Let me conclude these very brief remarks on Guevara’s conception of socialism and communism with a few comments on some common misunderstandings of Guevara’s views on these topics. First of all, it should be noted that Guevara envisions communist society, as do all Marxists, as a classless society of abundance, whose purpose is to satisfy the needs of all. Thus, in speaking of “the central idea of entering communism” in “On the Budgetary System of Finance,” his important 1964 essay outlining his theory of economic organization, Guevara refers to “a society of large-scale production and the satisfaction of man’s basic needs.” Furthermore, he acknowledges, in keeping with a basic premise of Marxism, that people’s needs will continue to grow and that the satisfaction of these needs—which will also “become increasingly complex”12—will entail the production and distribution of more and more consumer goods13; and on numerous other occasions Guevara insists on the need to increase the supply of such goods.14 Indeed, Guevara even endorses on occasion the most robust notion of abundance—that is, not merely enough for everyone but an endless supply for everyone15—as when he remarks, in a speech that also dates from 1964, that the “new society” will be one in which “all will have an infinite quantity of consumer goods at their disposal.”16 Thus, while the immediate objective during the transition to socialism is to satisfy people’s most basic needs (for food, medical care, education, housing, etc.) and to prioritize the needs of the most disadvantaged sectors of the population, the long-range goal is abundance.17 If I belabor this point, it is because at least one recent critic of Guevara has asserted that Guevara had no interest in increasing the number of consumer goods available to Cubans.18 But the assertion is, as the passages cited attest, completely untenable.
The second misunderstanding of Guevara’s thought worth mentioning here involves the claim that Guevara advocated the simultaneous building of socialism and communism.19 This claim also proves completely untenable. While Guevara does maintain, as we shall see in the following chapter, that it is possible to compress the stages through which a society must pass in order to reach socialism and, eventually, communism, he never argues, to my knowledge, that they can be built simultaneously in Cuba or, for that matter, anywhere else. (One should also bear in mind in this connection that Guevara’s thought focuses above all, as we have already seen, on the political economy of the transition to socialism, which he does not identify with the political economy of socialism.) Moreover, it is precisely because Guevara does not believe that socialism and communism can be built simultaneously that he accepts Marx’s familiar distinction between the distributional principles appropriate for the former and the latter: whereas under socialism, the “lower” phase of communist society, an individual’s contribution to the social product will necessarily determine his or her share of social benefits, under communism, the “higher phase of communist society,” the operative principle of distribution will become “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”20 As Guevara invokes and endorses Marx’s distinction on numerous occasions,21 the claim that he does not accept that “the principle of ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his work’ was the one appropriate to ‘socialism,’” a claim recently advanced by Samuel Farber,22 makes little sense.
Guevara’s Conception of Revolution
“Remember that the revolution is what is important.”23 These words, from a letter that Guevara wrote to his children in the last year of his life, offer a concise statement of the importance of the Cuban Revolution, and revolution generally, for Guevara’s worldview. Yet, the depth of his commitment to revolutionary social transformation notwithstanding, Guevara never attempted to produce a systematic treatment of his conception of revolution. To be sure, Guevara occasionally offers a general characterization of revolutions, as when he defines them as “accelerated radical social changes,” or explains that they consist in “cries of desperation from the people, who take up arms and solve the immediate problem of an oligarchy, or a government, that is oppressing them.”24 But his comments on the nature of revolution are for the most part of an incidental character. Nevertheless, a number of these comments on the nature of revolution are of some interest, as are his more developed thoughts on the measures that socialist revolutionaries will have to enact if their revolution is to succeed. (I am not referring here to Guevara’s more specific ideas and policies for building socialism, which we shall examine in the following chapter.) Consideration of these comments and thoughts reveals, if nothing else, that it is hardly the case that, as one author has argued, Guevara tends “to reduce revolution to armed struggle, the armed struggle to rural guerrilla warfare, and guerrilla warfare to the core group of the foco.”25
Let us note, to begin with, that Guevara often emphasizes—in keeping with Marx’s well-known thesis that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”26—the need to utterly transform the prerevolutionary state institutions. While Guevara would not exempt any of the state’s central institutions from this transformation, he tends to attach paramount importance to the destruction of the existing army—that is, to the dismantling of the army inherited from capitalist society and its subsequent replacement by a “people’s army.” (This is not the same thing as the need to defeat the oppressor’s army, a topic touched on in the preceding chapter.) As he says in an essay titled “The Cuban Revolution’s Influence in Latin America,” written in 1962, “One of the premises of the Cuban Revolution is that it is absolutely necessary to immediately destroy the army in order to take power seriously.”27 Yet this is not, for Guevara, merely