Report on the Bolivarian Revolution: Part 1

This report, written by Cde. Cristophe Simpson of the Jamaica Left Alliance for National Democracy and Socialism (LANDS), details his experiences during his Summer 2019 visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the 25th São Paulo Forum, hosted by the International People’s Assembly. Simpson’s first-hand account of the Bolivarian Revolution is rich with valuable insights, particularly regarding the Venezuelan masses and their relationship to the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has successfully resisted Yankee imperialism for 23 years (and counting) and is a beacon of revolutionary optimism. Simpson’s report is long (some 65 pages), so we plan to publish it in the Red Clarion as a five-part series.

The full report (all five parts) can be found here.

Introduction

I stayed in Venezuela from July 26 to August 26, which is an entire month or approximately 5 weeks, to conduct business on behalf of LANDS. The trip can be broken down into 3 parts:

• Attending the 25th Sao Paulo Forum
• Spending a week in Petare
• Participation in the Che Guevara Brigade

I spent enough time to see both good and bad things in Venezuela. It is necessary to discuss both, but this will be done carefully. Overall, the things that I had experienced and witnessed have strengthened my confidence in the Bolivarian Revolution.

The nature of the good things is very eye-opening. These are not the things that they talk about in the mainstream media, or things that even well-known activists or journalists who visit Venezuela spend much time to focus on. These are things that my organisation may have heard small references to in the past, but without in-depth detail.

The nature of the ‘bad’ things is much more sensitive. Most of these things are issues regarding specific individuals and organisations rather than the situation in Venezuela, and thus they do not need to be in a public report; these things will only be discussed within our organisation and with our Comrades from Cuba and Venezuela. These things are not major concerns for the government, but they can become weak points in the Bolivarian Revolution in the future if they go unchecked and get out of hand.

This report will focus mainly on the good things; the only ‘bad’ things that may be mentioned in this report are related to the blockade and other problems that the Venezuelan people, movements, and government are actively trying to overcome.

This report will be read by specific Comrades from organisations and movements in Venezuela before being publicly released, just as a check on the accuracy of some things said in it. Before public release, it will also be discussed with Comrades from Jamaica and Cuba, as well as allies from other countries who are engaged with LANDS.

During the trip, I had a Jamaican Comrade with me for only the first 4 days; after the first 4 days, I had not encountered another Jamaican until after I left Venezuela. With this said, the report will have more of the tone of a personal account than a typical formal report; much of it will be written in first-person and there will be many minor anecdotes.

25th São Paulo Forum

My participation in the Sao Paulo Forum was limited, as I had arrived a day late, due to things beyond my control. Some details of this will be noted in a separate private report, as they are related to other issues that I faced or noticed during the trip. I was not the only person who experienced or noticed most of these issues. As established in the introduction, rather than focusing on these problems, this report is intended to note interesting things that I experienced or what was accomplished.

We (another Comrade and I, both representing LANDS) attended the 24th Sao Paulo Forum in Cuba the year before this one and the International People’s Assembly in Venezuela early this year, so I had high expectations and I had hoped to see some persons whom I had met in Cuba. This time, I went with another Comrade who is also a registered observer in LANDS but who was representing another organisation.

There were, however, some difficulties with organising this forum in the same way as the one before. The Sao Paulo Forum in Cuba was much more seamless because the party and the state worked together to ensure its success. The International People’s Assembly that was held in Venezuela in February 2019 was also a major success; it was organised by parties, other organisations, social movements, and with heavy involvement from the Foreign Ministry.

The separation between the party and the state in Venezuela is more than one would assume and became much clearer in this event when the Foreign Ministry was less involved. Officials working in the government were responsible for reaching out to invited guests, but they were not the ones organising the forum. There was a disconnect between the officials working in the government, the Comrades in the PSUV, and the Comrades in other parties and movements that are allied with the PSUV.

There are finer details and specific individuals who could bear more responsibility for some of the problems, and this will be mentioned in the separate private report, but the point of mentioning this disconnect is to get rid of the myth that Venezuela is some one-man or even one-party dictatorship.
There was also an apparent attempt to sabotage the Sao Paulo Forum; there was a cyberattack on Venezuela’s electricity and telecommunications systems on the day that officials from the party and the Foreign Ministry were working together on important things to ensure the success of the forum. Venezuela has its internal inefficiencies like any other country does, but this exacerbated the problem.

