American friend: We Americans seem to be growing very interested in Latin America these days.
Burstin: I have to disagree with you. There is certainly a great deal of what resembles interest, but it isn’t really that at all. In the past, the amount of writing about Latin America, say in the American press, was negligible, except when we had a good revolution or an outstanding earthquake. Of course, you had a few dozen academics, some quite respectable, who were your Latin American specialists, but some of them had either a patronizing outlook or they wrote books which were mainly catalogues of the mistakes committed by the United States and of the atrocities committed by Latin Americans, or vice versa, or both. What has really existed among you, basically, is an anthropological curiosity about our backwardness and our bizarre history. As for the current outpouring of books, essays, articles, and news stories about Central America, it reflects not an authentic intellectual or political interest, but perplexity spiced with pious worries and guilt feelings.
A: Could you be more specific about those “worries and guilt feelings”?
B: In the United States, at least in a sector of your academic and political classes, you seem to be experiencing, first, the feeling that perhaps you should have paid attention to us in the past, that it is this lack of interest which is now producing our convolutions; and, second—this is more common among liberal and leftist intellectuals—there is the belief that the poverty and the social and political nightmares of Latin America have been produced by the United States, by the exploitation of our countries by American corporations, and the intervention in our internal affairs of the United States government and politicians. So there are two distinctive kinds of guilt associated with this perplexity. Which one do you suffer from?
A: Probably both, but especially the first. I admit that I do think that if we had taken notice in the past of these strange realities south of the border, we might have avoided what we have now, maybe even the perplexity.
B: Before I tell you why I disagree again, let me tell you that my credentials in this matter are good. I have been writing for many years, always complaining, about the indifference of the United States toward some real democratic options in Latin America. These democratic options almost always seemed improbable or risky to the people in Washington. Of course, there was more to it than that, but if you look carefully at the whole picture, you will perhaps find, if not a justification, at least an explanation of your indifference to us. In the last ten years I have been asking my friends and my students: tell me, why should the United States—or Europe—have been interested in Latin America? Why do you think we are so interesting? Sure, we have in Latin America enormous individual talents, as with any other human conglomerate. But as a civilization, as an ensemble of societies, what have we shown to the world? What is so interesting about poverty, scientific and technical backwardness, illiterate and undernourished masses, cultural inanition, and political brutality? Some of our writers and artists—who have, precisely, described this horrible backwardness of Latin America—were once right in complaining about indifference by the rest of the world, but that is no longer so: Latin American art has been granted world recognition. As for our other somber realities, they could perhaps elicit compassion in a modern man—but interest? Why?
A: Don’t you think that poverty itself can be of great intellectual interest?
B: To the anthropologists who have studied the cultural characteristics of poverty, yes. But not everybody is Claude Lévi-Strauss. In themselves poverty, backwardness, and political brutality are not really interesting. Mass poverty needs no explanation; it is the “natural” state of society. As thinkers from Adam Smith to Karl Marx have recognized, what needs explanation is wealth, that is, how different societies have been able to overcome the natural state of poverty. From there you can try to explain why so many societies, having had a chance, failed. The same thing is true of political backwardness. It may be of interest to students of political history, but in itself it too is quite boring. The Latin American variant of it, caudillismo, has been extensively researched, and it has been found to be the only original Latin American contribution to the world of political ideas. Brutal societies, like the ones we have around here, only become truly interesting when the Russians enter the picture. But that is a different story.
A: Tell me.
B: Well, why have some American politicians discovered, all of a sudden, that there is a social and political hell down here? And “here” means next to the United States, not on Saturn, in which case you would have needed NASA to discover it. When a transformation like this happens, you should either cherchez la politique, that is American presidential politics, or cherchez the Russians; in this case, you would do well to cherchez both. I cannot believe that hundreds of American politicians, writers, editors, and policy-makers in the past did not know what was going on south of the Rio Grande. They looked but they did not see; they listened but they did not hear. This immense world of political criminality, these hundreds of thousands of people being killed, tortured, or starved to death, all this Dantesque reality was known, but nobody cared.
What then suddenly gave everyone eyes to see and ears to hear? You can find the answer in today’s newspapers. See here, on the front page: “Fleet of Soviet Warships Sails in the Caribbean.” It took the Russians a while to come here, but finally they came. They tried for the first time in the early 30’s, when they sent Farabundo Martí to organize a Communist takeover in El Salvador and failed, but finally they are here, in the Caribbean, the Mare Americanum.
