“The national independence struggles of the peoples of Our America have simultaneously been anti-imperialist struggles from Tupac Amaru up through our times.”
From September 4th to 7th, 1981, writers, poets, and scholars converged in Havana, Cuba, for the Primero Encuentro de Intelectuales por la Soberanía de los Pueblos de Nuestra América — the first Conference of Latin American and Caribbean Intellectuals for the Sovereignty of the Peoples of Our America. Hosted by Casa de las Americas, participants came from across the region, bringing with them a range of ideological and political stances.
But they came together around one thing: the threat of Ronald Reagan and the United States to the peace, security, and sovereignty of the Americas. Indeed, in the introduction to Nuestra América: En lucha por su verdadera independencia, the print publication of the conference proceedings, the editors noted the rare political urgency that marked the atmosphere of the conference. But it also pointed to what Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet Mario Benedetti described as the "unprecedented unity" of the conference participants in the face of the threat of Reagan. The editors continued:
with his neutron bomb, with his hysterical escalation of the arms race, with his insistence on stoking the Cold War, with his hatred of socialism and the cause of national liberation, and his frequent aggressions against countries struggling for their full independence, Ronald Reagan unwittingly helped the participants at the meeting realize that while the aggressiveness of American imperialism exhibits more weakness than strength, it is nevertheless a powerful enemy that is infringing upon the fundamental rights of our people and that we must confront the enemy decisively, using all the resources at our disposal to overcome it.
In short, Ronald Reagan not only unmasked the true face of US imperialism, but also exposed inherent weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
One of the most remarkable and stirring contributions to the congress was an address by the Puerto Rican political scientist Manuel Maldonado-Denis (1933-1992). Published in Spanish in Nuestra América as the essay, “La liberation Nacional: imperative categorically de Nuestra America,” it appeared in 1982 in English in the Havana-based journal Tricontinental, as “National Liberation: Categorical Imperative for the Peoples of Our America.”
Denis’s essay captured the militant energy of the Havana congress. He invokes the long history of Indigenous and African resistance in the Americas, and of peasant and worker struggles for freedom. He also reminds us of the main tasks of national liberation: “a) the struggle for national independence; b) the struggle against other subtle, and not so subtle, forms of colonization that continue even after national independence has been won; c) the struggle for economic independence, that is, the struggle to recover for the use and enjoyment of the nation and all those means of production remaining in private hands; [and] d) the socialization of these means of production and the process of building socialism.”
Importantly, for Maldonado-Denis national liberation can only be achieved if regional unity is established for its defense. It is no wonder that Donald Trump, like Reagan before him, is continuing the unhinged violence of US imperialism in the region and doing everything in his power to breed division and suspicion amongst the nations and peoples of our Americas. It is long past the time that the peoples of our Americas realized their mutual interests to come together and fight back against the monster.
We reprint Manuel Maldonado-Denis’s essay, “National Liberation: Categorical Imperative for the Peoples of Our Americas” below.
National Liberation: Categorical Imperative for the Peoples of Our Americas
Manuel Maldonado-Denis
When Emmanuel Kant, the idealist philosopher, set out to explain the essence of each person’s moral obligation to the rest of mankind, he proceeded to define it in the following way: “Always try to act in such a way so that the principle of your behavior can serve as a general rule.” This categorical imperative, as it was called in the ethics of this renowned philosopher from Konigsberg, was echoed in Jose Martí’s famous advice: “Every true man must feel upon his own cheek the slap upon any other man’s cheek.” This responsibility of mankind arises from the very process of human solidarity: to fight injustice and oppression wherever it arises. This is true both for individuals and for peoples. Hence Martí tell us in the Manifesto of Montecristi: “It is touching and an honor to think that when an independence fighter falls upon Cuban soil, perhaps abandoned by the unwary of indifferent nations for which he sacrificed himself, he falls for the greater good of mankind, the affirmation of the moral republic in America, and for the creation of a free archipelago where the respectable nations may lavish their wealth which, as it circulates, must fall upon the crossroads of the world.” Can one imagine a better or fuller expression of this internationalist spirit, which guided Martí and continues to inspire all those who see the struggle against imperialism as one clearly transcending national boundaries, inserted in the very center of the fight against injustice and oppression, whether in Palestine or South Africa, El Salvador or Puerto Rico? A categorical imperative is a mandate, a specific statement calling for fulfilling the duty of universal solidarity. This duty at present means on a collective level fighting for independence and national liberation for the world’s peoples.
Specifically in Our America it means supporting all peoples’ struggles against imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism. Or, to continue in the line of thought of the peerless Cuban liberator, it consists of unceasingly fighting with every means at our disposal for the first and the second independence of all our peoples, perennial victims of imperialism’s domination and exploitation.
