From Zapata to Fidel and Chávez

In Latin America, the revolutionary dream came unstuck due to the impatience of often overrated leaders. Today the revolutionary impetus seeks to install democracies and has a hard time doing so.

Mexico hosted the first revolution of the 20thcentury. It was 1910, and Emiliano Zapata, with his army of derelicts and landless people, became the hero of a dramatic epic that shook the country for a decade. 84 years later, atthe dawn of 1994, an army of people “the colour of the earth”, led by a man who called himself Subcomandante Marcos, rose up in Chiapas and jarred Mexico in the name of that same Zapata. Surprisingly, the men in arms declared that they did not intend to seize power. Since then, other rebellions, insurrections and riots have turned the word revolución into something moving and necessary, disappointing or illusory, shaping the political and social grammar and imagination of the Americas.

After Zapata, and before Zapatism, only two other experiences of revolución generated much enthusiasm. They seemed to be an unavoidable cure for “the open veins of Latin America”, as Edoardo Galeano puts it. One was successful, at least on the surface: almost six decades have gone by, and Cuba still has an octuagenary Castro in command, albeit sitting in the room next to the presidency. Today’s Cuba is dazed and dejected, often at the center of some international controversy, taking the cue from the Chinese blend of authoritarianism and free market.

The other revolution ended tragically, on 11 September 1973, after only three years. The first attempt to achieve socialism by constitutional means ended withthe Chilean president wearing a helmet and holding a machine gun, stunned under the bombs launched by his traitors, his glasses soon to be chipped and split in half. Those broken glasses are the shattered revolution of Salvador Allende.

It suffices to read the articles writtenby Eric Hobsbawm in the1960s and‘70s to understandthe fate of this monumental term. A rigorous historian of rebellions, a communist and a keen observer of social unrest, in love with Latin America, Hobsbawm presented such a lucid analysis that only the political left could have ignored.In a 1970 article that appears in the collectionViva laRevolución he writes that several of the guerrilla attempts aimed at starting a revolution were overambitious (he mentions the one led by Che Guevara in Bolivia) and “doomed before they started by sheer amateurism – e.g., ignorance of local Indian languages or local conditions, by strategic and tactical obsolescence … – by a noble but ill-advised impatience but above all by fundamental political error”. Which error? The unrealistic persuasion that they could achieve the impossible.

Cuba became the matrix of the successful revolution. But, as Hobsbawm always used to say, it was a mere exception, despite the amount of hotbeds that emerged all over Latin America throughout the ‘60s. And even though “Latin America ceased to be an object of history and became a subject” for the first time in 500 years, the fires of revolution gradually died, too weak to stay alive and to withstand an increasingly deadly counter-guerrilla and guerrasucia apparatus. In the end, both the number of victims and the political vacuum left behind are incalculable.

Cuba had two epigones. In 1979, Sandinista rebels entered the Nicaraguan capital ofManagua. Defeated in the 1990 general election, they came back on the scene in 2007 under the same leader, Daniel Ortega. In order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, Ortega devised a “family-based monarchy” (as Gioconda Belli called it) which became eerily similar to the dictatorship he had overthrown. No one has painted a better picture of the enthusiasm and treachery of the Sandinista movement than Sergio Ramírez, a former leading Sandinista and one of the most gifted writers in Latin America, author of Adiós Muchachos:A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution.

And then there is Venezuela: here the revolución was embodied in Hugo Chávez, who, since 1998, turned the country inside out and upon his death in 2013, left it in the hands of his vice president, Nicolás Maduro. Today’s Venezuela is an organism in default, violent, hopeless, controlled by men and women who seem cynical and unscrupulous, while thousands of Venezuelans flee abroad, seek asylum in other countries or queue up for bread and retirement benefits. Perhaps we need to focus on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, i.e. the three countries in which the revolución has become the State, in order to wash away the sweetish aftertaste of the term and to understand its atrophy.

Carlos Manuel Álvarez Rodríguez is one of the best reporters in Latin America. The 28-year-old Cuban is the founder of El estornudo, an online magazine which was censored by the government last February.His narrative journalism has recently translated into the collection of stories La tribu. Retratos de Cuba (SextoPiso editions, 2017). Álvarez Rodríguez has been based in Mexico City for a couple of years now. “The myth of Cuba lives on”, he says, “but I believe that Latin America should distance itself from it once and for all. Cuba is a dead weight preventing any idea of change. Nowadays, it is only functional to the right and to neoliberal policies”. Only a young educated Cuban could be so insightful. When I ask him what the revolución that spanned three generations of Cubans means to him, he shakes his head: “revoluciónin Cuba is a semantic misunderstanding. A lexical betrayal has been carried out: it’s not only a linguistic issue, it’s the betrayal of the whole order of life.We need to reappropriatelanguage, name those who confiscated it in order to distort reality and use our words against them”.