And it also took a while for us, Latin American democrats, to be noticed and listened to: it took the establishment of a Communist regime in Cuba and the spread of Marxism-Leninism throughout Central America for Americans to learn that political indifference may have an explanation but it also has a price. Now, with the Russians, the Cubans, and an assorted bunch of “people’s liberators” riding high in Central America, everybody seems acutely worried about our social and economic backwardness, about our political brutality.
For this Fidel Castro and his Soviet backers have to be thanked.
A: What about the other guilt feelings—those originating from the belief that the poverty and the social and political nightmares of Latin America have been produced by the United States?
B: This belief is at the heart of everything that is happening here. All the revolutionary groups in Latin America base their political action on the premise that poverty, chaos, and dictatorships—all, as you know, endemic phenomena around here for many centuries now, even before the United States emerged as a unified country—have their origin in the exploitation of our countries by the United States and in the interventionism and colonialism of the United States in Latin America. This premise, which does not have to be proved but only accepted, not only finds stimulus in some academic and left-wing political circles in the United States; it also gets joyful and enthusiastic support from many political leaders of the Third World, as well as most of the social-democratic and democratic-socialist political parties of Europe.
A: I have to admit that I myself have begun to believe that the United States is responsible for many of your troubles.
B: But also, somehow, I suspect that you have never been quite convinced of your convictions. Down deep, I am pretty sure, you know that this idea—the idea that the United States is the cause of our backwardness, and that the prosperity of the United States rests on plunder—does not fit with reality. But you don’t dare to say so because you would then be called a conservative or even, God forbid, a reactionary.
A: Instead of talking about me, why don’t we go on talking about the issues? For instance, I always thought that this American idea of responsibility for your troubles was the exclusive property of the Left, but I gather that you think it also involves the Right and sometimes even the democratic Center.
B: Yes, although not many on the Right or in the democratic Center express it explicitly. You see, thousands of tons of printed paper and thousands of hours of radio and television—not to mention the uninterrupted sequence of seminars on “dependence and underdevelopment”—tell our citizens daily, persistently, and unequivocally: we are poor because the United States is rich; the United States is rich because it exploits us; let’s fight against the United States. As simple as that. And the message goes on: we live in chaos and under dictatorships because the United States intervenes in our countries; the support that the United States has traditionally given to our dictators proves this; American corporations are the godfathers of all the brutality and the killings that for decades the Latin American dictators, their puppets, have perpetrated. All we have to do is fight against the United States and all this will come to an end. And the implicit assertions are equally important: if the United States hadn’t intervened in our countries, Latin America would not only have developed economically but we would also be enjoying perfect social justice and pure Jeffersonian democracy.
A: Do they really go that far?
B: What do you mean “really”? Listen to this example. On March 5, 1981, one of our foremost novelists, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, who is a leftist but certainly not a Communist, wrote in the New York Times: “Is not this the other fundamental reason, along with colonialism, of turmoil, instability, terrorism, hunger, and weakness in the area: United States interventionism, always, only, United States interventionism?” So now you can see what your interventionism has produced in our countries: turmoil, something we never knew before the United States started messing up things down here; instability, which of course is also completely alien to our tradition of centuries-old stable governments; then you have also provoked in our peaceful societies terrorism, which the Montoneros, the Tupamaros, the Sendero Luminosos, and our native fascist gangs had to learn from American textbooks provided by the CIA; and as if all that weren’t enough, add to the list hunger, a completely new social catastrophe in Latin America, because, as is universally known, for centuries we were such big producers of agricultural products that for the last two hundred years one of our main public-health problems has been the prevalence of obesity among our peasants; not only that, but worse, because, as is also universally accepted, our land had been fairly distributed among our obese farmers, who always used advanced agricultural techniques until the United States brought all this to an abrupt end by taking away our techniques and fertilizers and then reorganizing things in such a way that a few landlords ended up with all the land and began paying those miserable wages of a few cents and two tortillas a day; and, of course, weakness, a sad situation because we still remember the old times when we were strong and progressive countries, an example for all humanity to follow.
