Paraguay, Bolivia’s former rival in the Chaco War is, however, nearby. There are now guerrillas in Paraguay. It is a very poor country. It has around one-and-a-half million inhabitants in a territory that is much larger than Cuba’s, with extensive jungles. It has some agricultural products and very few cattle. It has terrible endemic diseases, such as leprosy, which has spread extensively, and there is practically no health care.
Almost the entire population lives in three or four relatively large cities. There have been several guerrilla experiences in the forests. The most important and most serious of these from an ideological point of view have been directed by a people’s revolutionary front with the participation of the Paraguayan Communist Party. Its guerrillas have been systematically defeated. I think that tactical mistakes have been made in the conduct of the revolutionary struggle—which has some laws that must not be broken—but, even so, uprisings continue. Some rebel groups are living in the forests and they know that if they turn themselves in they will be killed. They are far from the borders.
Paraguay is an ideal country for guerrilla warfare. It is agriculturally very rich and has wonderful natural conditions. There are no high mountains but there are forests, very large rivers and operational zones where it would be very difficult for regular armies and very easy to wage a struggle with the help of the farming population.
It has a dictatorship of the extreme right, which used to be very influenced by the Argentine oligarchy. Paraguay was a semicolony of Argentina but with the latest penetrations of US capital has now become directly dependent on the United States. It maintains a bestial dictatorship and has all of the seeds of an intensive short-term popular struggle.
A little farther to the north is Peru. Peru should be watched closely in the future. It has very special characteristics: 80 percent of its population is indigenous or mestizo and there is very clear racial segregation. Whites own the land and the capital; the mestizos generally work as overseers for the whites, and Indians as serfs.
In Peru, farms are still sold complete with their Indian workers. Farms are advertised in the newspapers along with the number of workers or the number of Indians who are forced to work for the feudal lord. You cannot even imagine how terrible the situation is unless you have been there.
Peru is the only country in Latin America with vast agricultural regions where the leftist parties have decisive influence and control. Peru and the indigenous region of Cuzco, where the Peruvian Communist Party has a strong influence, are the only areas in the Americas where any Marxist party has a strong influence. Some years ago the Peruvian Communist Party seized the city of Cuzco by force of arms, but revolutionary conditions didn’t exist and there was a kind of tacit truce: the rebels returned the city and the oppressors, the government troops, took no reprisals. A tense situation ensued, and today Cuzco remains one of the areas where a revolution is threatening—or, rather, where there are hopes of a revolution in Latin America.
Peru is in a similar situation, extreme poverty and extreme oppression, the fundamental characteristics of the heavily populated Andes and important factors for carrying out a revolution. The people don’t speak Spanish; the most commonly spoken languages are Quechua and Aymara, closely related to each other. Anybody wanting to communicate with the Indians has to speak those languages; if they don’t, communication will be impossible.
Nationalities aren’t defined by the borders of those countries. Aymaras in Bolivia relate better with Aymaras in Peru than with whites in either Bolivia or Peru. First the colonizers and then the imperialists have taken pains to maintain that situation. There is, therefore, a natural affinity between those two countries, and in Peru and Ecuador and even as far as Colombia, between the areas where the Andeans and Quechuas live. In all of those countries the prevailing languages are dialects.
These countries have great geographical differences. Peru has three mountain chains crossed by valleys, and the eastern half of the country leads into the great Amazon River basin, which is where la montaña begins—an area of medium to high mountain ranges with a subtropical climate, similar to the climate in our mountains, but with more difficult natural conditions.
The little-developed bourgeoisie in Peru lives on the coast, a narrow, desert-like strip that runs parallel to very high mountains. The highest peak in Peru’s western mountain range is just 100 kilometers from the coast and 5,000 meters above sea level. It sits there like a shell washed ashore. A month or two ago there were uprisings you probably heard about, in the mining area in the middle of the country. Mining is very developed in Peru and you know that mine workers in general are very combative. They don’t necessarily have great political awareness because of the conditions in the country, but they are very combative. The Peruvian army consists of a caste of officers at the top, all from the same class, and masses of Indians at the bottom; if a serious uprising were to occur, there would be no way to crush it.
Ecuador has the same conditions with just one difference: the Ecuadoran bourgeoisie—or a part of it—and, in general, all the supporters of the left have much more influence in the cities and are much clearer about the need for an uprising. Several leaders of these Ecuadoran leftist groups have been in Cuba and have been considerably influenced by the effects and results of the Cuban revolution. They openly uphold the banner of an immediate agrarian revolution. There is also a strong repressive army and the United States has stationed some of its troops in Ecuador. I think that Ecuador, too, is a country where intensive revolutionary struggle will soon appear.
