Sketch of José Martí, the legendary Cuban revolutionary. (Photo: Cira Pascual Marquina.)
By Cira Pascual Marquina – Aug. 31, 2026
For more than two decades, it was easy to be in solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution. Caracas became a kind of political capital for a heterogeneous international left: party militants and trade unionists, anti-imperialists and intellectuals, and, increasingly, people whose principal relationship to politics was mediated through social media. They came for congresses, meetings, and elections. They stayed in fancy hotels, met government officials and, in some cases, communards and grassroots activists. Then they returned home carrying the images and arguments of a revolution that, for much of that period, was moving forward despite the tremendous imperialist pressure bearing down on it.
That history matters. Venezuela opened a political and material space in which people from different parts of the world could meet, exchange experiences, and imagine a common project. The international gatherings organized during the Chávez and Maduro years were part of a broader effort to build a new political geography in Latin America and the Global South. They helped sustain networks, friendships, campaigns, and forms of political cooperation that would otherwise have been difficult to establish. It would be petty and historically inaccurate to dismiss these experiences simply because the conditions that made them possible have since changed, or because some visitors were drawn as much by the privileges granted to them by the revolution as by the work of building it.
There was, however, a ceiling to this form of solidarity. Its material conditions made it possible to participate in the revolution without sharing its risks or the mounting everyday difficulties faced by working-class Venezuelans due to the blockade. The government itself made this possible: through a great deal of organization and collective sacrifice, it built the capacity to receive thousands of visitors, organize events, and provide accommodation, allowing the international guest to experience the revolution while remaining largely untouched by the hardships through which Venezuelans were living and, often, outside the rich debates taking place at the grassroots. This internationalism asked little of those who practiced it and came with its own small rewards for visitors, but it was useful.
The situation has changed dramatically. Since January 3, when U.S. imperialism bombed targets in Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and deputy Cilia Flores, the Bolivarian Process has entered a far more difficult period, marked by tactical retreats, new contradictions, and developments that have narrowed some of the paths opened by the revolution. This is not a straightforward reversal but a turning back that forecloses certain possibilities for now while leaving intact the terrain on which the radical process of building communes continues.
For many internationalists who traveled to Venezuela before January 3, the communal project remained largely peripheral to their actual political engagement, often encountered through three-hour visits to a Caracas commune. Yet the discourse surrounding the commune became a central pillar in the international defense of the Bolivarian Revolution. That emphasis was not misplaced. Today, the communes stand as the primary strategic reserve of the revolution, although their development remains highly unequal.
The Venezuelan revolutionary process has not reached its endpoint. The political experience accumulated over more than two decades remains alive in many communes, as do the capacities forged through years of struggle. And, perhaps most importantly, communes continue to exist as living spaces of resistance, organization, production, deliberation, and popular power, albeit with very different levels of development and political consciousness.
Internationalism of the best kind is a relation of reciprocal, though not necessarily symmetrical, political obligation between organized forces: an exchange of capacities among peoples who are themselves organized, linked by the recognition that their struggles are part of a common historical terrain. The material conditions of the last two decades made another, easier relation possible. Understanding what has changed requires being precise about that history, and about what the present conjuncture is asking of those who wish to remain on the side of the revolutionary working class of Venezuela. Internationalists should turn towards the communes, because that is where the strategic reserve of the revolution is alive and well.
Some internationalists who once spoke fluently about the communes, often on the basis of brief encounters with them, now read the retreats of recent months as betrayal and are quick to prescribe from a distance what Venezuelans ought to do. Yet the communes themselves are engaged in the difficult work of navigating these contradictions rather than calling for a rupture with the process as such. From where we stand in Venezuela, the task is different: to understand how a way forward can be built within conditions that are genuinely difficult, genuinely contradictory, and yet genuinely ours to work through.