A: An impressive list of accomplishments for the United States, isn’t it?
B: Yes, but it is still not complete. Carlos Fuentes forgot to mention corruption, I don’t know why.
A: If this is what is said by a left-wing but non-Communist Latin American intellectual, what do the Communists have to say about the role of the United States?
B: From a theoretical point of view they seem to disagree strongly, because the Communists will say that if we fight American imperialism and support the Soviet Union everything around here will be bright and beautiful, while the non-Communists will argue against Soviet “imperialism” and attack both superpowers at the same time. So they present a picture of neutrality and independence. But objectively, as the Marxists say, the attack of the non-Communists on the United States is quite similar to, frequently identical with, the argument of the Communists, which is why they often come together in the fight “against imperialism and for national liberation.” For some strange reason, wherever a political movement like that happens to be successful in Latin America, the people who are not independent, the Marxist-Leninists, always happen to get control of the whole thing; they align themselves with Moscow, and, after a while, you begin to see the old independent anti-imperialist fighters claiming that they were betrayed, and there we go again. (By some strange coincidence, too, all of them are strongly anti-Israel but say they love Jews.)
The argument against my analysis is that it is precisely what the reactionaries and pro-imperialists say when they try to delegitimate the struggles for national independence by classifying them as “Communist” and, by doing so, to justify all the mistakes and abuses of the United States in our countries. I know this argument well, because when I belonged to the Left in Costa Rica, we knew how to manipulate the independent intellectuals and, believe me, willingly or not, they were manipulated. There is not one example in Latin America in which the “nationalistic, patriotic, and independent” forces did not find strong and indisputable reasons of one kind or another to enter into a frank or furtive alliance with the Soviet Union, most of the time because of a “lack of understanding” by the United States.
So the premise that the United States is responsible for the hunger, the instability, and the brutality in our countries unites well-meaning American leftists, independent anti-imperialistic Latin American intellectuals and politicians, and hard-core Marxist-Leninists. And when this assorted group gets together and is really able to get somewhere, by some strange repetitive coincidence, the Marxist-Leninists always turn out to be the major shareholders of the whole business.
A: Does all this go back a long way in Latin American history?
B: No. It is a relatively new political phenomenon. In the last century, for example, our greatest thinkers and politicians—men like Simón Bolivar and Benito Juarez—not only were great admirers of the United States but also wanted to emulate its example.
A: So things have changed a lot.
B: Yes; instead of old-fashioned liberal democrats, we now have these professional blamers. They should be forced to read the writings of P.T. Bauer. So should everyone else. You may not agree with him about everything, but how are you going to deny the overwhelming facts he puts before you? If colonialism were the original cause of our backwardness—and, along this line of thought, also of that of Africa and Asia—why is it that the so-called Fourth World, the least-developed countries of the Third World such as Afghanistan, Chad, Bhutan, Burundi, Nepal, and Sikkim, did not until very recently have any external economic contacts, and how is it that most of them were never Western colonies?
Listen to this lucid and luminous paragraph of Bauer’s:
About ten years ago a student group at Cambridge published a pamphlet on the subject of the moral obligations of the West to the Third World. The following was its key passage: “We took the rubber from Malaya, the tea from India, raw materials from all over the world and gave almost nothing in return.” This is as nearly the opposite of truth as one can find. The British took the rubber to Malaya and the tea to India. There were no rubber trees in Malaya or anywhere in Asia (as suggested by their botanical name, Hevea braziliensis) until about one hundred years ago, when the British took the first rubber seeds there out of the Amazon jungle. From these sprang the huge rubber industry—now very largely Asian-owned. Tea plants were brought to India by the British somewhat earlier; their origin is shown in the botanical name Camilla sinensis, as well as in the phrase “all the tea in China.”
You can make the same case for bananas that you can for rubber in Malaya, and get a standing ovation down here by shouting that the bananas are being taken away from us by the yanquis. Nobody will interrupt you to say that bananas were brought to our countries by foreign companies, and that if we didn’t have bananas in the areas where they are planted, we probably would have nothing there.
A: The other argument which is used within this context is that the dependency of your countries has not exactly produced the backwardness—the backwardness was there—but the dependency has prevented your countries from developing and has perpetuated that backwardness.
