by SA’s Editors / July 2005 issue of Socialist Action newspaper
To celebrate the new rise of revolutionary movements in Latin America, Celia Hart—a leading Cuban journalist and intellectual and the daughter of two of
the most celebrated leaders of the Cuban Revolution, Armando Hart and Haydee Santamaria—began a series of lectures in Mexico City on June 29.
The lectures took place at the Workers University and at the Trotsky Museum. The museum is within the house that Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky lived in at the time he was assassinated by an agent of Stalin in 1940.
Hart described her outlook in an interview published in the Mexico City daily La Jornada of June 29. She stressed that the future of the Cuban Revolution
depended on the spread of socialist revolution in Latin America: “The fact that there is a Bolivarian revolution [in Venezuela] gives strength to Cuba. I
think that the future and permanence of the Cuban Revolution depends, completely, on the direction of a continental revolution.”
Celia Hart’s lectures in Mexico City come on the eve of the celebration of the July 26 attack on the Moncada Barracks, considered the start of the Cuban
revolutionary process, in which members of her family participated and for which one (her uncle) was brutally murdered.
Hart told La Jornada: “I am the daughter of revolutionaries and what I feel, in the first place, is envy, because the desire of any revolutionary is to make a revolution that triumphs, like the Cuban Revolution. However, I feel inserted into the Latin American revolution, which I feel part of. I believe that the Cuban Revolution is one of many that have to be accomplished.”
She stressed her view that the revolutions in Latin America would follow the example of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. La Jornada summarized: “In Latin America, the real idea proposed by Leon Trotsky
of a permanent revolution prevails: a movement that is not enclosed in borders but advances towards other countries, without faltering.”
The prominent Cuban intellectual presented the view that the Cuban Revolution itself was an example of permanent revolution. Her second lecture was entitled: “The Cuban Revolution and the Permanent Revolution: a
New Interpretation of the Cuban Revolution.”
She called for the formation of left parties to organize the movements toward socialism in Latin America: “They need organization of a left-wing party,
without sectarianism or top-down directives to organize this strength in a new force that moves the revolution. We would need to pick up speed and
organize the continental left, to channel all this energy towards a more radical social revolution.” — The Editors
