Che Guevara Talks to Young People

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  Following the 6 August decree expropriating the property of major US corporations in Cuba, Washington and its client regimes in Latin America increased political and diplomatic pressure, as they accelerated military preparations, in hopes of stemming the revolutionary process and smothering Cuba’s example. The foreign ministers of the Organisation of American States met in Costa Rica 16-28 August. As workers and youth demonstrated in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution in the streets of the capital, the ministerial gathering issued the Declaration of San José, denouncing Cuba for accepting aid from the Soviet Union and China. Cuban toilers and their revolutionary government responded to this assault on their national sovereignty at a 2 September rally of more than one million in the Plaza of the Revolution where the First Declaration of Havana was approved by acclamation.

  Condemning “the exploitation of man by man, and the exploitation of the underdeveloped countries by imperialist finance capital”, the declaration proclaimed “the right of the peasants to the land; the right of the workers to the fruit of their labour; the right of children to education; … the right of nations to nationalise the imperialist monopolies, thereby recovering their national wealth and resources; the right of countries to engage freely in trade with all the peoples of the world; the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of the peoples to turn fortresses into schools, and to arm their workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, Blacks, Indians, women, young people, old people, and all the oppressed and exploited, so they themselves may defend their rights and their destiny.”

  At the time of this gathering, the Ministry of Public Health’s priority was the creation of a network of rural hospitals and clinics, to extend health care to the majority of peasants who had had no access to regular services; prior to the revolution there was one rural hospital in the entire country, located in Oriente province. Other measures that followed were the nationalisation of drug companies and a sharp increase in the number of students training to be doctors, nurses, and medical technicians. A system of free medical care was progressively introduced and by 1963 covered the entire country.

  Compañeros:

  This modest ceremony is only one among hundreds being held as the Cuban people celebrate day by day their freedom and the advance of all their revolutionary laws, their advance along the road to total independence. But I find it interesting nonetheless.

  Almost everyone knows that a number of years ago I started out my career to be a doctor. And when I started, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.

  I wanted to succeed, as everybody wants to succeed. I dreamed of being a famous researcher. I dreamed 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.

  Through special circumstances and perhaps also because of my character, after receiving my degree I began to travel through Latin America and got to know it intimately. Except for Haiti and the Dominican Republic, I have visited – to one degree or another – all the countries of Latin America. Given how I travelled, first as a student and afterwards as a doctor, I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child due to lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and unrelenting punishment cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child becomes an accident of no importance, as is often the case among those classes in our Latin American homeland who have been dealt the heaviest blows. And I began to see there was something that seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making a substantial contribution to medical science: it was helping those people.

  But I continued to be, as all of us always are, a child of my environment, and I wanted to help people through my personal efforts. I had already travelled a lot – I was then in Guatemala, the Guatemala of Arbenz – and I had begun to make some notes to guide the conduct of a revolutionary doctor. I began to look into what was needed for me to be a revolutionary doctor.

  However, the aggression came, the aggression unleashed by the United Fruit Company, the State Department, [John] Foster Dulles – they’re really all the same thing – and by the puppet they put in who was named Castillo Armas – was named!13 The aggression was successful, since the people were not yet at the level of maturity the Cuban people have reached today. So one fine day, I, like many others, took the road of exile, or at least I took the road of fleeing Guatemala, since that was not my homeland.

  Then I realised a fundamental thing: to be a revolutionary doctor, or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution. 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 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, who know what a weapon is worth and what the people’s unity is worth.

  Then we get to the heart of the problem that today lies ahead of us. We already have the right and even the obligation to be, before anything else, a revolutionary doctor, that is, a person who puts the technical knowledge of his profession at the service of the revolution and of the people. Then we come back to the earlier questions: How does one do a job of social welfare effectively? How does one reconcile individual effort with the needs of society?

  Once again we have to recall what each of our lives was like prior to the revolution – what each of us did and thought, as a doctor or in any other public health function. We must do so with profound critical enthusiasm. And we will conclude that almost everything we thought and felt in that past epoch should be filed away, and we should create a new type of human being. If each one of us is his own architect in doing so, then creating that new type of human being – who will be the representative of the new Cuba – will be much easier.