The result was that a significant portion of delegates were not able to arrive in Venezuela in time for the start of the Sao Paulo Forum, and things were rescheduled to ensure that we could participate in some things that we would have otherwise missed; the downside of this was that certain things clashed with each other (i.e. things that were scheduled for different times were now being held concurrently, though in different locations to avoid interference with each other). With all of this said, some important experiences during the Sao Paulo Forum were mostly things that I did outside the formal confines of the forum.

Formal Participation in the Forum

Plenaries

The plenary sessions were amazing experiences, just as they were in Cuba. They had less speakers, and most were Venezuelan, but they were great, nonetheless. The Venezuelans who spoke, both the government officials and persons from social movements, accounted for many of the critiques that someone would try to make at face-value.

They spoke of many problems in concrete terms and explained the international situation with more depth than just limiting things to Trump; the blockade against Venezuela only intensified with Trump but some of the measures and sabotage started before that. Some of the things that were emphasised were the importance of production and national self-reliance, a self-critique of the old dependence on imports for food and commodities. The government of Venezuela is very aware of its problems, and we were reassured of its competence in addressing them.

Afro-Descendants Caucus

I was not able to participate much in the Afro-Descendants’ meeting, but I was pleased to see several Black Comrades from places that I’ve never seen Black representation from before. There were some technical issues (relating to the audio equipment and the translation equipment) which made it difficult to listen to most of what was happening.

Youth Caucus

I was able to participate in the Youth meeting, but I arrived late because I spent more than half of the time in the Afro-Descendants’ meeting that was taking place at the same time. Originally, they were scheduled to be at separate times.

I was given a chance to speak, and I used it to explain the current situation in Jamaica with the austerity policies, the workers’ struggles, our government’s collaboration with the US, and the difficulties with rallying support around the mainstream Left party. LANDS itself was founded partly because a group of Comrades on the Left were losing confidence in the PNP, our mainstream Left party. The JLP, the mainstream right-wing party, is in power right now.

We prefer the PNP’s foreign policy over the JLP’s foreign policy, but the PNP lost the support of many older Jamaicans after embracing austerity politics and it fails to win the support of the youth because it is seen as focusing more on history than on things that are currently relevant. The JLP has more appeal among younger people, and their current policies make them seem more concerned with welfare while people associate the PNP with austerity. They’re also better at optics.

Unscheduled Encounters

This section focuses on things that were not officially a part of the Sao Paulo Forum.

Conversation with a Comrade from Peru

One of my first encounters on this trip was before I arrived at the Sao Paulo Forum; I met Victor, a Comrade from Peru, and we quickly got along. Our conversations started with asking about the problems in our countries and the organisations that we are involved in.

At some point, we began to discuss Maoism. I told him that Maoism is a major part of my ideology but that, since he is from Peru, I needed to clarify that I’m not the same type of ‘Maoist’ as the persons in Sendero Luminoso. I loved his response; he said that they were/are not Maoist, and he went into detail, and we both spoke about that for a while.

I had a similar encounter with a Peruvian Comrade who I met in Cuba at the Sao Paulo Forum last year; he said that many Peruvian people see Sendero Luminoso as terrorists, but he didn’t say that they were “not Maoist.” I was glad for this second encounter in Venezuela.

The conversation continued and we realised we were similar in thought, having strong admiration for much of Mao’s work, disliking dogmatism, equating some self-labelled “Maoists” in Peru and the USA to Trotskyists, etc. – these were not new ideas that I introduced to him or that he introduced to me; we both had these opinions already, and there is established literature1 on the similarities between Trotskyism and this new ‘Maoism’ that emerged in the 1980s.

These things are also not mere meaningless labels for persons to identify with and have random arguments online; this is about how we go about our political work, and some reckless errors of some organisations and individuals have caused harm to communities, movements, and even entire countries. We discussed particular strategies and the errors of Sendero Luminoso, particularly how they related or failed to relate to the actual material conditions and the different classes that existed in Peru.
It’s refreshing to have these types of conversations with like-minded Comrades in person. Apart from this encounter with the Comrade from Peru, another Comrade from Jamaica and I have had similar encounters with Comrades from Brazil.