The history of Our America is singularly rich in terms of its liberation struggles. Fortunately, the new generation of Latin American historians and sociologists has taken on the job of retrieving these social struggles from the buried past where they have been assigned by official versions of history molded to the ideas of Latin America’s ruling classes. The struggles against oppression, from the uprising of the original Indian populations to those of the black slaves, from Tupac Amaru to Macandal, are glorious chapters in our peoples’ histories. The popular masses, the workers, these “historyless” peoples, are now in the forefront of current historical processes. We can view in this context those who took up the cause of these people, those who fought against oppression and plunder. We can put into their correct perspective events such as the 19th century Haitian Revolution and the 20th-century Cuban Revolution, the recent Sandinista Revolution and the glorious struggle being waged by the Salvadoran people right now. Our youth can identify with such men such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Simon Bolívar, Ramón Emeterio Betances, Eugenio Maria de Hostos, Jose Martí, Augusto César Sandino, Augusto Farabundo Martí, Julio Antonio Bella, Pedro Albizu Campos, Ernesto Guevara, Salvador Allende, in short, with all those who embodied in word and deed, the hopes and desires of the peoples of Our America—without excluding, of course, all those anonymous heroes who daily are resisting and fighting, everywhere on every battlefront, attempts to deny our popular sector’s inalienable right to a decent life within their societies.
The concept of national liberation requires an exhaustive and thorough study which we cannot provide in his brief paper. But if we had to define its main outlines we could list the following: a) the struggle for national independence; b) the struggle against other subtle, and not so subtle, forms of domination that continue even after national independence has been won; c) the struggle for economic independence, that is, the struggle to recover for the use and enjoyment of the nation and all those means of production remaining in private hands; d) the socialization of these means of production and the process of building socialism. All these steps should take place for the full development of the national liberation process which, as can be seen, must culminate with socialism.
If we analyze in detail the ups and downs of these processes we can see that they have hardly followed a linear path; rather each process itself has been marked by advances and reverses. One thing is clear, nonetheless. The people’s struggle for liberation can be temporarily held back; it can even be contained for relatively long periods by the use of systematic repression against the popular sectors, but it can never be totally destroyed. As has been amply demonstrated in countries of the southern cone and Central America, fascist methods are used when the system of imperialist domination is threatened.
We will now proceed to examine more thoroughly each of the aspects of the national liberation struggle listed above.
In the first place, it is clear that for a people to exercise their sovereignty they must have national independence. Since Jean Bodin defined the concept of sovereignty in the 16th century, this has meant the exercise of supreme authority within a specific territory. For this concept to be not just a legal, but a real one, the people must be the basic source of that sovereignty. Therefore, colonialism, by placing the source of power in the hands of another country, is the denial of the principle of sovereignty. National independence, therefore, is the peoples’ basic freedom because it grants them the power to exercise sovereignty over a specific territory. The fact that this sovereignty can be infringed upon, even after achieving national independence, is common knowledge. But this is precisely why the peoples’ national independence struggle must be a frontal attack on imperialism, mortal enemy of the liberation of the world’s peoples. Those who do not perceive that imperialism is a system of global domination; who do not realize that this system, as Lenin so rightly affirmed, is the highest stage of capitalism in its monopoly stage; who do not understand that the socialist countries have not participated in the plunder of the natural and human resources of the peoples who have been and still are the victims of colonialism and neocolonialism, but rather that the socialist countries have aided in their struggle against underdevelopment, are seriously mistaken in their historical outlook, as Fidel Castro has pointed out on many occasions. The national independence struggles of the peoples of Our America have simultaneously been anti-imperialist struggles from Tupac Amaru up through our times.
But national independence is just a milestone — a very important one — in the national liberation process. Once independence has been attained, then the problem arises of the dependent relations which refuse to die and continue to be reproduced under the new sovereign status. These dependent relations have deep economic, social, political and cultural roots. When countries attain their independence under the system of dependent capitalism — as has usually been the case — their hard-won independence seems virtually annulled given the stubborn factors tending to perpetuate uneven development and economic backwardness. As shown by the unsuccessful efforts to create a new international economic order, and the failure of the overblown North-South dialogue, the capitalist countries are not willing to give up their privileges and prerogatives they derive from unequal exchange between raw materials and manufactured goods. Attempts by raw material exporting countries to excercise sovereignty over these resources have encountered the open hostility of the importing countries. Despite this, it should not be forgotten that the demand for full exercise of the people’s sovereignty over their natural resources was raised by General Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico and with his actions an irreversible process was set into motion, refuting the already discredited notion that our peoples are incapable of efficiently administering what by right is theirs.
Therefore, if there is no struggle for economic independence, national independence runs the risk of becoming merely the nominal exercise of sovereignty. Martí warned us in the 19th century of the tiger stalking our peoples even after they have attained national independence. It is necessary to be on guard against this tiger because it always returns by night to endanger the gains of the peoples. Martí was referring, needless to say, to the imperialism he knew so well, having lived in its entrails; thus he warned the peoples of Our America to resolutely struggle for that second independence which could only be won through a frontal attack against that “violent and brutal north which despises us.” Economic independence is a requisite for the real exercise of sovereignty; it is the people’s’ demand that they not be subject to the conditions imposed by transnational corporations, that their natural and human resources not be subservient to international industrial and financial capital, and that their territories not bristle with army and naval bases which foreclose the peoples’ sovereignty. In reference to this last point, we have the situation of the base at Guantanamo in Cuba, which continues to be a flagrant insult to our peoples.
