Che Guevara Talks to Young People

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  The ruinous loans of the so-called Development Bank have disappeared from here forever. This bank, for example, would loan 16 million pesos to an industrialist who would put up 400,000 pesos (and these are exact figures). These 400,000 pesos did not come out of his pocket either; they came out of the 10 per cent kickback he received from the salesmen he purchased the machinery from. Even though the government had put up 16 million pesos, this gentleman who put up 400,000 pesos was the sole owner of the company. And since the government held his debt he could pay at easy terms and at his convenience. Now the government has stepped in, refusing to recognise this state of affairs. It claims for itself any company set up with the people’s money. If “free enterprise” means a few spongers enjoy all the money of the Cuban nation, then this government states quite clearly that it is opposed to “free enterprise”, to the extent the latter is opposed to state planning.

  Since we have now ventured into the thorny area of planning, let me say that only the revolutionary government, which plans the country’s industrial development from one end to the other, has the right to establish the type and quantity of technical personnel needed in the future to meet the needs of this nation. The revolutionary government should at least get a hearing when it says it only needs a certain number of lawyers or doctors, but it needs five thousand engineers and fifteen thousand industrial technicians of all types [Prolonged applause] – and that they must be trained, they must be found, because this is the guarantee of our future development.

  Today we are working tirelessly to transform Cuba into a different country. But the professor of education standing before you today does not deceive himself; he knows that he is as much a professor of education as he is president of the Central Bank, and if he must perform one or another task, it is because the needs of the people require that of him. None of this is accomplished without the people themselves suffering, because we are still learning in each case. We’re learning on the job. Since we hold new responsibilities and are not infallible – we weren’t born knowing what to do – we must ask the people to correct the errors.

  This professor standing before you was once a doctor, and by dint of circumstance was obliged to take up arms, and after two years graduated as a guerrilla commander – and will later on have to graduate as a bank president or a director of industrialisation of the country, or perhaps even a professor of education. [Applause] This same doctor, commander, president, and professor of education wishes that the diligent and studious youth of the country prepare themselves so each of them in the near future may occupy the positions assigned them, without hesitation, and without the need to learn on the job. But this professor here before you – a son of the people, forged by the people – also wants this very same people to have, as a right, the benefits of education. The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study. Education should be the daily bread of the people of Cuba. [Applause]

  Naturally, it never occurred to me to demand that the current professors and students of the University of Las Villas perform the miracle of enrolling the masses of workers and peasants at the university. We still need to travel a long road, to go through a process all of you have lived through, a process of many years of preparatory studies. What I do hope to accomplish, however, basing myself on my modest background as a revolutionary and rebel commander, is for the students at the University of Las Villas to understand that education is no longer anybody’s exclusive preserve, and that this campus where you carry out your studies is no longer anyone’s sheltered enclave. It belongs to the people of Cuba as a whole, and it will either be given to the people, or the people will take it. [Applause]

  I began the ups and downs of my career as a university student, a member of the middle class, a doctor who shared the same horizons, the same youthful aspirations you have. In the course of the struggle, however, I changed and became convinced of the imperative need for revolution, and of the great justice of the people’s cause. That’s why I would hope that you, who are the masters of the university today, would turn it over to the people. I am not saying this as a threat that tomorrow the people will take it from you. No, I am simply saying that if the masters of today’s University of Las Villas, the students, turn it over to the people as represented by their revolutionary government that would be another of the many beautiful examples being set in Cuba today.

  And to the professors, my colleagues, I have something similar to say to you: You must colour yourselves black, mulatto, worker and peasant. You must go to the people. You must live and breathe as one with the people, which is to say, you must feel the needs of Cuba as a whole. When we achieve this, no one will be the loser. All of us will have won, and Cuba will be able to continue its march towards the future on a stronger footing.

  And it won’t be necessary to include, as a member of your faculty, this doctor, commander, bank president, and now professor of education, who bids you all farewell. [Ovation]

  The role of the university in Cuba’s economic development

  (At the University of Havana, 2 March 1960)

  The development of both agriculture and industry in Cuba, as elsewhere in Latin America, Africa, and most of Asia, was stunted by centuries of colonial exploitation compounded by decades of imperialist plunder. US capital imposed a largely single-crop economy on the island – sugar. Cuba was bound by agreement to supply Yankee monopolies with what amounted to more than one-third of the sugar for the US market. At the same time, Cuba was shut off from other buyers of its crop and was heavily dependent on imports from the United States for industrial products and even food.

