By Geraldina Colotti on December 28, 2022
José Ernesto Novaez, poet, writer, essayist and coordinator of the Cuban chapter of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity (REDH-Cuba). We met him in Caracas, at the International Book Fair (Filven), where Cuba was present with a stand full of precious cultural proposals, and with a panel of authors who participated in numerous debates at the Fair.
The slogan of Filven 2022 was “Reading decolonizes”. A theme around which, in its 64 years of existence, the Cuban revolution has built a message of resistance and perspective for all peoples determined to be free.
What was and what is the contribution of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Popular Movements in Defense of Humanity?
The REDH was born as a space to bring together intellectuals, artists, leftists, or progressives not only around concrete political projects but also in defense of the great causes that affect humanity as a species. At this moment, in the face of humanity, the contradiction posed at the time by Rosa Luxemburg, that between civilization and barbarism, is more present than ever. We are faced with the unavoidable need to free ourselves from a system that degrades life at a rate that compromises the survival capacity of the species, that leads to misery the growing masses of the world’s population, while wealth is increasingly concentrated in a few hands. A situation in which fascism is returning to the countries of the hard core of European capitalism. What is happening in Italy is paradigmatic. Fascism is the expression of the inability of capitalism to resolve the contradictions of the system, with its policy of exclusion, terror, and legitimization of superiority over others, seen as barbarians and devalued. The REDH has the great task of confronting this threat and contributing, in its small measure, to the development of Latin American integration, at a potentially favorable moment, given that the left, in its various political shades, is governing the major economies of the region, has a political dominance at the level of the South American area. Our task is to contribute to the public debate on the necessary policy at local, national and international levels, and to promote a common inter-American and international agenda as the only way to confront the organized barbarism of capitalism with its great military bloc of terror, NATO.
What will be the main stages of this agenda for 2023 and on what issues?
Our great task, to quote an expression of Fernando Buen Abad, is to produce the semiotic ammunition necessary for the processes of revolutionary social transformation. This implies an analysis of the errors and weaknesses to be resolved in order to fight against the cultural hegemony of capitalism, against the colonialism of minds, and to transform this semiotic ammunition into common weapons, within the reach of all revolutionary and progressive forces. This battle against capitalism is above all a practical battle, against its structures of domination, but it is also a battle to be won on the symbolic front, otherwise we are condemned to return to the past. The contribution of REDH is therefore to deepen the roots of this project of emancipation, making critical thinking, and revolutionary critique, a militant tool.
It is important to reiterate that liberating the mind from colonialism is first and foremost a material process, while some postmodern tendencies have taken other directions.
Yes, it is important to reiterate that language is a field of dispute, but it is not the only one. We must take power, we must fight in practice, and do so with intelligence and critical sense, taking into consideration the historical context and the characteristics of each country. Frantz Fanon and his essay “The Damned of the Earth” are still relevant today. However, defeating colonialism by force of arms is only part of the task. The real challenge begins when the revolutionary forces have to build a truly sovereign, truly decolonizing project. This is where we have had the most difficulty because, in spite of more than two centuries of Latin American independence, symbolic independence has not always been achieved, a sovereign project that pretends to have a clear conception not only of country but also of the nation. We have to fight against a cancer that is taking hold of the progressive forces: nationalism, which stains this vision, because it is not about the love of country, in the sense of loving and defending the nation, that is, in its relationship with the other. My homeland cannot be truly sovereign if the context that surrounds it is not that of an emancipated, prosperous and dignified Latin America.
…The chauvinist “small homelands” fed by the extreme right, such as the “Make America Great Again”, used by Donald Trump in his electoral campaign…
Yes, the sectarianism of the nation-state. José Martí has pointed out an unsurpassable definition: Homeland is humanity. It is man himself who defends himself by defending his country, but this defense is linked to the defense of Venezuela, of Cuba, of Palestine, of all just causes at the continental and international level: a global battle against a system that is global.
Decolonizing the imaginary also means depatriarchalizing it, crossing the gender struggle with that of capitalism and imperialism. Do you agree?
Undoubtedly. In the ontological concept, and in the process of joint emancipation that cannot be exclusive, it is necessary to measure men and women, both on the basis of the position they occupy in society, and on the basis of the structures of domination operating in a given society. The mere fact of placing a woman in a certain place does not mechanically transform the situation of women, and even if we arrive at a society in which women are not marginalized, they may still be marginalized if certain mental patterns exist. There is a tendency to make women invisible even in progressive sectors. Sometimes it happens that a very advanced panel is organized, in which revolutionary speeches are envisaged, but women do not appear: not because there are none, but because dynamics are created and imposed that invisibilize and ignore the role of women. The culture of machismo is difficult to eradicate, and unfortunately so are all the flaws produced by discrimination, which considers some subjects as second-class: because overcoming this discrimination means losing concrete privileges, a status of superiority that produces a practical advantage, not only symbolic. In a male-dominated society, a man has more chances of getting a job, or in any case even with the same job, in a couple, he has a greater weight in the power relationship at the social level. We have to depatriarchalize, not in a dogmatic way, but by directing efforts in the right way, so that there are more opportunities and so that the most suitable people occupy the positions.