From what has been said up to here we can see that the peoples’ struggle for the full exercise of their sovereignty must lead to the socialization of the principal means of production and a process towards socialism. This, of course, is no easy task. The resounding victories of the peoples of Cuba, Vietnam, and Angola — to mention only three examples — have provided a revanchist dynamic in Western ruling circles, a dynamic which has as its current political expression the coming to power of the Reagan administration.
In the current political situation, national independence and sovereignty of all the world’s peoples are endangered by the rise to power of the most recalcitrant and militaristic sector of the U.S. ruling class. In the Caribbean, Nicaragua and Grenada are daily facing the threats of intervention that have long been part of our peoples’ history under U.S. hegemony. Revolutionary Cuba is facing new aggressions from U.S. Imperialism. The only thing that can stop this power, the only force able to counteract its mad ambition for world domination is the existence of the socialist world, which has stood up to the arrogance which has characterized the imperial republic of the United States since its very inception.
Imperialism, as a worldwide system of domination, can live with national independence only if this independence is not used to challenge capitalist relations of production. The process towards economic independence is already an irritant in imperialism’s relations with independent countries, but there is always the possibility of creating new trade and industrial relations which turn into a mockery, or make inoperable the processes of socialization of social wealth. Capitalism, however, cannot live with the transition toward socialism which endangers its domination over the lives and wealth of “Third World” social formations. Not even the creation of structures like people’s power is acceptable to the ruling classes. They will not permit naughty children: the empire demands total submission, and if this is not forthcoming, it means war: a war which at the beginning takes the form of economic aggression but with the broad range of resources at its disposal can even go as far as chemical and biological warfare.
It is in this context that the struggle is being waged by the peoples for their sovereignty, i.e. for complete control over their national territories, including the subsoil and surrounding territorial waters, the fauna and flora, water resources, etc. This sovereignty cannot be fully exercised unless real power is held by the social class which produces social wealth, the class that along with the natural resources which are mankind’s heritage, represents the most important of the material productive forces: the working class.
It is precisely the working class, together with the peasants and the other popular sectors, which is called upon to play the historical role as protagonist of the struggle for national liberation and socialism which is the only path to win our people’s sovereignty.
When our first liberators fought against the disintegrating Spanish empire, their main concern was to end the horrible system of oppression that prevented, by its retarding action, the full moral and material development of our peoples. In the Antilles, for example, this great struggle was waged not only to attain national independence, but also to end black slavery. It was in this sense that the three great 19th-century Antillean figures — Hostos, Betances, and Martí — were not only revolutionaries who fought to break colonial ties with Spain, but also they couldn’t imagine for a moment that black slavery would be tolerated in the new republics. They fought for a political revolution as well as a social one. By this time Karl Marx had already written the first volume of Capital and had founded the International Workingmen’s Association. But socialism, as a historic vision, valid for Europe of this period, did not appear, nor could appear, in the political outlook of these great Antillean revolutionaries.
The struggle to liberate the Antilles began at the same time as imperialism’s mad scramble for colonies in which over two-thirds of the world’s population fell victim to capitalist expansion. Marx, who died in 1883, had already started to analyze this process but a fuller description would have to wait for V.I. Lenin in his work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Although Martí, even before Lenin, had given a brilliant description of this phenomenon he did not hesitate to call imperialism, unquestionably it was Lenin who based his analysis on historical materialism and delineated the historical role of the national liberation movements in the struggle against imperialism. Thus the basis was established for the anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles to be connected to the struggle for national liberation and socialism. What better example of this than the life and work of the great revolutionary and people’s leader named Ho Chi Minh!
Therefore the Latin American revolutionary tradition, to the extent it has been consistently anti-imperialists, goes perfectly hand in hand with the current struggle of the peoples to exercise their sovereignty and for their national liberation. On the centennial of the Grito de Yara, Fidel Castro stated, referring to the 19th-century revolutionaries, that if they were alive today they would be like us, and if we had lied then we would have been like them. We must meet this challenge if we are determined to confront the most powerful enemy in mankind’s history.
One last thought. The national liberation of the peoples of what Martí called Our America can never be complete until all the countries Bolivar included in his liberating vision have attained their independence. I come from a U.S. colony which is one of the strongest links in its chain of domination in the Caribbean. None other than Major Ernesto Guevara affirmed that one’s anti-imperialism could be measured by the extent of one’s solidarity with Puerto Rico. For more than a century our people have been waging a struggle for independence and national liberation. Different historic reasons have made it impossible up to now to write this last verse of Bolivar’s poem. But as long as Puerto Rico has not attained its full sovereignty and independence, the sovereignty of all the peoples of Our America is endangered. Therefore, we affirm in conclusion, that Puerto Rico’s national liberation is a categorical imperative demanding the militant solidarity of all the world’s peoples.
Manuel Maldonado-Denis, “”National Liberation: Categorical Imperative for the Peoples of Our America,” Tricontinental 82 (1982), 8-15 .
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