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IN PORTUGAL

Solidarity with Cuba and Venezuela

Published May 5, 2006 8:41 PM

People filled an auditorium in downtown Oporto April 27 to applaud the release of two new books—an occasion that enabled them to express solidarity with two countries under attack by U.S. imperialism: Venezuela and Cuba.


Ellen Catalinotto reads solidarity message.
WW photo: John Catalinotto

The two books, translated into Por tuguese and just published, are “Hugo Chávez: A Man, a People,” by the progressive journalist Martha Harnecker, and “The Admirable Campaign of Bolivar,” by Juvenal Herrera Torres, a Colombian historian from Medellin.

The Cuban ambassador to Portugal, Jorge Castro Benitéz, and the Venezuelan ambassador to Portugal, Manuel Quijada, addressed the meeting, as did the meeting’s organizer, Portuguese journalist and author Miguel Urbano Rodrigues. The presence of the two ambassadors and a speech by Urbano attacking the U.S. government as the “Fourth Reich” made it clear that to honor the two books meant also to oppose U.S. threats against these two revolutionary countries in Latin America.

Urbano said that the threat from U.S. militarism is “the main menace to humanity today. It threatens not only war and economic dislocation, but also the destruction of the environment.” He also mentioned the exemplary role of Cuba—only 90 miles from its greatest enemy—and Venezuela in “mobilizing the people of Latin America against neoliberal, privatizing economic policies pushed by the U.S.”

Quijada, who worked together with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez long before the charismatic Latin American leader was elected to office, discussed the progressive role of Simon Bolivar in the 19th-century anti-colonial struggles that liberated much of Latin America from direct European rule, and also the current threat to Venezuela from the U.S.

The Cuban ambassador noted that the Cuban Revolution, despite 47 years of hostility from U.S. imperialism, had a major advantage in contrast to the situation in Venezuela: “Our bourgeoisie all fled to Miami. Venezuela still has a relatively powerful capitalist class living in the country and capable of threatening the revolution.”

“If you want to show solidarity with Cuba,” he added, “then help defend Venezuela’s revolution.”

The gathering heard a message from Berta Joubert-Ceci of the May 20 Hands off Cuba and Venezuela Coalition in the United States, a broad group organizing a Washington, D.C. demonstration on May 20 in solidarity with the two countries. Anti-war U.S. activist Ellen Catalinotto read the statement.

Joubert-Ceci wrote that even “in the belly of the beast” there was solidarity with the two revolutions, and that it was especially important to build that solidarity at a time when immigrants were rising up in the millions inside the U.S. “This,” she wrote, “is the echo of the uprisings in Latin America that the U.S. rulers were unable to stop at the border.”