And how is the situation in Cuba on this issue?
After the Revolution, it was necessary to make additional educational efforts aimed at women, because even in general poverty, men were still favored with a set of possibilities that women did not have. An effort had to be made and it was worth it. Much progress has been made in terms of laws and regulations. However, although we have overcome many concrete manifestations of machismo, it is difficult to eradicate, because it takes refuge in cultural and institutional practices, etc., that voluntarily or involuntarily reproduce it.
You are very young, and you have not known the years of feminist struggles in capitalist countries. How do you rate the level of knowledge of your contemporaries on this issue? Don’t you think there was a setback?
In Cuba, perhaps in certain sectors of society, yes. Globally, this time of economic crisis, crisis of the paradigm of the capitalist model, also generates a moral and political crisis that affects the daily life of individuals. This reopens the way to retrograde visions of reality. In the case of Latin America, we are witnessing the growth of religious fundamentalism which, promising a radiant future, subjects entire masses of individuals to relationships of spiritual, symbolic domination. We see that, on the one hand, human society – especially in the Western world, because the Eastern world has other characteristics that sometimes it is very risky to analyze with Western canons – seems to have reached a shared consciousness in the conquest of the rights of social groups that had been marginalized in other historical stages. On the other hand, this awareness conflicts with the conservative visions that the crisis is producing, in which certain sectors feel threatened and think that the way to save themselves is to take refuge in the extreme right, in the exclusion of the other. For this reason, racism, xenophobia and the exclusion of those who are different are advancing in rich economies, such as those of Europe, in which migrants play a fundamental role. It is also a way of channeling discontent. In Russia, the czars, when social tensions increased, organized pogroms and massacred Jews. Persecuting, making invisible, and demonizing the other is a mechanism of domination and control. In the countries that constitute the hard core of capitalism, we see that many sectors, especially the middle and upper classes, the more their status is threatened, the more they adhere to fascist options, while the most disadvantaged sectors, whether in the rich countries or those of the global south, take refuge in spiritual, religious or political alternatives of a fundamentalist nature. And so come unpresentable characters like Bolsonaro, who fortunately lost the elections against Lula, in Brazil, although he continues to lead a very high level of polarization. To this contribute the hegemonic media, which every day romanticize the issues, demonizing without measure the option of the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism by the left, repeating that socialism in all its forms is not a serious option, it is the gulag, etc: a black legend to confuse, also based on the errors of socialism. Entire sectors are made to believe that the only way to govern a society is to go more and more to the right and that the left is bad.
This January 1st Cuba celebrates one more year of revolution, and continues to be a beacon in the world. However, while Latin America is moving towards change, in Europe -I am thinking mainly of Italy- the popular classes have not been able to produce structural changes, neither with votes nor with weapons. How do you explain it? How do we get out of it?
I will give you a personal opinion. In Western Europe, after World War II, the United States built a political, financial and diplomatic architecture to serve its interests. The UN Security Council is an artifice that empties the United Nations Organization of meaning, because it does not matter how the world votes, what matters is the veto power of a single great nation, which renders ineffective any resolution or measure that the rest of the world decides. The same thing happened with the Bretton Woods agreements and with the construction of that international monetary order. The United States became the victorious great power not because it had won the war, which was won by the Soviet Union, but because it was the power that emerged strengthened from the conflict, from all points of view: with its army practically intact, with its national territory unharmed, where not a single bomb had fallen, with an industrial capacity fortified by the money that had flowed in rivers, and with the capacity to maintain a critical influence over the old European powers that had already gone bankrupt after the Second World War. None of the great colonial empires survived the crisis of World War II. Therefore, what took shape after this war was a Europe in which the enormous amount of resources introduced by America to stabilize Western European capitalism produced a kind of cushion, formed by the middle class, which was able to cushion and neutralize the strong revolutionary tendency that existed in some important countries, such as Italy or Greece, or France. I could say that the impasse in which the region finds itself is the result of the betrayal of the European middle class and the European proletariat to the international revolutionary cause. I know it is a strong thesis, but I believe that the European proletariat has tacitly accepted to outsource the cost of its development to the Third World, in exchange for high living standards. Marx says that capitalism, like a vampire, grows by sucking the blood of the proletariat. European capitalism has grown by devouring the blood of its workers and, since World War II, has outsourced the costs of its development to the underdeveloped countries of the South. An important part of the European middle class and proletariat has totally betrayed the revolutionary cause and has settled for a standard of living determined by good wages, forgetting that this was only possible in the elitist core of world capitalism, and at the cost of the violent destabilization of Latin America and other regions of the world. To ensure the permanent flow of capital and raw materials to maintain that standard of living, democratically elected governments were overthrown and replaced with bloody dictatorships that violently eliminated progressive forces. A global social pact was imposed to deindustrialize our countries: we did not have to assume the burden of development, but only to guarantee the raw materials that would allow a huge advantage for the great European capital. Several generations of Europeans have lived better than the previous ones. When did this whole mechanism begin to enter into crisis? When the neoliberal policy of Thatcher and Reagan – that of the richest 1% who want to cut social costs for the majority in order to increase their dividends – begins to deteriorate the purchasing power of European society and the standard of living of American society.