  Organising Cuba’s workers, peasants, and youth to blaze a trail out of this subjugation was the topic of Guevara’s nationally televised speech to students at the University of Havana in March 1960, printed here. At the time, the US House of Representatives was discussing a bill sent to Congress by US president Eisenhower authorising Washington to reduce Cuba’s sugar quota. The bill was passed 3 July and three days later Eisenhower slashed the quota.

  Anticipating Washington’s moves, the revolutionary government was negotiating trade agreements with other countries. These included a five-year pact with the Soviet Union that had been signed in mid-February, providing for the purchase of one million tons of sugar annually and the extension of low-interest loans to Cuba.

  Imperialism was also stepping up acts of counter-revolutionary sabotage and terror. Planes taking off from Florida targeted Cuba’s sugarcane fields and refineries. Two days after Guevara’s speech, the ship La Coubre – carrying arms bought from Belgium with donations from Cuban working people to defend their revolution – blew up in Havana harbour, killing eighty-one people. At a mass rally the following day honouring those who died in the explosion, Fidel Castro proclaimed the new battle cry of the revolution “Patrio o muerte!” [Homeland or death!]

  My dear compañeros:

  Before getting into the subject of today’s conversation, I’d like to warn you not to put too much weight on Mr Naranjo’s words – I think that’s the name of the person who introduced me. I’d rather you consider me a modest revolutionary and a first-year student. [Applause] I’m a freshman in economics at Revolution University. [Applause]

  I have come to speak with you bearing the somewhat ambiguous title of revolutionary, as well as the title that unites us all as brothers: that of student.

  I intended this conversation to be a little more informal, with questions and answers, and even debate. But the special circumstance that it is being televised to the entire country requires me to present the subject I was going to speak about in a more organised fashion. It is a subject that has been of concern to me, as I believe it should be to many of you.

  Roughly, we might call this speech “The Role of the University in Cuba’s Economic Development”, because we are beginning a new stage in the area of economics.

  We have achieved all the political
prerequisites to begin this economic reform, and we have taken the first step along these lines, changing the structure of land ownership in our country. That is to say, we have started with an agrarian reform, as every development process should start.

  But to know what this process will be, we have to situate ourselves historically and economically. If we are beginning a process of development, that means we are not developed. We must be underdeveloped, semicolonial, or semi-industrialised – as the most optimistic would have it; use whatever name you wish. But we must study in detail the characteristics of that system, what it is that makes us underdeveloped, and what are the measures that will enable us to overcome that underdevelopment.

  Naturally, the first characteristic of an underdeveloped country is its lack of industry, its dependence on goods manufactured abroad. Cuba fully complies with this first prerequisite of being an underdeveloped country.

  Why has Cuba for years had the appearance of prosperity when in fact we are without qualification a semicolonial country? Simply because Cuba’s exceptional climate and the accelerated development of a single industry, sugar, made it possible for us to compete in the world market with favourable productivity levels in that industry. US capital, trampling over the laws they themselves came up with, promoted the development of the sugar industry.

  There’s an old law from the times of the US government in Cuba that prohibited any US citizen from owning land on the island. That’s what the law says. Nevertheless it was soon broken. [Manuel] Sanguily’s proposition to ban land ownership by foreigners could not go anywhere, and little by little these foreigners began to take over the large sugar plantations and to create this powerful industry of 161 mills, six million tons of sugar a year, and productivity rates that made it competitive on a world scale. But they were very careful to ensure that Cuba would maintain another essential feature of semicolonial countries: that of producer of a single product. So Cuba depends solely and exclusively on a single product to obtain foreign exchange with which to purchase consumer goods on the foreign market.

  By bestowing on us the apparent gift of a higher price for sugar, they forced on us a market economy, ruled solely by the law of supply and demand. And in exchange for low US tariffs, goods manufactured in the United States received preferential tariffs here, thus making it impossible for our own local industry, or for any non-US manufactured goods, to compete.

  From the beginning of the new nation, such sharp economic dependency translated into an almost absolute political dependency, even after the Platt Amendment was abrogated. That political situation ended 1 January 1959. The first frictions and difficulties with the “northern giant” began immediately. These frictions were logical if you consider that a country accustomed to special treatment suddenly saw that this little “colony” in the Caribbean irreverently sought to speak the only language a revolution can speak: the language of equal treatment.

