Fidel’s Trip to Argentina

24.May.03    Análisis y Noticias

Kirchner assumes this Sunday as president of Argentina, and his god father Duhalde has carried out two moves apparently disconnected between each other, but that have to do with the configuration of the new context, where the bad ones are in the extreme left and the extreme right, while them, the “democrats”, are in the right place, the institutions.

The first move was the pardon to Gorriarán and Saneidín, the first a guerrilla member of guevarista orientation and the second a fascist from head to toes. The game of the government has been quite obvious, to try to show that they are the good guys, that they are offering the dove of peace to everybody and release from prison the symbols of that which must be denied, the extremes that must be repudiated by society, as if democracy extend its hand to those two “negative” poles of society and by freeing these figures one is magnanimous, condescending and superior, because one has the power to grab and to let go whenever one wants, and he summons everyone to leave behind childish attitudes and come to the sancto santorum of institutional democracy.

That symbolic game of valuing democracy which would be threatened by both sides, tries to hide that the real antagonism is between capital and its institutions against the people, to blur the real contradictions to bring the population into the regional project of stabilization of capital and annihilation of resistance, the one that grows from bellow everywhere and which they have not been able to stop by the force of coups and military dictatorships. Those military coups did not come to prevent the victory of the communists and the guerrillas, but to contain the dissatisfaction of the people of the continent, who went firmly to the offensive after the Cuban revolution which has today become stabilized and constitutes the most advanced country of Latin America in a series of social indicators, while in the other countries we continue eating shit.

The Cubans taught us that the enemy is defeated with the people mobilized, with organization and popular force from bellow and from the beginning with Che at the forefront they stimulated us everywhere to give the strongest fight without quarters against the states, the governments and capital. Guevara himself considered his duty to leave his position of high leader of the revolution to come to the center of our Abya Yala to take up arms and join the peasants and other insurgent groups to support the extension of the continental insurgency.

The reformist left of the time saw itself between two waters, to continue supporting the projects of conciliation and popular fronts to direct the processes from above or to join Guevara and the guerrillas that were growing everywhere. Some, many, chose to turn their back, like Mario Monje, Secretary General of the Bolivian Communist Party, who had made a commitment with Che to articulate the struggle in the entire country, labor movement, peasants, students, in short, in coordination with the guerrilla groups. Che started off and when he was up in the mountains, Monje, the great traitor, said no, that he was not going to do it, that Che and the ELN were stepping all over the tradition of struggle of the Bolivian people, of their communist party, in short, a thousand of pretexts. The guerrilla in the mountain was left abandoned, and soon these low life, began to say that the idea of Che was to get to the mountains by himself and from there to become the vanguard and summon the rest. How cynical! It is necessary to ask oneself how is it possible that the Bolivian Communist Party, that had committed to support the ELN and to work together, having as witnesses the members of the Cuban Communist Party, because the agreement was done in Havana, changed the color of their jackets so calmly. They made fun not only of Che, the ELN, the Latin American people, but also the Cuban party. That part will still have to be clarified, we are not about to let go of it like some others. The moment will come for us to ask them to account for that.

Cubans continued supporting the struggle from bellow, because as they were isolated by the Organization of American States (OAS) and were being blocked, it was only right that their main alliance be with the struggle of the people from bellow. But the threats and the international diplomacy said something else. They pressed the Cubans and they criticized them for their support to the guerrillas. They blocked them and they prevented their development, in addition they disarticulated the socialist camp thus isolating Cuba. The way out by Cubans and the breaking of the blockade has been well done, they have been able to establish ties with the most diverse of countries and they have been partly able to neutralize the aggressive campaigns against them from capital in general, and in particular from the USA, country that wants to swallow them in whatever way possible and does not stop in the adventures of aggression and threats of invasion.

Thus the Cubans have had to develop a state policy, where the economic and diplomatic relations with the rest of the countries must respond to determined canons and the Cubans have known to integrate the democratic language and international law that those in power use in their actions to deceive the people of the world. It is no longer the times of the Cuban representative removing his shoe and striking the table in the encounters of international diplomacy. If the Cubans don’t do that thing of adapting to the coursed circumstances of organized blockade and aggression, they are left even more isolated and become easy prey of foreign appetite. It is a necessity. Which is different of doing that as a policy for the struggle from bellow of the people who face those democratic institutions. For example, if a group of the left in Venezuela says that one must blindly support Chávez because that is good for the Cubans, they would be very wrong, or if now, some said that we are to support Kirchner because he opens a space to Cuba, would also be mistaken.

