Waters, editor of New International, which is also published in Spanish as Nueva Internacional, chaired the event. Part of her opening remarks appear below.

Oscar Rodríguez is a member of the legislative assembly in the state of Miranda, which surrounds Caracas. He is also a leader of the Youth of the Fifth Republic (JVR), which is affiliated with Venezuela’s governing party, the Movement of the Fifth Republic.

Zuleica Romay is vice president of the Cuban Book Institute.

Harry Villegas, a brigadier general in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces no longer on active duty, is vice president of the executive secretariat of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. The association is made up of Cubans who have taken part in revolutionary struggles and internationalist missions over more than half a century. Villegas is widely known as Pombo, the nom de guerre given him by Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban Revolution, alongside whom Villegas worked and fought for a decade, during Cuba’s revolutionary war as well as in the Congo and Bolivia. Villegas is also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, a National Assembly deputy, and Hero of the Cuban Revolution.

Footnotes and translation of the remarks by Rodríguez, Romay, and Vi-llegas, excerpts of which are published here, are by the Militant. The translation and remarks by Waters are copyright © 2006 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
To initiate our discussion, let me say a few words about Nueva Internacional—a publication that is new to many of you here today.

As our masthead says, Nueva Internacional is “A Magazine of Marxist Politics and Theory.” It is not the organ of a party, but the members of the editorial board are leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States. They include SWP national secretary Jack Barnes, who is the author of the lead articles in these two issues we are discussing. We also benefit from the collaboration of supporters in other countries.

The purpose of Nueva Internacional is not discussion for the sake of discussing. It is a tool to arm and to be used by workers and youth actively involved in the practical work of building a communist party and youth organization—in the United States above all.

We believe that building such a proletarian movement is a historical necessity. None of the burning social questions of our epoch will be settled short of working people in the United States taking the economic and military power to rule out of the hands of the class that today imposes its interests on the world.

Building a communist party in the United States—or in any other country—is an objective inseparable from the tasks of proletarian internationalism. It can only be reached working together with others fighting for the same objectives around the world. That is one of the reasons we value so greatly collaboration and opportunities to discuss these questions in gatherings like this one today….
 

Nueva Internacional is above all directed to the youth, to new generations coming to political consciousness as they enter into struggles along this working-class line of march. This is one reason it means a great deal to have Oscar here today, speaking on behalf of the leadership of the JVR. It is young people above all who must absorb and internalize the proletarian way of doing politics. And we know from experience that there is a real hunger among young people—students, workers, and others—for the kind of political depth the material in Nueva Internacional allows them to reach for and debate.

The single largest sales of Nueva Internacional in its various languages have been to young people from around the world at events such as the World Festival of Youth and Students that took place here in Caracas last year.

We also know that to make a revolution it is not enough to be young. If that were the case, our class would have triumphed long ago. Without continuity of proletarian thought and organization, without a mix of experiences among generations of revolutionary fighters, without collaboration across borders—and without each new generation making the lessons of the modern international working-class movement its own—victory is very far from certain. It will be won, if at all, at a much higher price than necessary. Those lessons have been paid for in blood by those who have gone before us.

That’s why having compañera Zuleica speaking from the perspective of the Cuban Revolution is so important, and why the participation of compañero Pombo means a great deal.
 

I want to emphasize only one political point about the content of these two issues. It is the comments of the other panelists, as well as those of you who are here with us today, that deserve the most time.

With conviction and with facts, these issues of Nueva Internacional put forward the view that we are today living through a great turning point in the international class struggle. The world that is being born today is not the world we have known, it is not the world we have lived in for the last 60 years. Communists and broader vanguard forces must fully absorb this historic shift and begin acting on its political logic.

The origins of the new world situation do not lie in any single event such as September 11. They do not lie in specific policies pursued by one or another Congress or U.S. president. The outcome of the just-concluded congressional elections in the United States will change nothing on this front and working people have nothing to celebrate in the electoral victory of the Democratic Party candidates.

Yesterday, for example, the Democratic Party members of Congress, as one of their first postelection actions, led the fight to defeat a proposed bill that would have normalized trade relations with Vietnam. As we all know, and our Cuban compañeros especially have lived the consequences of this for more than 45 years, trade restrictions are one of imperialism’s weapons of war.

