the falsifications of Marxism and their spokesmen Haya, Betancourt, Paz Estenssoro and the others. But by creating a vacuum where these mystifications prevailed, Cuba has also created a new need: for an authentic Marxism, capable of thinking the national experiences of South America. Not only the independence of Cuba in the Sino-Soviet dispute, but the whole daily practice of its leaders, both in the Sierra Maestra and in power, indicates that Latin America is transforming itself into a new centre of revolutionary thought, adapted to its own conditions. Cuba has also shown, without knowing it, that this theory has still to be developed in many parts of the Continent. For since the death of Jose Carlos Mariategui, founder of the Peruvian Communist Party and author of Seven Essays in the Interpretation of Peruvian Reality, the most important Marxist work produced in Latin America before the Cuban Revolution, most Marxist leaders and theoreticians imported prefabricated strategies and concepts from Europe. Before Fidel Castro and before the Venezuelan and Colombian Revolutions, Marxism had never found its correct articulation with a social reality so atypical, by European standards, as Latin America. The true weight of the Cuban Revolution is perhaps felt with greatest force within the revolution itself. It puts an end to revolutionary models, whether Soviet, Chinese or even Cuban, to the sterile comfort of schemas and formulae, to separation from the masses, and to the cult of organization for the sake of organization. In this sense, Cuba has demonstrated in practice that the old Marxism was no longer any good, that it was necessary to recover the revolutionary inspiration of Marxism-Leninism and to submit Marxism once again to reality of class action. This need is felt everywhere, but it is still not satisfied everywhere. Thus Latin America, which today seeks its revolutionary road, knows by the example of Cuba that it must invent that road from its own experience. The Second Declaration of Havana did not spring out of the heads of the Cuban leaders one exalted night, nor was it abusively promulgated to the Latin American masses in the name of any mysticism: it was the product of the convergence of all the latent aspirations and experiences of the exploited masses of the Continent. The resistance which may crop up to its effective discussion and distribution does not come from the demand of revolutionary organizations for independence, but from the traditional torpidity of certain suiviste leaderships. Unfortunately Fidels bitter comments in his speech to the Womens Congress in 1962 are still not anachronistic: it will be remembered that Fidel contrasted the presence of objective conditions in almost all Latin America with the absence of subjective conditions in the vanguards to match the opportunity of the historical situation.
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2. Cuba has raised the material and ideological level of imperialist reaction in less time than that of the revolutionary vanguards. If imperialism in the short run has extracted more advantages than the revolutionary forces from the Cuban Revolution, this is obviously not due to its superior intelligence. Imperialism is in a better position to put the lessons which it has learnt from the Cuban Revolution into practice rapidly, because it has at its command all the material means of organized violence, as well as the nervous ferocity constantly whipped into action by its instinct of self-preservation. At the material level, the extraordinary reinforcement of the repressive apparatuses beginning in 1960 cannot be over-emphasized. The other side of the gilded medal of the Alliance for Progress is military aid to the Latin-American governments of a new intensity and nature. A month before Dillon launched optimistic plans in Punta del Este for transforming Latin America into a paradise of golden latrinesplans whose inevitable failure was analysed by Che Guevara at the time Kennedy submitted to Congress in July 1961, a special military programme designed to guarantee the internal security of Latin America against subversion. According to the New York Times of July 4th, the programme represents a radical modification in the military programmes for the western hemisphere. Until now the principal objective has always been to equip some air and naval units for the combined defence of the Hemisphere against exterior attack. Now, greater importance is attached to internal defence against subversion. During 1961 alone, 21 million dollars were spent on anti-subversive forces. Thousands of young officers from the Latin-American police forces now pass through the counter-insurgency school in Panama every yearthe exact figure is a military secret. Battalions of Colombian anti-guerrillas, Ecuadadorian paratroopers, Peruvian commandos, Bolivian rangers, Argentinian gendarmes (equipped with heavy armaments) and many other military 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 its own country. But it is in the terrain of information and infiltration that US aid has been strongest. In Brazil no one, with the exception of Brizola who ordered the burning of the police archives in Rio Grande do Sul when he was governor, denounced the fact that the FBI and CIA controlled the secret dossiers of the political policeeven at the height of a government of the national bourgeoisie. With a population of 20 million, Argentina has seven different and rival political police corps. In Venezuela, Sotopol, Digepol, SIFA and PTJ compete against each other without counting the agents recruited by the CIA. Twenty years ago, said an Ecuadorian military information officer, we were still innocent. When students demonstrated in the streets we shot at them, with disastrous results. Today we know that of the hundred