Why then, after releasing the “bad” extremes of Gorriarán and Saneidín, Fidel is invited to the presidential act where Kirchner assumes the post. Obviously because now for the Argentineans, Cuba is not in any extreme, that now it is part of the institutional “democratic” camp. We have already said in previous commentaries that the way for capital in Latin America is the containment of the struggles of resistance and a new program of alliance of classes, in way of popular fronts that incorporates a sector of the lefts to spaces of power from where to negotiate privileges for some sectors, that is, capital and its governments, buying out a minimum part of the popular movement, specially the one that is subordinated to the reformist parties, as well as the PT and the CUT in Brazil, the CTA in Argentina, the Socialist Party in Chile, the Frente Amplio in Uruguay, and the bolivarismo, of course, new form of performance that is born of a Venezuelan military fraction that because the revolt of masses in the country it saw itself in face two ways out, to do a new military coup, following the old Brazilian, Argentine and Chilean tradition, or to do a new military coup with a progressive face, as the Torrijos type in Panama, that represented a sector of the local bourgeoisie that disputed with another one the benefits of the channel, as today in Venezuela a sector of the capital dispute with the other the benefits of Oil. The army chose to join one of the blocks and the left came again, just as in Panama, to say that now Chávez is progressive.

The relations of Cuba with Panama at the time of Torrijos were optimal, even knowing that the army had been folded to a bourgeois fraction and assumed their political representation in the state’s institutions.

Cubans knew perfectly well, as all the left of the continent, that in Panama the project happened to subordinate the struggle of classes to the alliance with a sector of the capital, that way, reinforcing reformist policies at the continental level. Different is the attitude of Cubans, that is correct in the defence of their conquests and to my to understanding it is necessary to support them and to defend them, because as I have said before, they are “the last of the Mohicans” of state socialism, because the next socialist processes will be different due to the different dynamics of social self-organizing by the bases in the continent, and both of these are complementary, there is no contradiction between supporting Cuba and to continue building a popular power with capacity to demolish the governments. That capacity and objective to demolish our governments belongs to our people, and we cannot ask from Cubans that they support or that they add themselves to that dynamic, it would be ridiculous, because I have already said that they must lean on the relations with the institutions that dominate to us.

But, on the other hand, we cannot either ask Cubans to tell us the opposite, that is, that we support within our countries the bourgeoisies, the industrialists, the governments. The Cubans are not going to tell us that, because that would also be ridiculous.

But a significant part of the left in the continent have understood that to support the Cubans it is necessary to support certain governments from bellow by joining with industrialists who will do businesses or have diplomatic relations with Cuba. A sector has arisen that met in Ecuador and they already have some time trying to convince the Latin American people that we must to join MERCOSUR to open a way to Cubans, as the policy of Lula and Kirchner is that of seeking regional integration of Venezuela and they say that way the doors to an integration with Cuba would be opened. If that is done by the industrialists, very well for Cubans, bravo! But from there to containing the class struggle and to direct the dynamics of resistance towards that regional integration is an obvious concession to the corporate class who need conversations and alliances that go in detriment of the interests of the people. Lula with its attachment to the IMF has already been tiredly denounced all over, by Petras, some leaders of the MST, by other sectors, and in particular by diverse sectors of Brazilian workers who see with surprise how the reforms of the PT, instead of favouring their interests, are destined to consolidate, to humanize and to modernize Capitalism and the military forces of that country.

Duhalde and Kirchner are extremely interested in the subject, because they have gone through very great scares in Argentina and are going to do whatever possible to close the way to the strategic advance of popular self-organizing from bellow which has surprised the world by its potential. For that reason they are reinforcing the idea of the democratic center with the liberation of prisoners. And with the visit of Fidel they hope to legitimize spaces of dialogue with sectors of the popular camp, specially the CTA, where the Argentine Communist Party is also a part of and which historical policy has been to work more in the advance of filling of spaces within the structures rather than the formation of a social movement with capacity to define its historical paths.

The visit of Fidel is very important so that the world’s public opinion see that Cubans fulfill the demands of diplomatic relations, economic and bourgeois international law, that there are no reasons for so much blockade and aggressions, specially in these times of new outbreaks of USA actions.

But it is also important so that the people do not subject themselves to these plans of alliances, so that we extend the idea that Cubans today have what they have because they brought down the government and established other modalities of social organization. But that our path is not going to be that of support to the institutions of the power, but the accumulation of forces to build our own paths.

We are not against relations with Cuba, very much on the contrary, but we do not forget that the main task continues being the resistance from bellow, the development of autonomy and the capacity to strike the enemy. Nobody is going to convince us that we have a main enemy in the USA and that for that reason we must ally ourselves with the local bourgeoisies, that is Chinese story. Our enemies are our governments who are aligning with the IMF and international capital to extract their gains at the cost of the sacrifice of the people. We are not disposed to support those quotas of sacrifice by already tried reformist strategies that have already been tiredly repeated and only bring defeat for the people. The time of vanguards that take us anywhere they want is over. It is now the time of the people and the capital knows it, that is the reason for so much propaganda to the humanization to disarm the people.

Welcome Fidel to Argentina!

The people receive you fighting and not accepting the governments nor licking the shoes of the industrialists!

Profesor J

Profesor_j@yahoo.com

Translated by ClajadepCanada