Marce Cameron
In recent months Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has not missed an opportunity to urge his supporters to contribute to a historic debate on the future of the country's Bolivarian revolution.
In the multitude of popular organisations embracing grassroots activists and a politically aroused and combative working people, this discussion is underway, spurred on by people's own experiences and by Chavez's public statements that to advance further, the revolution must break with capitalism altogether and build a new "socialism of the 21st century".
But will the country go beyond capitalism in a post-Soviet world dominated by US imperialism? And what might this "socialism of the 21st century" look like?
While Chavez has made it clear that his government does not intend to copy socialist Cuba â recognising that every socialist revolution has its own peculiarities, and does not emerge from a blueprint â valuable lessons can be learned from the experiences of other revolutions.
As the mass debate about socialism gets underway in Venezuela, Venezuelan working people are increasingly looking to Cuba's socialist revolution for inspiration. The Cuban Revolution abolished capitalism in the early 1960s. It has managed to survive into the 21st century despite a crushing four-decade-long US economic blockade and the collapse in the early 1990s of its main trading partners â the Soviet Union and the socialist states of Eastern Europe.
On the other hand, the Bolivarian revolution has surged forward just in time to bring the besieged Cuban Revolution some much needed moral and material reinforcement. With the help of Venezuela, Cuba is finally leaving behind the "special period" (post-Soviet) economic crisis.
Sure signs of this recovery are the May 1 doubling of the minimum wage and pension increases; the free distribution of rice-cookers and other basic goods to low-income households; the winding back of the number of small and medium-sized joint ventures with foreign investors; the elimination of the US dollar as legal tender and the strengthening of the Cuban currencies against the US dollar and the Euro; an overhaul of the country's aging and unreliable electrical generation system; and ambitious plans to build 100,000 houses next year to address the acute problem of overcrowded and crumbling homes.
Collaboration between the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions on every front â economic, social, political, cultural â has deepened dramatically this year and is set to further intensify, as the initiatives contained in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas accords (known by their Spanish acronym ALBA), signed by Chavez and Cuban President Fidel Castro in Havana in October 2004, begin to bear fruit.
At the heart of the ALBA accords is Venezuela's supply to Cuba of cheap oil â up to 90,000 barrels a day according to some sources â in exchange for the assistance of Cuban doctors, teachers and other professionals. But this is just the beginning. At the end of April, Chavez was back in Havana to sign a further 49 bilateral agreements.
An example of this expanded cooperation is that Cuba will buy, on credit, around US$500 million worth of Venezuelan sardines, chocolate, work-boots, lingerie and other goods for distribution at subsidised prices to Cubans. This will create an estimated 100,000 new jobs in Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA, will re-start a Soviet-era oil refinery in Cuba and explore for oil in Cuban waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
Also in the pipeline is a joint venture between Cuba and Venezuela to manufacture solar panels for Caribbean countries; Cuban assistance to develop Venezuela's sugar industry; a joint venture to build cheap housing in both countries; cooperation in protecting biodiversity; and the first ALBA games, to be held in Havana this month.
In a televised address on May 6, Castro reported to Cubans that some 20,000 Venezuelans have had their eyesight restored or improved after being treated by Cuban specialists for curable cataracts and other related conditions.
Castro reported that 7567 Venezuelans needing serious surgery had been treated in Cuba. He also revealed that Cuba is stepping up its training of Venezuelan health-care professionals, so that within 10 years 40,000 Venezuelan doctors and 5000 health technicians will have been trained.
ALBA is a bold vision for Latin American economic integration based on mutual benefit, solidarity and respect for national sovereignty. It's an alternative to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that Washington has been trying, without much success, to impose on Latin American countries in a bid to open up their economies even further to the unrestrained plunder of US corporations.
The ALBA accords have resulted in a significant strengthening of the revolutions in both Venezuela and Cuba, and the creation of a powerful Cuba-Venezuela "axis of solidarity" â a potent symbol, and a practical demonstration, of what the international solidarity of working peoples with state power in their hands can achieve.
The importance of Cuba's involvement in the Chavez government's "social missions" to bring health care, literacy, recreation and other benefits to the 80% of Venezuelans who have lived in poverty under previous governments can hardly be exaggerated.
Cuba's contribution has been critical to the success of these programs, which have consolidated the Bolivarian revolution's support among the majority of Venezuelans. Without this support the Chavez government could not have overcome the vicious campaign of destabilisation waged by Venezuela's still powerful capitalist elite.
Through these missions, the lives of the poor are being transformed. The missions have not only helped alleviate the suffering of millions of impoverished and marginalised people, they've also helped to empower them by restoring their hope and human dignity, thus allowing them to become ever-more active participants in the revolutionary process.
Without the cooperation of tens of thousands of Cuban revolutionaries â teachers, doctors, sports trainers and others â it's doubtful whether such ambitious and far-reaching social programs could have even been contemplated, let alone implemented, by the Chavez government.
The problem isn't so much that Venezuela lacks doctors or teachers, but that the vast majority of Venezuela's professionals are simply unwilling to live among and serve the poor on subsistence salaries. By contrast, Cuban professionals, educated in a spirit of human solidarity, volunteered in large numbers for the missions.
The sheer scale of this humanitarian cooperation is astounding, especially considering that Cuba is a besieged Third World country of just 12 million people. For example, by the end of 2005 there are projected to be some 30,000 Cuban health-care professionals working in Venezuela (Cuba has about 65,000 doctors).
Introducing an interview it published with Cuban doctor Llorente Munoz, who is working in Venezuela as part of the Barrio Adentro ("Inside the Neighbourhood") health-care mission, the May 20 Christian Science Monitor reported: "Munoz has a photograph of her sons tucked into the corner of her bathroom mirror. Arnaldo, 7, and Enrique, 13, are back in Cuba while she is at this small Caracas clinic taking care, as she puts it, 'of my other children' â Venezuela's poor
"Munoz is one of 20,650 Cuban health-care workers and 8600 sports instructors who have fanned out across Venezuela in the past two years, offering free checkups, medicines, and stretching classes."
Venezuela's information minister Andrs Izarra told the Monitor that since Barrio Adentro began in 2003, some 60% of the population have received health-care at one of the 300 clinics staffed by Cuban doctors and 2575 lives have been saved.
"Cuba", said Izarra, "is our ally in the war against poverty and illiteracy."
While the capitalist media in Venezuela have tried to frame the Cuban workers as "communist agents", Cuba's code of ethics forbids its internationalist volunteers from preaching the virtues of socialism.
They don't need to â actions speak louder than words. A Venezuelan mother whose sick child has been cured by a Cuban doctor might begin to wonder if maybe socialism isn't so bad after all. Indeed, opinion polls confirm that the Cuban's example is winning hearts and minds in Venezuela.
"Thanks to his 13 missions", the Monitor reported, "[Chavez] is currently enjoying a 70% approval rating, according to a Datanalisis poll published earlier this month. And while 7 [out] of 10 respondents to the poll said they did not want Venezuela to fully imitate the Cuban-style communist system, the percentage was higher than in similar polls taken five years ago."
From Green Left Weekly, June 8, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.