ways of stifling a revolution, firearms should be the last. Sure enough: six or seven important guerrilla focos proclaimed in Latin America since 1959 have been annihilated or pre-empted by delation or more frequently as a result of infiltration into the revolutionary organizations. The theoretical affirmation that the social question is not a police matter is of little use; 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 valid for the historian a hundred years later. The role of clandestine warfare is all the more important because in oppressive political rgimes revolutionary politics often has no other choice than that of armed or clandestine struggle. Put another way, there are at the moment no military or political experiences that are unilateral, and the raising of the level of revolutionary warfare is being perfected in both directions. The Venezuelan War Ministry published Ches Guerrilla Warfare in 1961, annotated and analysed on the right-hand pages. This document is now in the hands of the Venezuelan guerrillas in Falcn. A regular army officer who had been through the counter-insurgency school in Panama, reached the guerrillas in Falcn with this document, and on the basis of his antiguerrilla training, annotated the annotations. This is one example among others of the double spiral of apprenticeship in which the natural advantage that the popular guerrilla has over the armysurpriseis in danger of dwindling. At the political level, the triumph of the Cuban revolution tends to radicalize, organize and unify the different tendencies of the bourgeoisie in a single counter-revolutionary front more rapidly than the revolutionary organizations are radicalized and unified. Cubas rapid transformation into a socialist country has been used by imperialist propaganda to frighten the so-called national bourgeoisies and the educated sectors of the middle classes. Hence the growing difficulty of certain political leaders in perpetuating the old myth of an alliance with the national bourgeoisie in order to direct popular pressure on the progressive wing of bourgeois governments (Goulart in Brazil, Belande Terry in Peru, and up to a point Illia in the Argentine received the support of the reformists). The paradox of an originally bourgeous-democratic revolution like the Cuban is that it has focused and consolidated the vacillating class consciousness of the neighbouring national bourgeoisies (in the equivocal mode of a revelationproduction) especially where these exist as a social classin Chile, the Argentine, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia. But this negative value contains naturally as its reverse a positive value: the revelation of democratic and revolutionary bourgeois who, as individuals, were able in differing degrees to join the revolutionary camp: Brizola in Brazil, perhaps Michelsen in Colombia, Lechn in Bolivia, etc. This inverse radicalization of the present forces (dominant class more to the right, exploited classes more to the left) benefits imperialism at the moment because of the changes which have taken place in the following three historical tendencies, since the Cuban revolution: I The bourgeois leaders of the former mass parties, APRA in Peru, AD in Venezuela, MNR in Bolivia, etc, have passed with arms and baggage into the imperialist camp (and in their baggage went important sectors of the peasants and sometimes workers). II The Pre-Cuban Communist leaders who, for lack of theoretical and 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 popular movement, have still not been able to do so for various reasons. III The young Fidelista movements which sprang up rapidly and which tried spontaneously to fill this flagrant absence of leadership immediately after the Cuban revolution, have in very few cases been able to maintain themselves. Spontaneity, underestimation of preparation and theoretical study, problems of organization, volubility of language account for the immediate failures of the Apra Rebelde in Peru, MOEC in Colombia, the Peasant Leagues in Brazil, Socialismo de Vanguardia in Argentina. Taught by their first failure and sustained by their revolutionary passion, numerous Fidelista organizations are now working to achieve new levels of action. These confused changes still leave open a central void in numerous areas, a space empty for a revolutionary vanguard, although they have altered the role of the vanguard. A void all the more surprising because Latin America is a mine of solid revolutionary cadres, determined and ready for sacrifice but who have not been able to coagulate in an organized vanguard. For many young militants this vanguard is waiting to be built, and it is an exhausting task. Ah, if only there were a man or a party we could follow. . . The phrase is repeated again and again among the thousands of young militants from Panama to Patagonia. Among all the panoramas of misery and neglect which Latin America has to offer, perhaps none is as absurd and anguishing as this: these men abandoned to themselves, hopelessly trapped by 50 years of the powerless ratiocination and blind formulas in vogue among the most consecrated of their predecessors. From one day to the next Cuba has transformed the language, the style and the content of revolutionary action with youthful verve. This renovation has an astonishing sounding-box in the Continent: demographic pressure. Half the population of Venezuela is under 20: this youth without memories will only follow those whom it sees fighting by its side. In the whole of Latin America, and especially at the level of political behaviour, there is a dramatic divorce between generations. In the semi-colonial countries of South America the pyramid of age groups shows clearly enough that this divorce reflects an objective situation that is going to become pronounced.
