I first met Hugo Chávez in April 2004. At our first face-to-face meeting in the Presidential palace of Miraflores, I presented him with a copy of Bolshevism in Spanish, which he accepted with great enthusiasm. He began to turn the pages and stopped.
“I see you write about Plekhanov.”
“That’s right.”
“I read a book by Plekhanov a long time ago, and it made a big impression on me. It was called The Role of the Individual in History. Do you know it?”
“Of course.”
“The role of the individual in history”, he mused. “Well, I know none of us is really indispensable,” he said.
“That is not quite correct,” I replied. “There are times in history when an individual can make a fundamental difference.”
“Yes, I was pleased to see that in Reason in Revolt you say that Marxism cannot be reduced to economic factors.”
“That is right. That is a vulgar caricature of Marxism.”
“Do you know when I read Plekhanov’s book The Role of the Individual in History?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“I read it when I was a serving officer in an anti-guerrilla unit in the mountains. You know they gave us material to read so that we could understand subversion. I read that the subversives work among the people, defend their interests and win their hearts and minds. That seemed quite a good idea!”
“Then I began to read Plekhanov’s book and it made a deep impression on me. I remember it was a beautiful starlit night in the mountains and I was in my tent reading with the light of a torch. The things I read made me think and I began to question what I was doing in the army. I became very unhappy.”
He later told me that the Bolshevism book and Reason in Revolt helped him to draw the conclusion that socialism was the only solution to the problems of humanity.
One of the most memorable experiences I can recall was the presentation of Bolshevism at the Havana Book Fair where I had the opportunity of putting the record straight on what really happened in the Russian Revolution, in particular stressing the role of Leon Trotsky. The audience included many youth, veteran Communist militants, university lecturers, a former Cuban ambassador, Aurelio Alonso (member of the board of Pensamiento Crítico in the 1960s), veteran Cuban Trotskyists and foreign students from a number of Latin American countries. For many of them this was the first time they had heard an explanation of the real role played by Trotsky in the Russian Revolution, particularly, a detailed account of the different positions that existed within the Russian Social Democracy in relation to the idea of Permanent Revolution (i.e. the tasks and leading forces of the Russian Revolution), and how Lenin and Trotsky had fundamental agreement on this after Lenin published his April Theses.
In my introductory remarks I said: “We must recover the real traditions of Bolshevism from under a heap of lies and distortions created by the bourgeoisie, but also by the Stalinists”. One of the ideas I stressed was the democratic nature of the Bolshevik Party, which was always characterised by vibrant debates that prepared it for revolutionary action. This sort of internal democracy was absolutely necessary so that the party would learn from its own mistakes. The idea that the Bolshevik party developed through an always onward march without mistakes, until the taking of power, is a Stalinist myth from which nobody can learn anything.
The fact that Trotsky’s books were on sale once again, was a clear indication that on the island there is a thirst for the genuine ideas of Marxism. These traditions have to be recovered for the new generation of revolutionary fighters that is emerging, particularly in Latin America. In this sense, Bolshevism is not so much a book about history but a tool for the building of the revolutionary party today. As I pointed out: “the revolutionary party is first of all ideas, methods and traditions, the historical memory of the working class, and only later an apparatus to carry these into practice”.
There were plans to publish Bolshevism in Cuba, but I do not know whether they actually came to fruition.