[Marxism] Celia Hart: "They are all the same"

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is an analysis of both the Cuban and the Venezuelan 
processes. It helps clarify that they're politically and 
developmentally linked stages in an uninterrupted process. 

It was published three days ago on the Rebelion website.

She begins by looking at the recent assassination of 
Danilo Anderson, and the Ibero-American summit held in 
Costa Rica, connects these to Washington's escalated 
attacks on Iraq and Cuba via the "dissidents", and then 
pulls these together in a conclusion you'll want to 
study closely, defending the anti-capitalist, socialist
perspective as the pertinent one for our times. Many on
the political left failed to grasp the real nature of the
Cuban revolution during its earliest stages and in the
initial stages following the triumph. Something similar
should not happen to the Venezuelan process, says Hart:

"Fidel said in March, 1956, "The Movement of July 26 is the
revolutionary organization of the poor, for the poor and by
the poor. The Movement of July 26 is the hope of redemption
for the Cuban working class..." Those who suspected that
the July 26 Movement was a proletarian revolutionary
organization were just a few. Imperialism, and almost all
the "traditional" communist parties did not realize until
the end, who Fidel was. We can fall in the same trap with
Hugo Chavez.

"Hugo Chavez is going after two things: The revolution
within the revolution, war to bureaucracy, and the need for
the integration of the Americas. We can say it in a
different way: permanent revolution and internationalism.
Commander Chavez is saying that he is not an ex-rebel, but
a rebel. Anyone who has been a true rebel never stops being
a rebel. Fidel has just loudly stated that "On facing
yesterday's deadly perils and today's, which are still
worse, Socialism will definitely be the only real hope for
peace and the survival of our species." Always the same
rebel... the same communist, different from so many
intellectuals who think the word socialism is useless in
their discourse."

Thanks very much to Maria Montelibre for this translation of 
Celia Hart's latest article. which appeared on the Spanish 
Rebelion website on November 25, 2004.


Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
http://www.walterlippmann.com 
============================================================

?THEY ARE ALL THE SAME.?   
by Celia Hart

-------------------------------------------------
This translation is simultaneously web-posted: 
http://www.walterlippmann.com/ch-11-25-2004.html
-------------------------------------------------

In 1955, Raúl Gómez García, Jesús Montané and Abel
Santamaría, three Moncadistas, started the underground
newspaper "Son los mismos" ("They are all the same.") They
would cleverly say that everybody in the enemy camp
belonged to the same group: the tyranny, the authentic
politicians, even those from the Orthodox Party. The two
last ones, due to their blindness or lack of loyalty. In
the end, all of them are useless for the country. I always
wondered who the other ones were. Those opposed to these
ones. Ever since then, I use these words when I want to
simplify about those who are not with the Man, for whatever
reason. They are all the same?.

San Jose, Costa Rica, lost many attendees who had been
invited to the dance?. Only half of the invited presidents
attended the XIV Ibero American Summit. Just because the
Pacific Rim Forum was taking place in Chile. It was
supposed to be more important, because the attendee
countries were richer. I mean richer, because their
economic development was greater.

It looks as if the recently re-elected President of the
United States, and suggestive China, were much more
eye-catching than the weak American countries, specially in
relation to education, which was the main topic of the San
Jose Conference.

Although, really, the main topic of the 1995 Bariloche
Conference was education. There are millions of
10-year-olds, who, ever since, do not know how to count nor
how to write a single letter. Neither San Jose, nor
Bariloche, will do anything for education. We will go back
to discuss education ten years from now, at that time the
children that were born during the Bariloche Summit (if
they were able to survive), will in turn have illiterate
children. So many broken agreements and such indolence for
humanity are really disconcerting. My uncle Abel would say:
"They are all the same?"

The news arrived, however, at that time, that Canada, Cuba,
Finland and South Korea had received a recognition from
UNESCO as a High Performance Group, the highest educational
recognition in the world. The experiences of these four
countries in the field of education should be a guideline
around the world, which in the last analysis is the reason
d'etre of the recent Summit. UNESCO's officials should ask
these countries how have they been able to achieve these
miracles. I don't think that there is a more urgent miracle
than education. That's the only way we will be able to
avoid being prey to the epidemic of stupidity which has
colonized the XXI Century.

The United States and China, in spite of their rapid
economic development, are not included in that list, we
must ask the reason. Venezuela, on the other hand, in later
years has had an unprecedented education campaign, using
thousands of new experiences, including those from Cuba.
Therefore, the most interesting aspect of the Summit would
have been the visit of the President of Venezuela.
Venezuela is not part of those four countries, but it will
be. It is the country with the highest educational growth
in the world.

