In one sense, the most distinctive and important quality of revolutionaries is an unqualified devotion to the revolution itself. In his essay “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” Guevara cites occasions in which many Cubans displayed a “total dedication to the revolutionary cause,” and it is obvious, from his remarks in this essay and elsewhere that Guevara identifies such an attitude with that of the true revolutionary. Or, rather, he identifies the revolutionary with the routinization of this attitude, which is why Guevara goes on to add that “to perpetuate this heroic attitude in daily life is . . . one of our fundamental tasks.”31 It is, in any event, a view more or less implicit in another sentence from the letter to his children cited in the preceding paragraph—“Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone, is worth nothing”—as well as in the comment that Guevara once made to his close collaborator Ángel Arcos Bergnes: “The principles of the Revolution come before personal principles.”32 Guevara’s own life, needless to say, exemplified “total dedication to the revolutionary cause” more than anyone else’s.33 In any event, this thoroughgoing dedication to, and identification with, the revolution is what inspires and sustains two other salient qualities of the revolutionary: a disposition to endure major personal sacrifices and a commitment to exemplary conduct.
The value—and inevitability—of sacrifice is an important theme in Guevara’s conception of the revolutionary. The sacrifices that a revolutionary must endure can take many forms: material goods forgone, leisure time lost due to work of one kind or another for the benefit of the revolution, and renunciation of certain personal aspirations (as regards, for example, professional ambitions or the choice of where to live). Such sacrifices prove necessary and unavoidable not only because revolutionaries have undertaken to build socialism at an accelerated pace in an underdeveloped country but also because they must do so in the midst of what Guevara calls “capitalist reaction.”34 What is more, this “capitalist reaction” includes not merely the lack of support from capitalist nations but also the belligerent enmity of the United States, a country only ninety miles away.35
Significantly, Guevara never made any attempt to mislead Cubans regarding the magnitude of the sacrifice that the transition to socialism in Cuba would require. To the contrary. For example, in a January 1962 appearance on televsion, the public forum par excellence, Guevara informed viewers that “the time ahead is a time of hard work and a time of sacrifice, in which many things will have to be scarce, in which it will take us a lot of effort to develop our industry, our agriculture.”36 But he was no less forthright when it came to acknowledging that not everyone in Cuba fully grasped the need for such sacrifice.37
In any event, while Guevara insists that all will have to accept sacrifices in the building of socialism in an underdeveloped country, it is the most committed revolutionaries who, because of their special responsibilities, will have to endure the greatest sacrifices. This is true, for example, in the case of the “vanguard” youth who become Young Communists (i.e., members of the Union of Young Communists), who must be “the first to be ready to make the sacrifices demanded by the revolution,” but in fact all cadres must possess a “capacity for sacrifice.”38 As a specific example of sacrifice, one might cite Guevara’s description of the optimal revolutionary administrator of a factory or enterprise who, whatever his or her relation to the party, is capable of forgetting all personal interests and of placing adherence to revolutionary laws and the performance of revolutionary duties before personal friendship.39
The true revolutionary must not only be indefatigable but also always seek more work and more sacrifices with which to discharge his or her duties; or, as Guevara says in a meeting in February 1964, for those in the vanguard, making sacrifices must be so habitual that sacrifice itself becomes their way of life.40 Most self-sacrificing of all is the revolutionary who becomes a leader at the highest levels41; and, as a matter of fact, on several occasions, including in “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” Guevara notes that the Cuban Revolution’s supreme leaders had to sacrifice much of their family life, besides enduring the other sacrifices that define the life of a revolutionary.42 Guevara claims, incidentally, that this understanding of the revolutionary leader’s sacrifices derives from José Martí, who “taught us that a revolutionary and a ruler can have neither a private life nor pleasures. He must give everything to the people that choose him, and this places him in a position of responsibility and combat.”43 In any case, as a man who often worked at his office until 3 a.m. and who worked on the weekends as well (part of this work consisting of voluntary labor),44 Guevara exemplified this spirit of self-sacrifice like no one else; and he specifically mentions the extent of this self-sacrifice in a highly revealing comment during his press conference at the 1961 Inter-American Economic and Social Council Conference: “I am convinced that I have a mission to fulfill in the world, and that for the sake of this mission I have to sacrifice my home, I have to sacrifice all of an individual’s pleasures of daily life, I have to sacrifice my personal security, and perhaps I’ll have to sacrifice my life.”45