a premise of the Cuban Revolution; to the contrary, “the defeat and subsequent annihilation of the army by the popular forces” is “an absolutely necessary condition for every genuine revolution.”28 Indeed, this is not only “an absolutely necessary condition” but is also the very first task that must be undertaken after a successful revolution.29 The reason for prioritizing the elimination of the old professional army is that it constitutes one of the principal impediments to the enactment of popular demands, “the enemy of the people par excellence.”30 In rehearsing this same argument in June 1961, shortly after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Guevara invokes Spain and Guatemala (allusions to the pre–civil war Second Republic and the early 1950s government of Jacobo Arbenz, respectively) as examples of popular movements that failed because they did not establish their own people’s army to defend the social gains achieved.31
Besides the need to dismantle the oppressor army, the newly victorious Cuban Revolution had to deal with—as will all successful anti-imperialist or socialist revolutions, thinks Guevara—the problem posed by those who not only served in the previous regime’s forces of repression but also were individually guilty of torture, murder, and so on. Guevara approved of executions in such cases. It is worth mentioning in this regard that on arriving in Havana in January 1959, Guevara was put in charge of the city’s La Cabaña fortress, and while there his responsibilities included the supervision of the revolutionary tribunals that tried and sentenced hundreds of people accused of crimes, often of a quite abhorrent nature, in service to the dictator Batista. Some of these people were executed,32 and while Guevara did not participate in the trials, he did have the last word on every sanction. Guevara defended the tribunals, a form of “revolutionary justice,” arguing that the revolutionary government only executed war criminals and those guilty of crimes against humanity. He suggested, moreover, that part of the negative reaction that these executions, which enjoyed nearly universal support within Cuba, provoked abroad arose from the fact that the foreign press, and preeminently the US news services, had failed to convey the true extent of the killings and torture under Batista, and in Latin America more generally.33 In any event, Guevara plainly believed that some executions were necessary and unavoidable, a view he reiterated in his response to criticisms from Latin American delegates following his address at the
United Nations in 1964: “Yes, we shoot people, we have shot people, and we shall continue to shoot people as long as it is necessary. . . . But I must say this: we do not commit assassinations.”34
Another noteworthy aspect of Guevara’s notion of revolution concerns his understanding of the dynamic of radicalization within a revolutionary process, and his views on the experience of radicalization within the Cuban Revolution in particular. Regarding the general topic of radicalization, Guevara holds that “a revolution that does not constantly expand is a revolution that regresses.”35 That the word “expand” here means something like “become more radical” or “intensify” (the original Spanish is que no se profundice—“is not deepened”) is obvious from other passages in which Guevara states or implies the same idea.36 A constant deepening and heightening of revolutionary measures reduces the possibility of a reversion to the prerevolutionary condition; that is, this procedure tends to make the revolution irreversible or, if one prefers, to forestall and neutralize counterrevolutionary tendencies. To be sure, Guevara sometimes characterizes the actual process of radicalization of the Cuban Revolution—namely, its evolution from the defeat of Fulgencio Batista’s army to the consolidation of policies and measures aimed at establishing socialism in Cuba—as a historically specific response to both external and internal pressures. The external pressure consisted of the resistance of the United States in the form of punitive measures taken against Cuba (such as the annulment of the annual sugar quota in July 1960), while the internal pressures included both antirevolutionary resistance emanating from the Cuban bourgeoisie and others who sided with American imperialism and popular support for the revolution, with its demands to push the revolution forward.37 Yet there can be no doubt that the radicalization of the revolution was, in Guevara’s view, not merely an appropriate response to contingent pressures. Rather, just as the elimination of the prerevolutionary army is, for Guevara, “an absolutely necessary condition for every genuine revolution,” so, too, is the constant expansion of revolutionary measures. Guevara’s thesis is, in any case, hardly original; it is, rather, a familiar Marxist idea, and Guevara actually invokes and paraphrases Marx himself in the sentence preceding the remark that I cited at the beginning of this paragraph.38
Guevara occasionally claims, in keeping with his (sometime) contention that contingent historical factors and circumstances dictated the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution, that it was the revolution’s tendency to follow a more and more radical course that led the revolution’s leaders to embrace Marxist and communist ideas. In other words, it was not merely true, as Guevara remarked to Jorge Masetti in 1958, that it was only in the course of making a revolution that the guerrillas themselves became revolutionaries,39 or that, as he maintains in Guerrilla Warfare, the interaction between the guerrillas and the people caused “a progressive radicalization” of the revolutionary struggle (as the former demonstrated the value of armed struggle and the lives of the latter revealed the true extent of oppression in Cuba).40 It was also the case that this process of relentless radicalization had eventually turned the revolution’s leaders into Marxists and communists.
