In the Laboratory of a Revolution

Her work Fidel: The Political Strategy of Victory, which illuminates the Cuban revolutionary process, is known in various editions throughout the Latin Amercian continent and has been one of the most read texts on the subject over the past 20 years. In another one of her works, Making Possible the Impossible: The Left on the Threshold to the 21st Century(1), initially published in Cuba and later in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal and Spain, Marta Harnecker offers a panorama of Latin American popular movements and, as the title suggests, ventures to define the new political drive—to make possible what at first sight appears impossible—that is today illustrated by, among others, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez and is embodied in the sentiment of Bolivarian Revolution. Three years ago, the Chilean that left her country persecuted by the Pinochet dictatorship, moved from Havana, Cuba to Caracas where she resides and works as a close ad hoc collaborator of Chavez in what she herself defines as the revolutionary "laboratory" that the petro-country has become. Harnecker is thus part of a select group of intellectuals - militant, organic - that, from within or out of Venezuelan territory, "assesses" the advancement of the process, which since the beginning of the year has had as its declared goal the construction of "socialism of the 21st century". Theoreticians, journalists and analysts such as Heinz Dieterich Steffan (German professor at the University of Mexico), the Uruguayan director of TeleSur Aram Aharonián and Luis Bilbao (journalist and director of the magazine America XXI), among others, make up this think tank of the left. Harnecker, for example, was responsible for the edition and indexation of "El nuevo mapa estrategico" (The New Strategic Map), a collection of speeches given by Chavez in November 2004 to the upper echelons of his government. This booklet contains the condensed doctrine of the Bolivarian Revolution