What is to be done? How do we act on what we have learned, and how do people already act?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
The practical question here has two parts. One is how a socialist in the imperial core should relate to these movements and the states some of them became, Cuba under blockade, Venezuela under sanctions, Nicaragua under Ortega, with solidarity, with criticism, or with both at once. The other is how to actually study and teach this history, which is where the reading guides and archives come in, several of them built by the liberation movements’ own descendants. This lens gathers the live arguments and the tools, and asks the room to locate itself honestly. It ties to the solidarity questions in Imperialism and the Global System.
Anchor questions
- How should socialists here support movements abroad without either romanticizing or lecturing them?
- The pink tide rose and fell. What practical lessons does that cycle hold for the next wave?
- Cuba and Venezuela are under blockade and sanctions. How does that change what criticism is fair?
- Nicaragua’s government calls itself Sandinista and jails its critics. What does solidarity mean there?
- What can a study group here actually learn, practically, from Cabral’s pedagogy or Sankara’s program?
Materials
All free unless marked otherwise. The set is built to argue with itself; each source’s stance is named.
Ongoing debates and solidarity
- Isaac Saney and Teo Ballvé, “Cuba and Venezuela in Debate” (NACLA, 2007). A ready-made structured debate over whether the two are models or cautionary tales. Free: nacla.org
- “The Rise and Fall of the Pink Tide” (ISR, 2017). A left-critical post-mortem, sympathetic but unsparing about extractivism and commodity dependence. Free: isreview.org
- Tricontinental, dossiers on Cuba and Venezuela. Committed anti-imperialist advocacy, a clearly-stated solidarity pole, flagged as such. Free: thetricontinental.org
- “How Daniel Ortega Turned From Liberator to Tyrant” (DW, 44 min). The core critical case on Nicaragua. Free: youtube.com/watch?v=qzIyjU-NmLI
- Guerrilla History (podcast). Sympathetic-Marxist but analytical, strong on Sankara and anti-colonial Africa. Free: podcasts.apple.com
Films of the revolutions
- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Kim Bartley and Donnacha O Briain, 2003, 75 min). An Irish crew was filming a profile of Chavez and found themselves inside Miraflores when the 2002 coup happened, so the counter-revolution and its reversal are on camera as they occur. Sympathetic and contested. About 63,000 views. A note on how to watch it: the film is out of legal circulation, with no stream, rental, or disc carrying it anywhere, and the copy linked here was not posted by the rightsholder. It is listed because it is effectively the only way left to see it. Free: youtube.com
- Cuba’s Life Task (Yaffe, 2021, 50 min). Cuba’s climate-adaptation planning. Sympathetic. Free: helenyaffe.org.uk
- “The collapse of Venezuela, explained” (Vox, 2017, 8 min). The mainstream-critical skeptical anchor. Free: youtube.com/watch?v=S1gUR8wM5vA
Study guides and archives
- Liberation School, study guides (PSL). Facilitator-ready guides on imperialism and self-determination. Marxist-Leninist; read critically. Free: liberationschool.org
- Africa Subject Archive (Marxists Internet Archive). The core free archive: Rodney, Cabral, Nkrumah, Sankara, Nyerere, and movement documents. Free: marxists.org
- The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation (Tricontinental, 2022). Cabral’s liberation pedagogy in the liberated zones, a concrete model. Standpoint flagged. Free: thetricontinental.org
- Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism and Decolonisation: A Reading List (Foluke Adebisi). A decolonial-academic map of the field. Free: democracyinafrica.org
- DSA International Committee, book recommendations. An annotated Global South anti-imperialist list. Free: dsausa.org
A note on method
The trap in this lens is that “what is to be done” becomes “which side are you on,” a loyalty test rather than a practice. Resist it. A useful session ends not with the room agreeing on a verdict about Venezuela but with each participant able to state the strongest version of a position they do not hold. Solidarity that cannot criticize and criticism that offers no solidarity are both cheap; the practical skill worth building here is holding the two together under pressure, especially for movements living under real siege.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Several study guides here are from politically committed organizations (PSL, Tricontinental) and are labeled as such. Contributions welcome, especially organizer-facing material on solidarity work and on the African liberation movements today.