[rad-green] Lessons from Bolivia: A View from Cuba

https://socialistproject.ca/2019/11/lessons-from-bolivia-view-from-cuba/

Lessons from Bolivia: A View from Cuba

*LATIN AMERICA <https://socialistproject.ca/category/latin-america/>  •
November 21, 2019  •  Yassel A. Padrón Kunakbaeva
<https://socialistproject.ca/author/yassel-kunakbaeva/>*

*This article was first published in Spanish on the Joven Cuba.com
<https://jovencuba.com/2019/11/12/lecciones-de-una-derrota/> website.*

Sad news comes from Bolivia. The coup has been accomplished. Once again,
the military has decided the game in our Latin American region, treading on
the very Constitution they swore to defend. President Evo Morales and
Vice-President Álvaro García Linera resigned. They said it was to avoid
further bloodshed. It’s the end of an era in the history of that Andean
nation, the same one that witnessed Che’s death.

No one can deny there was a coup. Evo’s decision to run for reelection may
be questioned, but it cannot be ignored that there was a ruling by the
judiciary power which authorized his candidacy. In any case, it can be said
that there was an institutional crisis
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_political_crisis>, as well as
issues with the counting of the votes. What cannot be denied is that Evo
should have been the legitimate President until another legitimate
President took office. The intervention by the armed forces can only be
considered a coup.

Evo and his group made mistakes. When I heard that they had authorized an
audit by the Organization of American States (OAS), I thought that had to
be a masterful plan hatched by Evo and Linera, because it would be
tremendously stupid if it wasn’t. By now accustomed to the intelligence of
Bolivian leaders, I believed they had everything under control, plan and
counterplan. From the distance, I lack the data to judge them properly. The
fact is that the OAS came in and played its role.
Tomorrow We Can Fight Again

My romantic side tells me that Evo should not quit; that he should play it
out to the bitter end, like Allende
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende>. But I want to wait some
time before I form a complete opinion. Time will tell how correct that
decision was. I want to know what Evo and the Movimiento al Socialismo
(MAS) will do now. I want to believe his words when he said that he hasn’t
betrayed his people, and that he will remain in Bolivia to fight from the
bottom
<https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/movement-towards-socialism-mas-resist-so-tomorrow-we-can-fight-again>,
with his coca growers. We’ll see.

What can we Cubans learn from what has happened in Bolivia? What teachings
does the fate of popular processes in Latin America offer us? That’s
something to keep in mind at this critical junction.

We should first understand what has happened. Evo Morales managed to
peacefully coexist, for years, with the Bolivian middle-class. He walked on
the path of liberal bourgeois democracy, getting 47 per cent of the vote in
the last election
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_general_election>. However,
the system shook him off, like a dog shakes off rainwater. The right showed
its most violent and racist side, reaching extremes such as the rape of a
indigenous young woman, who was then hanged with her own braids. The army
and the police, which Evo didn’t manage to change, proved to be quite at
home at oligarchic domination.

Evo was the President. The MAS attained a degree of hegemony for years.
However, the political system of liberal democracy – especially in the
shape it takes in Latin America, with its institutions and power apparatus,
its parties, its press, its justice and its military – proved to be
effective.

The bourgeoisie may let you sit at the head of the table, but it knows it
owns the table, the chairs, the windows and the house itself. Sooner or
later, they will kick you out of it.
Dismantling the Ancien Régime

And so one cannot help but remember Fidel, and the clarity with which he
led the Cuban Revolution once the insurrectionary phase was completed. He
knew the first thing to be done was to disband the old army and the old
police, to arm the people, to destabilize the entire bourgeois
institutional system. The triumph and continuity of the Revolution in Cuba
were achieved thanks to a complete dismantling of the preceding
institutional apparatus, and to the cultural shift that was brought about,
in which even the concepts of that political system were discredited and
largely forgotten.

Of course, it’s not the same to triumph by means of an armed revolution
than by winning an election. In Cuba we were lucky enough that most of the
bourgeoisie left the country. They lost by forfeit. But it’s a good thing
to realize that today, sixty years on, what bothers and pisses off
imperialists everywhere the most is that they don’t have a way to deal with
the Cuban system, because they lost all handles on our reality.

Seeing what has happened in Bolivia, what happened before in Argentina and
Brazil, what is happening in Venezuela, we should be nothing but glad we
were lucky enough to have had our history, for having eradicated that
scaffolding of liberal bourgeois democracy, a system warped to the benefit
of classes which, when push comes to shove, fail to respect their own
democracy and at the drop of a hat show their fascist side.

I’m not saying the current Cuban system is perfect. We have major problems
which must be overcome. But we should not get too excited about the models
of democracy we see in other countries. We also cannot fail to value the
cultural aggregate of our recent history. Something as simple as the fact
one can talk to a lieutenant colonel at a bus stop, speaks about armed
forces which are popular. It may not all be perfect, but they are not
detached from the people. That’s a utopia elsewhere in Latin America.

Imagination is needed. Whatever we change in our country must be through
socialism. We must materialize that which was only outlined. We must add
what was forgotten. We must build the socialist and popular democracy we’ve
spoken about so much.

Of course we need to have the rule of law. But justice must come from the
heart of the people. It cannot come from those professional and
class-minded mafias which treat Latin American countries brutally. We need
popular and independent courts of law. It might be a good idea to remember
ancient times, and how justice worked in the *polis* of Athens or in the
Roman republic, as well as the experience of the Paris Commune.

We cannot abandon the idea of popular armed forces. Above all, we must
rescue Fidel’s idea of popular militia. An army which is the people itself
at arms, so no one may snatch away its destiny.

We need transparency and participation in communication. The archaic system
of our printed press is an aberration which must be abandoned. Fortunately,
the digital world signals the birth of a new sun, with citizen
participation and electronic government. At the same time, faced with media
empires of capitalist propaganda, we must boost the use of public media by
the citizens themselves, as well as the creation of networks and
counter-hegemonic media.
Economic Parliament and Pluralism

There’s a need for democracy, but it must be focused mainly on the economy.
We must empower groups of workers. We have the self-management experience
of Yugoslavia as an example. The plan must be negotiated collectively, with
the participation of all sectors of the economy: public, cooperative and
private, with unions and political authorities at the table. There should
be an Economic Parliament which works all year long.

We need pluralism, the historical failed subject of socialism. But it makes
no sense that, in a society in socialist transition, this should be
attained through a multi-party system. Competition between parties, based
on money and propaganda, is the playing field of the bourgeoisie. Instead,
there should be empowerment of grassroots spaces, and a practice of
pluralism at the base. We should ‘say everything’, ‘look for trouble’. We
must allow plurality of programs in elected officials, and supply power and
budgets to those officials so they may solve problems.

With the concerted efforts of us all, we must find a truly revolutionary
path in present-day Cuba. But it is my firm conviction that such a path
does not go through restoring the liberal bourgeois democracy. Count me out
of that. Today we witness what’s happened in Bolivia. That’s a violent
restoration, in a country where the changes were not that radical. Can you
imagine what those who advocate oligarchy and imperialism would do in Cuba
if the platform for their accession to power were created?

Accepting the concepts of the enemy is the first step in recognizing a
moral superiority it doesn’t have; it is the path to self-blaming, and the
gateway to defeat and death. •

Yassel A. Padrón Kunakbaeva is a Marxist philosopher, revolutionary
activist. He writes for La Joven Cuba <https://jovencuba.com/>.

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