A couple of days before, some Cuban "dissidents" decided to
fix the San Jose celebration. It seems that terrorist
Carlos Alberto Montaner and his collaborators did not learn
about the UN news on education, and took part in an action
supporting Cuban "democracy." Genius! The truth is found in
the relation between the two events: on the one hand Cuba
receives a recognition from the UN because of its
educational achievements, on the other, the Cuban
Revolution is at fault because it does not defend
democracy. If two plus two still are four, then we must
admit that in Cuba there are many dictators, who make women
give birth to live children, and, under terror, they force
those children to learn to read, at an age in which most
children in the world enjoy human rights such as child
prostitution, illiteracy, and death.

In San Jose, Costa Ricans defended the morality of the
Americas, and did not allow in Costa Rica the farce which
took place in Praga. With hand made signs and tightly
closed fists, it ended tens of millions of dollars and
prevented the meeting where the farce of helping democracy
in Cuba was going to be implemented. On the other hand, the
Chilean people put on their best show for the Forum of the
Pacific Rim. After all, these summits are useful. They
unite our peoples in the streets and invite us to the
struggle. That will be the major contribution to these
presidents' meetings.

Fidel could not attend the Ibero American Summit. He was
injured just because he was working on education, during
the graduation ceremonies of no less than four thousands
art teachers. Chavez could not either, because a few hours
before, Attorney General Danilo Anderson had been murdered,
with a cowardly explosive in his car.

"Danilo was a man who symbolized the Bolivarian process. In
the corrupt, classist, Venezuelan justice system, he was
one of the few attorneys who applied the law to the
pro-coup and criminal individuals in pro of national
subversion, who had to face their impunity. (?) Danilo
presented a double threat to Washington's terrorist plans:
he was taking one of its main power tools, the corrupt
justice system of the Venezuelan high class, and was
becoming a symbol of the honest and useful patriot for the
majority of the new Bolivarian Fatherland."

They are not doing anything new. Tens of years trying to
oust the Cuban Revolution have not offered the enemy any
new variants in their "struggle." A few months ago they
murdered an engineer from PDVSA. We could trace almost a
perfect parallel between the methods used in both cases.
The assassination attempts against Commander Fidel Castro,
the murder of our teachers, the explosions of La Coubre
ship and a Cuban plane, etc?. Nothing has changed. And,
why? Because they are all the same, they have always been
all the same, because they do not even have the scruples to
look for another peninsula in the United States besides
Florida, nest of cowards, traitors and assassins, who
dressed up in tuxedos, encourage a pathetic conference on
democracy, and at the same time do not hesitate in
assassinating a prosecutor? We already should be used to
that.

They are undoubtedly supported by the CIA, and the U.S.
Government tolerates them. Three of the criminals who were
acquitted by the Ex-President of Panama, are now showing
off somewhere else. The ex-President, in turn, certainly
needed the moneys from her people to pay for dresses and
jewelry. She had the gall to make a public announcement
about it. She is shameless. I still cannot understand how
in the San Jose summit a resolution against terrorism is
launched, if one of those four assassins is surely hiding
in a Central American country.

They cannot hide, the dirty water has already been served
on the table. The tolerance and impunity offered by the
recently re-elected President of the United States,
accomplice of Anderson's assassination and other murders
which must still be investigated. Because all the purged
Cabinet of the Empire has left to do, is to put their white
hoods on, upholding their racial superiority. And the
cameras will be able to show the Secretary of State with
blue eyes. They got the American people used to so many
lies, that Ms. Condoleezza Rice could easily obtain a pure
Anglo Saxon past.

This fundamentalist and ignorant clique will continue
protecting the criminals attempting against the young
Venezuelan Revolution. In the end, they are protecting the
assassins of Prosecutor Anderson. It is sad, but in this
history, anyone who is truly united is the enemy: the
pathetic Conference in Prague and in San Jose for democracy
in my country, the death of Prosecutor Anderson, and those
responsible for the extermination in Faluya?. are all the
same. They have the same motivations and obey the same
interests.

We must still hear Bush in Santiago de Chile, "scolding"
Iran and North Korea because they are not "behaving right."
Terrorism. It is laughable. There are many of us who are
still ensnared into the enemy's verbal trap. Terrorism,
axis of evil, struggle for freedom and all that
phantasmagoric verbiage of the White House. Without
realizing it, we follow them, and we complicate our
discourse with so much phraseology.