Conversation with a Comrade from the Philippines

Like Victor and I, she dislikes Puritanism, and she is critical of dogmatic or orthodox stances on countries like Cuba, Venezuela, or China. She understands that different countries have different material conditions, and she extends this to having a nuanced understanding of State Capitalism.

She isn’t, however, uncritical of China. Her issues with China are not so much their internal politics, but we did discuss the imperfections with China’s internal politics. Like me, however, she sees China as a victim of the capital of the West; capital is coercive, and the global economic system that we exist in is one where we make decisions out of desperation for capital. China accepts low wages, subprime working conditions, and other things so that it can attract foreign investment. All Global South countries do the same. We can’t make critiques of China’s internal economics2 without accounting for the pressures of the global economic system.

She says that the issues with China and the Philippines are national, and that a lot of the anti-China sentiments in the Philippines are driven by the Nationalistic petit-bourgeoisie. She says that they have to accommodate them in the Left because they are trying to build a broad front with all sectors, and she is critical of China but also of the overdone anti-China sentiments. She doesn’t make the error of seeing China as worse than the US or condone her government’s friendliness with the US, but she is caught in the middle between genuine critiques of China and simply rabid anti-China sentiments.

We briefly discussed Duterte; I said that I had hope in him when I heard him aiming for peace with the Communists, but then felt betrayed when he took a 180 turn on that, and she excitedly explained that she felt the exact same, i.e. both in having hope and in feeling let down. She invited me to the Philippines and told me of an upcoming event, and also that she would try to arrange with her Comrades to provide accommodation at the university she works at.

Bolivarian University of Venezuela

A Venezuelan Comrade organised a tour for a small group of youth to visit the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV). We visited different departments to learn about the courses that are offered. The most notable departments that we visited were linguistics, indigenous studies, and computing. As is typical in Venezuela, the university is free to attend. The bathrooms are clean and well-kept, and the common areas have comfortable furniture.

We had a meeting with the Dean of the school, in which a Comrade who worked at a university wanted to establish a working relationship between her institution and the UBV. The Dean was young (he seemed to be in his early 30s), very friendly, and welcoming. He gave us many books including one of Chavez’ most important works, the Blue Book. After our meeting, I noticed that he had some ‘Russian doll’ type figurines3 of Soviet leaders, and I casually made remarks on the leaders based on how much I liked them, i.e. I gave thumbs up to Stalin and Lenin, a so-so gesture at the leaders from Khrushchev onwards, and a confused gesture at Gorbachev. He and others repeated my thumbs up with Lenin and Stalin, the so-so gestures with the others, but he gave a thumbs down at Gorbachev.

We had heard Maduro refer to Marxism-Leninism more than once, but to see that admiration for the earlier Soviet leaders existed among other Venezuelans was important. This wasn’t the last time I encountered Venezuelans who had favourable opinions of Stalin and Mao, and the others were normal persons, not officials like the Dean of this school.

We went to the nearest subway station after leaving the university; as we walked, I noticed a newspaper stand, and a large stack of newspapers of a particular type that were insulting Maduro; I remarked that it’s ridiculous that persons call Venezuela a ‘dictatorship’ where there is ‘no freedom of speech’ while that can happen. “Is this what they call a dictatorship?” I asked. My Comrades were still around me, as we were walking together, and they had similar remarks.

I added, to the conversation, that the People’s Revolutionary Government did not tolerate such things in Grenada, and referred to an incident where they arrested a group of persons and seized all of their printing equipment to shut down a newspaper they were creating; nevertheless, I consider the People’s Revolutionary Government in Grenada to have been one of the most democratic projects in the world. If others who know about it in detail would agree with me that it was a democratic project, and if that could happen there then but isn’t happening in Venezuela, it makes no sense to say that Venezuela has no Democracy because of a supposed lack of free speech; if Venezuela had no free speech, I would not have seen those newspapers.

Visit to the Students’ Residency in Plaza Venezuela

A Comrade opted to meet up with me when he found out that I was in Venezuela; he took me on a tour of the “Students’ Residency” where he lived. Over 200 students live there. There are several floors, and each room has 2-3 persons cohabiting as roommates. The kitchens and restrooms are communal, and there are free Wi-Fi zones; the size of each room is decent, and the conditions of the building seem very much like a regular university dorm in the Caribbean. The roof has a small garden with pumpkins and other things, as well as some equipment for working out.

