Che Guevara Talks to Young People

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  But even more, at a time when all students should have as many resources as possible to help them achieve their goals and get their degrees, we find that a simple transfer from Santa Clara to Havana disrupts a student’s education, because in this tiny country, the three universities have not even agreed to establish, as a minimum, a common programme of study.

  The government is taking steps and is conscious of where they will lead. The entire people support these steps by the government, and you are training to defend with your bodies and blood the revolution that is the pride of Latin America today. Why then can’t the universities march together on the same road and at the same pace as the revolutionary government? [Applause]

  I don’t want to come and argue in front of the cameras. I simply want to sound the warning bell so that thought is given to this: there cannot be two sets of principles nor can students have two sets of criteria. Anyone ready to give their life to defend the revolution should also be willing to help carry out the revolution’s plans, [Applause] which is much easier. Because, say what you may, it’s much easier to adapt to another opinion than to die for an ideal.

  That’s why the university at this time takes on such extraordinary importance. Even though it is made up of individuals who in their majority support the government, in a way it can become an element that holds the revolution back. Right now you are not afraid of that; right now everything is rosy. But the day will come, tomorrow or the next day, when the lack of technicians will prevent the establishment of an industry and we’ll have to postpone it for two, three, five, or who-knows-how-many years.

  At that precise moment we will see how important this delaying factor has been – having a university that has not brought its lecture halls and classrooms up to the level demanded by the revolution, by the people.

  Is this inevitable? Is it inevitable that, within a certain period of time, universities are doomed to become a brake, that is, virtual centres of counter-revolution? I reject that with all the strength of my revolutionary conviction, because the only thing we lack – absolutely the only thing – is coordination. Nothing more than that little word, which has become the goal of all government institutions, and should also be the object of attention of the student compañeros. Coordination between the students of the University of Havana and the universities of Las Villas and Oriente. Coordination between the programmes of study of these three universities and those of the institutes and secondary schools that will supply them with students. Coordination between all these student bodies and the revolutionary government. Coordination so that at a certain moment, for example, the students know that at some point in the future the government’s plans for development will require a hundred chemical engineers. They will take the necessary measures to organise the training of these hundred chemical engineers who are needed. Coordination to avoid an excess of my colleagues, doctors, who would vegetate in bureaucratic jobs, instead of carrying out the great social function of medicine, attending only to the struggle for life. Coordination so that the number of graduates in those old fields of study called the humanities are reduced to the amount necessary for the cultural development of the country, and so that the student body turns to those new fields of study that technology is showing us day by day, and whose absence today will be deeply felt tomorrow.

  This is the whole secret to success or failure – let’s not say failure – relative failure, the failure to achieve the plans of the revolutionary government in the fastest way possible. [Applause]

  Right now, together with technicians from international organisations and from the Ministry of Education, we are studying the basis on which to establish technological institutes, which will provide us with an average scientific foundation. That will help our development a great deal. But no country can really call itself developed until it can make all its plans and manufacture the majority of the products necessary for its subsistence within its own borders. Technology will allow us to build things, but how to go about building them, to see farther down the road, is the job of planners. This is what must be studied in quality universities, with a broad cultural base, so that those coming out of the new university we all dream of will be able to answer the call of Cuba ten or fifteen years down the road.

  Today in many posts we see a number of doctors, of professionals, carrying out bureaucratic tasks. Economic development has raised its finger and said: no more professionals are needed in these fields of knowledge. But the universities have shut their eyes to the warnings of the economic process and they have continued churning out this professional layer from their classrooms and lecture halls. We have to step back and carefully study the characteristics of development and then proceed to produce the new professionals.

  Someone once told me that a profession was the result of vocation; that it was something innate and could not be changed.

  First of all, I think that position is wrong. Statistically speaking, I don’t believe that an individual example has any importance. But I began studying engineering and ended up a doctor; I later became a commander, and now you see me as a lecturer. [Applause] There are basic vocations, that’s true, but today the branches of science are so vastly differentiated, on one hand, and so intimately tied together, on the other, that it is difficult for anyone to say at the dawn of their intellectual development what their true vocation is. Someone may want to be a surgeon and that will happen, and they’ll be happy doing that their whole life. But along with him there will be ninety-nine other surgeons who could just as well have been dermatologists, or psychiatrists, or hospital administrators, depending on what an extremely demanding society enables them to be. Vocation can only play a tiny part in the choice of new professions being created or in the reorientation of those we already know. It can’t be anything else, because other factors stand in the way. These are, as I said, the huge needs of a society; in addition, there is the fact that nowadays hundreds and thousands, and maybe even hundreds of thousands, of Cubans have had the vocation to be doctors or engineers or architects, or any other profession, but have not been able to do so simply because they could not afford it. In other words, among individuals, vocation does not play the decisive role.