Continuing up the Andes, the backbone of the continent, we come to Colombia where, with periods of greater or lesser activity, a war has been going on for the past 12 years. The Colombian guerrillas have made mistakes that have kept them from achieving a people’s victory such as ours. There has been a lack of ideological leadership. The guerrillas are dispersed and lack a central command (which we in Cuba had), they have been under the personal leadership of caudillos from rural areas, and they began to rob and kill just like their rivals in order to survive. Naturally, they gradually fell into banditry. Other guerrilla groups adopted a position of self-defense and did nothing other than defend themselves when attacked by the government. The situation of struggle and of war to the death led these guerrillas to be weakened. Some of them were completely wiped out.
Right now, influenced by the Cuban revolution, the guerrilla movement in Colombia has grown stronger.
One group of young people, the MOEC [Worker, Student, Peasant Movement], did something similar to what the July 26 Movement did here in the beginning of its struggle. They espouse a series of rightist tendencies toward anarchy—that are sometimes mixed with anticommunist ideas—but they reflect the seeds of a determination to fight. Some of their leaders have been in Cuba. The most determined and enthusiastic of them was compañero Larrota, who was with us during the April [1961 Bay of Pigs] invasion and some time before that. He was murdered when he returned to Colombia. MOEC is probably not important as a political movement and in some cases even could be dangerous, but the group is an example of what is happening there.
Clearly the Colombian parties of the left are trying to hold back the insurrectional movement and move toward electoral struggle, in an absurd context where there are only two legal parties, each taking turns at power. In such absurd conditions, the more impetuous Colombian revolutionaries consider that resorting to elections simply wastes time, and in spite of all obstacles they are doing everything they can to further a struggle that is no longer latent but has developed into open fighting in several parts of the country.
It is difficult to say whether the struggle in Colombia may or may not be important. It is not directed by a well-structured leftist movement; it consists of efforts by a range of social groups and elements from different classes all trying to do something, but there is no ideological leadership and that is very dangerous. There is no way to know where it’s going, but the conditions are being created for the futur
e development of a well-structured revolutionary struggle in Colombia.
The situation in Venezuela is much more active. The Communist Party and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) are heading an armed movement of liberation, and civil war has practically broken out in Venezuela. We should be very interested in this Venezuelan movement; we should be watching it carefully and with great affinity.
Some tactical disagreements have arisen over how to wage that struggle. As a result of our own experience, in which our nation was born from a unilateral experience, we favor guerrilla warfare based on peasants’ groups and seizing the cities from the countryside. This is based on our masses’ great hunger for land and on the mercenary armies’ extreme weakness when moving through large territories in Latin America. Imperialism’s attacks can’t be effective in areas that are favorable for the guerrillas and the popular forces. The government is unable to move beyond areas where the population is concentrated.
Some Venezuelan compañeros have said several times that something violent may happen in Venezuela, that special conditions exist, with some military groups ready to support an insurrection. Partial results were seen in the last insurrectional attempt made at Carúpano, showing once again that, in a revolution, Latin America’s professional military men serve only as a source of weapons for the people. The only mission an army group can have is to let itself be disarmed. From then on, it should be left alone; at most, isolated individuals should be taken from it.
I don’t know that specific area very well, but I am familiar with neighboring areas and in that region impenetrable forests and mountains are nearby. There, a guerrilla unit can create an extremely difficult situation. The area is near oil-exporting ports, such as Caripito, and a guerrilla unit can threaten one of the key areas of the imperialist economy in Venezuela. The marines, however, didn’t set foot outside their garrison. The marines who rebelled couldn’t go anywhere in the interior of the country. They surrendered as soon as they saw that the loyal troops outnumbered them.
A revolution cannot be carried out in those conditions. As you know, guerrilla struggle is long and drawn-out; battles follow one another very slowly and the greatest difficulties aren’t direct action by the enemy but rather struggle against the rigors of the climate; lack of provisions and medicine; the struggle to awaken the rural masses ideologically; the political struggle to incorporate those masses in the popular movement; the slowness of the revolution’s advance; and certainly, in the case of Venezuela, US intervention to defend its oil possessions. All these things influence the guerrilla struggle.
This time—although this time only, it can’t be said any other way—the path adopted in Venezuela was to try to deliver a violent blow via some of the units of the army. Even if they had triumphed, it would only have been a victory of one part of the army over the other. What would the army then have done? It’s very simple: they would have pardoned the losing faction, maintained their caste status and allowed them to retain all of their caste privileges and their class’s control in the country. The exploiting class has the weapons that maintain that army of exploitation.
