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The plaza is the center of Cristo Rey, one of the nine communal councils that make up El Panal and the most recent to join the commune. Surrounding the plaza are the Sala de Autogobierno (Self-Government Hall), always buzzing with communal activity; the Aula Cultural Ali Primera, where kids can take guitar or karate classes; Radio Arsenal, where the communards themselves broadcast constantly about their dreams and challenges; a Barrio Adentro medical clinic; a soccer field; children’s play areas; and an open-air amphitheater with remarkable acoustics, called a concha acústica. The commune recuperated this space only recently, after years of neglect by the local government. It was built for meeting, deciding, learning, playing, and telling stories, and on the afternoon of Saturday, September 12, it served all of these purposes at once.

If the truth be told, the scene felt like an afternoon in a socialist future. Not a finished future, of course, but one glimpsed in practice. The earthquake that had struck Caracas almost three months earlier left no visible trace in the plaza itself, but its effects are still evident: cracks are being repaired, walls rebuilt. More than a hundred homes had been damaged. Just days after the earth shook, however, the commune’s spokespeople, joined by engineers, had identified the damage and began the repairs, with the municipal government supplying bricks, cement, and paint.

Outside, residents of Cristo Rey were busy electing their spokespeople: coordinators of tasks such as education, sports, health, culture, and finances. Participation was high, with turnout above 50 percent, and the atmosphere was festive. Throughout the afternoon, people were crossing the plaza with their soup bowls, trading stories and predictions about the election.

The thirty-something communard called Anacaona was one of the people overseeing the process. A spokesperson herself, she is always busy. Now she is texting someone about bricks to be delivered to finish rebuilding a home, while talking with another about the day’s events. Putting the elections in context, Anacaona reflected: “The assembly is Chávez’s method; it’s our method. Those elected today have more responsibilities, but the decisions are made by the community as a whole.”

On the soccer field, a youth tournament was underway, and the plaza erupted at every goal. Nearby, teenagers enrolled in the commune’s summer vacation program sang with an energy that carried across the square. Younger children ran through the play areas. Most people brought together there lived in the commune, though others came from elsewhere in the city

What made this so much like an afternoon in the future? In the plaza, things that capitalist cities keep apart came together in one space: political decisions, food, sport, culture, education, children playing. Capitalist geography compartmentalizes life. Here, the borders break down. Voting was not a mere chore squeezed between other errands, and the dramatic work that was about to be presented was not mere escapism.

By late afternoon, more than a hundred people had gathered around the amphitheater to watch the play. The work had a provocative title: Bolívar: You Did Not Plow in the Sea. It was written by Augusto Boal, the creator of the Theater of the Oppressed, while the idea of staging in the commune was the brainchild of filmmaker Thierry Deronne and Luciano Carvalho, a teacher and theater director from Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).

Carvalho had come from São Paulo to Caracas for ten intense days of preparation. As a matter of principle, the actors were not professionals but young communards from El Panal and from across the country, from communes in Lara, Yaracuy, Carabobo, Falcón, Mérida, and Anzoátegui. Supporting it all was Deronne’s Escuela Popular y Latinoamericana de Cine, TV y Teatro, a grassroots project dedicated to making art outside conventional cultural institutions.

Before those assembled, Carvalho made a surprising announcement: This performance was to be a world premiere. The work by Boal had never been presented before. The Brazilian director was especially delighted that it was going to happen in a Venezuelan commune, where working people are building new forms of collective power. Although Boal had written the play in the 1960s, it could not be staged in its time because the dictatorship descended on Brazil with force. The play opened with a procession. The actor-communards entered from stage left carrying flags, including the Palestinian flag, while singing “Latinoamérica,” the Calle 13 anthem whose refrain insists that the wind, the sun, and the rain are not for sale.

An important innovation was that Bolívar was not represented by one person. Instead, different communards played him at different periods of his life. At the center of the story is his meeting with Alexandre Pétion, the Haitian revolutionary, who requested one thing from Bolivar in return for supporting the cause of Venezuelan independence with arms and ships: he said that the enslaved people in Venezuela must be freed.

The play follows Bolívar through his defeats and his hardest years, which led him to think that he had, in his own words, merely “plowed in the sea.” Yet the performance ended with a young communard singing Ali Primera’s “Canción Bolivariana,” a song that insists that Bolívar’s thought is not dead. That ending enacts a response to Bolívar’s exasperated words about the futility of his life’s work. In effect, the independence leader did not plow in the sea if communards like those on stage and in the audience are willing to take up his unfinished project.

In a commune, this participative dynamic is amplified. Rehearsal never really stops: people plan, argue, and intervene in their own reality all the time, so the distance between stage and audience was minimal from the start. The actors are neighbors and comrades, and the audience did not sit still. People laughed and answered the actors out loud. At one point, a young boy in the audience insulted the representation on stage of Francisco Santander, Bolivar’s traitorous rival. The boy needed no encouragement, and nobody told him to be quiet.

Both the voting and the play—the afternoon’s two main events—followed the same logic. Through the voting process, people were choosing their spokespeople, knowing that authority still rests with the community as a whole. In the amphitheater, people were doing something similar with Bolívar: refusing to hand him over to a single actor. Throughout much of Venezuelan history, Bolívar was trapped in a single body, and that was a statue! Chávez brought him down from the pedestal and into the present as a living political project. The Bolívar of El Panal that day had many bodies and many ages.

Plowing in the sea is a vivid image of futility. One of Bolívar’s last major projects, which may have led him to think he had plowed in the sea, was the project of Latin American unity embodied in the 1826 Amphictyonic Congress in Panama. The aim of that event, depicted in one of the plaza’s murals, was to form a league of Latin American nations.

Two hundred years later, communards in Venezuela and peoples around the continent are still at work on this project of Latin American unity, even as U.S. imperialism meddles in our continent’s affairs with unprecedented levels of violence. In the work of theater, one could see a powerful image of Latin American unity. On the stage, there stood communards from several communes, a director from Brazil’s landless movement, and, among the flags, the flags of Palestine and Haiti. To be sure, it was no league of states, and nobody signed a treaty. However, the performance was a rehearsal for and small enactment of Latin American unity.

Carvalho said that an organized pueblo, one that builds popular power every day, cannot be defeated. The Brazilian theater director’s optimism might have seemed out of place, given the major setbacks Venezuela has experienced this year. However, unlike most of the claims being thrown around about Venezuela these days, which are given from disembodied positions, Carvalho’s affirmation was a grounded one. The capacities a pueblo acquires through practice—whether making political decisions together, staffing a radio, or staging a drama—are indeed the revolution’s bedrock. Thierry Deronne seconded this idea, pointing to the need to expand it. Deronne said that “a revolution must have a strong cultural front,” and he affirmed the central role of communes such as El Panal in that task.

Today, Venezuela has been hit by an earthquake and an imperialist military attack, while Latin America is more divided than ever. Many are saying, in so many words, that not only Bolívar but also Chávez, Evo Morales, and their whole generation plowed in the ocean. However, from the perspective of El Panal Commune, where people are hard at work day after day—in organizing, voting, art, sports, and production—things look and feel very different. In this commune, politics and the historical project have touched ground. Here, people are plowing not in the ocean but in the territory, and they are producing concrete results.