The Seeds of Latin America's Rebirth Were Sown in Cuba

On 9 October 1967, Che Guevara faced a shaking sergeant Mario Teran,
ordered to murder him by the Bolivian president and CIA, and declared:
"Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man." The climax of Stephen
Soderbergh's two-part epic, Che, in real life this final act of heroic
defiance marked the defeat of multiple attempts to spread the Cuban
revolution to the rest of Latin America.

But 40 years later,
the long-retired executioner, now a reviled old man, had his sight
restored by Cuban doctors, an operation paid for by revolutionary Venezuela
in the radicalised Bolivia of Evo Morales. Teran was treated as part of
a programme which has seen 1.4 million free eye operations carried out
by Cuban doctors in 33 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean
and Africa. It is an emblem both of the humanity of Fidel Castro and
Guevara's legacy, but also of the transformation of Latin America which
has made such extraordinary co-operation possible.

The 50th
anniversary of the Cuban revolution this month has already been the
occasion for a regurgitation of western media tropes about pickled
totalitarian misery, while next week's 10th anniversary of Hugo
Chavez's presidency in Venezuela will undoubtedly trigger a parallel
outburst of hostility, ridicule and unfounded accusations of
dictatorship. The fact that Chavez, still commanding close to 60%
popular support, is again trying to convince the Venezuelan people to
overturn the US-style two-term limit on his job will only intensify
such charges, even though the change would merely bring the country
into line with the rules in France and Britain.

But it is a
response which also utterly fails to grasp the significance of the wave
of progressive change that has swept away the old elites and brought a
string of radical socialist and social-democratic governments to power
across the continent, from Ecuador to Brazil, Paraguay to Argentina:
challenging US domination and neoliberal orthodoxy, breaking down
social and racial inequality, building regional integration and taking
back strategic resources from corporate control.

That is the
process which this week saw Bolivians vote, in the land where Guevara
was hunted down, to adopt a sweeping new constitution empowering the
country's long-suppressed indigenous majority and entrenching land
reform and public control of natural resources - after months of
violent resistance sponsored by the traditional white ruling class.
It's also seen Cuba finally brought into the heart of regional structures from which Washington has strained every nerve to exclude it.

The
seeds of this Latin American rebirth were sown half a century ago in
Cuba. But it is also more directly rooted in the region's disastrous
experience of neoliberalism, first implemented by the bloody Pinochet
regime in the 1970s - before being adopted with enthusiasm by Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and duly enforced across the world.

The
wave of privatisation, deregulation and mass pauperisation it unleashed
in Latin America first led to mass unrest in Venezuela in 1989,
savagely repressed in the Caracazo massacre of more than 1,000 barrio
dwellers and protesters. The impact of the 1998 financial crisis
unleashed a far wider rejection of the new market order, the politics
of which are still being played out across the continent. And the
international significance of this first revolt against neoliberalism
on the periphery of the US empire now could not be clearer, as the
global meltdown has rapidly discredited the free-market model first
rejected in South America.

Hopes are naturally high that Barack
Obama will recognise the powerful national, social and ethnic roots of
Latin America's reawakening - the election of an Aymara president was
as unthinkable in Bolivia as an African American president - and start
to build a new relationship of mutual respect. The signs so far are
mixed. The new US president has made some positive noises about Cuba,
promising to lift the Bush administration's travel and remittances ban
for US citizens - though not to end the stifling 47-year-old trade
embargo.

But on Venezuela it seemed to be business as usual
earlier this month, when Obama insisted that the Venezuelan president
had been a "force that has interrupted progress" and claimed Venezuela
was "supporting terrorist activities" in Colombia, apparently based on
spurious computer disc evidence produced by the Colombian military.

If
this is intended as political cover for an opening to Cuba then perhaps
it shouldn't be taken too seriously. But if it is an attempt to isolate
Venezuela and divide and rule in America's backyard, it's unlikely to
work. Venezuela is a powerful regional player and while Chavez may have
lost five out of 22 states in November's regional elections on the back
of discontent over crime and corruption, his supporters still won 54%
of the popular vote to the opposition's 42%.

That is based on a
decade of unprecedented mobilisation of oil revenues to achieve
impressive social gains, including the near halving of poverty rates,
the elimination of illiteracy and a massive expansion of free health
and education. The same and more is true of Cuba, famous for first
world health and education standards - with better infant mortality
rates than the US - in an economically blockaded developing country.

Less
well known is the country's success in diversifying its economy since
the collapse of the Soviet Union, not just into tourism and
biotechnology, but the export of medical services and affordable
vaccines to the poorest parts of the world. Anyone who seriously cares
about social justice cannot but recognise the scale of these
achievements - just as the greatest contribution those genuinely
concerned about lack of freedom and democracy in Cuba can make is to
help get the US off the Cubans' backs.

None of that means the
global crisis now engulfing Latin America isn't potentially a threat to
all its radical governments, with falling commodity prices cutting
revenues and credit markets drying up. Revolutions can't stand still,
and the deflation of the oil cushion that allowed Chavez to leave the
interests of the traditional Venezuelan ruling elite untouched means
pressure for more radical solutions is likely to grow. Meanwhile, the
common sense about the bankruptcy of neoliberalism first recognised in
Latin America has now gone global. Whether it generates the same kind
of radicalism elsewhere remains to be seen.