When one part of the army has triumphed over the other—say, the constitutional section over the anti-constitutional section—it is nothing more than a tiny distortion or a small clash within the group of exploiters. This is a contradiction that in present-day Latin America will never be decisive, with imperialism maintaining its tools of exploitation.
One of the premises of the Cuban revolution is that it is absolutely necessary to immediately destroy the army in order to take power seriously.
Brazil is another big country in South America that is in a strange situation of unstable equilibrium. As you know, Brazil is the largest country in Latin America, the third largest in the world and the country with the largest reserves of raw materials owned by US interests. It has 60 million inhabitants and is a real power. All its raw materials are being developed by US capital, and all the contradictions of Latin America have appeared there.
Two trends can be noted in the forces of the left: some of them want a revolution, while others want to take power by more peaceful or institutional means. The forces of the left that are represented, above all, by the peasant masses of the northeast are clearly willing to seize power despite the opposition of the bourgeoisie (the bourgeoisie puts up little opposition; imperialism is the real enemy).
Brazil is really several different countries. The northeast region is one of them. It is a very poor, densely populated area where there are terrible droughts and the very large peasantry is particularly combative. In the center of the country there is a largely unpopulated jungle area with small agricultural plots. To the south is the industrial area with São Paulo and Río de Janeiro, the most important cities in Brazil.
The northern area is ideal for insurrection. Exploitation has reached such an extreme that peasants cannot stand it anymore. Every day there are reports that Brazilian compañeros have been killed in their struggle against the large landowners. After Quadros resigned and the military tried to stage a coup, the country reached a compromise: the present government is in power thanks to a compromise between the exploiting groups, the Brazilian national bourgeoisie and imperialism. This compromise will, of course, be violated and the two will start fighting among themselves. If they haven’t yet done so openly, it is because they face one great enemy, the Brazilian people.
When Quadros resigned, Fidel explained more or less what the Brazilian people should do. His words were broadcast to the Brazilian people and caused a lot of disquiet. Some thought it to be an act of interference by our government and prime minister in Brazil’s internal affairs. I believe that revolutionaries should give such advice in times of great danger and great need for decisiveness. If a decisive battle had been won in Brazil, the panorama of Latin America would have changed rapidly. Brazil shares borders with all the other South American countries except Chile and Ecuador. It has enormous influence. It is really a place for waging a battle.
In our relations with the other Latin American countries, we should always consider that we are part of a single family—a family with more or less special characteristics—and we must not forget our duty of solidarity or our duty to express our opinion at specific moments. It is not a matter of always interfering or of tediously pointing to our own example—an example not all other countries can follow. But at moments like that, when Brazilians were debating the future of a large part of Latin America, we should speak out.
Part of the Brazilian battle was lost—and could be lost—without too many consequences, but it was nevertheless a moment of tremendous tension. If the battle had been won, we would have won a great deal. What happened in Brazil was not a triumph of the popular forces; it was simply a compromise, in which the group that has power, weapons, decisiveness to use them and great clarity about what has to be done gave up some of the privileges it had won. It will try to regain them later on, and then there will be a clash, too.
This year has already been one of violent clashes between the popular forces and those of oppression. The coming years will be similar. It cannot be said exactly when a collision will occur between such forces in each Latin American country, but it is clear that the contradictions are more and more exacerbated, and this is creating subjective conditions so important for developing a revolution. Two such conditions are particularly important: awareness of the need to effect urgent social change in order to do away with the situation of injustice and the certainty that it is possible to bring about that change.
All Latin Americans are training to bring change about. Training takes the form of uprisings and daily struggle, at times through legal means and at other times through illegal ones; at times in overt struggle and at other times underground. In all cases, the people are training constantly in all possible ways and that training is maturing in terms of quality and intensity, which presages very great future battles in Latin America.
Central America is lik
e one country sharing the same characteristics overlaid with massive imperialist domination. It is one of the places where the popular struggle has already reached a climax but where the actual results are hard to see. In the short term I do not think they are very encouraging, because of the extensive domination of the United States. In Guatemala there has been a relative failure by the progressive forces, and Mexico is fast becoming a US colony. There is a type of bourgeoisie in Mexico, but it has made a pact with imperialism. It is a difficult country that has been greatly harmed by the so-called Mexican revolution, and no important actions against its government can be foreseen there.
I have concentrated my attention on the countries that have entered into the sharpest contradictions with us and in which special conditions have been created for struggle. We have responded to the aggression through our mass media and explained as far as possible to the masses, telling them what can be done, and we are waiting. We aren’t waiting as if we were in an orchestra pit preparing to watch the fight; we aren’t spectators but rather are a part—an important part—of the struggle. The future of the peoples’ revolutions in Latin America is very closely linked to the development of our revolution.
The Awakening of Latin America Page 42