By Geraldina Colotti on November 22, 2024.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro turns 62.
On November 23, the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, celebrates one more year of his life, the sixty-second. A life dedicated, from a very young age, to the ideals of socialism, united to the multitude of young people, inspired by the October revolution and the subsequent ones. Young people who wanted to “do like Che”, lighting, everywhere, “one, ten, one hundred, one thousand Vietnam”: from the Andes to the Alps, from Latin America to Europe.
Today’s young people, deprived of memory and future in capitalist countries, cannot imagine the climate of the years in which Nicolás grew up, “a restless giant” whose “extraordinary intelligence” everyone recognized, a connoisseur of sports and music. Passions that, however, took a back seat, as “el Pajaro”, as he was called in high school, chose to be at the forefront of the student movements that rebelled against injustices, in Venezuela and the rest of the world.
Many in Europe, more accustomed to building consumerist icons or celebrating bourgeois heroes, will scoff if we mention a book published this year in Venezuela entitled Nicolás Maduro, present and future. It bears the prologue of a poet and a historian, Ana Cristina Bracho and Pedro Calzadilla, as unaccustomed to rhetoric as journalist Mercedes Chacín, who has accompanied the edition.
It is not, therefore, a hagiography, but a small fresco of history, to peek into the abyss before us and jump over it with more strength and less fear: with the enthusiasm born of great history, and the courage of those who find themselves with their backs against the wall, and must take it into account. A lens to understand the fury of imperialism against the Bolivarian country, “guilty” of possessing immense riches, and of wanting to dispose of them for social welfare. Precisely in the last few days, the United States has passed a bipartisan law to prevent any trade with Venezuela, even calling it the Bolivar Law, in total contempt of the national hero and everything he fought for….
“Blessed are the peoples who do not need heroes,” wrote the German poet Bertolt Brecht, meaning by this that an example is always needed: the example of women and men who embody the collective ideals for which they are willing to sacrifice. Even sacrificing their own lives.
Reading the letters of the partisans condemned to death by Nazism, we understand what was the force capable of winning the game: the belief that communism was “the youth of the world”, and that it prepared “singing tomorrows” to which one should contribute.
The extreme right, which builds its “international” in the four corners of the planet, knows this well. Transforming, with the capitalism of the platforms, old “myths” into new fashions, it also offers juicy poisoned meatballs to the popular classes, inducing them to follow false flags. It can take advantage of anomie.
During the twentieth century, in the complex and fierce battle that animated the world divided into “two blocks”, the bourgeoisie had the opportunity to stifle the voice of the announced “tomorrows”. It did it also by mocking the dream of those who continued to sing those mañanas, or sang them again: with new notes, new rhythms, more direct and less sophisticated, but present and still with the bar straight against the wind.
If the Cuban revolution has renewed the fear of the bourgeoisie for 65 years, the Bolivarian revolution is the “specter that has been haunting” for 25 years. “An unusual and extraordinary threat to the security of the United States”, defined Democrat Obama: the threat of the example that, in the century of the ‘post-everything’, makes possible a revenge of socialism, based on peace with social justice.
If we think that, after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the bourgeoisie trembled strongly for seventy years, we understand that the resistance of Cuba and the baton of Venezuela, which has shown the possibility of winning with the ballot box, but with the same ideals of Fidel and Che, is already a long way to remember those “mornings”.
That a former trade unionist of the subway leads the Bolivarian government, and that this happens within a collective project of popular democracy, seems unbearable for a Western capitalism that, on the “left” -a left that has now reached neoliberalism and warmongering- only produces gray technocrats, while on the right -a shrewd or shady right, depending on the most effective mask for the dominant system- appear tycoons or clowns, or uncouth people, or falsely anti-system ladies.
Even more unbearable is that this “restless giant” stood firm and knew how to overcome, “with calm and sanity, nerves of steel and maximum popular mobilization”, the multifaceted series of attacks unleashed against him by imperialism after Chávez’ death.
The Commander, whom the oligarchy defined as a “monkey” due to his indigenous origin, but whose figure today serves to disqualify the current ruler (“Maduro is not Chávez”, the “lukewarm ones” have been repeating for years), had invited the people to vote for him: “My firm opinion, full as the full moon, irrevocable, absolute, total is that, in a scenario that makes it necessary to call, as the Constitution mandates, new presidential elections, you elect Nicolás Maduro as President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. I ask it from my heart”.
Chavez pronounced these words on December 8, 2012, upon his return from Cuba where he was trying to treat a tumor, together in its final stage. And the people, that people who had accompanied him since February 4, 1992, when he unsuccessfully led the civic-military rebellion against the “camouflaged democracies” of the Fourth Republic, had placed their trust in their Chancellor, who had supported him and who had absorbed the numerous battles fought at international level to weave a “new independence” of the continent: in the name of Bolivar, and of the “democracy of peace with social justice”.
