‘The blockade is an absolute contradiction'  

Orestes Martí - Manuel Alberto Ramy                                 Read Spanish Version  

An interview with Michel Balivo

Balivo is a Uruguayan intellectual who lives in Venezuela and contributes to numerous progressive publications worldwide. His works appear in prestigious publications from the improperly called "alternative press" -- a misnomer because it is the most objective medium that cybernauts have to avoid the news "noises" and "blanks" that the so-called "major media" offer them in a shamelessly manipulative manner. Balivo's works cover topics of great relevance, with the touch of necessary humanism, and they frequently are illustrated with drawings by the Andalusian Juan Kalvellido.

The series of interviews he did at one time with his friend Gloria La Riva ("The Five; A legal aberration or a political game?") are constantly consulted and frequently quoted by people who are interested in the situation of the five Cubans arbitrarily kept in U.S. prisons. "Sighting on the future, I aim to the left," a personal interview with this outstanding intellectual, has been reproduced in a large number of Web sites.

Michel Balivo is precisely our next subject. We ask him:

Cuba nears the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the triumph of its Revolution. Did you live through that event? How do you remember it?

Balivo: I was very young when it happened and I lived it from Uruguay, my native country. I remember it as a wave in the swirling sea of those days, very similar, although less accelerated and less global than today. Vietnam, the hippies, their colors and flowers, their "make love, not war," Mao and the Chinese revolution, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, the electrifying Bay of Pigs. The leftist ideas bursting through the world. In those days, every student was anti-Yankee and anti-imperialist. The urban or suburban guerrillas throughout America. The ensuing brutal repression.

It was a stage that disarticulated the tranquil and cyclical continuity of the collective conscience, opening it to global, planetary interaction, laying the foundations of the current economic structure. A before-and-after the 1960s. The erudites opined that there was nothing new under the sun and that what happened then would not be remembered. Those of us living today are proving the erudites wrong.

What influence did the Cuban Revolution have in your social surroundings?

Balivo: I live in Venezuela and like to point out the life strength that the Cuban Revolution has instilled in the Bolivarian Revolution. Thanks to its doctors, educators, athletes, most of the missions have been possible. Especially the mission to provide handicapped people with equal treatment and give them whatever they need to become active and participating citizens. I also hugely value the example that life is not just money and comforts. The revolution is, to whoever wishes to hear it, a living testimony that to a human being adversity is merely a force to be dominated and channeled for the good of social service.

What do you think about the U.S. blockade against Cuba? Would you counsel the new administration in Washington to lift the blockade, in answer to the demands of the international public opinion, especially to the results of the votes at the United Nations?

Balivo: I believe that the blockade is an absolute contradiction and that -- whether the new administration lifts it or not -- it is in fact being lifted. To want to do something is one thing; being able to do something is a different story. The young people have grown up and no longer obey the shouts of their elders. What was possible under certain temporary conditions will not be possible forever.

What do you consider the "pending assignments" of the Cuban revolutionary process? What do you expect from the Cuban Revolution in the next several years?

Balivo: I would say that what predominates today is not local circumstances. Therefore, while the cultural and economic history of each human group contains variations, they are not as important as the greater, collective conditions to which we must inescapably give an answer today.

This greater condition (which we all know and does not require a detailed explanation) is precisely what propitiates and facilitates mechanisms of integration like the ALBA, founded five years ago by Cuba and Venezuela and that today has six members and several observers, among them Russia, China and Iran.

Today, more than ever, we need alternate operative models that enable the complementation and development of nations. This can no longer be a national and isolated destiny. That is why I believe that, beyond national histories (which obviously are the impulse and point of departure of these initiatives) we would do well to give preference to the attempts to integrate nations or enable them to march in step.

Many say that, if they were Venezuelans, they would vote for Chávez. I say that the economic siege Cuba has been subjected to is a historic accident and that when you are obliged by circumstances to live in some sort of captivity you develop secondary, substitutional characteristics that do not exist in a free existence.

If I were Cuban, I would wish to freely join the continental and planetary process that Latin America and the world are living through. I would like to overtake and leave behind the deep mark that that accident has left in the psyche. The destiny of people is to leave behind the culture of fear and violence, thus balancing their individualities with what is essential and common to every human being. And not fixing upon and enshrining a historic moment.