B: Well, as Jean-François Revel has cleverly asked, why is it that here, in our hemisphere, the dependency of Latin America on the United States has produced backwardness, while in Canada, which is a country “dependent” on the United States to a degree that has no equal in the world, this relationship has produced not backwardness but a modern, progressive, and rich country? Or take Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, poor and backward countries three decades ago but now among the most prosperous and vital in the world. They were invaded by foreign capital and technology; they became dependent on Western “imperialism” and markets; and yet in just three decades they left all their backwardness behind and are now jumping into the era of the highest technology. So there they are, working hard and studying hard and inventing things, and bringing in foreign capital, and becoming dependent and all that; and here we are, poor, rancorous, and blaming others for our social brutality and historical evils.
A: Let me go back to my first question. You denied there was a lot of real interest in Latin America, but you can’t deny that there is a lot of writing being done. Have you read much of it?
B: Yes, though it is almost impossible to cope with the rate of production. And now that several European writers have also discovered Latin America, it has became an avalanche. But I do my best.
A: I wonder how a Latin American like you reacts to this avalanche.
B: Well, sometimes it is interesting, sometimes it is funny, sometimes it is quite boring. Some of these books are travel diaries disguised as political analysis: “I want you to. know that I had the courage to go down there, my life was in danger several times, more frequently from the food than from the guerrillas, but I survived the food, the guerrillas, and the government, and before I write my book I want to tell you that the whole thing stinks.”
Then there are books presented as “human” documents and composed of recollections of superficial conversations with some of our political leaders, together with conversations with “independent” leftist intellectuals—the more anti-American the better—as well as some guerrilla leaders who hate American companies but who always like gringos very much “as people,” and a few barefoot campesinos who, by a strange coincidence, always happen to think the same way about everything as the writer thought up there in the United States before his trip down here. This type of book says in effect: “I went there and I found a lot of interesting and curious people, characters who, believe me, you don’t see on Park Avenue, and I strongly believe that we have neglected these people for a long time and that we don’t understand them; we don’t understand what is going on down there because the situation is quite complicated, so I strongly believe we should do something immediately and quite different from what we have been doing up to now; I must confess that I don’t really know what we have been doing up to now, but above all let’s remember the lessons of Vietnam. . . .”
Then there is another general category, the books or essays which are really a summary of daily newspaper stories presented as well-informed and deep thinking, and which generally end up with the proposal that “We Americans should go away and ask the Cubans and the Russians to go away, too.” To which I am always tempted to add that perhaps we Central Americans should also go away.
What still other people say, but only implicitly of course, is: “Those people down there have no way out, so let them have their revolutions in peace, let them kill each other as they please, we can’t do anything about it anyhow, and it is not our responsibility; if the Russians want to go in, let the Russians have their Vietnam down there; as for me, I’ll stay in Southern California.” Or: “Well, those guys in Central America have a terrible situation; on the one hand, this, and on the other hand, that, so, let’s wait and see. . . .”
Last year, I also read some very outstanding people, people I personally admire and respect, including Robert W. Tucker, who, I don’t know why, decided to support the idea of “power-sharing” in El Salvador. Until reading them, I was acquainted with the following Marxist-Leninist ways to seize power: (1) storm the Winter Palace; (2) send in the Red Army and establish “peoples’ democracies”; (3) make a long march, beat the other side in a civil war, and form a government; (4) throw the President of the country out of the window; (5) participate within a broad coalition in a popular upheaval against a dictator and once the dictator has fled, expel your old partners from the country or throw them into jail; (6) go to the mountains, fight a guerrilla war in the name of democracy, and throw out the dictator; then, when you are in power, announce that you are a Marxist-Leninist.
Those are the classical ways. Now some American political analysts have added another one: “Organize a guerrilla movement even if you cannot win, but make sure the government cannot defeat you for a certain period of time; then propose ‘power-sharing,’ and enter the government without having won an election, without the help of the Red Army, without even having won the guerrilla war.”
A: What about the Europeans?
B: One contemporary European writer I greatly admire is Guenter Grass. Well, he went to Nicaragua. In the February 1984 issue of the Atlantic, Mario Vargas Llosa, the renowned Peruvian novelist and a friend of mine, wrote an article strongly protesting what he called the “media stereotypes” of Latin America, and criticizing Guenter Grass for exhorting the Latin Americans to follow the “Cuban example.”
