Che Guevara Talks to Young People

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA

  Che Guevara Talks to Young People

  Preface by Armando Hart Dávalos

  Introduction by Mary-Alice Waters

  Kwela Books

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  Preface

  ARMANDO HART DÁVALOS

  Writing a preface to Che Guevara Talks to Young People – which has as an afterword Fidel’s speech at the monument built in the centre of the island to house the hero’s sacred remains, together with those of his unforgettable comrades – constitutes for me both an honour and a genuine challenge. I will try to share with the young reader – to whom this book is largely directed – some necessarily brief thoughts on this outstanding figure of the Americas and of contemporary world history.

  It’s true that Che would speak much differently to young people today, who are living under very different conditions, than he did over three decades ago. Nevertheless, in rereading these talks, one is struck by how extremely relevant they are. These speeches confirm that Che is indeed a man of the present.

  At the beginning of the 1990s it was said that all models for changing the world had disappeared, together with the possibility of finding new ones. The image of the Heroic Guerrilla, however, rises throughout the Western world as a spectre that continues to grow. And it will do so, with greater or lesser force and richness of ideas, to the extent that it reaches young people and they take up the essential part of his actions and aspirations.

  José Carlos Mariátegui, one of Latin America’s great revolutionary thinkers, studied and pointed to the need for myths. He pointed out how peoples who have accomplished great feats have had to create myths among the masses. If we want to be revolutionaries in the strict sense of the word, we must study the reasons and the factors for why Che lives on in the hearts of the Americas and expresses, in a thousand different ways, the desires and aspirations of the most radical youth on various continents. Thirty-some years after his rise to immortality in the Yuro Ravine, his image resonates through plazas and streets, reviving his cry of “Ever onward to victory!” Finding the reasons behind these facts is the best way to uphold the ideas of socialism and the possibilities of revolutionary change.

  The teachings and the example of Che’s sacrifice in the jungles of Bolivia have etched in the minds of the new generations for all time a sense of heroism, and of moral values in politics and history. And since the moral factor has been what’s lacking in politics and has ended up leading to revolutions, there is one conviction of Che’s that has been dramatically confirmed: without the moral factor, there is no revolution. He also spoke with eloquence, depth, and rigour about the need for a new man in the twenty-first century. Life itself has compelled this individual to be formed in the twentieth century. Recognising the enormous role of culture and moral values in the history of civilisation, and extracting from it the necessary practical consequences is Commander Ernesto Che Guevara’s most important message to young people. There is a history behind this. Civilisation never made an analysis with the necessary depth, from a scientific viewpoint, of the role of moral and spiritual values over the course of history. That is the most important intellectual challenge that the twentieth century has left to youth.

  In Europe, Western and Christian culture began to evolve before the year 1000 until it achieved, with Marx and Engels, the highest level of philosophic knowledge in relation to social and economic science. In Latin America and the Caribbean, meanwhile, a line of thinking crystallised – symbolised by Bolivar and Marti – that, on a scientific basis, emphasised the power of man and the role of education, culture, and politics. The originality of Ernesto Che Guevara – as with the Cuban Revolution – consists of the following: Inspired by the spiritual heritage of Our America, and starting with his commitment to moral values, he adopted the ideas of Marx and Engels, and advocated using the so-called subjective factors to motivate and guide the revolutionary action of the masses and of society as a whole.

  What is valuable and of interest from the standpoint of Marxism is that from this vantage point, Che got radically closer to Marx than did other interpretations of the ideas of the author of Capital that were prevalent during the second half of the twentieth century. The Third World perspective of the internationalist guerrilla fighters who fell in Bolivia was an implicit call to socialists to decisively orient their actions towards the Third World. The wisdom of this political and moral course was not understood and supported at the time by those who could and should have done so. For this reason, the world changed along lines favourable to the most reactionary right, ending up in postmodern chaos.

  In Che’s speech in Algiers on 24 February 1964, this call took on a dramatic and polemical character. Tragically, history would prove who was right. The saddest thing for revolutionaries is that Che’s position on the role of the previously colonised or neocolonised countries was closely in line with what Lenin had brilliantly foreseen decades earlier, pointing to the importance of liberation movements that were emerging in the East. Valuable literature exists by the person who forged the October Revolution, and it should be restudied at the present time.

  The inadequacy of the social sciences under the prevailing system stems from the fact that they ignore one decisive reality: today’s growing poverty, the root of the evils and anguish suffered by modern man, together with the destruction of nature. Overcoming this situation is man’s greatest challenge as the twenty-first century dawns. From the scientific viewpoint, taking up this issue – rather than pretending it doesn’t exist – is the essence of an ethical system that aspires to be built on solid foundations for the future. Ignoring human pain is the great crime of the social systems that currently exist. We are realists, but for us the reality of man is complete and whole, not partial and mean, which is the way the existing interests see reality.