The Bankruptcy of Social-Democracy

As far as the so-called generation of 1920 is concerned, this clan of social-democratic leaders who grew up together in exile, in the shadow of the revolutionary sacrifices of their respective peoples, has happily liquidated 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 the Second World War, and then controlled and contained the whole LatinAmerican anti-imperialist movement until three years ago. Cuba has expelled them from the revolutionary stage on which, until quite recently, they awakened popular illusions. The frustrated sentiments of
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these petit-bourgeois leaders who were brought to power by their revolutionary phraseology are evident. In the 1950s Betancourt could still believe himself to be leading a popular anti-imperialist resistance; after Fidels lightning visit to Venezuela in 1959, Betancourt knew what his role was to be. In the rabid insults Betancourt shortly afterwards launched against Castro-Communisman expression which swept the Continentand in his paranoiac unbalance there speaks, in fact, a small and expended politician condemned to an armoured car and solitude, who, one day in 1959, in the Plaza del Silencio in Caracas allowed his role and accoutrements to be confiscated from him before 500,000 people. The Fidelista movement, the point of divorce between two generations, is born between two historic momentsthe bourgeois and the socialist revolution. The unforgivable fact about the Cuban revolution is that it spanned these two moments as though this were the most natural thing in the world. The culmination of one epoch and the beginning of another, Cuba fixed for ever the moment in which a tradition is inverted and becomes its contrary. Over-determined par excellence, the historic fortune of the Cuban revolution was to have been able to win the material and moral aid of these old liberal politicians whom Fidel and Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Ernesto Guevara and Almeida, young men without a political past but with lan and honesty, were soon to sweep away. A singular fusion of contradictions. In the most intense moment of the clandestine struggle the July 26th Movement could collect funds in New York in the name of The Rights of Man; accept the material aid of Pepe Figueres, president of Costa Rica, for the defence of democracy; receive official monetary aid from Venezuela which had recently been liberated from the Perez Jimenez dictatorship, as well as a plane-load of armaments from Larrazabal, president of the Democratic Junta; and assure itself a world-wide protective publicity thanks to the capitalist press, Life and Paris Match. None of this detracts from the extraordinary merits of the July 26th Movement but it is necessary to recall it in order to evaluate what has changed in 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 Colombian independent republic a few hours from Bogota asked me ironically. The peasants were preparing to meet an offensive by the regular army which had been planned for several years in collaboration with the Yankee military mission, and they lacked everything. Remoteness of the international centres of aid, poverty in money and arms, systematic campaigns by the national and international press to discredit its objectives and the meaning of its struggle, solitude and hungerthese are the bitter obverse of the call to courage which is ineluctably imposed on todays 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 less easy today to establish a wide liberation front, when every antiimperialist attitude is immediately labelled Castro-Communism and driven from legality, than it was five years ago. It is much less easy to forge a popular army today when regular armies have for the past five years 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 has come to change our language and perspectives, in Europe and other areas, when we attempt to understand the difficulties confronting the comrades in this part of the world.
Venezuela: From Town to Jungle

The commentaries (or their absence) in the objective Western press on the Venezuelan Revolution show one thing quite clearly: whoever ignores 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 is much more evident in Venezuela than in any other country. More than half the total US investments in Latin America are in Venezuela, which in consequence is not only the most deeply penetrated by the US but the most carefully watched. The Venezuelan Revolution, after the failure of its urban insurrectional form, which was not appropriate for it, has undoubtedly found its second breath, its definitive equilibrium, in this long-term task: to move from a guerrilla army to a popular regular army in the interior of the country. It thereby leaves to the city all its political importance, in order to safeguard the possibilities of legal mass action and audacious alliances. Meanwhile in the interior, more than in Caracas, mass work is directly articulated to the armed struggle. This evolution recalls the Chinese revolution, which was often thought to be close to death after the bloody failures of Canton and Shanghai in 1927. But it was only then that the Communist leaders were able to surpass the Bolshevik model of revolution and to find an authentically Chinese form, victoriously defended by Mao against Li Li-san. Born of defeat, the withdrawal to the countryside with the Long March and the creation of revolutionary peasant bases, signified victory. But the blood shed in Shanghai or in Caracas, 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 though it were the result of an error of judgment. On both occasions, the theoretical proof that an isolated urban insurrection cannot achieve victory in a semi-colonial country which is predominantly peasant, had to be made in practice. If the proof of revolutionary theory were of a theoretical order, a few good theoreticians would be sufficient to make good revolutions merely by deduction and without useless diversions. The strategy of the long war, carried from the countrys interior to the cities, although tacitly adopted by the commanders of the guerrilla fronts since 1962, had to wait for the confirmation of events in order to be guaranteed by the urban leaders two years later; till then there was a disjuncture between the plans of the urban and rural leaders. Anyone who went to the rural fronts before the elections of 1964 could testify to the strategy of Douglas in Falcon, and Urbina and Gabaldon in Lara: guerrilla struggle in depth, taking political more than military forms. The patient creation of support cells among the peasants in each hamlet or village, the daily talk of propaganda and contacts, the cultivation of new lands in the jungle, the methodical campaign to achieve literacy among the combatants and peasants, the
