Sucre, Bolivia. A bar of the new Bolivian state-owned mining corporation.

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Pedro Escobar dropped a 50-centavo piece in the jar labeled "For The Cause". It wasn't much, but it was something. Not that life as a silver miner was an especially lucrative one, though it had become significantly better under the revolution--he even got time off now, which was basically unheard of before. But he owed it to the revolution to help out those who sought to overthrow similarly oppressive imperialist regimes. It was in the newspaper of the Party of the Institutional Bolivarian Revolution [PBRI]. It was in the newspaper of the unions too. Pedro hadn't been able to read previously, at least not well, but his son, who had been taught by one of those Soviets at least basic fluency, read the paper aloud to him.

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Around Bolivia, cash piled up. It was largely drawn from the workers and farmers of Bolivia, the prime beneficiaries and supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution, though it must be said that the Grand National Revolutionary Junta certainly goosed the donations a little--and it wasn't like Bolivian union leadership was in any way opposed to this effort.

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The result is that cash, in the forms of US dollars, Swiss bearer bonds, even silver bullion, have been making their way to the guerillas in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. More may yet follow, though Bolivia's revolution is yet young and the impoverishment of the country under the regime of the tin tyrants had left it without the strong fiscal resources of many other nations. Still, nearly two million dollars have trickled through, half to each little cluster of Caribbean rebels, through various means.

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If there is one thing that must be made clear, it is that the Bolivian revolution is the one that all the intellectual thinkers of Latin America have been hoping for. And Bolivia hopes to touch every Latin American nation the way that Mexico and Venezuela have in the past with its radical social upheaval and disposal of the old monied and propertied elites in favor of the people, of modernization most radical. In a way, it already has, from an Argentine medical student who reads every dispatch from La Paz with excitement to the hope it inspires in the Caribbean Legion and its young spokesman Fidel Castro.