  Che saw and appraised reality from an ethical standpoint – in order to improve it. That is where the power of the myth he left us resides. His ideas combine the most advanced thinking of European philosophical thought – Marx and Engels – with the utopian vision of Our America – Bolivar and Marti.

  The error of those who renounce utopia is in not considering the real needs that emerge from the facts that lie beneath the surface. For this reason, they are unable to conceive of tomorrow’s truths.

  The essence of the Latin American culture present in Che’s revolutionary ideas consists of viewing reality and the effort to change it as indispensable elements for understanding truth and transforming the world in the interests of justice, while at the same time taking the New World’s utopian sense and converting it into an incentive for forging tomorrow’s reality. Che did not renounce either reality or hope. He was a revolutionary of science and of conscience, both of which are needed by the Americas and the world in order to confront the challenge we face in the next century.

  Study carefully these works by Che and you will find a good lesson for the present and for the future.

  December 1999

  Introduction

  MARY-ALICE WATERS

  All the members of the Cuban government – young in age, young in character, and young in their illusions – have nevertheless matured in the extraordinary school of experience, in living contact with the needs and aspirations of the people.

  Ernesto Che Guevara

  28 July 1960

  Che Guevara Talks to Young People is not a “C
he for Beginners”. The legendary Argentine-born revolutionary, who helped lead the first socialist revolution in the Americas and initiate the renewal of Marxism in the 1960s, speaks as an equal with the youth of Cuba and the world. He never talks down. He sets an example as he urges young people to rise to the level of revolutionary activity and scientific thought necessary to confront and resolve the historic contradictions of capitalism that threaten humanity.

  He challenges them to work – physically and intellectually. To learn to be disciplined. To become revolutionists of action, fearlessly taking their place in the vanguard on the front lines of struggles, small and large. He urges them, as they grow and change through these experiences, to read widely and study seriously. To absorb, and to make their own, the scientific and cultural achievements not only of their own people but of all previous civilisations. To aspire to be revolutionary combatants, knowing that a different kind of society can be born only out of struggles by men and women ready to put their lives and their lifetimes on the line for it. He appeals to them to politicise the work of the organisations and institutions they are part of, and in the process politicise themselves. To become a different kind of human being as they strive together with working people of all lands to transform the world. And along this line of march, he encourages them to continuously renew and revel in the spontaneity, freshness, optimism, and joy of being young.

  “Che was truly a communist,” Cuban president Fidel Castro told the solemn assembly in the city of Santa Clara on 17 October 1997, as the remains of Guevara and six of his fellow combatants were interred at the site of a memorial in their honour, thirty years after they fell in combat in Bolivia. Che based himself on objective laws, Castro said, the laws of history, and had unqualified confidence in the capacity of human beings, ordinary working people, to change the course of history. In the process of making a socialist revolution on the doorstep of Yankee imperialism, Che insisted, the workers and peasants of Cuba would remake themselves as social beings with a new consciousness, a new set of values, a new world view, a transformed relationship to one another. They would set an example for all.

  In his preface to these speeches, Armando Hart underscores that on this question as on others, Guevara – and the Cuban Revolution he was part of – came “radically closer to Marx” than most of those in the second half of the twentieth century who claimed to speak in the name of communism. “If this revolution is Marxist,” Guevara told the nine hundred participants in the First Latin American Youth Congress in the summer of 1960, it is “because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx”. Deeply rooted in the history, culture, and politics of his Latin American homeland, Guevara brought to that social reality and its traditions of struggle a scientific understanding of the universal laws of the history of class societies. He combined a renewal of Marxist orthodoxy in theory with the example of physical and moral courage that earned him the name, the Heroic Guerrilla.

  In the pages that follow, Guevara draws frequently on his own experiences to explain to others why the image of the lone, self-sacrificing hero – the image in which many later tried to remake Che himself – is nothing but the exaltation of bourgeois individualism, the flip side of the coin of the dog-eat-dog reality of capitalism. It is the opposite of the revolutionary cooperative course of the toilers, the course that made the Cuban Revolution possible.

  Speaking to a group of medical students and health workers in August 1960, Guevara describes how his youthful idealism when he was studying to be a doctor led him to dream of being a famous researcher, “of working tirelessly to achieve something that could really be put at the disposal of humanity, but that would be a personal triumph at the same time. I was, as we all are, a child of my environment.”

  As he travelled throughout the Americas, however, and learned first-hand of the economic, social, and political realities of imperialist domination, he came to recognise the futility of such a course. “The isolated effort, the individual effort, the purity of ideals, the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals – all that is for naught if the effort is made alone, solitary, in some corner of Latin America, fighting against hostile governments and social conditions that permit no progress.