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reinforcement of the organization to maintain contact with villages and towns, the supply and information networksall this work of political organization culminated in the creation of a fixed revolutionary base with its school, its own jurisdiction and its own radio centre (already established in Falcon). Tasks of subterranean implantation of which the press sees only the militaryand less essentialaspects. While the urban 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 guerrilla silently and calmly used this same time to establish the political infrastructure of its future military actions. In the euphoria of recent popular victories, political underestimation of Betancourts government and American imperialism prevailed in the ranks of the urban militants who had not yet experienced, for obvious reasons, the new, post-Cuban conditions of struggle. Hence they underestimated the governments repressive power and the military strength of imperialism which explains the unexpectedly rapid dismantling of the legal and illegal political organizations of the revolution in Caracas and the state capitals. Thus the Venezuelans were the first to experience, in the country most directly colonized by the US because of its oil and iron, what the peoples war has become in post-Cuban conditions. They paid dearly for their pioneering role. Now that the failure of the reformist experience, attempted in Peru, Brazil and in Chile, appears incontestable to everyone (indeed the fact is not always critically assessed) it is good to see the revolutionaries of fraternal countries return to the immense store of experiences in Venezuela, experiences which even in their 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 is currently in the vanguard of reformism, as the recent Christian Democratic electoral victories show. This partys advanced political positions certainly reveal the level to which the mass movement of these last years has been raised there. The policies pursued by the working-class movement in that country, after being restored to legality by Ibaez in 1958, may in some measure explain, not the victory of reaction, but the fact that the latter could surprise and baffle all the reformists of the Continent. It is not necessary to have read Clausewitz to know that the basis of every tactic, whether revolutionary or not, is to fight on ones own terrain, or (wherever there is a bourgeois rgime) not to allow a battle to become decisive when it is on the adversarys terrainin this case, the terrain of representative democracy, whose class character is even more marked in Latin America than in Europe. Although in this respect Chile is distinguished by a genuine particularism (parliamentary tradition, eclipsed role of the army, very secondary importance of agrarian feudalism, etc. . . .), the decisive importance of the Catholic church (Freis 400,000 vote plurality over Allende were given him by women as the separate count of ballot papers by sex revealed), the total control of the large newspapers and all the the propaganda media by the dominating class, the freedom of action which
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the charity organization Caritas enjoyed to buy votes among the callampas (the working-class areas of Santiago) by the free distribution of foodstuffs from the Alliance for Progress, the impressive antiCuban campaign carried out by the United Statesall these guaranteed the electoral supremacy of the bourgeoisie from the outset. Although prior to September 4th, 1964, there were some working-class sectors in Chile which were sceptical of the possibility of a popular victory on this terrain, FRAP (Frente de Accion Popular) took care to convince them to the contrary. 1 From the start of the election campaign all working-class demands were suspended, in spite of inflation and growing unemployment, so as not to frighten the middle classes. The democratic parties, wholly converted into electoral machines, assured their militants of Salvador Allendes victory, thus diverting the attention of the masses from the question of taking real power to that of the nature of the electoral majority to be wonwhether it was to be relative or absolute. An electoral majority was assumed in practice to be power itself. Three months before the election, alarmed by the military mobilization of Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru and the rumours a military coup dtat in the event of a popular victory (lent credence by the Brazilian putsch), FRAP was obliged to take hurried and formal measures, behind the backs of the masses, to protect its leaders and to prepare the road to clandestinitymeasures which did nothing to raise the level of popular consciousness and preparation. 2 The presidential election was conceived by FRAP in terms of an alliance with centrist and frankly reactionary parties, and concessions to deserters from the Liberal and even Conservative partiesin short of a policy of local notables. This went to such an extreme that the front page of Vistazo, the Young Communist review, made a large display of a banquet offered for Allende by the Grand Lodge of the Chilean Freemasonswhich includes the best names of the Chilean commercial bourgeoisie. Finally, very little separated Freis Christian Democrat programme from that of Allende, with the exception of the latters proposal for the progressive nationalization of the copper mines while the former proposed their Chileanization. But Frei was able to use more direct means to get across to the masses. 3 Since all working class offensive actions were postponed until afterwards, even the adversarys aggressive actions were not countered, in order not to frighten the electorate. Chile is the only country in Latin America where the breaking of diplomatic relations with Cuba did not provoke mass demonstrations. When, shortly before the elections, this diplomatic rupture took place, FRAP contented itself with a communique 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 taking its distance from the Cuban revolution, as well as from the other revolutionary movements in being. It did not answer the torrent of reactionary accusations against the bloody dictatorship of Fidel Castro and in consequence numerous popular strata thought that there was, in fact, 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 a bourgeois representative democracy; it is another to use such an election in a bourgeois manner. It is one thing to defend the honesty of a given election and respect for the Constitution in a given conjuncture against reaction; it is another to take the fervent defence of bourgeois legality and the letter of the Constitution as an absolute, abstracted from any class position. During the Chilean electoral campaign, the Left competed with the Right in pacifist declarations and humanitarian condemnations of violence, in general. Thus one can read in the Chilean CP programme, approved at its 12th Congress in March 1962: The thesis of the peaceful road is not a tactical form but a proposition geared to the very programme of the communist movement. . . (the peaceful road) wholly corresponds to the interests of the march towards socialism and the eminently humanist character of MarxistLeninist theory. The present correlation of national and international forces has increased the possibility of achieving revolution without armed struggle. Leaving aside the irrational optimism of such a thesis in Latin America five years after the Cuban Revolution, it is still surprising to see how the theoretical humanism of Marxism serves to justify the abandonment of all political and theoretical rigour. It would obviously be unjust to explain the reactionary victory in the Chilean 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 into account the present imperialist superiority and the extreme uncertainty of electoral terrain for popular forces even in such a country as Chile, the rub of the matter is that an electoral result which represented an electoral victory unequalled in Latin America by any other democratic movement, was turned into a revolutionary defeat. It succeeded in obtaining an equal number of votes among men voters, less subject to conservative and clerical pressures than women, and forced reaction to the 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 of all Latin American militants into a crucial test, they would today undoubtedly 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 in the 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 imperialist net. Dominated by a veritable superiority complex that tended to overestimate the specific characteristics of an advanced democracy, the Chilean working-class movement tried to put in parentheses the Latin American national liberation movements and the conjuncture already described which the Cuban Revolution had created in the whole Continent.