When I spoke to environmental sociologist Emiliano Terán Mantovani, a 30-year-old Venezuelan and one of the most insightful commentators of the Caribbean country, his judgment was equally harsh: “In Venezuela the revolución is over. It’s not like they left a desert, a barren landscape which can still sustain life. They systematically created a vacuum. We are living in such a dramatic and desperate situation that it’s even difficult to find the right words to describe it. No one can make predictions. It’s a devastated country with an exhausted government”. What can we expect? “Many times in the history of this country, the turning point has been sudden and dramatic. It might happen again. Or not, after all Maduro’s government is a transitional government”. How so? “It’s a government that declares itself to be Chavista but proceeded to dismantle Chavismo: while Chávez pushed for popular participation, redistributive policies and sovereignty over resources, his successors have created an authoritarian regime, sold out resources to corporations and voted for neoliberal policies”. He adds: “The whole thing was controlled by the military: both China and the USA know this”.

Venezuela is Daniel Ortega’s last ally. Even the Cubans are very wary of Managua. And in the explosion of anger that the country of the isthmus is experiencing, few believe that the former commander, his wife (his vice president) and the family clan that controls all State institutions will manage to survive politically. Héctor Mairena is one of the many Sandinistas who have long dissociated themselves from the Ortega family, including almost all the commanders and prominent leaders of the ’70s and ’80s. In those years he chronicled the revolution, while today he is one of the leading exponents of the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista-MRS. He too speaks of “a semantic question that revolves around the word ‘left’. It’s unforgivable that regimes born with the goals of emancipation and progress have twisted the meaning of the term into its opposite. In so doing, they made it indigestible to millions of people. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that the only way to be revolutionary is to recognize reality”.

Reality or delirium – is this the modern equivalent of the old slogan “socialism or barbarism”? Álvarez tries to dig even deeper: “They make people believe that what they’re experiencing is the result of that event, but in so doing they prostitute that moment, which was joyful and glorious and gave shape to the desire for freedom and emancipation that was confiscated from us”.

In short, it seems that what is left of the revolución is its great romantic appeal and, at the same time, a sinister shadow. Even Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, is very cautious about using the term. Pragmatic, radical and ready for the next election, Morales is the only politician of the so-called “progressive decade” to still be in the saddle in Latin America.  

The last leader to use the word revolución was Rafael Correa in Ecuador, but he specified it with an adjective: ciudadana. The euphoria of change lasted the first year of his mandate, then he managed his two presidencies with a mix of social-democratic policies and a rather nonchalantly authoritarian approach. Now, having left the country in the hands of his former political associate Lenin Moreno – who in the meantime has become his worst enemy –, Correa too has to deal with the judges who are breathing down his neck.

In Colombia, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) –the most long-lived of the guerrilla movements born in the ‘60s in Latin America – have negotiated a difficult agreement with the State and turned into a marginal political movement, whereas the ELN (National Liberation Army) is still waging attacks, thus making it difficult to advance the peace talks. But the Catholic-Marxist group inspired by Cuba is the last armed group on the continent and is currently running out of social oxygen. In spite of their strength and resilience, neither the FARC nor the ELN have ever come close to actually seizing power. In fact, they have become increasingly unpopular among the majority of the population, devastated by almost a century of violence and an oppressive colonial legacy.      

How can a revolución endure? Emiliano Terán Mantovani reflects on his country: “Political chavismo has resisted the storm because it still has an important albeit minority base that supports or accepts it. The real political capital, however, is not there or not only there. It can be found in the amount of micro-rebellions, strikes and protests carried out autonomously by ordinary people all over the county, outside the political parties: bus drivers, teachers, doctors and nurses, farmers, environmentalists and students. They organize in response to the lack of water, electricity, public transport, food and medicines, the plundering of their land and the oppression of their communities. A critical fine dust with great democratic potential”.

Héctor Mairena raises an interesting question: “Is what happened in Nicaragua during these past months of protest a revolution? I believe so, a civic revolution. It was carried out in the name of the three pillars on which any revolution must rest: respect for democracy as a plural, living, free space, beating with different ideas; respect for human rights; the rejection of corruption”. Are these the new revoluciónes Latin America is waiting for?

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