  I want to emphasise this, because it’s typical in this modern world to have, on the one hand, a kidney specialist – speaking of a profession I’m familiar with – who often has little to do with an eye doctor, or an orthopaedist. At the same time these three professionals, just like a chemist or a physicist, in order to understand the characteristics of matter, will have to study a series of things common to all. Today you have them talking about physical chemistry, and not just physics or chemistry, as perhaps they are still referred to in high school today and as I learned them in school. In order to understand physics and chemistry well, one has to know mathematics. In this way all professions are united in a single body of minimum knowledge that a student must have. Why assume then that a compañero who is just starting his first year of university studies already knows that after those seven years – or six, or five, or whatever – after completing a difficult field of study in which they learn things as of yet unsuspected, he will be an orthopaedist, or a lawyer, or a criminologist? [Applause]

  We should always think in terms of the masses and not in terms of individuals, without believing that we are anything other than individuals and jealous defenders of our individuality. To analyse and figure out the needs of a country, each of us must be able to defend our point of view a thousand and one times, if necessary. Still, it’s criminal to think in terms of individuals because an individual’s needs are completely unimportant in face of the human conglomerate of that individual’s fellow countrymen. [Applause]

  Speaking sincerely, I would have liked to present to you, compañero students, a series of facts and figures that would demonstrate the divorce that exists at this moment between the university and the needs of the revolution. Unfortunately, our statistics are rather poor and we don’t have statisticians here; t
hey just started to get organised and I couldn’t present the proof of numbers to you – you who have minds accustomed to real, practical problems. This will have to wait for another time – if you have the patience you’ve had tonight. As for today, I will feel satisfied if after these words, you discuss the problem of the university, not with me but among yourselves, and with your professors and your fellow students at the universities of Oriente and Las Villas and also with the government, which means discussing it with the people. [Applause]

  Never forget, technology is a weapon

  (To closing of First International Meeting of Architecture Students, 29 September 1963)

  The First International Meeting of Architecture Students and Professors took place 27-29 September 1963, on the eve of the Seventh Congress of the International Union of Architects held in Havana.

  The final plenary session of the meeting of students and professors, which Guevara addressed, approved a number of resolutions, including a denunciation of Washington’s indictment on 27 September of four US young people for “conspiring” to travel to Cuba. Three of the youth were among fifty-eight people who earlier that summer had visited the island challenging the ban on travel to Cuba imposed by the administration of US president John F. Kennedy. After a four-year fight against this antidemocratic move, the US Supreme Court declared the travel ban unconstitutional in 1967.

  Another resolution called for “active participation” by university students in their respective countries “in the struggles headed by the popular masses for deep-going transformations” of society. True political independence, the document said, could only be wrested in a “struggle against imperialism – headed by Yankee imperialism – and against colonialism”, and would necessitate “replacing the decrepit socio-economic structure with one that meets the interests of the entire working people, as the Cuban Revolution has shown”.

  As the congress of the International Union of Architects was concluding, the second major agrarian reform law, which confiscated holdings in excess of 165 acres, was enacted by the revolutionary government. This measure affected ten thousand capitalist farmers who owned 20 per cent of Cuba’s agricultural land and constituted an important base for counter-revolutionary activity organised by Washington. Through this measure, property relations on the land were brought into harmony with the state ownership of industry in Cuba, cementing the worker-farmer alliance that has been the backbone of the revolutionary regime from its inception.

  Compañero students and professors of architecture the world over:

  It is my duty to give the summary, as we call it in Cuba, that is, to make the closing remarks and conclude this international meeting of students.

  I must begin by making a very embarrassing confession: I am totally ignorant on all these questions. My ignorance reached the point of not realising that this international meeting of students was apolitical. I thought it was a student conference, without knowing that it was part of the International Union of Architects.

  Therefore, as political people, that is, as students who participate in the active life of your country, and after reading the final resolutions of this meeting – which by the way shows that the ignorance was mutual because the resolutions are also very political [laughter and applause] – I thought I’d say, first of all, that I agree with the resolutions of this conference. It seemed to me that its conclusions were logical, not just revolutionary but also scientific – that is, scientific and revolutionary at the same time. So I was going to give a short speech, a slightly political one if you will. But I really don’t know if this is the appropriate place to speak about political matters. At any rate you are the ones to decide whether I should do so, because I don’t know much about technology. [Applause and expressions of agreement]

  Okay. I am not resorting here to cheap demagogy in order to get around your rules. I did not know your rules and simply came to make a summary in my capacity as a politician, a politician of a new type, a politician of the people, but a politician nonetheless, due to my functions. I was also impressed that the conclusions were approved, it seems, by a very broad majority. I am in agreement with the vast majority of the resolutions; they outline the role of the student and the technician in society.