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b Opportunism has a common trait in Latin America with left-wing adventurism: underestimation of North American imperialism, despite the proliferation of military putsches in recent years. It was widely known in Cuba and other countries, that given the lack of preparation of the Chilean democratic organizations, an electoral victory by Allende would have brought no fundamental change in the structure of the state apparatus, and that neither the Chilean ruling class nor the imperialist forces were going to be cast into oblivion by popular action.
The Strategy of Reformism

This radical underestimation of imperialism appeared all the more sharply in the case of the reformism of a section of the Brazilian revolutionary movement. If ever there were historic proof of the futility of reformist efforts, it was in Brazil. As the limits of this article do not permit an analysis that would require a separate study in itself, we need only note that the Brazilian Communist Partyas its present selfcriticisms indicateabandoned its class independence in exchange for an alliance with the national bourgeoisie represented by Goulart. This opportunist line provoked its mechanical opposite in a large sector of Brazilian revolutionary forcesa petit-bourgeois radicalism which disdained patient work among the masses, in some sectors influenced by Francisco Juliao and in others by Brizola. Thus if the fascist coup met no resistance, one of the reasons was that it took the Communist Party completely by surprise in full legalistic euphoria. The only sectors prepared for the struggle preferred to postpone it, not wanting to come to the defence of a corrupt and impotent rgime now, and not yet able to unite the masses on a revolutionary platform which was still inexistent. Let us merely ask why, some time after the Cuban Revolution and in spite of all its lessons, illusions about a peaceful step towards socialism persisted among the political leaderships of various countries. Perhaps the secret of this mysterynot much of a secret, actuallymust be sought in the general conception which current reformist tendencies have of the Latin American Revolution. Let us reproduce the arguments which a highly qualified representative of these tendencies was good enough to develop for us, in an Andean nation where a popular insurrection existed in a latent state while he spoke: The aim of our action in Latin America is to consolidate the states of national democracy like Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and Brazil (this was in Goularts time) so that they can serve one day as poles of attraction for the less advanced neighbouring states. These national states can only fortify themselves effectively at the expense of North American imperialism, which tends to eliminate competitive national economies capable of escaping from its commercial monopoly. North American imperialism is the natural enemy of the national bourgeoisies. Thus the only chance for these national bourgeoisies to develop economies independent of foreign control and to start an accumulation of capital, is to resort to the disinterested economic aid of the socialist camp, which
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is given without political conditions. This is why the primordial duty of the socialist camp is to continue to build up its economic power unceasingly. There are two reasons for this. First, it will then be able to supply long-term loans and technicians to countries in Latin America that is to say, weaken or restrict the zones of North American influence. Secondly, the revelation of the material and cultural progress of the socialist 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 to mature, since it is obvious that they cannot spring up overnight. The growth of a national bourgeoisie is the simultaneous growth of two contradictions: the first with imperialism, which ceases to exercise its previous exploitation, and the second with the nascent proletariat, which it begins to exploit. A strong bourgeoisie produces a strong proletariat. We must rely fundamentally on this double contradiction. As long as the national bourgeoisies are still too weak, there is no possibility for a revolution. The weakness of the working-class and its parties should not lead us, however, to fall into a sectarian policy of isolationto which, incidentally, the inexperience of many leaderships might incline them. We must be able to forge the broadest alliances, without fearing that the middle class takes the lead in them. Many small and middle bourgeois have excellent political attitudes. Today, they are the only realists. International conditions now play an increasingly determinant role in revolutionary triumphs. It is better not to hurry, since every year that goes by changes these international conditions in favour of socialism: the Cuban economy grows, the economy of the socialist camp grows, new socialist countries arise in other parts of the world and so on. In this situation, to attempt a revolution by launching armed struggle against the representatives of the national bourgeoisie which is now forming in power, would only delay or compromise the advent of objective conditions for advance. The most progressive elements of the government and the bourgeoisie would be thrown, ipso facto, into the arms of the North Americans. The defeat of the insurrection would allow the most retrograde elements to become uppermost once again and perhaps annul the simulacrum of a land reform and even denationalize the mines. The USA would demand the shutting down of the Soviet Embassy which we have kept in existence with great difficulty, despite every provocation, and the departure of the socialist economic missions. The greatest dangers in Latin America today are impatience and jacobinism. They lead to a deterioration of objective conditions and the sacrifice 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 resist the test of the facts. The reformist strategy presupposes that states of national democracy under the leadership of the bourgeoisie can develop in Latin America, not aligned with the United States and capable of becoming increasingly independent of imperialism. However, the history of the last 20 years has shown that there is a fatal and insoluble dilemma for all such bourgeoisies.