Values and beliefs that Nicolás held high in the eleven years he has governed, as vice-president in the absence of the commander, and then as president, and now re-elected on July 28 for a third term. Pedro Calzadilla, who has known him since high school, now that so much water has flowed under the bridge, finds the same Nicolás as then, a tall, mustachioed, good-humored, protective, passionate and fond of jokes.
And he writes in the book’s prologue: “He must have a soul impervious to the hatred unleashed by the oligarchies of the world when someone raises his voice to defend the poor, the working class, the weakest. The tenacious machinery of defamation, mockery and proscription against President Maduro, in the midst of an economic blockade aimed at provoking a revolt against his government and overthrowing him, has made no progress in this quality of a good leader and good man that his great mentor, Commander Hugo Chávez, wisely knew how to detect”.
What is most striking for a European Marxist is the knowledge of the history of the workers’ movement and of the resistance struggles against colonialism and slavery, which Maduro always uses in his speeches, especially in international congresses. Opportunities to restart a new common feeling and start singing together again the need for those “mornings” of resistance.
In Maduro’s speeches always emerges the importance of the Latin American union and resistance to capitalism, anchored in the figures of Bolivar, Lenin, Mao and Chavez and, in his case, also anchored in the Christ of the origins, with its own characteristics of the Venezuelan socialism of the XXI century. Nicolás comes from the Venezuelan extreme left, he was a militant of the Socialist League when he was told that a group of progressive military was trying to take power.
Then, together with the one who would become his wife, and who was then a young barricadera lawyer, Cilia Flores, he will decide to accompany the Commander’s march, from Yare -the prison where he had been locked up together with his fellow adventurers-, to Miraflores. And he will choose to be “absorbed” by history, as did Chávez, who grew up secretly reading Mao’s Red Book in the academy.
Like many young people, in Latin America and the world, Nicolás was marked by the death of Salvador Allende, the Chilean President, who chose to fall, rifle in hand. Following in the footsteps of Chavez, who vaccinated the revolution against the rise of Pinochet, by making the Bolivarian National Armed Force a new popular army acting in civic-military union, Maduro has been able to reject with the same spirit the demands of the oligarchy, despite not being a military man. And the Fanb, which for years has been led by a man of peace and culture, Vladimir Padrino López, responds to every attack by defending socialism, and with a clenched fist.
The book dedicated to Nicolás is, therefore, a collective fresco, which pays homage to so many comrades, to so many heroes who made the Bolivarian revolution possible, also fighting with weapons against those “camouflaged democracies” born of the Punto Fijo pact: the pact with which the moderate left of the time handed over to the oligarchies in Washington’s pay the hopes born of the resistance to the dictatorship of Marco Pérez Jiménez, defeated on January 23, 1958.
The sons of those heroes, like Jorge Rodriguez Sr., murdered under torture, are today the protagonists accompanying the President in his leadership of the revolution. The brothers of those heroes, former guerrillas still alive, like Fernando Soto Roja, remind today’s youth of the true nature of the bourgeois state. Fernando’s brother is still today among the “disappeared”, thrown out of a plane by that democracy highly praised by Washington, which inaugurated this practice long before the dictatorships of the Southern Cone.
The memory of that past conflict, transmitted through the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), renews young people’s awareness of the price to be paid to build those “singing mornings” for which the communists of the last century gave their lives. The experience of Nicolás, who lived the times of the last century as a young militant of the extreme left and as a trade unionist, and who knew how to weave, with Chávez, relations with a multicentric and multipolar world, with whose help he was able to face the aggressions of US imperialism and its European allies, shows that “yes it is possible”: that it is possible to win, even against a powerful enemy. And, in fact, despite sanctions, coup attempts and military invasion, Bolivarian Venezuela has managed to raise its head again, showing a process of economic recovery and international prominence.
The book dedicated to Nicolás recounts the main stages of this popular resistance, which went through the narrow doors of history, reminiscent of the lack of role of those who, in capitalist countries, are fooled by propaganda and do not reflect when criticizing what is missing, according to them, in Venezuela, about their responsibilities in having contributed to silence those “mornings” that sang in the ideals of the partisans.
Therefore, the main initiative this year was the organization of the congress against “fascism, neo-fascism and other similar expressions”, which gathered in Caracas more than 700 delegates from all continents. In this context, the International University of Communication (Lauicom), directed by Rector Tania Diaz, published a volume, significantly entitled The Masks of Fascism in the Third Millennium.
On that occasion, Maduro launched the Anti-Fascist International, whose objective is to build a common agenda of struggle – anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal – capable of articulating the local with the global. An agenda based on values antithetical to the barbarism of those who invite people to save themselves by drowning their neighbors, an agenda based on peace with social justice.