  I was somewhat amazed by the resolutions, I can honestly tell you, because the people visiting us have come from every country of the world. There are only a few countries, numerically speaking, where socialism has been built, but in terms of inhabitants their numbers are strong.

  The countries fighting for their liberation – under different systems and at different stages in their struggle – are many, but they also have different governments, and above all their professional layers do not always have the same interests. The capitalist countries, naturally, have their own ideology. For all these reasons, we were surprised by the tone of the discussions.

  I thought, perhaps a bit mechanically, that in general students from most capitalist, colonial, and semicolonial countries belong to those layers of society whose economic resources place them outside the ranks of the proletariat, and that therefore, their ideology would be very far from the revolutionary ideology we hold in Cuba.

  But my mechanical approach led me to forget that in Cuba also there was a layer of students, the majority of whom – given their social origins – did not belong to the proletariat either, yet that layer of students has participated in all the revolutionary actions in Cuba in recent times. They have given our people some of the most beloved martyrs in the cause of liberation. Some of them have now graduated, while others continue their studies, integrating themselves into the Cuban Revolution and giving it their total support.

  I had forgotten there is something more important than the social class to which an individual belongs: youth, freshness of ideals, and a body of knowledge that, at the moment one emerges from adolescence, can be put at the service of the purest of ideals.

  Later on, the social mechanisms that exist in the various oppressive systems one lives under may change this way of thinking. But students in their big majority are revolutionary. Students may have more or less awareness of a scientific revolution, they may be more or less conscious of what they want for their people or for the world and how to achieve it. But students are, by nature, revolutionary because they belong to that layer of young people for whom life is opening up in front of them, and they are acquiring new knowledge every day.

  This is the way it has been in our country. And even though some professionals and students have clearly left us, we have seen with great satisfaction – and sometimes also with surprise – that the vast majority of students and professionals remained in Cuba in spite of all the opportunities they were given to leave the country, in spite of all the temptations offered by imperialism.

  The reason is understandable: even if we keep in mind that under an exploitative social system students cannot choose their own career or follow their real inner vocation, there is always a meeting point between someone’s inner vocation and the career chosen; only rarely does this not occur. As a rule, the choice of most careers is also influenced by a series of economic factors, although the choice is made primarily because of individual preference.

  In our country professionals and students have been given the opportunity that a professional should really aspire to: the opportunity to have all the tools of their trade in order to accomplish their work. For the first time professionals in Cuba have felt themselves true builders of society, participants in society, responsible for society. They cease to be simple wage earners – partly hidden behind various forms of exploitation – but nevertheless in their great majority wage earners, building for somebody else, interpreting the wishes and opinions of others, always creating wealth for someone else through their work.

  Clearly, in this beginning stage limitations have been great. Our scientists cannot carry out the research they would like. Sometimes we lack dyes and all kinds of technical devices they need to carry out their research. Our a
rchitects cannot design with all the taste and beauty they are capable of – they lack the materials to do so. It is necessary to distribute to the maximum what we do have, so that more can be given to those who have nothing. At this stage it is essential to redistribute wealth so that everyone has a little.

  But very concretely, in exercising the profession you represent, the creative spirit of man is put to a test. There is the problem of the materials available and of the service to be provided, but it is up to our professionals to find the right solutions. In doing so, they have to carry out a fight as though they were fighting against nature, against an environment that is beyond man’s control, in order to fulfil in the best possible way not only the desire to give more to our people, but also the personal satisfaction of building a new society with one’s own hands, talents, and knowledge.

  Our revolution has been characterised by broad-mindedness. We have not had the great problems with professionals that other countries building socialism have had, with debates on art. We have been very broad-minded.

  We do not agree with everything our professionals and artists believe. Often we have had heated discussions with them, but we have taken those who are not socialists, those who not only don’t care for socialism, but resent socialism and dream about the old days, and we have managed to have them remain in Cuba, fighting, discussing, working, and building. And, in fact, from a practical standpoint they are socialists, which is what we are interested in. [Laughter]

  We have never fled from confrontation or discussion. We have always been open to discussing any idea. The only thing we don’t allow is using ideas for purposes of blackmail, or sabotage against the revolution. In this respect we have been absolutely inflexible, as inflexible as anyone.

  On the most basic level, 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. The only thing we demand is that the state’s general policies in this stage of building socialism be respected. Such has been our approach.