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1. Demo-bourgeois Fascism

The party of the national bourgeoisie confiscates a popular revolution and seizes power, as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional did in Mexico, Accion Democratica in Venezuela and the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario in Bolivia. This progressive petitbourgeoisie does not possess an infrastructure of economic power before it wins political power. Hence it transforms the state not only into an instrument of political domination, but also into a source of economic power. The state, culmination of social relations of exploitation in capitalist Europe, becomes in a certain sense the instrument of their installation in these countries. In a short-circuit characteristic of semi-colonial countries, the state transforms itself from a juridical expression of the given relations of production in a society, into an instrument for producing, to some extent, relations of production which are not already given in the society. The proliferation of public prebends sole source of employment for thousands of followers without work, serves as a substitute for the development of an apparatus of production. Without the control of the state apparatus, this bourgeoisie is nothing economically; political power means everything for it, and it is capable of everything to keep it. The specific form its class consciousness takes is police vigilance. A party card is the pre-requisite of public employment. In Venezuela, every single secretary in a Ministry has to pay dues to Accion Democraticabefore so much as learning to type. Party dues are deducted directly from the salary of the public functionaries, just as trade union dues for the official unions are deducted from workers wages. An inflated and cynical mass of higher and middle echelon bureaucrats, private secretaries, crooked lawyers, businessmen, police agents, officers involved in reselling arms, drug-addicted diplomats, trade union leaders living off the Ministry of Labour, are parasites on a state apparatus that is in turn a parasite on the society. It is matter of life or death for these creatures to maul or strangle anyone who comes near their particular prize. Threatened by popular demands, this bourgeoisie of nouveaux riches immediately betrays the nationalist ideology which at the beginning characterized its leadership of the masses (above all the peasants, hypnotized by the constantly renewed promise of a genuine land reform), turns coat and devotes itself to collaborating ever more shamelessly with imperialism, whose interests it undertakes to administer on the spot. Give and take: oil, mining and commercial concessions in exchange for some royalties and grants in aid, which are rapidly invested in private motorways and swimming pools. From this point of view, the Venezuelan and Bolivian rgimes (with or without Paz Estenssoro) show extraordinary similarities. The same agrarian reforms, scandalous land deals in Venezuela and division into private lots of uncultivated soil in the East of Bolivia, the same populist demagogy, which ensures the good name of the rgime abroad: periodic electoral frauds, maintenance of a sort of parliament, public mise en scne to demonstrate the support of the workersall designed to give it a democratic appearance. Surrounded by the people in arms, that is to say, mercenaries recruited from unemployed workers and lumpen (in Venezuela, the half-dozen legal and extralegal police corps, in Bolivia the militias of the MNR, composed of
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illiterate Indians and railwayworkersthe only working-class trade union in which governmental terror produced results), this bourgeoisie has to defend its political power against those who gave this power to it in the first place: the workers and students led by young nationalists and Communists, who in Venezuela struggled against Perez Jimenez for 10 years and Gomez for 20, and in Bolivia suffered the long calvary of massacres in the mines and insurrections crushed by the Roscathe tin-oligarchy. At the end of this evolution, the rgimes of national democracy give birth to a monster which might well be called demo-bourgeois fascismunique exception to the rule that there is no teratology in history: a supreme transformation of the contradictions into which a bourgeois rgime without a bourgeois class, a liberalism without liberals, inexorably enters. Such is the first horn of the dilemma: pure and simple betrayal of the bourgeois-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 antifeudal agrarian reform, extension of the vote to illiterates, establishment of diplomatic and commercial relations with all countries, control of the profits of the great North American companies, and so on. To resist the combined pressures of the US ambassador (the Ecuadoreans call him the Viceroy), the journalistic campaigns, the juridical obstacles always opposed by a parliamentary majority which is the fruit of electoral fraud and co-option within the ruling class, the President is forced to resort to the popular masses and ask the support of workingclass parties and trade-unions, and if necessary (as in Brazil) of Peasant Leagues. From then on, the rgime is constantly blackmailed with the threat of an army coup. Cornered between the workers and peasants whose enthusiasm he has stimulated, who pressure him behind, and the army mobilized by the injured oligarchy and the winks of the State Department, which blocks him 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 has perceived that the mechanism now set in motion leads to its downfall. The victory of a policy of national independence requires socialist measures: this truth, once discovered, provokes panic. The bourgeoisie immediately abandons its apprentice sorcerer. Little does it care if the constitutional legality whose champion it was against subversion so recently, is trampled under foot by the military. At any pretextin Brazil it was Goularts pardon of the sailors who had mutinied against their officersthe prefectures are occupied, the provincial garrisons fail to answer telephone calls from the Presidency, tanks move towards the Presidential Palace, and the streets empty: the putsch has come. The President and a handful of advisers are left up in the air. Precisely because constitutional legality has been respected throughout the process, 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, condemned to be merely symbolic, like the small popular demonstrations which flare up here and there, and are rapidly dispersed at gun-point. Incapable of opposing a serious counterforce to the armed representatives of his own class and of the State Department, the President takes a plane to Uruguay or Panama. Such was the fall of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 (when the North American Army trained, equipped and organized the mercenary troops of Castillo Armas), Bosch in Santo Domingo in 1963, Goulart in Brazil in 1964, not to speak of Arosemena in Ecuador, Arevalo and Villeda Morales in Central America and so many others who have been replaced by military rgimes or juntas. There are no exceptions to this tragicomedy in the history of the Bonapartist variants of the national bourgeoisie, such as Vargas in Brazil (1954) and Peron in Argentina (1955). The order of acts and scenes never essentially changes: as this repetition indicates, the history of the heroes of bourgeois reformism has the truth of a religious myth. Reformism, an inverted dogmatism, imprisons itself in a cyclical time in order to shut its ears to the lessons of history. Like the beautiful phoenix, it dies one night, to be reborn the next morning. The luckless heroes of bourgeois progress have so strong a preference for romance that their tragedy always ends in comedy. Such is the second horn of the dilemma: a bourgeois (an individual or a group of individuals), even if he is brave enough to take the nationalist ideology professed by his class literallyalthough not enough to break with itand even if he undertakes to convert his class to fidelity to itself, that is to say, to a bourgeois reform of feudal society, is invariably strangled by his own class, which turns against him its instrument of political domination, the army. Far from being inconsistent with itself, the national bourgeoisie in so doing only reveals the distance which separates what it isa bourgeois ally of agrarian feudalism and foreign capitalfrom what it claims to benational and anti-imperialist. The bourgeoisie likes to be thought unfaltering, but only up to a certain point. In politics, as in everything else, the golden mean is the bourgeois virtue.