The second quality that defines the true revolutionary is, as noted, a commitment to exemplary conduct. Revolutionaries should, according to Guevara, set an example, and the greater the responsibilities of a revolutionary (the higher the position of authority occupied by the revolutionary), the greater the importance of his or her exemplariness, for one’s duty to make sacrifices is commensurate with one’s responsibilities. As Guevara puts it in his 1962 essay “The Cadre: Backbone of the Revolution,” revolutionaries should always be “demonstrating through personal example the truths and watchwords of the revolution.”46 In short, they should, as he stresses in a speech from January of the same year, preach by example, and he specifically mentions “sacrifice” and “work” as two areas in which the revolutionary must prove exemplary.47
For Guevara, an important corollary of this idea is that no one ought to recommend or call for actions that one does not, or will not, perform oneself. Indeed, in a report prepared for the Council of Ministers and that covers 1961 to 1962, Guevara notes that this principle had been, in effect, the official policy applied to those who held leadership positions in his Ministry of Industries.48 (There is no question that Guevara was unrivaled in his adherence to this principle, as those who knew him and worked with him are quick to emphasize.49) This readiness on the part of revolutionaries, and especially those who hold positions of authority, to perform difficult work or endure major sacrifices would create what Guevara, borrowing a term from Fidel Castro, calls “moral compulsion,” which refers to an example’s effect in motivating or inspiring similar actions in others.50 At the same time, Guevara does not hesitate to claim that a revolutionary who has invariably displayed exemplary conduct may have the right to demand similar conduct from others when this is indispensable. As he would remark in a January 1964 speech during a ceremony in which “communist labor” certificates were awarded, “The one who can show with his example day after day, without expecting from society anything but recognition of his merits as a builder of the new society, has the right to demand sacrifice of others when the time comes.”51
In sum, we can identify the duties of revolutionaries with five basic qualities: a profoundly egalitarian outlook, a very strong sense of social duty, an exceptional devotion to the revolution, a disposition to endure major personal sacrifices, and a commitment to exemplary conduct. As noted earlier, the first two qualities also characterize the new human being, but the latter three properly characterize revolutionaries during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. Guevara’s identification of the revolutionary with these qualities, and in particular with great, even extraordinary, personal sacrifice, helps to illuminate the striking remark from his Bolivian Diary, cited earlier, to the effect that the revolutionary is “the highest form of the human species.” If revolutionaries represent this level of achievement, it is not only because of
the difficulty of their struggle and the value of their objective but also on account of the sheer range and magnitude of the sacrifices that they must endure, which far exceed anything that the new human being will face. After all, the new human being will inhabit a society in which a communist institutional framework will already exist, as will abundance; in which a very robust sense of social duty will, thanks to a different process of socialization, be the norm, and thus inevitable social burdens will be shouldered by a far larger number of people; and in which, as a result of the technical revolution, work will be far less onerous than it is at present and all will be able to dedicate themselves to the kind of work they most wish to pursue.52 If we grasp the extent to which the optimal revolutionary is in some sense even more estimable than the new human being, it will not be difficult to understand why Guevara holds revolutionaries in such high regard. But to grasp as much is also to understand the error in assuming that the revolutionary accurately “prefigures” the new human being, or that a revolutionary’s lifestyle should be construed as an instance of “prefiguration,” a term now regularly used to designate the practices of individuals, movements, or organizations that attempt to reflect or embody—in their relationships, forms of organization, tactics and methods, and so on—the society that they seek to create, the goal that they aspire to attain.53 To be sure, some of the revolutionary’s specific practices are prefigurative. One example is the manual labor performed by senior managers and technical personnel, which, as Marta Harnecker has pointed out, prefigures the communist society—this was its purpose—in which the opposition between manual and mental labor has ceased to exist.54 As a whole, however, the revolutionaries’ actions amount to something that we might more accurately call “superprefiguration,” as they must endure far more sacrifice than the new human being, have to be “exemplary” (and overcome formidable obstacles in the process), and should exhibit a level of devotion to social transformation—that is, the revolution—that will prove quite unnecessary in a communist society.