Grass, in a letter to the Atlantic, denied that he was recommending a Soviet-influenced solution: “Actually, I have been saying repeatedly that if Latin America can rely on Western Europe for help, it will no longer need to turn to the Soviet Union. Cuba, too, would have taken a different course, had it not been isolated and at the mercy of Soviet interests.” Grass concluded his letter by saying:
Nicaragua needs time and peace in order to preserve and develop its newly won freedom from Somoza’s dictatorship. Such development requires that the United States government cease destabilizing this small country and be prepared, together with the governments of Western Europe, to give needed economic and development aid. This is the only way that the exercise of influence by the Soviet Union (like that which occurred in Cuba) can be prevented.
Mario Vargas Llosa replied that he had read some newspaper reports according to which Grass was proposing the “Cuban example” for Latin America, but he was now glad to learn that Grass was really not proposing anything of that sort. Well, I haven’t read the reports mentioned by Vargas Llosa, but I have read an epilogue written by Grass to a book entitled Trouble in Our Backyard, edited by Martin Diskin. Let me just quote a few passages:
I went there [to Nicaragua] with only superficial impressions, but I returned with vastly different perceptions. . . . I had no idea how similar the Polish trade-union movement, Solidarity, and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas actually are, or how the persistent and defiant dependence of Poland on the Soviet Union is mirrored by that of Central America—in particular Nicaragua—on the United States.
Then he continues with this same argument: “Even skeptics have to admit that Rosa Luxemburg appeared in Poland in the guise of the Virgin Mary and that in Nicaragua the Mother of God has the look of Rosa Luxemburg.”
Grass goes on to say that the United States is ready for a new Vietnam in Central America, and than he says:
I knew all that before the trip, but it was not until I arrived in Nicaragua that I was to feel so ashamed of those that I, a German, have to be allied with [that is you, the Americans, in case you don’t get it]. As far as it is possible for an individual, I hereby wish to terminate this association for the following reasons: because for a long time it has not fulfilled its obligation to protect Western democracies; because its members are required to be silent and tolerant of the crimes of their superpower ally, in order not to weaken the alliance. . . .
Etc. Then he says: “This renewed Christian confidence is spreading across Latin America, and even in Cuba, where the revolution is thought to have been completed and is itself a model for Nicaragua. . . .” And then near the end, he says: “Nicaragua needs help. It is trying to develop its agriculture, which in a few years will produce surpluses (maize and beans), and so will help meet the growing worldwide hunger problem. . . .”
A: When was this essay written?
B: In 1983. So I can understand Mario Vargas Llosa’s anger. Does Guenter Grass know that in the eighteen months following the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution the country that gave the most financial support to the Sandinista government was the United States, and that this aid continued even after the Sandinista junta had begun to renege on its promise to create a pluralistic society? Does he know that American aid to Nicaragua during those eighteen months far exceeded the total U.S. aid to Somoza over the previous twenty years? So how can he say that it was U.S. interference, or lack of economic aid, that drove the Sandinistas to link up with Fidel Castro and with the rest of the Communist world and also the Libyans and the PLO? I can only tell you that from my own discussions with Cuban leaders, and from what I know that they know that I know, and reading again what Grass writes, I can hear from here the horselaughs of the Cubans.
A: In general, though, what are your feelings about the writings of the European intellectuals?
B: With very few exceptions, they are patronizing. Quite a few of them, who are unhappy with industrial capitalism, know, if they are not illiterate, that the only way to change it radically in the direction they want is by a dictatorship; they don’t like reformism, which they consider to be a trick of “the system” to perpetuate itself. But they don’t dare to propose a “class dictatorship,” that is, a dictatorship of the party, as Lenin did. So they feel quite frustrated. You know that all the rhetoric about “democratic processes” and “working within the system” is pietistic chitchat. There is no way to collectivize an economy quickly without terror, repression, and dictatorship. Whenever you hear somebody saying that he wants to “transform the social structure” in order to achieve “a change in the ownership of the means of production” while preserving individual freedom, political pluralism, and all the other “bourgeois” democratic institutions, either he is stupid or he thinks you are stupid. To achieve Lenin’s goals you need Lenin’s methods. If they say to you that they don’t like Lenin’s goals, and they don’t like social-democratic goals, and they don’t like liberal-capitalist goals, then, again, either they are stupid or they think you are stupid. So, in this respect, only the real Marxist-Leninists, who belong to an international movement without which nothing they want is possible, do know exactly what they are after and how to achieve it. The rest are the discardable circus.
