The experience of the
Through the management structures set up by the workers and the people to direct the productive process and everything that affects living conditions - the environment, health, culture, etc. And finally through political and other organrevolutionary left
All these forms of participation will take account of the positions taken by
Conclusions of a proscribed workers leader the various social forces.
another way, in order for real democracy
The persons deprived of political rights, the "proscribed," were excluded to work, it is necessary to rely on pluralism, a diversity of forms of participation, by the signing of the Naval Club agreements between the Colorado Party, and continual mobilization....In short, we the Frente Amplio and the dictatorship. One of them, Ruben Sassano, support popular initiative and decision who has been a political refugee in France for several years, is a represen making in all spheres and at all levels of
He was an activist in the Montevideo dockers' union, partici solving the problems facing the nation...
pated in all the struggles of the workers' movement, and was also a victim sum up, we advocate building of all the repression against revolutionary and worker militants. But he socialism on the economic level through also exemplifies the trajectory of the revolutionary militants favorable to democratic political forms that will avert the positions and orientations followed in struggle by the March 26 Movebureaucratization and permit a real dement, which today are being carried on by the IDI.
velopment of people's power.
The following interview was given to Daniel Jebrac in Paris on Octoway, we want to create the conditions so that the people and the people only will exercise political and social hegemony.
also state clearly that we see working class as the organizing and leading force in the people's movement, as the driving and central conscious force in bringing about the range of economic, political, social and cultural changes that will lead to socialist democracy....
In this sense, respect for the autonomy of the trade-union organizations is the central axis of our conception of socialist democracy. We know that it is necessary to respect and to help to safeguard the independence of the unions with respect to the economic, social, political and cultural organizations. It is unquestionably in the framework of such social freedoms that the workers will be able to combat the tendencies that may arise for a misappropriation of the economic form of bureaucratic privileges in the management or administrative bodies of structures of collective
Our historic project is national and social. Because it is national, it calls for fighting to free the country from depen-
It considers that breaking the ties dence.
of dependence is an essential precondition for developing the potential of country and of the Uruguayan the people....
The unity of the peoples and liberation movements of Latin America is an essential factor to give impetus to this anti-imperialist policy. By laying out an international policy of anti-imperialism and Latin American unity, we are only giving a regional content to some of the general principles valid for international relations on the world scale. That is, condefense of friendly relations sistent among all peoples of the world, peace states, the sovereignty and selfamong determination of peoples, nonintervention in the internal affairs of any people and nonalignment behind any decision- making center.
The Independent and Democratic Left
Program Commission
Montevideo, August 1984
24 ber 30.
Question. For many years, you were an activist and a leader in the Montevideo dockers' union. Today, on the eve of the elections, you are among those who remain proscribed. I have seen writing on the walls of Montevideo calling for your return. To put it another way, the demand for the release of all the political prisoners, starting with Raul Sendic; and for the return of the proscribed, starting with yourself and the poet Benedetti, illustrates the limitations of the loosening up in Uruguay. Moreover, it points up the need for a struggle that will con tinue after the November 25 elections. What is your situation today exactly?
Answer. I have been in France for seven years as a political refugee. When I heard talk about a loosening up, I went to demand my papers so that I could go back since, even for a convinced internationalist, exile remains a terrible torture. I had problems enough with the fine points of the language in Uruguay, so you can imagine in France what it is like. After seven years, I still express myself a bit like Tarzan. To cut a long story short, they refused to give me the papers, and I remain proscribed.
Q. How do you see the organization going on in the Uruguayan workers' movement and the significant of these
A. I have kept up contacts with the country and with, worker activists passing through France. One of them told me recently that because of all the people killed and in exile the working class there is like a big body with only a very small
This is also true of all the left parties. And the military are very much aware of this, even if they are obliged today to make some concessions.
The political refugees authorized to go back find themselves being subjected to warnings, pressures and threats. The repressive forces have withdrawn intact from the front of the stage. But they remain in the backroom, sharpening their knives, taking miles of photographic
Their rights were sacrificed Ruben Sassano (DR) film, building up their files on the workers' and revolutionary movement.
You can't underestimate the enemy. They know perfectly well that if magnificent workers' movement rebuilds its leadership, their days will be numbered. So, they will do everything to prevent that.
The elections and the withdrawal of the military into their barracks, therefore, are a safety valve. Moreover, the Frente Amplio put the people off balance by signing the Naval Club agreements. It may lose us in negotiations and elections what the people won in the streets. It has offered the repressive forces the chance to divide the opposition. What it should have done was to demand democracy without any restrictions and not give the military the breathing space they so much needed.