Before concluding this discussion of Guevara’s conception of revolutionaries, it may be useful to say something about one facet of a revolutionary’s sacrifice, understood as the practice of making sacrifices, that I have not mentioned previously—namely, the acceptance of discipline. Of course, one might just as well assert that sacrifice is one aspect of discipline, rather than the other way around. In reality, sacrifice and discipline seem to reciprocally condition each other: discipline makes sacrifice possible (it ensures that we make obligatory sacrifices), but it is also a consequence of sacrifice (we achieve discipline through sacrifice—by resisting certain promptings, renouncing certain pursuits, and so on). But whatever the relationship between sacrifice and discipline, the fact is that Guevara attaches a great deal of importance to the question of discipline—it is, for example, one of the attributes of a cadre mentioned in “The Cadre: Backbone of the Revolution”55—and, accordingly, contends that significant breaches of discipline must not be tolerated. So, for example, he would declare in the epilogue to Guerrilla Warfare, “It can never be permitted . . . that a revolutionary of any category should be excused for grave offenses against decorum or morality simply because he is a revolutionary.”56
Mention of this topic is important if only because one of Guevara’s most controversial policies at the Ministry of Industries was precisely a policy for handling certain breaches of discipline. The policy in question consisted of sending administrators guilty of certain serious violations of basic norms to the Guanahacabibes rehabilitation center on the western tip of Cuba. Those whose sanctions consisted in confinement at Guanahacabibes were sent to the center for periods ranging from one month to a year, and at the center they spent their days performing physical labor of various sorts, labor that was, according to Tirso Sáenz (another of Guevara’s close collaborators in the Ministry of Industries), no worse than that of a forest worker.57 After they had completed their “sentence,” the sanctioned administrators could return to the Ministry of Industries, and, since they had discharged their debt to society, no one was to criticize them for the error that had warranted the sanction.58
As Guevara underscores in the January 1962 Ministry meeting in which he discusses Guanahacabibes at some length, the center was for people (i.e., management personnel) whose error—which might be a disciplinary problem, an act of nepotism, or a violation of ethical guidelines59—constituted a breach of “revolutionary morality”; those who were guilty of criminal misconduct should be sent to jail—that is, they were to be handled by the normal criminal justice system.60 For this reason, he regarded the corresponding sanction as a “moral” sanction, as he would say in another meeting two and a half years later.61
In any assessment of Guanahacabibes, one must bear in mind two factors. First, confinement in the rehabilitation center was the most severe sanction meted out. Second, and more important, the punishment was hardly tantamount to a standard penal sanction: the ministry administrator could in fact reject the sanction, but if he did so he would have to abandon the Ministry. Indeed, the administrator sent to Guanahacabibes was even responsible for getting to the center himself.62 Together with the fact that it was a “moral” sanction and one intended to improve the administrator’s revolutionary caliber, the relatively “voluntary” nature of the punishment (by contrast, one cannot “reject” a state’s sanctions for breaches of the law) helps to account for Guevara’s claim that a spell at Guanahacabibes represented a “revolutionary sanction.”63 It is also worth pointing out that Guevara visited Guanahacabibes on many occasions and that during his visits he would perform physical labor alongside the other men “sentenced” to the rehabilitation center and give a talk at the end of the workday.64
While some of Guevara’s closest collaborators, including Orlando Borrego and Ángel Arcos Bergnes, defend the legitimacy of the rehabilitation center at Guanahacabibes, a place that they themselves saw firsthand,65 one could certainly challenge the value and wisdom of this approach to rehabilitation and reeducation. Unfortunately, the currency of distorted accounts of the nature of Guanahacabibes have made a serious evaluation of the center, and the rationale behind it, very difficult. Jorge G. Castañeda, one of Guevara’s biographers, deserves some of the blame for this state of affairs. In his widely praised biography, Castañeda devotes two paragraphs to the rehabilitation center, one of which consists of some of Guevara’s own remarks from the meeting cited above. Castañeda implausibly links Guanahacabibes to a broader “crackdown” in Cuba and also contends that the center established a precedent for, among other things, the later “confinement of dissidents,”66 no matter that no one was sent there for being a dissident and that the punishment was in a certain sense voluntary. Unfortunately, some subsequent