Well, many of those European intellectuals are unhappy with their brand of democratic socialism, but they don’t dare propose Leninist methods to achieve what they want. Here, in Central America, they have found a place where they can air their grievances against industrial capitalism and where, especially, they can smear the United States, and, of course, and this is very important, they can accept here methods which they would never say are good for their countries.
Not long ago I had a discussion on television with some European journalists who argued that in Central America there was no tradition of democracy, in the “bourgeois” sense of the word, and that our peoples were not used to political freedom, so there was no sense in talking about that here. In other words, we only have a choice between a dictatorship of the Right and a dictatorship of the Left (which would at least “improve our social conditions”), and democracy is a luxury we can afford to live without. There were two well-known German journalists in the group, so I asked them whether they thought that Germany and Japan had a longer democratic tradition than Nicaragua, or Colombia, or Chile.
You see, that is the problem: it is so easy to find historical justifications and sociological reasons for the imposition of non-democratic systems on other people, based generally on their lack of democratic traditions, or their poverty, or both. It is only we, who live here, who don’t agree with that overseas sophistication. Maybe we don’t have any democratic traditions, but we don’t like to live under dictatorship either.
Besides, we do have democratic forces in our region. This is a real and fundamental turnaround of the whole perspective, as much for you as for us. The United States has been finding out, in the last few years, that military dictatorships may look like the only reliable stabilizing force in the area, but when the real shooting and fighting starts, they tend to disintegrate and collapse, as happened in Cuba with Batista, in Nicaragua with Somoza, and, for different reasons, in Argentina with the military junta.
So now you are finding out that our democratic leaders in Latin America, who happened to have been here for all of our recent history, are, after all, not only the legitimate friends of the United States from the political and moral point of view, but also the best political alternative. A pity you couldn’t help find one for Nicaragua during Somoza’s time, as you did in the Dominican Republic when Trujillo died.
A: All this writing, all this activity, all this confusion—is it really new for a man like you?
B: No, not at all. In fact, this new wisdom of American and European intellectuals and writers that finds the United States responsible for all our evils, and the proposition that Marxist revolutions are not only inevitable but desirable, and that those revolutions are the only way out for our countries—meaning that fighting the United States is the key to freedom, well-being, economic development, and social justice—all that was the standard intellectual and political diet we fed ourselves thirty years ago. Of course, in a good proportion of cases all this was not only an academic exercise, but it led to militancy of all sorts, including Soviet-oriented Communist parties, Maoist groups, Trotskyists, terrorist associations, and independent self-appointed demolishers of the establishment.
A: You yourself were, as you mentioned earlier, one of the intoxicated.
B: Yes, and to a considerable degree, almost to the point of no return; because in this, as in almost everything else, there is a point of no return, there are dangerous one-way trips. But I was lucky. It was one of the most interesting stages in my life, a fundamental one, which taught me, among other things, never to judge the world from the most dangerous place you can judge it—that is, sitting at your desk in a faraway country concocting profound social analyses about the “natives,” and delivering political prescriptions whose consequences will anyway never affect you personally.
A: But in what way were you lucky?
B: You have to be lucky to catch the disease at the proper time in life. If not, you are lost. One of my friends, who together with me passed through the adolescent leftist jungle, pointed out recently that if you become a leftist after forty, the disease becomes not only incurable but ridiculous. The difference, at least in Latin America, is that when you catch the revolutionary virus at the age of seventeen, you are stimulated by it, and it produces a certain intellectual excitement and vitality. You also have a chance to develop the intellectual defenses that eliminate the disease and leave you strong enough to reject almost any subsequent recurrence. Then you become completely immune to any totalitarian temptation. For that, you have to get sick when young, and you have to have enough strength of character after you recover to survive the avalanche of attacks and insults that will come crashing down on you. The collection of insults I have personally been graced with by the Communist press in Costa Rica in the last twenty years is really notable. So if somebody should call them agents of the empire of evil, we would not be even close to getting even in the interchange of insults.
