ROUTE OF REVOLUTIONS

Three countries in the New World. The United States, Mexico, and Cuba. Three experiences of revolution. Three attempts to reach a radical change, a new future. Three ways to create a new society. But what these societies aimed to? Did they have success?

The circle is always a returning line to the same point. The sphere rotates and, at some point, changes its speed and turns. This is called revolution. A sudden modification in the angle of rotation and momentum. From astral bodies to genetic functions, to revolute something is to alter it in a deep manner, is the contrary to the mere reform and progressive change.

Revolutions are everywhere, from the evolution of species, to the way a baby cries when is born, to the form one person can exercise a radical attraction over us. My life experienced a revolution every time I fall in love or I moved to a new culture. But in the case of an entire country, what lead people to demand and seek for a revolution in their lives?

In the case of the mentioned countries, different reasons were behind their historical revolutions. Yet, a common factor was determinant: the aim to establish a connection between the world of politics and the world of people; in the same sense, it consisted of bringing the world of flesh and bones to politics. Revolution is between ideal horizons and those who suffer, feel and have joy. It is the very connection between promises and the actualization of those promises over concrete persons in specific moment of history.  Let me describe briefly each of those revolutions.

The American Revolution

The colonization of thirteen colonies in the north Atlantic was different from other parts in America. Yet, in 1776, white settlers with support of slaves and foreign powers challenge the rule of Britain. The separation was based on tribute sovereignty and representation. If one pay taxes and is not represented (consulted) in the Parliament as an equal citizen, then the decision lack representation. As the British forces pushed up and even used violent coercion over the locals, and feeling as second-class citizens and considering the colonial rule as illegitimate, the American armies vanquish the colonialist and after ten years of war establish the first modern state based on Enlightment ideas of freedom and responsible government against tyranny. Obviously, those ideals were not truly implemented and served as excuses to subjugate slaves and to foster an imperialist expansion in the next centuries.

For example, when I was in Philadelphia and Washington, some public museums denounced the long road to improve freedom and responsibility in American politics. The African American Museum and the Americas Indian Museum from the Smithsonian association retold all the struggles and the need to rescue and implement the ideals that created the revolution back in the 18th century. Jefferson words about freedom and dignity that echoed Spinoza, Locke and other thinkers who explored concepts as love, equality, plurality, tolerance, and so on, are still the corner stones behind social claims nowadays. To see and study how those ideals traveled across time and places is beautiful. And the present time, filled of obscurantism and deliberate ignorance from the elites, demand more than ever to reestablish the path of dignity and freedom.

Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. Luther King Memorial, Washington DC.

A couple during the rain in Manhattan (2019). Every act of love is radical, every revolution needs to forge love.

The Mexican revolution.

After the independence from Spain and the war against the United States in the first half of the 19th century, the Mexican rule was defined by a program of modernization, concentration of land and power in the figure of Porfirio Diaz. The failure of Diaz regime outbreak a violent and long conflict from 1910 and 1920 acknowledged as the Mexican revolution. During this period, different factions (from the southern Zapatian peasant workers, to the Northern Villa rural militias) challenged the central power and conquered the capital city in a symbolic march that represented the provisional victory from those remote and excluded areas over the institutions of government. A clear answer from the peoples ignored and left to die for centuries in one of the countries with most inequality in the Americas. The revolution is so complex and had many actors, but, after the 1920s, the revolutions energies were directed into an institutional party (PRI) and the social experimentation of social justice and land for small peasants were annulled in the following decades. Historians such as Adolfo Gilly even claim that the Mexican experience was the Interrupted Revolution.

I have two opinions about my trip to Mexico, one as a researcher and another as a traveler who tries to enjoy and live the place. In the first one, Mexico is a very multifaceted place that I liked. It is an authentic country with all its problems of security, corruption, poverty, etc. People there are generally hardworking and many strive to earn some money in informality. The social inequality tear me apart inside. Even so, there is some mix between the “Spanish”, the indigenous nations (the national anthropological museum is spectacular btw) and the modernizing program (since the time of Porfirio Diaz) that make this place unique. Modernity in Mexico is surrealist. Postmodernism was invented here a long time ago, even before any theorization like those of Octavio Paz in his Labyrinth of Solitude, a book that talks about what meant to be Mexican in a labyrinth of identities and crossing cultures since the Spanish conquest. In addition, Realism in Mexico is magical. The dysfunctional democracy is presented as the institutionalization of perfect social control against any neo-revolutionary attempt of social justice claim, think for example in the case of the students of Ayotzinapa. In short, the revolution of 1910 that is remembered one day in November is the revival of an old yearning that everything remains the same under the sun.

In the second approach, Mexico is still a magic place that reminds me a lot from my childhood times in other Latin American countries. I can travel back in time walking in the streets, eating at food trucks and markets.  I ´ve tasted food like quesadillas and pozoles, saw the color of painting, murals and buildings, walekd with people in crowded stations and felt the chaos of Mexico City. I even visited pre-Columbian pyramids and ruins in Teotihuacan (to my surprise they were even previous to the Mexica and Aztecs and were abandoned in the 9th century) and in Cholula (another majestic architectonic complex from Cholula´s peoples that were bloody conquered by Cortez). In short, enchantment and decadence altogether, revival and death, those are the fingerprints of the Mexican culture.