Bourgeois Revolution and Socialist Revolution

What explains the dilemma? The explosive situation which in Latin America has produced the Cuban Revolutiona proof of it to itself and to the world. For this situation is the following. As it has been said of Russia before 1917, Latin America today is pregnant with two revolutions, the bourgeois-democratic and the socialist revolution, and cannot release one without releasing the other: at the birth of the first, it cannot withhold the second.2 Thus it is perilous to count on the national bourgeoisieeven in those countries where one is developingto make a bourgeois-democratic revolution, since it is well aware of the process which it would be unleashing. To say that it has fallen to
2 Louis Althusser, Contradiction and Over-Determination, published in New Left Review 41, January-February 1967.

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the proletariat and to the peasantry to accomplish the historic tasks of the bourgeoisie is to say that the alternative today is not between (peaceful) bourgeois revolution and (violent) socialist revolution, as the promoters of the Alliance for Progress claimed, in agreement with the reformists, but between revolution tout court and counter-revolution, as they admit today. Recently the mild souls of the New Frontier have put aside their mildness (they had this advantage over many reformists) and deliberately welcomed counter-revolution, as the Mann Doctrine of recognition of de facto military governments witnesses. For today, in effect, imperialism has only two tactics: either to avoid the birth of the bourgeois democratic revolution (military coup dtat) or, when the birth has occurred inadvertently, to empty it of its content (demo-bourgeois fascism). If the creature is already there, cage it; if it is not yet born, abort it. No matter what reformist Communists or Christian-Democrats believe in Chile, there is no third solution. More; since Cuba put an end to inadvertencethe democratic Mexican (1910) and Bolivian (1952) revolutions are the belle epoque of US nonchalance before the Cuban Revolutionabortion manu militari is the rule today. The proof is 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 armed organization), within the rules of constitutional legality, plays a strange game, 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); or he 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 (Venezuela 1959): betrayed on betrayer. In both cases, the peaceful and bourgeois revolution will pay the cost. When the day of the genuine confrontation comes, which will be much later, all that will be necessary will be a few more rifles. By a supreme irony of history, in Latin America the surest road to a future of blood and tears has been baptized the peaceful road to socialism.
Brazil: Capturing the State from Within

The Brazilian experience of basic reforms, attempted by the Goulart government, combined the optimum conditions for victory: a powerful mass movement supported by the central government, one of the strongest Communist parties in the Continent installed in the state apparatus itself, and an army penetrated from top to bottomor so it was believedby a strong democratic or even revolutionary movement. It logically crystallized the hopes of all those in Latin America who thought 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 Communist Party down with him, whose secretary-general had said to disquieted friends a few days before the coup: Dont worry, we are already in power. The party, which had infiltrated the network of the bourgeois state apparatus without succeeding in dominating it completely, thus allowed reaction to kill two birds with one stone. At present, 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 awakening is 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 of its secretary-general Vieira, has known how to adapt itself to the objective demands of history, openly joining the cause of the besieged peasants of Marquetalia. It may be assumed that by co-ordinating their action with that of the Venezuelan guerrillas of the Andes and Lara zones, and extending their armed struggle across the unguarded plains which unite the two countriesas they are trying to dothe Colombian guerrillas have singularly accelerated the liberation of two neighbours, Colombia and Venezuela. Thus that unity of national struggles which was preached by Bolivar and without which America will stagnate for a long time, has already been achieved. As for those, every day less numerous, who persist in refusing to make a radical critique of their failures (Peru, Chile and Brazil), their own silence condemns them, throwing into relief its equivocal justification: patience. This cardinal virtue of revolutionaries ceases to be respectable when it is erected into a theoretical argument against all the arguments of reason and reality. By contrast, anyone can denounce the impatience of the young Fidelistas when they peremptorily decree the means and ends of the revolution. But who has noticed the paradox whereby the very parties of Patience are those which deliver themselves over to blind realism and unprincipled alliances for electoral purposes (like those Peruvian revolutionaries who voted for the Christian Democratic candidate in the municipal elections in Lima in 1963, abandoning the candidate of the Liberation Front), in other words to a policy of short-run gains and long-run losses? Does not true revolutionary patience, on the contrary, consist in building up the fundamental force of the revolution by long-term work, distinguishing once and for all the different class banners (which does not exclude any alliances, of course) and grouping the exploited about a revolutionary nucleus which grows irreversibly like the July 26th Movement in Cuba, the FALN in Venezuela and the self-defence militias in Colombia, changing into a guerrilla army before becoming a regular army? The impatient, for their part, show the most surprising tactical flexibility, forge the broadest alliances without compromising their 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, let us 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 foundations of the State, its army and police, is not shared by thousands of militants from Guatemala to Brazil without some common source. Without