One conjuncture for internationalism
There is an important distinction between the Venezuelan and Cuban situations. Venezuela has suffered a direct blow to its institutional and political capacity, while Cuba continues to endure the material effects of a genocidal blockade. Both, however, demand renewed attention from internationalists, and both confront a broader imperialist offensive whose forms and intensity differ from one country to the other.
The offensive is not confined to Venezuela or Cuba. Across Latin America, the working class is confronting a reactionary advance that takes different forms: fascist and hard-right governments are advancing in countries such as Colombia, El Salvador, Chile, and Argentina; other states remain deeply subordinated to imperialist power; and progressive governments that still hold ground are navigating an increasingly hostile environment. In the United States, meanwhile, a renewed McCarthyism is taking shape around the criminalization of dissent and the treatment of solidarity itself as subversion.
Beyond the hemisphere, the genocide against the Palestinian people continues, alongside the war waged by the United States and “Israel” against Iran. These struggles unfold under different conditions and demand different forms of organization, but they belong to a historical moment in which imperialist power is becoming more aggressive as its ability to secure consent grows more fragile. José Martí called such a moment ‘la hora de los hornos,’ the hour of the furnaces. Today the heat is distributed across the continent and well beyond it.
The form of internationalism that took shape around Venezuela over the past two decades was made possible by a particular set of material conditions, and those conditions have changed. Solidarity is now being asked to become something more than attendance, and the question is what that change should mean on each of these fronts. In Venezuela, some of the answer has begun to emerge through a series of self-organized internationalist brigades that have traveled to the country in recent months, seeking above all to encounter the popular and communal forces that continue to organize within this difficult terrain.
Brigades: an old practice in new conditions
Revolutionary internationalism has a long history in Latin America, and its most important precedents are useful precisely because they treated it as a material political practice.
Che Guevara’s conception of internationalism was inseparable from the conviction that anti-imperialist struggle could not ultimately be divided into sealed national compartments. A victory or defeat in one place altered the terrain elsewhere. Cuba’s form of revolutionary internationalism gave this principle a remarkable material form, sending doctors, teachers, technicians, soldiers, and political cadres far beyond the island. Cuban internationalism repeatedly transformed the resources and knowledge produced by one revolution into capacities available to other peoples, which often expressed themselves as brigades.
That internationalism cannot simply be recreated. History does not return in identical form, and the conditions that allowed revolutionary Cuba to act internationally on that scale were historically specific. But the underlying question remains: what does it mean for one revolutionary organization or popular process to place something of its own accumulated strength at the disposal of another?
The Venezuelan experience of recent months points toward one possible answer. A few days after the January 3rd bombardment, the PUPSOC, a mass organization from southwestern Colombia, made its way toward Venezuela with around fifty people in a rickety bus. Many of them were campesinos. They traveled with their own food, their own cooking equipment, and the means to sustain themselves along the journey. They did not arrive because Venezuela could offer them comfortable conditions. They came because they understood what was happening in Venezuela as a matter that concerned them as an organized people.
There is a considerable difference between traveling because one has been invited to an international event and making a long journey because one’s own organization has decided that a struggle taking place in another country forms part of its political horizon. The former can produce important solidarity, and for years it did. The latter points toward a different, more substantive relationship—one in which people arrive with their own political experience and something concrete to contribute while they also learn from and exchange with, in the Venezuelan case, communards who are planting the seeds of territorial socialism in a country under siege.
Leaving aside the so-called internationalism of leftist intellectuals mostly in the Global North pontificating about our revolution and dictating, from afar, what working-class Venezuelans should be doing—a favorite pastime for many since January 3rd—the reemergence of revolutionary, self-organized brigades is the most important change taking place in substantive internationalism towards Venezuela today. It is no longer the 5-star hotel lobbies full of folks happy to be in Venezuela and even happier to see each other. It is people self-organizing to come to Venezuela, learn from what remains politically alive despite the difficulties, and spend time with communes that continue—unevenly and under considerable pressure—to organize collective life while thinking about the strategy that will bring us out of the furnace that descended from the North.