  It is good for you – those present here, residents of Havana – to absorb this idea: that in Cuba a new type of human being is coming into existence, one that cannot be entirely appreciated in the capital, but that can be seen in every corner of the country. Those of you who went to the Sierra Maestra on 26 July must have seen two absolutely unheard-of things: an army with picks and shovels, one that takes such pride in marching in the patriotic celebrations in Oriente province with its picks and shovels ready, side by side with the militia compañeros marching with their rifles. [Applause] But you must also have seen something much more important: You must have seen some children who by their physical stature appear eight or nine years old, but who are nevertheless almost all thirteen or fourteen. They are the most authentic children of the Sierra Maestra, the most authentic children of hunger and poverty in all its forms. They are the creatures of malnutrition.

  In this small Cuba, with four or five television channels, with hundreds of radio stations, despite all the advances of modern science, when those children for the first time came to school at night and saw electric lights, they exclaimed that the stars were very low that night. Those children, whom some of you would have seen, have now been brought together in schools where they are learning everything from the ABCs right up to a trade, right up to the very difficult science of being a revolutionary.

  These are the new types of human beings emerging in Cuba. They are being born in isolated places, in remote points in the Sierra Maestra and also in the cooperatives and workplaces.

  All that has a lot to do with the topic of our talk today: the integration of the doctor or any other medical worker into the revolutionary movement. Because the revolution’s tasks – of training and nourishing the children, educating the army, distributing the lands of the absentee landlords among those who sweated every day on that same la
nd without reaping its fruit – those are the greatest works of social medicine that Cuba has achieved.

  The principle of creating a robust body should be the basis of the battle against disease – not creating a robust body through a doctor’s artistic work on a weak organism, but creating a robust body through the work of the whole collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity.

  Someday medicine will have to become a science that serves to prevent disease, to orient the entire public towards their medical obligations, and that only in cases of emergency intervenes to perform some surgical operation, or to deal with something outside the characteristics of that new society we are creating.

  The work entrusted today to the Ministry of Health, to all the institutions of this type, is to organise public health in such a way as to aid the greatest possible number of people, to prevent everything foreseeable related to disease, and to orient the people. But to carry out the organisational task, as for all revolutionary tasks, what is required, fundamentally, is the individual. The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardiser of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of the individual capacity of human beings.

  What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. And our task today is to orient the creative talent of all the medical professionals towards the tasks of social medicine.

  We are at the end of an era, and not only here in Cuba. Despite everything said to the contrary, and despite all the hopes of some people, the forms of capitalism we have known, under which we have been raised and have suffered, are being defeated throughout the world. [Applause]

  The monopolies are being defeated. Every day science, the collective work of many, registers new and important triumphs. It is our proud and self-sacrificing duty to be the vanguard in Latin America of a liberation movement that began some time ago in the other subjugated continents of Africa and Asia. That very profound social change also demands profound changes in the mentality of the people.

  Individualism as such, as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment, must disappear in Cuba. Individualism tomorrow should be the proper utilisation of the whole individual, to the absolute benefit of the community. But even when all this is understood today, even when these things I am saying are comprehended – and even when everyone is willing to think a little about the present, about the past, and about what the future should be – changing the way we think requires profound internal changes, and helps bring about profound external changes, primarily social.

  Those external changes are taking place in Cuba every day. One way of learning about this revolution – of getting to know the forces the people have kept stored inside themselves, forces that have lain dormant for so long – is to visit the length and breadth of Cuba, visit the cooperatives and all the workplaces being created. And one way of getting to the heart of the medical question is not only knowing these places, not only visiting them, but also getting to know the people who make up those cooperatives and workplaces. Go and find out what diseases they have, what their ailments are, what extreme poverty they have lived in over the years, inherited from centuries of repression and total submission.

  The doctor, the medical worker, should then go to the heart of his new work, that of a person among the masses, a person within the community.

  Whatever happens in the world, the doctor – by always being close to the patient, by knowing his psyche so deeply, by representing those who live close to pain and alleviate it – has a very important job, one with great responsibility in society.

  Some time ago, a few months, a group of students here in Havana, recently certified as doctors, did not want to go to the countryside and were demanding extra payment for doing so. From the viewpoint of the past, this was not out of the ordinary, at least it seems that way to me, and I understand it perfectly. This was the way it was, the way I remember it being some years ago. It is the rebellious gladiator once again, the solitary fighter who wants to ensure a better future, better conditions, and to make others appreciate the necessity of what he does.

  But what would happen if it were not those boys – the majority of whose families could afford several years of study – who completed their courses and were now beginning to practise their profession? What if instead 200 or 300 peasants had emerged, as if by magic, from the university lecture halls?