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enumerating all its elements, let us indicate one of them. There is no need to accumulate statistics to demonstrate that the Latin American masses are today the victims of a kind of peaceful genocide by imperialism and the ruling classes. Without even counting the deaths by violence in the wars which have periodically devastated the Continent (300,000 deaths in Colombia from 1948 to 1958), two random figures from official statistics may be cited. In the suburbs of Recife (North-Eastern Brazil), 500 out of every 1,000 new-born children die before the age of two. The average life-expectancy of the adults who work in the Bolivian mines or the Brazilian latifundia of the North-East is only just over 30. This is a vertical sample of America. Latin America is now undergoing a demographic increase (3 per cent a year) more rapid than anywhere else in the Third World, which present relations of production (generally semi-feudal) render desperately explosive. Compared with our own, this increase in population creates quite different units of historical time. One example: the programme of the CPSU, adopted by the 22nd Congress, decrees a period of one generationat the most half a century, but even this period appears too short in realityfor the construction of communism. Yet many Brazilian revolutionaries, to speak only of them, when they set time limits place the construction of a new society only a few years off (however unrealistic this may appear to them). In the space of 20 years the demographic growth of the Soviet Union will have only the best effect on the growth of its productive forces and its standard of living. Brazil in the same period will double its population, from 60 to 120 million inhabitants. In other words, if Brazilian society has not been fundamentally changed in the interim, the number of victims (the number of children dying in the suburbs of Recife) will more than double. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Latin American comrades live in a state of emergency, a feverish and urgent passion not to sit still. If they remain where they are, they will be killed more easily, one by one. A passion inspired both by Fidelista impatience and a vague feeling of imminent salvation, the mystique of the starving which affects the peasants of North-East Brazil. Once this qualitative difference between the different temporalities of the world is admitted, it will perhaps be better understood that the margin between a strategy of seizing power and the tactics which derive from it, is less in Latin America than in Europe. It may also be understood why slogans directly taken over from the European working-class movement referring to peaceful coexistence, for exampleencounter such difficulties in Latin American conditions. It is easy to concede that inequalities of world development, especially demographic growth, suppose uneven forms and rhythms of revolutionary action. Butwhy not state it clearly?it is equally evident that the different sectors of world revolutionary activity may enter into secondary contradiction with each other, to the extent that the differences between them are not acknowledged.
Fidelism and Leninism

The failure to see this is perhaps to blame for the fact that a certain reformist current persists in considering the Fidelista conception of the revolution, the theory of the foco, as adventurist, always suspect and sometimes dangerous. The correct behaviour for a vanguard, by con40

trast, is to win time, economize forces, unconditionally perpetuate the legality of the organization, send the safest militants to European socialist countries to enlarge the reserve of cadreswhence they sometimes return de-nationalized, dissociated from the local situation, rejected or ignored by the militants of the interior. . . . For reformism, every initiative that presses for armed struggle, that is to say, to reply with illegal arms to the undeclared war (whose names include silicosis, infantile parasitic diseases, brutalization, slow death. . .) that imperialism wages against the exploited, is considered premature in the best of cases and provocative in the worst. For the leaders and militants of the new Fidelista generation and for the Cubans themselves, the conditions for armed struggle are given in a general manner: for them the development of objective contradictions is in danger of being regulated, compromised or retarded by the enemy, if Latin American revolutionaries do not seriously press forward on the long struggle for power, through realistic initiatives and decisive revolutionary actions. These must be guaranteed by serious reflexion on the objective conditions without being the passive reflexion of these conditions. Anyone who sees from inside the opposition of these two attitudes will probably seek the false exit of neutrality. European Marxism, it will be said, is flawed by positivism (with an empiricist basis): It is enough to know the objective conditions well to act well; while Cuban Marxism is flawed by voluntarism (with an idealist basis): It is not always necessary to wait, Che Guevara once wrote for all the conditions of the revolution to be given; the insurrectional foco can create them. But this double relationship, which compares two incommensurable phenomena is marked by unrealism. Like every false theory it cannot give birth to any practice and is a reflexion of none. We have attempted to show elsewhere,3 that the pointers of method grouped under the name of Fidelism are, in the concrete conditions of the majority of Latin American countries, a guide to action, the surest of all. As such, so-called Fidelism is none other than Leninism. It is in no way a closed model; assimilated and recreated by Latin American masses, it is the guide to the first step towards a continental liberation. Let us listen attentively to the reports which reach us from the neighbouring mountains of Venezuela and Colombia: Latin America is on the threshold of an era of endless combat, from which it can expect only difficult yet certain victories. 1965

3 Rgis Debray, Latin America: The Long March, published in New Left Review 33, September-October 1965.

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