Q: I heard that in the context of the opening of the election campaign, the IDI held a rally of 15,000 people, at which a message of support from you was
International Viewpoint 10 December 1984
in Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia and Africa. I of the state, defeated the weaker army, read and that it got a great round of ap-
In what sense did you mean this I gave my support to the IDI because I think that it is a working-class united front, even though there are different conceptions within it about how to that remain are over tactics and methods, but there is a common goal. Together with the militant current of the Inter-union Workers Plenum (PIT) in the trade-union field, the IDI can form a real class-struggle pole. Reinforced by all the experience of these last ten years, this bloc can become the main bastion of workers' resistance for struggles today and in the
You have to understand what the component forces of the IDI are. There is the Party for the People's Victory (PVP), which comes out of an anarchist background, today identifies with Marxism, and is seeking an identity. There is the United Action Group (GAU) led by Hector Rodriguez, which has an antibureaucratic and anti-Stalinist majority and has a working-class base in the textile in-
There are also a lot of people who were attracted in the past by the lot of independent activists from the new generation looking for a real party.
Finally, the PST is supporting the IDI in its campaign, and has announced that it wants to open up more deep going discussions with the IDI on medium-term perspectives. It is to be expected, in fact, that, under the impact of the crisis, after Frente Amplio and the dictatorship will blow apart. And then the FA will have to
You, yourself, are a kind of symbol of the 1960s and 1970s generation of activists who experienced the repression of 1971, the coup d'etat, and the historic general strike of 1973, followed by new repression and torture. sight and the new experience of exile, how do you see your own trajectory to-
A. I started working at the age of 12 in a soap factory. That was my first experience of what it is for a child prematurely turned into a worker to have to sell your labor power. years, I started to really understand my situation, and it was Communist Party who gave me the first instruments for understanding it. After that, since I had the good fortune to be considered "a promising soccer player," they found me a job on the Montevideo docks. At the age of 17, this new experience served to plant the idea of class struggle firmly in my head.
Your meeting with Che Guevara was a real turning point in your life?
A. Since I was a docker, they assigned me to protect Che when he came for the Punta del Este conference in 1962. I had an admiration for this man who had raised high the banner of internationalism International Viewpoint 10 December 1984 wonder how some people can still say that he was a nationalist. question his methods of struggle, but not out for once and for all what a revolutionary activist should be, a pragmatic intellectual who had not lost his roots and who understood the way the people think and feel.
A new situation was created by the Cuban revolution, which shook all of Latin America. As a personality, Che rallied the support not only of the Marxists but also of major Christian currents. Today, some people would like to forget
But as for me, I can't go along with applauding people when they win and turning your back on them when they have the bad luck to lose.
In 1967, I was invited to Cuba, and there I discovered a people, a collective
And I said to myself, here they are beginning to forge the new human being that Che talked about. I was all the more enthusiastic because to go to Cuba I had to pass through Czechoslovakia and stay at the Hotel International in Prague. That was in the middle of the Vietnam war. And the first thing proposed to us in Prague was to change our dollars on the black market. They didn't into the hotel ball because we didn't have ties. These first small details
There were also the cars of party bureaucrats that passed with drawn cur-
We said to ourselves that these were a funny kind of leaders who drew their curtains in order not to see the people. And there was nothing on Vietnam, no mobilization for solidarity. It was in Cuba that we learned about the uprising in Czechoslovakia. surprised. It was logical. We had found a bureaucracy living off its people, and there was nothing internationalist about it.
Q. Was it after your stay in Cuba that you moved away from the Communist
In 1975, the National Liberation Movement (MLN, Tupamaros) appeared in Uruguay. It polarized the elements attracted by the Cuban revolution. it fell victim to the confusion that was later propagated in other countries such as Argentina. It considered the Communist Party its strategic ally. But how could you base a strategy on such a division of labor between armed struggle and the
How could you build the armed struggle counting on reinforcement ultimately from the masses that were left in the hands of the CP with its parliamentarist conceptions? evitable happened.
The masses went their way, following a nonviolent conception of the struggle, and the armed movement went its own. The MLN did not know how to unite the mass struggle and the armed struggle. Thus, the more powerful armed force, the professional army, the armed force the guerrillas, as early as 1971.
Q. As a workers' leader, you must have experienced this contradiction more
A. Yes, I did. The idea was that the working class was the leading force in the liberation struggle. structures are supposed to be secret, when military centralism smothers democracy, activity tends to be reduced to following orders. I believed in a convergence between the armed movement and the mass movement. But the guerrillas were crushed in 1971 by a very selective without the CP-led mass movement lifting a finger. the 1973 coup d'etat launched a frontal assault on the workers' movement as a whole, when we counterattacked with the general strike, the comrades on the docks
"Now's when we could use the [the "boys,' that is, the guerrillas]."