This is a questionable thesis but not because anyone would challenge the proposition that the Cuban Revolution underwent a very profound radicalization in a very brief span of time. Indeed, most observers would not only grant this proposition but also agree with Guevara’s interpretation of the revolution’s early development. For example, in an article published on the very day that the Rebel Army attained its victory, January 1, 1959, Guevara refers to the revolution as a cross-class movement, and twelve months later he would characterize the initial stages of the Cuban Revolution in more or less populist terms, describing it as antifeudal and opposed to the big landowners (antilatifundista).41 Not long after this, Guevara would note, in a parenthetical periodization included in a document for the Council of Ministers, that the “bourgeois-democratic” phase of the revolution lasted no more than twenty months (i.e., until September 1960),42 a claim that likewise appears quite plausible. The problem arises when Guevara goes on to suggest, as he does on some occasions, that he and the other leaders of the July 26 Movement (named after the date of Fidel Castro’s unsuccessful attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba in 1953) discovered, and subsequently came to embrace, Marxism and socialism/communism as a result of their experience during the revolution. For example, in his July 1960 speech to the First Latin American Youth Congress, Guevara tells his audience that, “if today we are putting into practice what is known as Marxism, it is because we discovered it here.”43 Likewise, in a question-and-answer session with American students in August 1963, Guevara, referring to the July 26 Movement, says, “We were not communists. It was necessary to fight for the people’s well-being and to change the existing reality. We saw, as the struggle developed, how Marxism had foreseen answers to the problem and how the behavior of American imperialism forced us to choose. . . . The study of the development of this struggle showed us the truth of Marxism.”44
While this account is certainly consistent with a Marxist approach to social analysis, with its emphasis on the social determination of our ideas, and may well offer an accurate description of the ideological evolution of much of the leadership of the Cuban Revolution, it hardly applies to the development of Guevara’s own political outlook, for the fact is that Guevara already adhered to a Marxism of some sort and espoused communist ideas prior to the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959.45 These commitments are reflected, for example, in a December 1957 letter to an important figure in the July 26 Movement, René Ramos Latour; in this letter, Guevara declares that on account of his “ideological preparation” he belonged “to those who believe that the solution to the world’s problems lies behind the so-called iron curtain.”46 Similarly revealing is an April 1963 speech in which Guevara remarks that he was thinking about a “socialist revolution” during the revolutionary war—and hence well before the Rebels’ victory—and in an interview published in Look magazine the very same month, Guevara admitted to his interviewer, Laura Bergquist, that he had a “Marxist-oriented revolution in mind” (the phrase is Bergquist’s) when he was “fighting in the Sierra Maestra mountains.”47 Approximately a year later, Guevara would state, in an interview with another American journalist, that he had had an intuitive sense that the revolution would follow the radical path that it took without foreseeing the “Marxist-Leninist formulation” of the revolution. When journalist Lisa Howard subsequently posed a question regarding Fidel Castro’s denial, while fighting in the Sierra Maestra, that he was a communist, Guevara, contradicting to a large degree his previous statement, replied, “I knew he was not a Communist, but I believe that I also knew that he would become a Communist. Just as I knew at that time that I was not a Communist but I also knew that I would become one within a short time and that the natural development of the revolution would lead all of us to Marxism-Leninism. I cannot say that it was a clear or conscious knowledge, but it was an intuition . . . the result of an examination, of careful assessment of the development of the attitude of the United States.”48 We might also note, finally, the significance of a famous joke relating to Guevara’s appointment as president of the National Bank of Cuba in November 1959. At a meeting of the revolution’s leadership, the story goes, Fidel Castro asked if anyone in the room was an economist. Guevara, half dozing in the back of the room, immediately and energetically raised his hand. When a nonplussed Castro later told Guevara that he never knew that he was an economist, Guevara replied that he thought Castro had asked if anyone present was a communist.49 It is seldom noticed that the joke’s comic effect requires the presupposition that Guevara already considered himself a communist prior to his appointment as director of the National Bank—were this not plausible, the joke would make no sense and would hardly be amusing—in late 1959. And if he did indeed identify himself as a communist less than a year into the revolution, long before it had implemented
its truly radical early measures (e.g., the nationalizations of US companies) and during a time in which the revolution was still passing through its “bourgeois-democratic” phase, the idea that Guevara became a Marxist and communist as a result of the social changes in Cuba appears utterly implausible.
So, when Guevara denies his own prerevolutionary adherence to Marxist and communist views, as in his exchange with the American students, his remarks are highly misleading, at the very least: while the evolution of the revolution no doubt radicalized him in many ways, Guevara plainly espoused a Marxist, communist political outlook at the revolution’s inception, however ill-defined this outlook may have been. No less misleading, therefore, is his assertion that he “discovered” the Marxist perspective through the Cuban Revolution. It is significant, in this regard, that just three months after his speech to the First Latin American Youth Congress (cited above) Guevara would remark, in “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” that “there are truths so evident, so much a part of the people’s knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a ‘Marxist’ with the same naturalness with which one is a ‘Newtonian’ in physics or a ‘Pasteurian.’”50 The latter remark, from October 1960, appears more than a little inconsistent with the uncertainly that Guevara expresses in July 1960 regarding the possibly Marxist character of the Cuban Revolution and, more generally, with the notion that he, along with the rest of the Cuban Revolution’s major leaders, gradually discovered Marxism through the revolution. Likewise, when Guevara denied being a “communist,” as he did in a mid-1959 letter to the editor of Cuba’s most important weekly magazine, it was plainly a matter of political expediency, a tactical untruth, as it were.51 As Guevara told Cuban journalist José Vázquez, while the revolutionary press should never lie, there are some truths that should be kept secret so as to avoid giving weapons to the enemy,52 a precept that seems especially reasonable when one faces an enemy as powerful as Cuba’s.
The Political Theory of Che Guevara Page 12
