Bolivia’s new president visits Cuba

The New Year began with a development of the greatest importance for Latin America and for the class struggle: a visit by Evo Morales to revolutionary Cuba. It was the first trip abroad by the newly elected president of Bolivia. He went on New Year’s Eve, just as Cubans were preparing to celebrate the anniversary of their socialist revolution.

Evo Morales, center, in Cuba with Fidel Castro.

Morales is the first Indigenous person to win the presidency in Bolivia, even though the majority of the people are Indigenous. He was elected on Dec. 18 with the largest vote for any president in decades.

Morales is also expected to visit South Africa, China and Brazil. He is not planning to visit the United States.

Evo, as he is affectionately called by his supporters, will be inaugurated on Jan. 22.

Cuban President Fidel Castro said the election of Morales had “shaken the world.”

The Cuban government placed a lot of importance on Morales’s trip. A high-level delegation of Cubans took part in the meetings with the Bolivian president-elect. They included the president of Cuba’s National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon; Carlos Lage, vice president of the Council of State; and Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque.

On the Bolivian side were 60 representatives, the largest delegation to accompany Morales abroad. They included a miner, who presented a miner’s hat to President Castro. He immediately put it on his head, according to the Cuban daily Granma.

The miners of Bolivia have played a historic role in that country, leading some of the most important and fiercest struggles against oppression and exploitation. It was the struggle of the miners—who suffer intense hardship—that led to the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Because of that revolution, the Indigenous people for the very first time won the right to vote in their own country.

Cooperation in health,
education and sports

Presidents Castro and Morales immediately signed bilateral cooperation and solidarity agreements during the visit. The agreements, signed on Dec. 30, mainly cover health care, education and sports.

As a result of these agreements, Boli vians will now be receiving free eye care, with Cuba contributing equipment and specialists. Cuba is also offering 5,000 scholarships for Bolivians to become future doctors and specialists.

Cuba will assist in a national literacy campaign in Bolivia as well.

A perusal of pictures on the Internet shows many history-making photos of this important visit. They are historic because of the significance of the struggle now raging in Latin America.

The election of the first Indigenous person in Bolivia, and most important an Indigenous leader who is a socialist and an anti-imperialist on the side of the oppressed, has worldwide significance.

Evo Morales’s orientation to Cuba shows that the popular movements in Latin America are gaining strength and are veering away from Washington. They are anti-imperialist and for self-determination.

Like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Cuba now has a good friend in Evo Morales of Bolivia—a friend whose priority is the people’s needs, not imperialist greed.

For this, Bolivia and Venezuela, like Cuba, have earned the wrath of imperialism.

As Castro asked, “Will the U.S. government be offended if Cuba helps increase the life expectancy of Bolivians?”

This trip showed the unbreakable links between the peoples of Latin America and Cuba. Bolivia is the land where revolutionary leader Che Guevara, who was born in Argentina but fought in the Cuban Revolution, was killed by the CIA.

Morales stated in Cuba that his visit signified “one of two generations of struggle for dignity, a meeting of two revolutions. The struggle of the Cuban people and above all of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was not in vain. They left the seeds and now there are fruits, not just in Bolivia but throughout Latin America.”

It surely was a nightmarish New Year for the imperialists in Washington, D.C.