Tariq the pirate: a review of 'Pirates of the Caribbean'

I have had two encounters with the writer Tariq Ali. The first was in the flesh in 2002 at a launch of his book The Clash of the Fundamentalisms. The second was televised and given the circumstances, slightly humorous. Tired after conducting various interviews around the slums of Caracas for my honours thesis last year, I settled down one afternoon in my modest hotel room, with a cool glass of water, to watch some television before commencing to write.

The first channel I viewed quickly persuaded my fingers to touch the remote and yet, by a stroke of luck, the following station presented me with a peculiar sight which made me pause.

Standing behind a podium with a Venezuelan government emblem and translator, there was Tariq Ali - on state television discussing the new editorial standards of Telesur, a joint venture by the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina and Uruguay to establish a television network to counter the perspectives of CNN.

Ali was in Caracas to help launch the channel along with actor Danny Glover and others. This sight should not have surprised me.

Similar to critical thinkers such as Eduardo Galeano and Noam Chomsky, who have not recanted on their radical past and accepted the machinations of neoliberal ideology, Tariq Ali has come out in support of the policies of the singing president in Caracas.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, published by Verso, is his latest effort in explaining the popular changes taking place in Latin America which are challenging US hegemony.

With a witty book cover portraying Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro (the latter with a halo around his head!), as three pirates that have dared to challenge the United States, Ali sets the tone in the first chapter by noting how most of the international press are failing miserably in reporting elementary facts on important events in the region.

The scant coverage of the recent fraudulent win by right-wing candidate Felipe Calderon, in the Mexican presidential elections, and the false depiction of the April 11, 2002 coup d’état against the Chávez government as a popular revolt, are in Ali’s view, the most notable examples.

The Financial Times’ Andrew Webb-Vidal, “fellow-hack” Richard Lapper and Phil Gunson from The Economist all come under fire and with good reason as those remotely familiar with the facts surrounding the 2002 coup would agree.

Recently, on November 19, Simon Romero in The New York Times stated that:

Tensions between the government and news organisations seem to have eased since the months after a short-lived coup in April 2002, which briefly removed Mr Chávez and appeared to have had the blessing of some established news media groups and the Bush administration.

Romero might have added that the NYT itself parroted the lies of the Bush administration during the days of the April coup as Howard Friel and Richard Falk have documented in their 2004 study The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy.

Some may wonder what Ali’s qualifications are for writing such a book on recent developments in Latin America but his links to the region stretch back over three decades. In 1967 he travelled to Bolivia as a member of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation to observe the trial of French writer Régis Debray as Che Guevara aimed to create a new revolution before his capture and execution under the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Delayed at the airport as Bolivian customs officials did not believe his passport and country of origin, Pakistan, were real, Ali once on the streets of La Paz writes how he realised the “indigenous people rarely smiled” as they “appeared to be occupied from without and within”.

Soon, from the glances of many creoles, Ali notes that he himself was viewed as “another Indian” experiencing local racism first hand. Such personal recollections make Ali’s book particularly interesting while his chapters on Bolivia and Venezuela make it clear why neoliberal policies have been rejected en masse by the populations of those countries.

In his chapter on Cuba, Ali notes how he met with local writers and intellectuals who asked him what he thought of their revolution. A frank response followed in that he believed it was his generation’s revolution too until “you betrayed us by going to bed with a fat, ugly, bureaucrat named Brezhnev”, referring to Cuba’s defence of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. Today, however, Ali writes that he and the Cuban revolution are both old and they need each other as it is “love in the time of cholera”.

I was disappointed the book does not attempt to summarise Ali’s thoughts on the changes taking place in the region, in particular, what the future could hold for the populations of Latin America. The poor in Venezuela are undoubtedly benefiting from the Chávez government’s programs, Morales is pushing through policies aimed at regaining national sovereignty and Cuba may (hopefully) carryout further reforms regarding freedom of speech, however, the alliance between the Axis of Hope is still undoubtedly weak.

Evo Morales, for example, faces the real threat of a coup. Although the recent triumph of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Rafael Correa in Ecuador may swell the ranks of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (the Axis of Hope’s answer to Washington’s Free Trade Agreement of the Americas), the reality is that until a major country in the region decides to join Caracas and Havana, the project for the regional integration of Latin America around popular democracies with strong social policies, remains unstable and far from consolidated.

The support for Chávez by Lula’s centre-left government in Brazil has certainly been important (even crucial at times), however, the former factory worker’s own policies, both national and international, have disappointed many as he has not sought for a strong enough shift away from neoliberal economics and US hegemony.

However, despite these limitations, the winds of change are certainly moving Latin America forward. While one should expect Pirates of the Caribbean to obtain few reviews, those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the enormous political shifts in Latin America would be wise to turn to the pages written by a pirate named Tariq Ali.