The students took control of the building by seizing it around the time that its restoration was almost finished. On each floor, schedules are displayed with responsibilities and chores (like cleaning the common areas) assigned to different persons; these are collectively decided in meetings, which are held regularly on each floor. Delegates from each floor together form a committee which co-governs the entire building along with the institutional presence of the mayor’s office; the entire building is self-governed in that the administration, decisions, and even the security is done by the students themselves.

The students don’t pay rent in the typical sense, but they pay a small maintenance fee which goes towards expenses like utilities (which are cheap) and cleaning supplies. They oversee this money themselves; they know what it is spent on. This is to say that they are not students renting spaces from a landlord; they are students who pool funds to maintain the building that they live in. They also don’t jointly own the building as specific individuals; the building is collectively controlled by students in that only students are allowed to live there; someone is not allowed to continue to live there after they finish school. The students attend multiple different universities.

I asked what happens if a student gets pregnant, and I was told of 2 specific cases; one student opted to leave the building, and I assume this may have been because she wanted to discontinue studies, but another student stayed and the residents on her floor collectively discussed how the baby would be taken care of. I was also told that they offer education on contraception to lessen the chance of student pregnancies. I also asked what happens if persons want to swap roommates to be with their friends, and I was told that that is facilitated but that there is a process which involves meeting with all the affected persons.

The students don’t have formal/official ownership of the building, but they are in talks with the government about that. It would be owned by the collective as an institution, not by the individual students. There are business interests in the building, so the government has asked them to consider doing small-scale commercial activity on the ground floor.

Commercial activity could take multiple forms, and I had offered my suggestions which were welcomed by my Comrade; they also had their own existing ideas as well. The ground floor has the entrance, a stairwell, the elevator, and a lot of empty space. Commercial activities could fall into 2 main categories; commercial operations done by the students themselves, or commercial operations done by outsiders who pay rent to the collective of students since the collective of students would be responsible for maintaining the building. The more creative ideas would involve commercial operations done by the students themselves, but even outsiders could mean small vendors instead of larger establishments.

Ideally, the students could do something that they themselves would use. They could set up a gym, a printery, a laundromat, a café, a cookshop, or similar things. Depending on the type of service, the students could not get them for free; still, it would be better for the students to buy from there than to go to a separate for-profit establishment. These small businesses would need revenue, but the benefit is that they would employ the students themselves, and the profit would go to development of the building (and if a high profit is achieved, prices could be cut which would both increase the appeal of the businesses to outsiders and the benefits that students get from using those services instead of going elsewhere).

In general, this was simply a fascinating project to learn about. Hopefully it can inspire similar movements in Jamaica, as our people – especially young adults – struggle with access to land and housing. The monthly rent for a student living on campus at UWI is around the same as or more than our monthly minimum wage in Jamaica. Many people have built their houses on land that they don’t own, being labelled as ‘squatters’ and forming entire communities of informal settlements. We need tenants’ unions and more social movements like these in Jamaica.

Assembly of the Caribbean Peoples

Some members of the Regional Executive Committee of the Assembly of Caribbean Peoples had a meeting during lunch time on one of the days of the Sao Paulo Forum, to plan for the upcoming 8th Assembly. I informed them that I could not attend the 8th Assembly because I would still be in Venezuela, but that another Comrade would represent LANDS.

We discussed a few things, including what to do about translation equipment and some proposals that I had for the methodology of the Assembly after experiencing some issues the last time. We have been stressing the need to build a communication network among ourselves so that integration is something we feel when we are in our respective countries, not only when we have money to spend on flights to meet up in the same place.

Environmentalist Caucusing

In Cuba in 2018, we had encountered a coalition from Mexico called Nueva Esperanza, and one of the movements in the coalition was the Movimiento Animalista. In February 2019, we encountered MEVEN, the Ecologist Movement in Venezuela; the persons I mainly interacted with are persons who really love animals. Unfortunately, our Mexican Comrades from the Movimiento Animalista could not make it to either the International Peoples Assembly or the Sao Paulo Forum this year, due to personal reasons unrelated to the forum or Venezuela.