  What would have happened, simply, is that those peasants would have run immediately, and with great enthusiasm, to attend to their brothers and sisters. They would have asked for the posts with the most responsibility and the hardest work, in order to show that the years of study they had been given were not in vain. What would have happened is what will happen within six or seven years, when the new students, children of the working class and the peasantry, receive their professional degrees of whatever type. [Applause]

  But let’s not approach the future with fatalism and divide people into children of the working class or peasantry and counter-revolutionaries. Because that is simplistic, because it is not true, and because there is nothing that educates an honourable man more than living within a revolution. [Applause]

  None of us, none of the first group that arrived on the Granma, who established ourselves in the Sierra Maestra and learned to respect the peasant and the worker, living together with him – none of us had a past as a worker or peasant. Naturally, there were those who had had to work, who had known certain wants in their childhood. But hunger, true hunger – that none of us had known, and we began to know it, temporarily, during the two long years in the Sierra Maestra. And then many things became very clear.

  We, who at the outset severely punished anyone who touched even an egg of some rich peasant or landowner, one day took ten thousand head of cattle to the Sierra and said to the peasants simply: “Eat.” And the peasants, for the first time in many years – some for the first time in their lives – ate beef.

  In the course of the armed struggle, the respect we had for the sacrosanct ownership of those ten thousand head of cattle was lost, and we understood perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. [Applause] And we learned it there, we who were not sons of the working class or the peasantry. So why should we shout to the four winds that now we are the superior ones and that the rest of the Cuban people cannot learn too? Yes, they can learn. In fact, the revolution today demands that they learn. It demands they understand that pride in serving our fellow man is much more important than a good income; that the people’s gratitude is much more permanent, much more lasting than all the gold one can accumulate. [Applause] And each doctor, within the scope of his activity, can and should accumulate that prized treasure, the people’s gratitude.

  We must then begin to erase our old concepts and come ever closer to the people, and with an ever more critical spirit as we do so. Not in the way we got closer before, because all of you will say: “No, I am a friend of the people. I enjoy talking with workers and peasants, and on Sundays I go to such and such a place to see such and such a thing.” Everybody has done that. But that is practising charity, and what we have to practise today is solidarity. [Applause] We should not draw closer to the people in order to say: “Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you with our science, to demonstrate your errors, your lack of refinement, your lack of elementary knowledge.” We should go with an investigative zeal and with a humble spirit, to learn from the great source of wisdom that is the people. [Applause]

  Often we realise how mistaken we were in concepts that we took so much for granted that they had become part of us and, automatically, part of what we thought we knew. Often we should change all our concepts – not just general, social, or philosophical concepts, but also, at times, our medical concepts. We will see that diseases are not always treated as one treats an illness in a big-city hospital. We will see that the doctor also has to be a farmer, that he ha
s to learn to cultivate new foods and, by his example, to cultivate the desire to consume new foods, to diversify the nutritional structure in Cuba – so meagre and so poor in an agricultural country that is potentially the richest on earth. We will see that under these circumstances we have to be a little bit pedagogical, at times very pedagogical. We will see that we also have to be politicians; that the first thing we have to do is not to offer our wisdom, but to show we are ready to learn with the people, to carry out that great and beautiful common experience – to build a new Cuba.

  We have already taken many steps, and the distance between 1 January 1959 and today cannot be measured in the conventional manner. Some time ago, the people understood that not only had a dictator fallen here, but a system as well. Now the people should learn that upon the ruins of a crumbled system, one must build a new one that brings about the people’s absolute happiness.

  I remember when Compañero [Nicolás] Guillén returned from Argentina early last year. He was the same great poet he is today – perhaps his books were translated into one fewer language, because every day he wins new readers in all the languages of the world, but he was the same as today. But it was difficult for Guillén to read his poems, which were poems of the people, because that was the first period, the period of prejudices. Nobody ever stopped to think that for years and years, with incorruptible dedication, the poet Guillén had put all his extraordinary artistic gifts at the service of the people and at the service of the cause he believed in. The people saw in him not the glory of Cuba, but the representative of a political party that was taboo. But all that is behind us. We have already learned that if we have a common enemy, and if we are trying to reach a common goal, then we cannot have divisions based on opinions about certain internal structures in our country. What we need to agree on is whether or not we have a common enemy, and whether or not we have a common goal. [Applause]