  At first, that huge Uncle Sam was depicted in the comics as being somewhat amused and surprised, looking at a little bearded dwarf who was trying to kick him in the shins, since he couldn’t reach any higher. [Applause] But the bearded dwarf has been growing and growing, until he now reaches continental proportions. He is now a living presence at the dinner table of the owners of wealth on the continent. [Applause] So whenever a people seeks to express their discontent and their unwillingness to go along with being pillaged, they raise the banner so dear to us: the portrait of Fidel Castro. [Applause]

  Politically we have gone the farthest of all the countries of America in redeeming our territory. Whether the great powers of this continent like it or not, it cannot be debated that we are the leaders of the people. [Applause] To the powerful masters we represent all that is absurd, negative, irreverent, and disruptive in this America that they so despise and scorn. But on the other hand, to the great mass of the American people (I’m referring to Our America, which is everything south of the Rio Bravo14) – these peoples derisively called “mestizos” – we represent everything noble, [Applause] sincere, and combative.

  But we know perfectly well that our economic development has yet to catch up with our political development – in fact, it has been left far behind. It is for this reason that the attempts at economic aggression being cooked up in the US House of Representatives could have an effect, because we are dependent on a single product and a single market. So when we fight with all our might to free ourselves from this dependency and we sign an agreement to sell a million tons of sugar and for a credit of one hundred million dollars, or pesos, with the Soviet Union, [Applause] the colonial representatives leap up to sow confusion. They try to prove that by selling to another country we are enslaving ourselves. But as far as slavery is concerned, they’ve never stopped to analyse what the regular sale of three million tons at supposedly preferential prices to the “northern giant” has meant, or means for the people of Cuba.

  At the present time we must wage an economic fight to diversify our markets and our production, and we must wage a political fight to explain to our people why the Cuban Revolution is looking for new markets. The history of the type of laws being concocted in the US House of Representatives can help us demonstrate how correct we were historically to move in anticipation of the aggression they were preparing, and to try to rapidly take our sugar to other markets.

  But I have not come here to speak only about sugar. I would have preferred not to speak of it at all, because what we are trying to do is turn sugar into simply one of many Cuban products made by Cuban hands, in Cuban factories, to trade in all markets around the world. [Applause] And it is on this question and at this very moment that the role of technology and culture in our country’s development becomes relevant and assumes its real significance. We are referring now to the role of our educational institutions in the future development of our nation.

  I do not believe education is what shapes a country. In fact, our Rebel Army demonstrated the opposite. Uneducated as it was, it broke through numerous obstacles and prejudices. But neither is it true that economic development alone – by the sheer fact of an economic transformation – will transform education, bringing it up to the same level. Education and economic development are constantly interacting and being reshaped. Even when we were able to change the entire economic landscape of the nation, the fact is that we have retained the same university structure. So on a practical level, this problem has started to knock on our doors. It is now knocking on the doors, for instance, of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform.

  With a stroke of the pen, we liberated our oil, and it became Cuban. [Applause] We took the fundamental step of freeing our mining industry, making it Cuban.15 [Applause] We began a process of developing six branches of production that are extremely important and basic: heavy chemicals; organic chemicals, starting with sugar hydrocarbons; mining; fuels; metallurgy in general and steel in particular; and the by-products of our intensive agricultural development. But we face the sad reality that the country’s universities – both in terms of course matter and number of students – are not adequate to meet the new needs of the revolution.

  Just the other day compañero [Angel] Quevedo asked me in a letter what I thought about having an economics school at the University of Havana. To respond to this question, all we have to do is conduct a survey of the economists currently working in the state planning bodies. The answer jumps out at you right away, in a somewhat aggressive fashion. When all our economic advisers are Chileans, Mexicans, Argentines, Venezuelans, Peruvians, or other compatriots from Latin America – whether they’ve been sent to work for the ECLA [United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America] or INRA [National Institute of Agrarian Reform] – when, in fact, even our minister of the economy [Regino Boti] has been educated in universities abroad, the question of whether we need a school of economics has an obvious answer: the need is enormous. And we need qualified professors who are able to understand the rhythm and direction of our economic development, which is to sa
y, the rhythm and direction of our revolution.

  That is one example. But what if we had engineers in the mining industry, in the oil or chemical industries, who knew the truth because they learned the basics of chemistry here? It is a fact that, while the government is trying to develop each of the six basic branches of our industry in order to give them a new tone and a super dynamic push, we lack the executive hand consisting of technicians – and note that I’m not even saying revolutionary technicians, which would be the ideal thing – simply technicians, with whatever skills and ways of thinking they may have; regardless of all the ideological fetters and obstacles from the past they may carry. We don’t even have this type of technician, who could help smooth out the road of the revolution.