And in Latin America?
The situation in Latin America was very different. The new republics born out of the wars of liberation had different national projects, with bourgeoisies that were often incapable of articulating organic processes of industrialization and that ended up selling the country to big British and American finance capital. They were incomplete democracies, whose presidents on their first visit went to the U.S. embassy to be accredited in Washington, to be presidents of a supposedly sovereign nation. In this context, what happened in Cuba was of decisive importance: because, while big finance capital dominated all the vital nerve centers of the nation, a revolution took place which quickly became radicalized and went on to a violent process of nationalization of big capital, fundamentally US capital. It was necessarily a violent process because there is no historical precedent in which U.S. big business peacefully abandoned power and lost its interests. A timid project of social reform, of politeia with big capital, would have had a dramatic outcome like that of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, a generational trauma that all Cuban revolutionaries knew well. That is why we continue to be subjected to the blockade, which obviously has a very high cost for a small island that does not have large natural reserves. The blockade hits the productive systems of the nation, and causes shortages and misery, but it did not break us. The blockade is the expression of the inability of U.S. imperialism, the greatest in the history of mankind, to conquer a tiny Caribbean island that has only now reached 11 million
inhabitants. From the comparative point of view we are an insignificant threat, but from the symbolic point of view we are very dangerous because Cuba is a country where the people suffer extreme shortages every day, but where they have been able to control the pandemic very well. We have produced five vaccines. If blockaded and underdeveloped socialism can do this, what could it not do if it were free of sanctions? That is the danger, that is why they sanction Cuba, that is why they sanction Venezuela. The blockade is an element of the weakness of U.S. capitalism, which does not have the strength to assume the costs of a military invasion to crush a popular process, taking the risk of healing fractures that would be recomposed in terms of the defense of the homeland.
Thanks to the commitment of Cuba and Venezuela, in recent years several world congresses have been organized in Caracas focusing on the need to rebuild an international articulation of revolutionary and progressive forces on the basis of a common agenda and the recognition of the existence of a common enemy. How do you see this path?
I am a chronic optimist. If we look at the process of symbolic colonization of capitalism, which goes through individualization – they want us alone, alienated, possibly drugged, unable to truly love – building a collective, thinking and acting together is an important form of resistance. I believe that there are spaces of progressive articulation in contemporary capitalist societies, which may not be as we would like them to be, but they are important spaces of resistance. They also exist in the United States, the homeland of individualism and selfishness, which a poem by José Martí describes as a prosperous but unhappy nation. The great challenge is how to make this spontaneous articulation, which is an almost instinctive form of resistance of the human community, become politicized in the sense of understanding that the transformation of the system does not pass through my overcoming as an individual, but through the transformation of economic, political and social logics on a large scale. On the other hand, this individualization reaches the point of attributing to the individual responsibilities that go beyond his or her possibilities, for example in the ecological issue. They are led to believe that if they do not use plastic plates and make a selective waste collection, the environmental footprint decreases, while in reality, the individual impact is, in any case, derisory compared to that of multinationals such as Coca Cola, which wastes dozens of liters of water and throws tons of chemicals into rivers and soil with impunity, putting its profits first. We must also abandon the idea that, for example, such a transnational is good because in Europe it does not destroy rivers… but it does destroy the forests of the countries of the South. Either we assume that the solution is collective, or we will continue to sink into despair. The great challenge is how we manage to repoliticize towards the left-growing sectors of the hard core of contemporary capitalism, because only by overcoming capitalism can the species be saved. There is no middle ground between civilization and barbarism.