In this interview with Llanisca Lugo, a member of the Martin Luther King Center of Cuba, we begin the publication of a series of interviews in which Latin America is a common theme, with a look at the continent, perspectives, ideas and especially the efforts of sister organizations.
Llanisca is coordinator of the Solidarity Program of the Martin Luther King Memorial Center, a macroecumenical organization of Christian inspiration, which contributes to solidarity and popular participation, based on Popular Education and a popular theology, critical, liberatory and contextualized.
Militants from various countries reflect on the situation in the region, our tasks and challenges ahead in the search for the reconstruction of a project of transformation and buen vivir of the majorities.
How would you characterize the current Latin American context?
We are currently living at a dangerous time for all the peoples of the continent, especially for all those organized to defend the ideas of social justice for our countries, a project of popular integration that is truly capable of building popular power, that power that we need so much. There is the most reactionary right-wing ideology on the continent. There is an advance of neoliberalism, the most criminal expressions of it, in the historical attempt of imperialism to dominate our regions. There is a capitalist system in crisis that has weakened institutions. There is a judicialization of politics that is directed against social and political leaders, all the criminalization that has the complicity of different organizations, the ongoing assassinations of comrades who defend territories and community life. The whole attack against the ideology of the left and the possibility of a new world that transcends capitalism is a fundamental feature of this moment, which we need to think about, analyze, in order to understand well how the relations between the structures of oppression are being generated. How the projects of domination over our region are being taken up again, for us to also place our strategies, which clearly have to be of resistance, of support, of solidarity and also of constructing alternatives, to build processes forward in unity.
Venezuela is the center of the dispute between projects in the region. A country that now symbolizes everything that the United States and regional elites can generate in terms of violence, pressure and sanctions to erase the possibility of popular resistance. And also a country that is a symbol of a giant, that is our Latin American people. Something we can emphasize is the joy, strength and resistance of the Venezuelan people in this process, which has the support of the social and political organizations of the continent that understand the significance of this process for the region, organizations that defend the Bolivarian Revolution.
What are the tasks for left and progressive forces in the region in this context?
There are many tasks. The fundamental thing is to organize, to prioritize these tasks. To find the basis for building the unity we so desire and need. Where are the points about which we can dialogue? What are the meeting points of our anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal initiatives, where are the real dialogue exercises that we can sustain? I believe that this is a fundamental task among the popular movements, parties, but also with states, in order to recognize the tension, oppression and struggle necessary to deepen the processes. Attempting to recognize the role, and the roles played by each actor, each subject within the revolutions. Within the countries where we do not have advanced processes of construction of popular power, but the opposite, we have to find where are the possibilities of overcoming the situation. We cannot accommodate ourselves to an era of defeat.
Other very important tasks are training, strategic communication, building our revolutionary identity, organized resistance. Let them rebuild this hegemony, this common sense. We have to fight and we have to build with the people, not only with the militancy of the organizations. The left cannot be content with radical discourses within its bosom, within its theatre. It has to go to the people, it has to discuss its project with the people, rebuild its project with the people, listen to what the people need. This is another task, to build an organized popular base, dialogue with the popular bases, with the humblest people. It is a primary task of the left today.
So strategic communication, formation, dialogue with the people, articulation with the people, and with the people, is a fundamental task of the left today.
Then strategic communication, training, dialogue with the people, the coordination between forces and the construction of a program that can unite us. I believe that these are tasks that we have to face today.
How do we move forward in reconstructing that hegemony that we knew we had in previous years where greater sectors of society were receptive to ideas of transformation?
I believe that one fundamental thing is to believe in the people. This is the first thing. Sometimes the left wants the people to believe in it, “they have to believe in my project”. We will believe in the people. In the people who give food to their children, who work, we are going to dialogue with those people, who want a better society and who are often disappointed. We have to nurture faith in the people.
This cannot be achieved only through great ethical debates. It is achieved through coherent behaviour. The discussion of coherence is a discussion we must have. Coherence in all the components of life. Emancipate ourselves from all forms of oppression.
Coherence and dialogue with the people are fundamental. And another aspect is our ability to connect with people’s ideas. Sometimes we talk about things that are very far from what people want, from what people feel, very far from life. We remain tied to scenarios, structures, apparatuses that today are perhaps no longer capable of generating revolutionary scenarios. The left has to reinvent its instruments. The instrument must be the privileged territory of dialogue with the people; it should be the territory where one builds the participation of the people. But at the service of the people, not the people responding to the instrument. We must constantly transform this relationship, we must revitalize it. It is necessary to renew our methodologies.
With old instruments we cannot create new societies. In moments of crisis, of redefining ourselves as we are in organizations, the subjects are reconfigured. In the popular field, subjects reconfigure themselves.
We see the need to build a new sustainable economic model that is a guarantee of the advances we are making. How do we advance in the construction of this new model?
The first thing I think is that we have to integrate it into our debates. We always separate it. Normally, the left isolates discussions of spirituality and economy from its debates. They are not normally part of our discussions. How do we produce life? From women in their unpaid domestic work, which has to be included when we assess the prosperity of a society, to how we surpass extractive matrices. How do we build a just transition, capable of seeking a model of systemic political ecology that integrates visions so that well-being is not understood as an escalation of consumption, but rather as a life in harmony, of sharing goods, of a life in community. It is necessary to upset the paradigm that we planted in the mind of what is meant by a healthy society. There is a belief that even our progressive governments aspired to have more consumption, to get people out of poverty. Of course it is important that people get out of poverty, and this was an achievement at one time in many countries of the region, but our project cannot be to build societies with a liberal bourgeois order, with a noble and democratic capitalism, this does not exist in the world. The greatest fallacy is to believe that as long as we have capitalism we are going to have a society with democratic capacity. We need to subvert this order from below with a new creation, with innovation of what is meant by the relations of the people with the structures at the local level. We need to stimulate local self-management, which stimulates the development of enterprises at the local level that solve people’s problems, this in dialogue with state policies that must advance towards this need to overcome extractive policies, that matrix that keeps us dependent on the world economic system that will always displace us, subordinate us.
Sovereignty is fundamental. We cannot build an economy capable of feeding our peoples without sovereignty. Energy, food and territorial sovereignty and women’s sovereignty.
In this way of thinking about ourselves from an integral point of view, an axis that has been gaining strength in the region is the debate, the practices that are framed in the construction of feminism. What assessment is made of feminism in the region?
Feminism is being mediatized with a lot of intention from the centers of power. A disorganized feminism is becoming visible, with no construction of political processes. A feminism led by actresses, singers, celebrities. And the feminism from below is not made visible, built by the sweat of the women of the people who engage in politics from their bases, who are saving the lives of their comrades, who are putting their lives at risk. We are advancing in Latin America in an understanding of how this must go through our project debates. Transversally. When we discuss democracy, we discuss how women contribute to the construction of this democracy. Since the history of patriarchy. If we enclose the discussion of feminism in a trend that only revolves around itself and remains there, we are limited. We need to build, to organize the mobilizations that were once very extensive in the region.