commentators have acritically accepted Castañeda’s ill-informed and highly misleading characterization of Guanahacabibes, and their own studies of Guevara have suffered accordingly. For example, Mike González, basing his account on Castañeda’s biography, leads readers to believe that anyone who violated “revolutionary morals” could be sent to the center,67 as though it were not the case that Guevara only sent administrative personnel from his own ministry to Guanahacabibes, the “morals” that had been violated were important norms and regulations, and one could refuse to accept the punishment. Like González, Samuel Farber also cites Castañeda and basically extends his line of thought, writing that “Guevara played a key role in inaugurating a tradition of administrative, nonjudicial detention subject to no written rules or laws.”68 (To be sure, Farber also cites Helen Yaffe’s account of the rehabilitation center—far more comprehensive and scholarly than Castañeda’s two-paragraph treatment of Guanahacabibes, but unavailable when González’s book was published—yet altogether ignores her analysis and that of the Cubans whom she cites.) In sum, and as is the case with so many other ideas and practices associated with Guevara, it is necessary to dispel a number of widespread misconceptions before one can even begin to unde
rtake a dispassionate assessment of the rehabilitation center at Guanahacabibes.
Worker Empowerment and Workers’ Rule
For Guevara, the Cuban Revolution was a “proletarian revolution” in the sense that it transferred ownership of the means of production to the working class, gave this class power, made possible worker control of both the means of production and the entire production process, and looked to the working class to guide the building of socialism.69 (It was not necessarily a “proletarian revolution” in the sense that the working class had “made” or led the revolution.) As Minister of Industries, Guevara emphasized that dimension of workers’ rule most relevant to his own area of responsibility: participation in, and control of, decision making within factories, workshops, and other industrial operations. Guevara emphasizes the importance of attaining this goal on numerous occasions.70 Besides affording workers effective control over production in the workplace, the aim was, as Guevara writes in an early 1962 essay, “Our Industrial Tasks,” to “create a socialist conscience by enlisting the workers in all of the practical tasks of the building of socialism; in participation in the management of the factories and enterprises and in the centers of technical study.”71 Guevara realized that much remained to be done in order to attain this goal and, in keeping with his commitment to workers’ rule, would criticize the lack of worker involvement in the management of factories in a meeting in the same month in which he published the “Our Industrial Tasks” article.72
One of the chief obstacles to establishing complete worker management in factories was the general level of education and training among Cuban workers at the beginning of the Revolution. While Guevara insists that the administrators, managers, and technicians—most of whose well-trained predecessors had abandoned the country—will have to come from the working class,73 he also stresses the need for “the working class to begin attaining the technical level required to take completely in its hands the administration of factories and the entire state.”74 Guevara’s desire to produce the worker-managers who would be able to oversee every aspect of production—that is, to generate a system of wholly worker-operated factories (in which the workers would take charge of not only decision making but also every aspect of the factory)—accounts for two of the motifs that appear time and again in Guevara’s speeches and writings: the importance of education and training and the need to promote a culture of collective discussion and consultation. In his address to the Eleventh National Labor Congress in November 1961, for example, Guevara remarks that “we have to develop the working class so that it can take charge, technically, of the workplaces.”75 Guevara actually links learning and education—which for many Cuban workers meant, in the short term, attaining the equivalent of a sixth-grade education (a fundamental goal in the first years of the Cuban Revolution)—to his notion of social duty, and it is precisely through the concept of work that he does so: as he says in another speech from the same month, the aim should be to “link study with work and work with duty.”76 Interestingly, in discussing the importance of study and continuous learning, Guevara suggests that what one at first experiences as external compulsion will gradually become a vital need,77 which is of course also the process of psychological development that he describes in connection with voluntary labor. At any rate, while acquisition of the rudiments of a basic education was the short-term goal, the most important task in the long term was occupational and professional training at all levels.78
The Political Theory of Che Guevara Page 16