A: Now that you have recovered from the disease and acquired your immunity, what are some of the things you have learned?
B: I have already told you about some of them. Here is another and one of the most important: revolutions are not caused by poverty and social injustice. Until a few years ago, poverty and social injustice in Central America were regarded by almost everybody as part of the landscape. Now, there is almost no one who does not affirm that poverty and social injustice are the causes of our tumult. Yet history gives no solid evidence for such an assertion. If the direct cause of the violence in Latin America were social injustice, El Salvador and Guatemala would hardly be the only countries where guerrillas threaten the government. We can all think of several other Latin American nations with masses of poor people—countries that, according to the myth, should be excellent candidates for revolution. But you see, in those Latin American countries where a more or less cyclical mechanism permits the exercise of power to pass regularly from one ruling group to another, the possibilities of revolution diminish markedly—despite persisting poverty and social injustice. No. Neither Fidel nor the Sandinistas came to power because the Cuban guajiro or the Nicaraguan campesino was chronically poor.
A: So how did they come to power?
B: Let me try to answer that by looking at an exemplary Latin American revolutionary, Che Guevara. If you say to somebody that Guevara was an innocuous revolutionary, he will laugh in your face. After all, when Guevara was with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra, he showed his bravery and imagination, and, afterward, when they were in power, he was a key to the radicalization of the Cuban revolution. But Guevara also fought to keep the official Communist party of Cuba from taking over leadership of the revolution. If he had prevailed, the Cuban revolution would never have been able to consolidate itself. In fact, it was not until the orthodox Communist party of Cuba was taken in as a fundamental part of the revolutionary process that Fidel Castro could really say he had a chance for survival. Of course, what he took in was not exactly the Communist party of Cuba, whose membership was tiny, but what the Communist party of Cuba represented internationally, that is, mainly the Soviet Union. Once the Marxist-Leninists of Cuba, who had incidentally opposed Fidel’s “adventurism” all during his stay in the Sierra Maestra, were pulled in, the lifeline with the Soviet Union was connected, and the real thing began.
A: But Che Guevara then started a new line of political action, trying to spread the Cuban revolution abroad and trying to transform the Andes into a “gigantic Vietnam,” as he used to say.
B: Yes, of course, and this proves further what I have been saying. After the Cuban revolution had more or less consolidated itself, Guevara either became bored with it or decided that without a revolution throughout Latin America the Cubans would always be in danger. By then, a great fear had spread all over Latin America: the Cuban menace, the specter of revolution. But it all failed to materialize. And why? I have a complete file of the insults and attacks Che Guevara was subjected to by the Communist parties in Latin America before he was finally defeated and shot in the Bolivian jungle. Without the full support, at the crucial moment, of the Soviet Union, this exemplary Latin American revolutionary was rendered impotent.
A: So you are saying that the old-fashioned Communist parties are the only effective revolutionary force in Latin America. Yet they seem to be so dormant and numerically weak.
B: Without them, and without what is behind them, Fidel Castro wouldn’t be where he is today. And because they were not really there for Allende in Chile, Allende is no longer where he was. The Communists in Chile knew perfectly well what was going on and what was going to happen. A year before Allende’s election, one of the most prominent leaders of the Chilean Communist party told me that they were quite dubious about the political wisdom of winning the next elections with Allende as their candidate, because they felt that there were no “objective” conditions for a Marxist revolution and a socialization of Chile. What he really meant was that the Soviet Union was not going to duplicate in Chile its involvement with Cuba, including, of course, the vital economic subsidy.
You see, the Communist parties attached to Moscow have always been accused by their more radical leftist competitors of being reformist, bourgeois, and ineffective. They are not. They are the only really effective revolutionary force in Latin America. The other groups and individuals are usefully noisy and belligerent, and they can sometimes overthrow a dictator like Batista or Somoza. But they are not capable of delivering the knockout blow, the blow that consolidates the process, that makes for the real thing. It is only when the Moscow-attached Communists and their sponsors come onto the stage that the real performance begins. And once it begins, the hope of democracy ends, and we who live down here not only have to suffer a new form of political oppression, which is bad enough, but we also have to suffer the arguments of our “friends” in the United States and Europe who tell us that we have no democratic tradition anyway and at least a dictatorship of the Left will “improve our social conditions.”
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