Our Comrades from Movimiento Animalista informed us that someone from Nueva Esperanza was attending the Sao Paulo Forum, and we had tried to set up an informal meeting between them and MEVEN. Both parties were interested, but we ran tight with time, so it did not end up happening. The interest seems to be there nevertheless, so we hope that these organisations will build a formal relationship soon.

Agro-Urban Movement

I was walking around the Teresa Carreño Theatre and I was fascinated by a particular video that I watched as well as a separate display set up by the Agro-Urban movement. After expressing this to a Comrade, he told me that the Venezuelan government has a Ministry of Urban Agriculture.

LANDS has been wanting to do urban agriculture projects for a while, but we haven’t found a space inside any community, except 2 Comrades’ homes; these Comrades don’t own these homes as they still live with their parents, so we don’t have that much liberty with the space. We got permission to use some space in the yard of the Venezuelan Institute for Cultural Cooperation, but that institute suspended operations because the sanctions have left them unable to pay utilities or staff since 2018. We hope that we can get some help with starting urban agriculture projects, whenever the sanctions are lifted or circumvented. We are looking for expertise or technical assistance in terms of training, not funding or materials. Still, even education and non-political cooperation have fallen victim to the sanctions.

Housing Missions

The government has built roughly 3 million homes and given them to the people for free; there was a stall displaying the different models of these homes. A model of a 3-bedroom house with an indoor laundry area caught my eye. The Comrades who were responsible for the display engaged me, and I told them about a similar common model in Jamaica, a 2-bedroom and 1-bathroom house that doesn’t have an indoor laundry area, and that costs millions of dollars.

Conversations with a Businesswoman’s Son

There is free public Wi-Fi at the Teresa Carreño Theatre, so I was pacing around a particular area for a while to try to connect to it. I was familiar with the area because I had hung out with a friend there in February. A random teenager in the same area saw me and knew what I was doing; he told me that it would be difficult to connect to the internet because of how crowded the place was at the time. He offered to turn on his hotspot to share data with me.

The teenager speaks English and he seemed open to conversation, so I engaged him a little. He’s white and his mother is a businesswoman6, and a Comrade had told me that this is a popular hangout spot for petit-bourgeois youth in Caracas at another point in time, so I considered the possibility that this boy may support the opposition and/or have negative feelings about the forum. He knew about the forum, I told him why I was there and the ideology and the type of movement that I’m involved in, and he didn’t give me any strange reaction or even disturbed facial expression; this is important to note because many right-wingers in Venezuela were not happy about the Sao Paulo Forum or the invitation of Leftists from other countries to Venezuela. Our conversation continued as normal.

As he knew why I was there, I was able to say/ask things more frankly/directly; I didn’t rush into asking it awkwardly, I had asked him permission to ask something political first. He told me that he is neutral in politics, and then I told him that I’ve never met any opposition supporters because everyone I meet either supports the government or is neutral. He told me that his father supports the Venezuelan opposition but that he lives in the US, while his mother lives in Venezuela and is neutral like he is. Socialism obviously doesn’t appeal to his class interests, but he still doesn’t support the opposition; I suppose that he doesn’t have enough discontent to decide to support the opposition, or the opposition simply doesn’t appeal to him with all its theatrics and careless tactics.

Even though this was a minor encounter, it was important. If the situation in Venezuela was as bad as the Western media describes, one would imagine that this random teenager who doesn’t support the government would have rushed at the first opportunity to tell me how bad things in the country are, possibly question why I would support Socialism, or at least show some sort of unwillingness to interact with me if he wasn’t in the mood for some political encounter; after all, this is how many persons who claim to be Venezuelan7 behave online. However, this teenager was quite friendly to me. Venezuela isn’t as politically-polarised8 as the Western media makes it seem.

Conversation with DPRK Diplomats

A diplomat from the DPRK opted to sit beside me on one of the days of the Sao Paulo Forum, and we had walked and talked together on our way from somewhere to Miraflores. He introduced me to the DPRK’s ambassador to Venezuela, and we had a pleasant conversation as well.

I told him that we were contacted before by someone from the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to start a Jamaica-Korea Friendship Association, but that we haven’t been able to manage such a task at this point in time. We were pleased to see the DPRK and Venezuela strengthening their ties, and to see the DPRK participating in the Sao Paulo Forum.