The underlying crisis driving the imperialist masters is not conjunctural. It is rooted in the economic downturn that began some three decades ago with the exhaustion of the economic expansion that grew out of the preparations for World War II. What is unfolding now is the acceleration of that crisis in all its manifestations, including the increasingly sharp conflicts born of competition among the imperialist powers. “One of capitalism’s infrequent long winters has begun,” Nueva Internacional explains. And for us it is going to be very long and very hot.

Decades of economic, financial, and social convulsions—as well as the resulting deepening of class battles—lie before us. That’s why we need men and women who have no fear of the heat, men and women who have the stomach for the kinds of struggles that are coming.

In preparation for these coming battles at home and abroad, Washington is implementing the most far-reaching change in its military policy and organization since the end of the 1940s when the U.S. rulers established a massive, permanent military command and national security structure to “contain” the Soviet Union. It is important to emphasize, however, that today’s course is neither Rumsfeld’s nor Bush’s. It is the bipartisan policy of the U.S. ruling class, already begun under Clinton.

In the last few days, for example, under cover of calls for more and more congressional hearings and commission of every sort to “examine” the reasons for their problems in Iraq, and talk about the eventual reduction of U.S. troop levels there, the direction the U.S. government is heading is the opposite. Yesterday, the newly elected leader of the Democratic Party caucus in the Senate, Harry Reid, proposed a $75 billion increase in the military budget to restore the combat capacities of U.S. Army units in order to allow them to increase troop levels in Iraq as well as Afghanistan and elsewhere as necessary. Bush is suggesting that 20,000 more troops will be sufficient to rapidly “pacify” Iraq.

There are deep-going factional divisions within and between the capitalist parties and other institutions of government in the United States, including the military high command. But the rancor of their discourse does not flow from conflicting strategic perspectives. It comes from something else—the more or less conscious realization of many that whatever policy changes they implement, they cannot contain the march of history. That whatever they do they cannot “win.” For the U.S. ruling families, the periodic changing of the guard from Republican to Democrat and back again is a useful, indeed indispensable, means by which they try to work through their tactical disagreements and adjust their course, but they do so with less and less conviction or confidence.

The imperialist rulers insist they are engaged in “a long war” against “terrorism”—one they will wage for a “generation” or more. But the real targets are evident to us all. That is why the working people of Venezuela were singled out by the Pentagon in its most recent policy review early this year as a growing “source of political and economic instability” in the world. That is why Washington has now named a special “manager” for “intelligence operations” directed against both Cuba and Venezuela.
 

For revolutionists, the fact that the world we have known for more than a half century has disappeared is no reason for despair, much less fear. Quite the opposite. What we see in this emerging world is another transformation beginning. Impelled by these momentous changes, by the increasing social and economic pressures on a growing majority of the toilers—including steps to restrict political and democratic rights even within the more stable bourgeois democracies—working people are responding. We are resisting. Including within the United States.

Often this reality is hard to see from the outside, but nowhere has it been more broadly evident than in the massive working-class mobilizations for immigrant rights that exploded onto the streets of the United States earlier this year. Millions—and not only immigrants—proudly downed tools and marched under the banner “We are workers, not criminals. Legalize all immigrants now!” Already their actions, harbingers of what is to come, have irreversibly strengthened the workers movement in the United States.

It is the political logic of these great shifts that we act on now.

As these issues of Nueva Internacional express it: Our politics start with the world capitalism has engendered, and how—not to reform it—but to transform it. Beyond recognition.

This is what brings us together here today.

I have only been able to read part of “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun” but aspects of the article have forcefully caught my attention. One example is the section titled “Compete or Die,” which explains how capital acts in the world, and how sometimes we don’t take into account that its tentacles extend everywhere. Perhaps we see some of the consequences of that in the communities where we live. But I think it’s important for us all to know this macro-analysis. I urge you to promote this article and to read it together in study circles in our communities in order to forge revolutionary consciousness.

In the past being a revolutionary was a little more difficult. Simply passing a message on to another comrade implied danger, because the intelligence agencies had orders to spy on revolutionaries.

Today this dynamic is different. This revolution is unique. A young person from a barrio can sign up for a mission, succeed in getting a scholarship, buy food at a Mercal, and if he gets sick can see a doctor at a Barrio Adentro clinic.¹ And then he says I am a revolutionary. But his level of consciousness is not what is needed.

