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“…living in a world without any possible escape… there was nothing for it but to fight for an impossible escape.”

—Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary

This is the story of a “heroic quest” to find a hidden door that opens into a better world. In that sense, there are two major elements to the story: the hero, and the door. In this narrative, each time the door opens a different place is revealed, and each time the hero passes through door he is transformed. The final doorway opens into the book you hold in your hands. Now it’s your turn to pass through the door.

Readers familiar with the archetypal heroic narrative structure will know that it is circular: the hero (who we’ll now call “the protagonist,” to avoid the unwanted connotations of the word “hero”) leaves home on a search into the unknown for a treasure. The protagonist faces, and wins, challenges, and then, after a series of adventures, returns home. And then, in a dream, the location of the treasure is revealed to be, of all places, buried beneath his bed.

The context from which the protagonist sets out is offered in the first chapter, but something should be said here about the more exotic waypoints to make the journey more comprehensible. I spent some thirty-five years (at the time of this writing) writing about, and doing solidarity with, revolutionary movements in Latin America. This memoir lays out the story of how I came to that work, and how my understanding of an anti-imperialist struggle has evolved over the years.

My first contact with Latin America happened when I landed in Nicaragua in 1982 as a rather naïve (I should say, very naïve) Christian solidarity activist. The Sandinista Revolution had been in process for nearly three years at that point, and it was responsible, in ways I didn’t even understand at the time, for revolutionary upheaval that seized the entire region in those years. My story also took me through work with the Zapatista struggle, primarily translating, co-editing and publishing what was the first book of their material to appear in English.

However, the bulk of this book concerns my work with the Bolivarian process of Venezuela, and this is the point that my understanding of the work of an anti-imperialist solidarity activist began to change. The section on Venezuela encompasses roughly half of the book, and it was the epiphany and denouement of a very long journey.

I am approaching, again, the beginning of my journey where I discover that the world isn’t at all what it appears to be. It is the responsibility of all of us who understand that to look beneath the surface for the truth concealed there. That is the treasure, the location of which only our dreams will reveal.

Clifton Ross

Berkeley, CA

February 2016