  “A revolution,” Guevara said, “needs what we have in Cuba: an entire people who are mobilised, who have learned the use of arms and the practice of unity in combat.”

  Before he could be a revolutionary doctor, there was a revolution to be made. Once set on that line of march, Guevara never turned back.

  From a young student rebel attracted to revolutionary ideas, Guevara – like other great communist leaders before him, starting with Marx and Engels themselves – was won to the popular revolutionary vanguard fighting arms in hand for liberation from oppression, exploitation, and all the accompanying indignities. Along that trajectory of revolutionary action by the toilers combined with systematic, disciplined hard work and study, Guevara emerged as one of the foremost proletarian leaders of our epoch. The opening of the first socialist revolution in the Americas, whose victory Guevara helped to assure, the example of internationalism set by the entire leadership of the revolution, and Guevara’s own contributions captured in speeches and writings he left us, initiated a renewal of Marxism that was not limited to the Americas.

  By consistently taking the political and theoretical conquests of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as his guide, by making the early years following the October 1917 revolution a point of reference, Guevara worked to lay a foundation that would help lead the Cuban Revolution to a different fate than that suffered by the regimes and parties of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It is no accident that his name and example are associated so closely with what is called in Cuba the Rectification process, the policies initiated by Cuban president Fidel Castro in 1986 (well before “the meringue fell” across Eastern Europe, as Cubans say) that strengthened Cuban working people and set the revolution on a course enabling it to survive the severe test of political isolation and economic hardship in the 1990s known as the Special Period.

  Che Guevara’s profound Marxism informs every page of this book. “On the most basic level,” he told the international meeting of architecture students in Havana in September 1963, “our country has what is scientifically called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and we do not allow anyone to touch or threaten the state power of the proletarian dictatorship. But within the dictatorship of the proletariat there can be a vast field for discussion and expression of ideas.”

  As Armando Hart observes, Guevara set the example and tirelessly educated those he influenced, especially young people, on the need for the socialist revolution to take and hold the moral high ground against the old ruling classes who claim to speak in the name of freedom and justice, of beauty and truth. With his trenchant sense of humour, he helped those he worked with comprehend the class character of all such questions.

  Among the many delightfully rich moments readers will encounter in the speeches that follow is Guevara’s lesson in the practical connection between the class foundations of ethics and aesthetics. Speaking to architecture students in 1963, and explaining that technology is a weapon that serves different classes for different ends, Che pointed to a mural on the wall of the auditorium. He remarked that there is a weapon depicted in the mural, “a US-made M-l, a Garand rifle. When it was in the hands of Batista’s soldiers and they were firing on us, that weapon was hideous. But that same weapon became extraordinarily beautiful when we captured it, when we wrested it from a soldier’s hands, when it became part of the arsenal of the people’s army. In our hands it became an object of dignity.”

  A similar thread of scientific clarity and an uncompromising dialectical materialism on questions such as education and human nature, links Guevara to fundamental writings of Marx, such as his 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach”. Criticising the mechanical materialism of some of the progressive bourgeois forces of the time, Marx wrote: “The materialist doctrine con
cerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated.” Human nature is not an immutable characteristic of human beings considered as abstract individuals, he said, but concretely “the ensemble of the social relations”. In his farewell remarks to the international volunteer work brigades, Guevara asks: “Have the people of this country made a revolution because that’s just the way they are?” “Absolutely not,” he answers.

  “The people are the way they are because they are in the midst of a revolution.” Through their actions, they are forging different social relations and a different understanding of themselves and the world – thus becoming different individuals, creating a different “human nature”, on the road to becoming socialist men and women.

  “We learned to respect the peasant,” Guevara told the Latin American Youth Congress in July 1960. “We learned to respect his sense of independence, his loyalty; to recognise his age-old yearning for the land that had been snatched from him; and to recognise his experience in the thousand paths through the hills.

  “And from us, the peasants learned how valuable a man is when he has a rifle in his hand, and when he is prepared to fire that rifle at another man, regardless of how many rifles the other man has. The peasants taught us their know-how,” Guevara said, “and we taught the peasants our sense of rebellion. And from that moment until today, and forever, the peasants of Cuba and the rebel forces of Cuba – today the Cuban revolutionary government – have marched united as one.”

  Youth must march in the vanguard, Guevara insists throughout, taking on the hardest tasks in every endeavour. That is the only road towards becoming leaders of other women and men – just as the officers in the Rebel Army won their stripes on the battlefield. Youth must learn to lead not only their peers, but revolutionists older than themselves as well. You must be a model “for older men and women who have lost some of that youthful enthusiasm, who have lost a certain faith in life, and who always respond well to example”, Guevara told the UJC leaders in October 1962.