the heyday of the Tupamaros, when you asked the MLN leaders what role the working class should play, some went so far as to say that that should be left to the CP. But we were already feeling the blows of the economic and social
And with the crisis, the liberals become conservatives, and conservatives,
The bourgeoisie started with a selective repression. First the guerrillas, and later the mass movement. and the reformists washed their hands of the repression against the guerrillas, who remained isolated and were destroy-
But afterward it came down on
Q. You yourself were imprisoned and tortured several times.
A. In 1969, I was arrested for the first time, and for two weeks, under a bourgeois democracy, for the first time I experienced torture. During a session of electric-shock treatment, I broke my bonds and tore off the hood that blinded me. I saw all the officers, their faces.
were already training themselves The army was already involved, even if it only began to act direct-
And there were already Amthroughout the country as the first case my only crime was having gone to Cuba to see what it was
In 1971, I was charged again, this time with being a representative of the March
Moreover, they kept arresting me for being a member of the CP or of the March 26 Movement, for having been in Cuba, as a trade unionist, or simply for being a worker who de. fended his class. In this little country of about 2.5 million inhabitants, there were 60,000 to 70,000 people imprisoned and
In 1971, I was kept in prison for 11 months with a hood on and tortured almost daily. All that leaves terrible long-term psychological damage. since I was a worker activist, the workers
came into the street to demand my re-
I tried to commit suicide. Then, the military became afraid of the possible consequences of my death. therefore, that it was my fellow workers who got me out of prison in 1972.
So, I went back to work, and I was able to go through the experience of the general strike against the coup d'etat in June 1973. They immediately put me back in prison. A general strike of that type can only end in an insurrection or a defeat. But there had been no preparation for an insurrection, either in the heads of people or materially, and you can't carry off an insurrection without preparation. So, we were defeated, despite the fact that 600,000 workers struck for two weeks.
After having liquidated the armed movement, the military settled accounts trade-union movement. forced into exile, ten years of agony for our people. mache facade of democracy that want to give us does not represent an end
The fate of the prisoners and the proscribed has not yet been decided.
In 1973, after my release, the comrades helped me leave for Argentina. There we continued to work with organizations that spoke the same language as
But what had happened in Uruguay helped us to understand things. The Argentine working class had one of the highest standards of living on the con-
The great majority of them remained Peronist. And the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) tried then to make the revolution without this working class. Although we had come to understand some of the errors, we stayed in Argentina up till the last moment. It was a matter both of solidarity and survival.
you have been in comes from abroad to overcome this contradiction, to stay a revolutionist in a country such as this without falling into anti-Communism and giving grist to the mill of the enemy. My answer is that you have to be a dissident with the Soviet or Polish working class and not with the likes of Solzhenitsyn who are making millions out of their dissent.
Where do you see the place of Cuba in all this?
Cuba, of course, is different from the USSR or Czechoslovakia. In 1967, I saw the poverty there. The other socialist countries gave almost no aid, or only on conditions. ceeded that year in opening a breach on the Latin American continent, it would have changed the course of things. But we had to wait until 1979 to see a revolutionary victory in Nicaragua. They tell us today that if there were no USSR, there would not be any Cuba. But, as for me, the Cuba I love is the Cuba of 1967, which had the revolution on the continent as its guiding star.
try to break the encirclement and open up a road. it was through Che's endeavor. Later, in another way, he hoped for something with Salvador Allende in Chile. Then, he had to wait for better days. But during this time the bureaucracy put down its foundations. But I am sure that if a revolutionary option appears again, in Central America or elsewhere, things would start to move again, including in Cuba.
This is a situation in which the organizations that identify with Trotskyism have a chance, if they can overcome their secondary internal contradictions and understand the priorities of the movement. The revolution can still be frustrated on our continent by the effects of the division of the world into zones of influence. For that reason, it is impor tant that there be Trotskyist organizations present, but on the condition that they understand our national realities.
It is necessary to start from the concrete reality of our continent. In Latin America, there are not only Miskitos but also Aztecs, Mayas, Guaranis. It would be too easy to think that once armed with Marxism we are invulnerable. These ideas, which originated in Europe, have led humanity forward. But they have to be applied to a different situation, in which you have to steep yourselves. best revolutionary Marxist is not the hard-line purist but the political activist who can really advance the revolution by taking account for example of what the samba, carnivals and soccer mean in Brazil and appreciating the role of Christianity.
You can't get revolutionary militants out of some sterilized test tube. There is an intellectual dogmatism that has been an obstacle to the independent and anti-bureaucratic revolutionary left taking the place that it has earned by its sacrifices.
The pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese Communist parties have degenerated. Why has the bureaucracy failed, for example, in Poland to counter the church with what it claims are its own values? The internationalist left is right. Facing capitalism and the church, the bureaucratic regimes are not competitive, unless it is possible to create a new kind of human being.
I tell you all this because while I was in the CP I shouted one day "Long live Stalin!" and another day "Down with Stalin!" without even understanding it. But democracy in socialism begins with democracy in the party. Unless there is democracy in the party, one day it will build an undemocratic state.
Q. But since France, have you been able to find your bearings politically, to assimilate all this