The solution to Latin America’s problems
In Venezuela and Cuba, transforming the system will improve the beleaguered countries’ economies, politics and living conditions
fter the fall of the Soviet Union, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez told Cuba’s Communist ruler Fidel Castro that his island nation was then the only truly free country. Fidel did not much like the comment as it meant admitting his country’s dependence on the Soviet Union, but he ended up agreeing.
Clearly Cuba has had to pay a very dear price for its independence, just as Venezuela is doing now, amid a situation that is becoming less tenable by the day. President Nicolas Maduro has said that if attacked with “blood and fire”, he will respond in kind, which effectively means heading towards a civil war. The situation there is tragic.
Cuba and Venezuela are besieged by an implacable enemy: Global neoliberalism that opposes state intervention in the economy and demands that the citizens’ welfare become subordinate to the laws of the market. In countries run by neoliberal systems, health care, education and social security are private and highly profitable businesses that are nevertheless deficient, and costly for citizens.
Real socialism, which in truth is an alliance of distributive justice and individual freedoms, alongside what the writer Jorge Luis Borges called “a strict minimum of government”, has yet to be invented. Current versions of socialism will not last, though under the pressure of current circumstances, plutocratic states will likely face an equally short future. Meanwhile, the only way to avoid local wars, which resolve nothing, is to have freely competing societies. It is a global issue, and its resolution will be global: through a showdown between cruel and predatory neoliberalism and the general interest.
The Argentine example might be of some use. Since General Juan Domingo Peron fuelled the idea that the Argentine people also had the right to own their country’s riches, and after violent guerrilla fighting and military regimes, the country has seen radically different ideas become powerful. Thanks to education and a vigorously politicised society, everyone in Argentina knows that clinging to power is useless. Rather, it is the people who must lift you to high office even as you accept the existence of an outspoken, active opposition.
Latin American countries have so many problems that strong opposition to policies is inevitable. But not everything has to be done through the state. Chavism, the political ideology of the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, forms a lucid and generous project that runs the risk of deviating into an authoritarian and exclusive regime, just when all Latin American states should be moving towards systems of complex, diverse democracies. The problem is that power is inebriating and feeds vain illusions. The state starts to be perceived as an end in itself, not a means, and that is poison to the lofty ideals of civilisation, because anyone who idealises the state and falls in love with power has abandoned the spirit of creative adventure that healthy politics requires.
Growing up with consumerism
During one of the opportunities I had to converse with Castro, the Cuban leader told me: “The thing is, our institutions have grown old.” So “renovate them”, I replied, “with your famous youth”. He asked what I meant. I responded sincerely, saying: “As far as I am concerned, you’re still very young.” I know now what I should have said: That there was a population of youths in Cuba who sympathised with the revolution, but wanted new opportunities, and who had to be allowed to reinvent the model. Why such fear of the infection of capitalism, with its televisions and internet, when nobody has alternatives to these things? Many of us who grew up with television, consumerism and the constant enticement to become rich are as critical as socialists, if not more, of capitalism’s predatory inhumanity and irrationality.
Recently, I told Maduro that he should free political prisoners, revoke the service ban on opposition leaders and call for fresh elections. An honourable defeat is worth much more than a victory deemed unworthy in the eyes of an electorate that knows what is going on.
In Venezuela, many know that the present crisis is due much less to the socialist system than the manipulation of oil prices and a programmed restriction of supplies blamed on the system, which really has nothing to gain from such a move. The opposition leader, Leopoldo Lopez, has now been moved from prison and granted house arrest, but it would have been more intelligent to simply free him, as it would all other political detainees. An opponent in jail is a martyr.
Today, Cuba can negotiate improvements to its economic situation, allowing the rise of new community initiatives without negotiating away its social protections or universal education. Let a new generation of Cubans, many of whom are grateful to the revolution, have their own agenda, and let the Bolivarian system in Venezuela learn the democratic art of leaving power to come back another day from the Peronists. The alternative is leaving in a way that means never coming back. William Ospina is a Colombian poet, essayist and novelist.
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