Today it’s much easier to be a revolutionary. But this ease can lead to breaking your spirit. We have to consolidate revolutionary consciousness through reading, commitment, values, and by promoting study circles that can increase comradeship.

Theory also has to go along with practice. That’s why I urge the youth, and all those we have worked with in one way or another, not only to organize study circles but to apply what we read.

Such a dynamic will allow this material to reach into the consciousness of our communities.

I began to see how this magazine makes a diagnosis of capitalism and its workings. I was surprised because I was aware of some things but I did not know how the capitalists, the banks, the financial institutions have no scruples, no principles, no values. They simply use interest rates and other means to accumulate riches at the expense of the majority, of working people.

This article helps us see from another point of view the hand of much bigger forces at work behind seemingly local conflicts. It helps us see how the hand of imperialism, the hand of capitalism, operates in our communities.

I’ll describe an experience we went through in the state of Miranda. Until two years ago we had a governor who represented the interests of the right, including having participated in the April 11 military coup.²

Two years ago there was the presidential recall referendum, which we won with 60 percent of the vote.³ That demoralized the opposition and many of them stayed away from the polls in the gubernatorial election that took place within a month after the referendum. So we were able to win a state where the opposition has had a strong base.

Since then, we have instituted a series of public policies in Miranda aimed at dismantling the effective privatization of health care by the previous administration.

In education and health care they were privatizing hospitals, clinics, schools.

In the last two years the new administration dismantled these policies and the state has assumed responsibility for these services.

Today I participated along with President Hugo Chávez in the inauguration of a new medical clinic, which has equipment with the latest, most advanced, technology, in Chuao, located in the municipality of Baruta, here in Caracas, where the opposition has had a strong base because it is an upper middle-class neighborhood.

This shows the opposition that we are governing both for the rich and for the poor. It’s clear that we must give priority to the poor, because they are the majority and they were excluded for so many years. But we also govern for the middle classes.

We faced a financial crisis in this country a decade ago, which cut deep into the pockets of those who had savings. And who had savings? The middle classes. If someone would deposit 10 million bolivars ($4,650) into a bank, financial institutions would often rob them of up to 6 million and leave them only with 4 million.

They had also imposed interest rates on credit cards of as much as 80 percent. People would use their credit cards to buy something and would be suffocated by debt.

What we were looking at as local problems were in fact the results of such policies, what can be described as capitalist cannibalism. Capitalists pushing to accumulate riches and power without any kind of principles, values, or purpose.

I greatly appreciate the invitation to take part in this meeting. And I am committed to include the material from this magazine in the study circles we are already organizing with the youth.

We are going to absorb it and promote it so that others understand it, which will help in building a stronger popular movement, one with conviction.

There is an expression at the beginning of the article that says something like, "We say as Lenin did in 1920…."⁴ I carried out an experiment. I gave the magazine to a compañero of mine at the Cuban book stand, a young man, about 20 years younger than me, to read the opening paragraphs and tell me what he thought. He asked me, "Can one repeat something Lenin said in 1920?"

I answered, "Repeat no, but understand yes." Because the world has changed in many superficial ways, but in essence it is the world Lenin knew in 1920. We have to know how to read Lenin and the classics of Marxism. We cannot read them literally. But you can be sure that perhaps by changing the word order or adding some new arguments, we would be able to say many of the things that Lenin wrote or said in 1920.

If we sometimes think that these things said or written long ago are no longer relevant it is because we're attuned to the superficial changes that have occurred in the world. We often don't realize that this remains the same unjust world, the same world that pays for the unbridled nature of the minority with the blood of the majority, as it was when the Soviet state was emerging from that classical proletarian revolution at the end of the bloody First World War.

Thus I find very interesting the way in which Nueva Internacional deals with the topic of electrification.

Back then an attempt was being made not only to carry out a great social program, not only to apply important advances in science and technology, but also to recognize that for backward Russia, whose countryside was marked by semifeudal conditions, electrification meant the possibility of transforming human beings into new men and women by creating new conditions of life and work, new conditions of material and spiritual well-being.

When we reanalyze these questions today, we realize that technology has a much deeper meaning than the solely functional view we sometimes have of it. Because technology is associated—from its very beginning and above all in its application—with a specific mode of production.

There is a section in the article that very perceptively points out that many of the great scientific advances of the 19th and 20th centuries came about as a result of wars of conquest, in order to expand the power to crush other peoples, to subjugate other peoples. In this case, technology was used to serve very spurious interests.