Learning across territories
Over the past weeks, three self-organized internationalist brigades have visited El Panal Commune in Caracas, each from a different political tradition and each testing itself against the same underlying questions. What is going on in Venezuela? What can be learned? What can they do?
The first, organized by Ítaca, an internationalist organization, and named after Ali Primera, brought young militants from the Països Catalans, whose political traditions include a long history of territorial and assembly-based organization aimed at breaking with the individualization and despotism of capital. Their encounter with El Panal began with something apparently simple: spending time in the territory, listening, asking questions of the communards, and allowing themselves to be questioned in return. The exchanges were productive precisely because neither side approached the other as a blank slate. The Catalan militants recognized in the commune’s direct democracy something continuous with their own experience, while placing it in a different geopolitical context; the Venezuelan communards, in turn, heard about collective practices forged within a struggle for independence and socialism in the imperial core.
The second brigade, named Tamara Bunke, brought together militants from Congreso de los Pueblos in Colombia; Jarqui and Endavant, both socialist organizations from the Basque Country and Catalunya respectively; Landless Workers Movement (MST) activists from Brazil; and NODAL, the Argentine-based news portal covering Latin America and the Caribbean with a grassroots perspective. Here the conversation kept returning to a key question: strategy. What does it mean to construct popular power under very difficult conditions, and how should territorial organization relate to the broader political objective of collective emancipation?
The relationship between the Fuerza Patriótica Alexis Vive (FPAV) and El Panal Commune offers one concrete expression of a question debated at length with the brigadiers: the dialectical relationship between the organization of cadres (FPAV) and the mass organization (Panal). At El Panal, the FPAV provides political orientation and sustains a long-term revolutionary horizon, while the assemblies are the space where decisions are made about land, distribution, and collective life. The problem is an old one in revolutionary politics: how cadre organizing and mass organizing can develop together, each strengthening the other without one replacing the other.
The third brigade, organized by ALBA Movimientos and named Fidel Castro, brought more than thirty young militants from across the continent to a program combining political formation with visits to spaces of popular power, El Panal among them. Together with the communards, the brigade painted a mural on the commune’s walls honoring the thirty-two Cuban internationalists who were killed on January 3rd defending President Maduro, their names placed alongside massive preexisting portraits of General Qasem Soleimani and Commander Mohammed Sinwar. What brought together the Latin American organizations present in the brigade was a shared political horizon: the unity of Latin American peoples, the struggle against imperialism, and the conviction that emancipation has to be built through organization and collective work among the people. The resulting mural said as much as any of the discussions did: a Cuban internationalist front, an Iranian general, and a Palestinian commander, held together on a single wall as three fronts of one war against imperialism.
Together, the three brigades point toward a way of thinking about internationalism closer to the older revolutionary idea than to the conference-and-hotel model: internationalism measured by what organized peoples can place at one another’s disposal. A campesino organization brings forms of territorial work developed in the Colombian countryside; Catalan and Basque militants bring assembly traditions shaped by their own struggles; Venezuelan communards bring decades of experimentation with self-government. Each side leaves with more capacity than it arrived with, or the exchange hasn’t done its job.
What remains
The difficulty of the Venezuelan moment makes this kind of exchange more significant, not less. The Bolivarian Revolution has not followed a straight line toward socialism; its history includes advances and defeats, openings and closures, moments of mass mobilization and periods of exhaustion, radical initiatives and retreats. The current conjuncture has brought some of these contradictions to the surface with particular force. This is the moment, then, to be precise about what we mean when we speak of the irreversibility of revolutionary processes. Political gains can be reversed, institutions weakened, policies changed, and economic structures redirected. We had not reached a point at which the advances of the Bolivarian Revolution had become fully irreversible, and pretending otherwise would obscure one of the central lessons of the present moment.