Zapata light portrait at Zocalo Square, 102th celebration of the Revolution, Mexico City

Nations from Mexico and festivals. National Antropological Museum (2019).

The Cuban Revolution

Perhaps the most difficult revolutionary experience to be told is the Cuban one. The motives and literature behind it are very known. The starting uprising of a vanguard of guerrillas that expelled the dictator Fulgencio Batista with support from the United States in the 1950s and the conquest of La Habana in 1959. Among those figures were Fidel Casto, Ernesto Guevara, Santiago Cienfuegos, and so on. The socialization of the revolution, the opposition from the USA, the connection to the URSS and the attempts to survive the economic embargo and preserve the initial impetus of the revolution. To mention the Cuban revolution is to mention how one of the poorest Caribean islands (peasants in rural areas were literally starving while rich tourists gambled in casinos in the capital) strived to conquer dignity, equality and light the path to a more radical attempt of social revolution if compared to other revolutionary cases in the Americas. This socialist recent experience marked by the Cold War ideological battles was hard to be achieved especially by the isolation from other powers, the rigid structure of the ruling communist party and the limits of the revolution itself (in terms of social justice and human rights).

When I was visiting the island, some of the people complained about the material constraints, the lack of opportunities and the low social mobilization in Cuba. Indeed, going there is like traveling back to the 1950, the tour guides even sell the imaginary of this time as ways of consumption (ride in Cadillac cars, visit to tobacco plantations, etc). It seems that there is like two islands in one, for local and for tourist. There are two currencies, two kinds of hotels, two parallel economies and ways of living. In the one hand, if one does not work in tourism areas, the island is the eternal promise of achieve the revolution and attend public schools, hospitals, pharmacies and assemblies, even if the impetus and ideals are escleroside. For example, when I was in the southern coast, in Pigs Bay, a place where Cuban exhiled militias sponsored by the USA invaded the island to overthrow Castro, I visited a small museum dedicated to the victory over the invaders, the virtues of the people and the brave heart of the leaders who defended the country. But the rhetoric and the brightness of the revolution stops there, when you leave the museum. In the outside world, people talk close to a bar, they work building houses for tourists, and the Caribbean turquoise waters seduce you to forget politics and swim.

A visit to the Cuban Artistic museum is also overloaded with political context and meaning. However, in the attempt to guide arts, the revolutionary government turned into a machinery of conservatism and rigid structure. It does not mean that some of the artistic exhibition are fantastic and have deep meaning. Yet, there is a continuous sensation of living in a reality stemmed from above (with slogans, messages, and rhetoric) that does not catch up with the mutable and heterogeneous will of the people. In my judgment, people should be the center and the promise of revolutions, especially if they are socialist projects. Thus, an alienated and rigid top ruling party disconnected from the people below (even if they foster associations, assemblies, social programs that are admired by other countries) should be deepened with participation in the top spheres of power. And this is a point never reached in Cuba or in other countries, but at least, to the eyes of history, this country tried.

Malecón, La Habana during the sunset.

Locals sparing in Playa Girón. 2019.

Looking at the driving mirror

The capillarity and granularity of institutions die when they reach the bottom level of policies. If there could be a way and an institutional form (perhaps direct anarchic organization in national scale, direct democracy and random representation from people instead of regular elections, among several crazy ideas that are necessary in crazy times), then the very idea of revolution would be further developed. A real connection between authority and people (not only general will of the people) would be the Saint Grail of revolutions, an event that would change the way human organize themselves in social structures since the formation of the first city-states back in the ancient history of Old Mesopotamia. Whether it is possible or not is futuristic and contingent to how we re-interpret and invest energy in keeping the fire of revolution(s) alive in the long term. In the short term the future is uncertain and there is a regression of politics into authoritarian societies.

Recently, an special friend lent me a book called “Radicalism of love” in which the relationship between love and revolutions is explained it terms that the latter have been characterized by gaps, incommunication, and supression of desires and insticts. However, from Lampedusa paths, in which everything changes to remain the same, to experiences of renovation; continuity and innovation are not simply two sides of the same coin. They are the very engine of hearts and fuel of history. Either if we want things to be the same or if we desire to awake new realities, we travel in a route of revolutions. The journey of living and dying, of loving and sadness, of joy and boredom, ultimately is the journey between deserts and oasis, of wanted and unexpected “micro”-events that pave the road to revolutions. And revolution without those precessions and sort of “mundane” events are just another corner on the road instead of new avenues of possibilities. For those who are like fire, the revolution starts in burning your own soul and letting the ashes to feed this arid land, it means to reborn in your own breath. For those who are like water, revolution starts in swimming in the uncertain flows of time, it also entails to keep floating until we reach the calm waters of hope across the lands of promises and actualization.