For that reason, under socialism we don't simply inherit technology. Rather we learn it, transform it, and put it to the service of humanity and of a different society.

It seems to me that the magazine's presentation of this subject is very up-to-date, even though it often utilizes documents, phrases, and facts drawn from decades past, from the last century.

I am very struck too by the way in which the article deals with the worker-peasant alliance today. It's true that imperialism has led to a diminishing number of peasants. With rationalizations, slogans, and demagogic policies concerning an alleged modernization, they have turned peasants into serfs once again. But it's no longer a feudal lord who is the master. Now it's a transnational food producer.

Because of this process, when one speaks of the worker-peasant alliance, we sometimes think it's impossible. Meanwhile the peasant is increasingly proletarianized, our army of workers becomes numerically stronger, with more people to fight, more people to educate, more people who will transform society.

I tell you sincerely that in a country like Cuba where Marxism is studied, where Marxism is applied, I'm surprised to realize that it's been a long time since I've seen anything written that takes up the worker-peasant alliance.

In reading Nueva Internacional I found myself asking: How would that alliance look now? How could it be achieved? And I really think that this article gives answers to those questions—not recipes, but answers.

In Cuba there is a TV program with a very interesting journalist who presents a topic and invites people to participate in a televised discussion, and at the end he says: draw your own conclusions. I feel the same way about this article. One has to keep thinking about it.

What stuck in my mind the most after reading the magazine is the need for us to continue pointing out, as Lenin said, that it's not enough for the proletariat to be subjected to conditions of exploitation. What is needed is a vanguard to explain it, to document it, to help people think about the facts of life. And the same thing is true with Marxist theory.

After all, many graves were dug to bury us all, together with our ideas. Barely 15 years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the world is seeing that all those graves were dug in vain, because Marxism is still alive.

Nevertheless this must be demonstrated. Even more so because at a certain point in Cuba and many other places we presented Marxism as a finished science. It was like the Bible, in the sense that there was nothing in it to be changed, all that remained was to do what was postulated. We went through an era of dogmatism, of schematicism. Some time ago we broke free of that ideological dead weight, but we still have to carry out a major discussion.

The other day a compañero here in the book fair was telling me: "What you did in Cuba is no longer possible. It's not possible to overthrow a power, an overwhelming power, by shooting rifles from the hilltops." It seems to me, for the reasons Mary-Alice explained, that the world is moving in a direction that will once again create the conditions that will make such methods of struggle possible once again.

That is why I believe the dissemination of Marxist theory is important—living theory that has been enriched with practice showing that there are many roads, specific to each people.

Here some people say, "They are Cubanizing Venezuela." But that's not true. The Venezuelans are doing things their way, and they're certainly not asking our permission.

What we have to do, above all, is disseminate the theory that lies behind our actions. Because we are very good at action. We are very good at deeds. Very good at fighting. But it's difficult for us to explain to the person marching beside us why their participation is needed, and that person simply has no idea. A person without convictions goes to a demonstration accompanying someone else, goes to a rally in support of someone, but he or she doesn't go because their consciousness tells them this is where they must be. And that is our job: to instill in people the ideas that lead them to move on their own, because of their own convictions.

To the extent that we achieve this goal, using this type of publication and many other means, I believe the better world we talk so much about will more and more become possible.

Without getting into theoretical concepts that you heard presented by people who have read these issues of the magazine more recently than I and have a much broader scope, I want to say that I think the importance of Nueva Internacional resides in the search for a theoretical understanding of the reality of the present-day world through the lens of Marxism and Leninism.

I take as a given that when we speak of Marxism, we are speaking of a dialectical science, not something static. A science that sees the world in continuous motion and evolution, whose application is not uniform for each country.

There are things that are specific to each country. The Venezuelan revolution has its own characteristics, starting from how it arose. The Cuban revolution has its own characteristics, starting from how it arose. The Russian revolution had its own characteristics starting too from its own essence.

That's why it's necessary to draw from the experiences of all revolutions.

You have to draw on your experiences here, which have been peaceful. But I recall something Che said, which I'll never forget, since I was at his side for a long time: that imperialism's nature is not peaceful. And since imperialism's nature is not peaceful, we can't think that it is going to leave us in peace. We always have to be prepared, analyzing, investigating in the light of Marxism, which is objective and concrete, looking for how we can know this system better and better.