The accumulated experience of a people has a different temporality, though. What is learned through the exercise of people’s power does not reside in institutions. Those who learned to deliberate in communal assemblies, to organize production collectively, who took part in land struggles, barrio organizations, workers’ struggles, missions, and communal experiments, carry that practical knowledge with them still: how to negotiate contradictions, distribute resources, deal with bureaucracy, defend territory, or govern some part of collective life. A policy can be reversed; a capacity formed through years of practice does not disappear overnight.
The present setbacks to the Bolivarian Revolution are real without being final: history has moved backward in some respects without returning to the point from which the process began. That matters for internationalism, because it changes both what there is to defend and where there is something to learn. The task is to recognize the political capacities that remain and to build relationships with those who continue to organize and struggle, here and abroad.
Do as the movements do
Movements with genuine construction have been approaching Venezuela very differently from the international Left intellectuals who have turned it primarily into an object of judgment—monitoring each concession, interpreting each statement, identifying each political error, and eventually announcing that the revolution is basically over (most often doing so from a considerable distance). By contrast, movements arrive with their own accumulated political experience and, when possible, use their own resources. They spend time with communards, walk through territories, cook together, debate strategy, and ask what can be learned from one another.
A movement’s point of departure is different because they already know what it means to organize under pressure and to sustain collective work when resources are scarce, so their visits become an occasion to explore what can be built together, beyond simply taking stock of what is happening in Venezuela. Movements with actual political work of their own tend to understand that an internationalist relationship has to be reciprocal, that solidarity involves learning as well as giving, and that the political usefulness of an encounter depends partly on whether both sides leave with more capacity than they had when they arrived. This may be one of the most useful lessons of the present moment: internationalism can be rebuilt through the practices of organized people rather than through the ‘authority’ of observers.
For those who remain interested in Venezuela, the challenge is therefore quite simple: do as the movements do—and by movements I mean organized forces with an actual political practice of their own: revolutionary parties, grassroots organizations, trade unions, campesino movements, and so on. Come with questions rather than verdicts. Come with your own experience. Come prepared to learn and to contribute. Come to the territories where people are still organizing. Come to the communes.
The international Left does not need to make Venezuela the center of everything. Cuba today demands urgent and militant solidarity, and the struggles unfolding across Latin America and within the United States are part of the same broader historical terrain, as is the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the war waged by the United States and “Israel” against Iran. These are different fronts and arise from different conditions, but together they reveal the same dangerous expansion of an imperialist power whose violence has grown more reckless as its historical position has become more precarious.
However, where there is an interest in the Venezuelan process, there is a possibility of turning that interest into something more useful than commentary. Martí’s ‘hour of the furnaces’ names precisely this kind of moment: a period of heat and danger in which the outcome is uncertain, but in which political forces are being tested and forged. His metaphor contains neither the comfort of optimism nor the paralysis of despair: the furnace is dangerous because it transforms things, but it also produces light, and Che would later place Martí’s words at the head of his own call to international struggle, extending that light beyond Cuba toward a continental horizon.
Venezuela is one of today’s furnaces because it faces extreme imperialist pressure while some communes continue to open a path towards socialism. Cuba is another, under a blockade that seeks to make revolutionary survival materially impossible. Palestine is another, enduring a genocide carried out in plain sight; Iran is yet another, confronting a war waged by the United States and “Israel” against its sovereignty. Across Latin America, popular movements are confronting reaction, fascistization, dependency, and the renewed assertion of U.S. power; and in the United States itself, organizers are confronting a political environment in which dissent and solidarity are increasingly treated as objects of repression. Each of these furnaces has its own temperature, its own history, its own contradictions—the task is not to rank them but to understand what it means to build relationships among those working in every one of them.
The revolutionary process in Venezuela is entering a difficult and uncertain period: its contradictions are real and so is what it has accumulated. Perhaps this is precisely the terrain on which a different internationalism can be rebuilt: one grounded in reciprocity, in the exchange of political capacities, and in the recognition that no revolutionary people can emancipate itself in isolation. The communes are still here, and movements are still working within them.
It is the hour of the furnaces, and what matters now is what light we make together.