There is something which could save us, Newton's Third Law
of Motion.

Newton worked in our favor. The Third Law of Motion states,
"Every action is followed by an equal and opposite
reaction."

They are all the same, and that implies that we must also
be all the same, against them.

Yes, Anderson's murder is another idiocy of the enemy who
is running around, blind, deaf and dumb. The rule is as
follows: for every crime they commit, more revolution for
us. Yes. Us. Anderson's murder will promote the
radicalization of the revolutionary process in Venezuela.

And Venezuela follows Newton. In the campaign of October
31, when 20 of the 22 states joined the Bolivarian
Revolution, Commander Chavez defined the radicalization in
the Venezuelan process. Radical is not synonimous with
extremist. Extremes never go anywhere. The word radical
comes from "root."

And we mean the root of Venezuela's problems. The enemy 
is not only isolated, but it is dressed again in the
assassin's garb. It triggers anger and hate, instead of
fear. "God first blinds those he wants to destroy," the
saying goes. In those elections Chavez not only launched
the war against large estates and against beaurocracy.
Chavez is not only planning against the ills of capitalism,
but against the ills a different society may have.
Bureaucracy. Corruption and Bureaucracy are two ills which
must be stopped when there's still time.

In a recent "Hello, President" program, Commander Chavez
spoke a lot about Che. Fortunately Che is being liberated
from that romantic and Quixotic aura put on him in many
places. Jose Marti must be liberated of the same thing. Che
is indispensable for us, not only as the heroic gerrilla
fighter, but also as a founder of Socialism and a socialist
thinker, who gave so much to revolutionary theory and
praxis.

This month was the 45th anniversary of the first voluntary
work promoted in Cuba by Che. On referring to the book "The
Road to Fire," by Orlando Borrego, Chavez talks about the
"prolific work by Che" as a leader of the Cuban Revolution,
and, more specifically, as Secretary of Industry, about his
drive in "analyzing different problems stated in the
Handbook of Political Economy by the Academy of Sciences of
the Soviet Union," written at that time under Stalin's
orders," about the key issue in the construction of
Socialism. He was terribly mystified by the Soviet
political economy, about the connections in the development
of productive forces, changes in the relations between
production and advances of socialist awareness.

Chavez continues, "Socialist economic theory states that
the previous development of productive forces is necessary,
so that later the relations of socialist productivity can
develop (...) but Che says that in underdeveloped
countries, Cuba, for example, it was impossible to wait 100
hundred years for the development of productive forces and
then change productive relations, Che stated, and I agree
with Che, it is possible to raise workers' awareness,
developing an awareness which goes further than Capitalism.
We are doing that over here, we cannot wait until industry
develops and national productivity gains impetus, that is,
for the development of forces behind productivity to the
extent that the development will affect productive
relations and [generate] a new economic model."

There are many who still doubt the Venezuelan President,
with infantile allegations, or interpret his actions
entrenched in textbook paradigms. I said it before, and it
is not a metaphora, that the triumph of August 15 has the
same importance than November 7 or January 1. We,
Communists, could have the same experience than in Cuba.
When the Communist Party started taking seriously the
movement of July 26 and Fidel Castro, Fidel and the Cuban
Revolutionaries were already far ahead in the race.

Fidel said in March, 1956, "The Movement of July 26 is the
revolutionary organization of the poor, for the poor and by
the poor. The Movement of July 26 is the hope of redemption
for the Cuban working class..." Those who suspected that
the July 26 Movement was a proletarian revolutionary
organization were just a few. Imperialism, and almost all
the "traditional" communist parties did not realize until
the end, who Fidel was. We can fall in the same trap with
Hugo Chavez.

Hugo Chavez is going after two things: The revolution
within the revolution, war to bureaucracy, and the need for
the integration of the Americas. We can say it in a
different way: permanent revolution and internationalism.
Commander Chavez is saying that he is not an ex-rebel, but
a rebel. Anyone who has been a true rebel never stops being
a rebel. Fidel has just loudly stated that "On facing
yesterday's deadly perils and today's, which are still
worse, Socialism will definitely be the only real hope for
peace and the survival of our species." Always the same
rebel... the same communist, different from so many
intellectuals who think the word socialism is useless in
their discourse.

Because, as Bertold Brecht said, the good men struggle for
a day. "But there are those who struggle their whole lives,
and they are indispensable." Together with them, we will
all be able "to change this Earth, once and for all."

ORIGINAL SPANISH:
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=8087  



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