It is a military principle that you can't develop a battle plan if you don't know the characteristics of the enemy. Even in irregular warfare, guerrilla warfare. I saw here a copy of Che's study Guerrilla Warfare, in which the analysis of the enemy is decisive—one must know how the enemy employs his weapons, his most modern weapons; what importance they have at the present time.

You are not going to be attacked with nuclear weapons, therefore it's not important for you to study nuclear weapons. We're making a supposition, of course, even though nothing is guaranteed. Otherwise we would cease being dialectical.

I think that the existence of a magazine that analyzes imperialism in its overall manifestations today is important for our discussions, so that each of us can really draw our own conclusions, as Zuleica said. So that we can conquer the weapons, the ideas, the elements that enable us to defend our revolution. Because we have our own revolution, we have a model for the construction of socialism. For me one of José Martí's ideas is universal. It's for the entire world: To build a homeland with all and for the good of all, and in such a country to conquer the highest degree possible of social justice.

The positions of Nueva Internacional have coincided in some cases with the reality of our revolutionary process.

One of the things Pathfinder Press has done the most, is to disseminate, through interviews, the experience of many Cuban combatants from their origins up through their participation in the construction of socialism.

On Saturday night there will be a presentation here of Our History Is Still Being Written, a book that has been promoted by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, and I promised Mary-Alice I'd participate in that activity.

If you are able to be there you will hear about a young Chinese man named Sío Wong, who is head of Cuba's state reserves today. You will hear about where Sío Wong came from, and how at a certain moment in the revolutionary war, Sierra Maestra, he was given responsibility for the state reserves.⁵

We were still not a state, but Fidel put him in charge of the Rebel Army's reserves in the Sierra Maestra. And Camilo⁶ and others arrived and convinced Sío Wong that their column was hungry and that they should be given a sack of sugar from the reserves. So Fidel removed Sío Wong from his position. Because Fidel told him that if these were reserves he [Fidel] was the one to decide what to do with them. No one else had the power to give them to anyone, no matter how much need there was at that time.

What is it that I want to convey to you? That the most important thing at a given moment is discipline. A conscious discipline, in which everyone carries out what each of us has to do as a revolutionary. That is decisive for you and for us Cubans. Because without discipline, there is nothing systematic, there is no comprehensive approach, the revolutionary message doesn’t come through with all the force and integral approach required.

The main thing I want to say here today is that we are very grateful for having been invited, and we believe that the effort under way for many years will bear fruit. Not just for us. These materials are also being disseminated broadly among U.S. workers, among Latinos, among other English-speaking peoples, in addition to Spanish-speaking people.

1. Barrio Adentro (Into the Barrio) is a program sponsored by the Venezuelan government that has brought some 20,000 Cuban medical personnel offering quality health care free of charge in working-class neighborhoods and rural areas where working people have had little or no access to medical services. Barrio Adentro and other social programs, such as a nationwide literacy campaign, are referred to in Venezuela as "missions." The Mercals are government supermarkets that sell food at subsidized prices.

2. In an attempted coup on April 11, 2002, Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez and a number of his ministers and other government officials were arrested. In response, hundreds of thousands of working people poured out of the poor neighborhoods of Caracas. In face of this massive show of support for the Chávez administration, the military divided and the coup collapsed after two days.

3. In 2004 the imperialist-backed opposition tried once again to oust Chávez, this time through a recall referendum that took place August 15. With a massive, organized effort by workers and farmers throughout the country, the referendum was defeated, with more than 59 percent voting "no."

4. At the beginning of "Our Politics Start with the World," Barnes quotes a statement made in December 1920 at the All-Russia Congress of Soviets by V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution. "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country," Lenin said.

5. Harry Villegas was referring to the presentation of Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution, a book by Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong. The event took place November 18 as part of Venezuela's Second International Book Fair. An article on the meeting appeared in the December 11 Militant. Sío Wong describes the incident on the Rebel Army reserves in the Sierra Maestra mountains that Villegas refers to here in pages 116—17 of Our History Is Still Being Written.

6. Camilo Cienfuegos was captain in column 4 of the Rebel Army, which was headed by Fidel Castro and led the 1956—58 revolutionary war in Cuba to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. He was promoted to commander in 1958, and became the Rebel Army's chief of staff in January 1959. He was killed in October of that year when the plane he was riding was lost at sea.
 
 
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