Che Guevara Talks to Young People

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  The work of the youth was conducted within the context of this vast sea of ideological struggles among distinct supporters of different ideas, even if there were no defined tendencies or currents. The youth organisation began functioning first as an outgrowth of the Rebel Army; later it acquired greater ideological depth, and then it transformed itself into the Union of Young Communists, which we could call the antechamber to party membership, which necessarily implies the obligation of acquiring a higher level of political education.

  Faced with these problems, there was no real discussion, although some discussions were held on the role of the youth organisation, from a practical standpoint. Should the youth organisation meet for three, four, or five hours to discuss profound philosophical questions? They can do so – no one is saying this is forbidden. But it is simply a question of balance and of one’s attitude to the revolution, to the party, and above all to the people. The fact that the youth are taking up questions of theory shows they have already achieved a certain theoretical depth. But if all they are doing is grappling with theoretical questions, it means the youth have not been able to get beyond a mechanical approach, and are confused about their goals.

  There has also been talk about how youth are by definition spontaneous, joyful. So the youth – and I’m talking in general, not about the particular group in the ministry here – have organised joyfulness. Then young leaders set about thinking, what is it youth should be doing, since, by definition, it’s supposed to be merry and fun. Precisely this was turning youth into old people. Why should a young person have to sit down and think about what youth should be?

  They should simply do what comes to mind, and that, in fact, will be what youth do. But this wasn’t what happened, since there was a whole group of youth leaders who had truly grown old. That’s when this joy, this youthful spontaneity is turned into superficiality. So we have to be careful.

  We should not confuse the happiness, the freshness, the spontaneity of youth all over the world – and especially Cuban youth, because of the nature of the Cuban people – with superficiality. These are two absolutely different things. It’s possible and necessary to be spontaneous and gay, but one has to be serious at the same time. So this is one of the most difficult problems to resolve when presented for theoretical discussion. Because, simply put, this is what it means to be a Young Communist. You shouldn’t think about how to be one, it has to come from within.

  I don’t know if I’m getting into deep, semi-philosophical waters, but this is one of the problems we have discussed the most. The main way the youth must show the way forward is precisely through being the vanguard in each of the areas of work they participate in.

  This is why we have often had certain little problems with the youth: that they weren’t cutting all the sugarcane they should, that they weren’t doing as much voluntary labour as they should. In short, it is impossible to lead with theories alone; and much less can there be an army composed only of generals. An army can have one general, maybe several generals and one commander in chief if it is very large. But if there’s no one to go into the battlefield, there’s no army. And if the army in the field isn’t being led by those who have gone into the field themselves, who’ve gone to the front, then such an army is no good. One of the attributes of our Rebel Army was that the men promoted to lieutenant, captain, or commander – the only three ranks we had in the Rebel Army – were those whose personal qualities had distinguished them on the field of battle.

  The first two ranks – the lieutenants and captains – were the ones who directed combat operations. So that is what we need – lieutenants and captains, or whatever you want to call them. You can take away the military titles if you want – but the person leading must do so by setting the example. To follow or to make oneself be followed can be a difficult task at times. But it’s much, much easier than forcing others to do the walking, making them proceed along a trail still unexplored, a trail on which no one has taken a single step.

  So the youth still need to take up the big tasks the government set forward, take them up as tasks before the masses, turn them into their own aspirations, and march along this road as the vanguard. Led and guided by the party, the youth must march in the vanguard.

  The first qualitative change in our party occurred when all the bad leadership methods were abandoned, and exemplary workers, vanguard workers – those workers on the production front who could really speak with authority and who were also the ones going to the front lines – were elected to membership.22 Although this was not the only change, and had to be followed up by a whole series of organisational measures, it marks the most important aspect of our transformation. There have also been a series of changes in the youth.

  I want to emphasise one point – something I have emphasised continuously: stay young, don’t transform yourselves into old theoreticians, or theorisers, maintain the freshness and enthusiasm of youth. You must learn to grab hold of the great watchwords of the government, internalise them, and become the motor force of the whole mass movement, marching in the vanguard. To do this, you have to learn how to discern the most important aspect of things being stressed by the government, which represents the people and is, at the same time, a party.

  Similarly, one must know how to weigh things and set priorities. These are tasks the youth organisation must carry out.

  You have been talking about the technological revolution. This is one of the most important things, one of the most concrete tasks and one that is closest to the mentality of youth. But one cannot seek to carry out a technological revolution by oneself, because the technological revolution is happening all over the world, in every country, both socialist and nonsocialist – I am referring to the advanced countries, of course.

  There is a technological revolution going on in the United States. There’s a powerful technological revolution in France, in Britain, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and these are certainly not socialist countries. So the technological revolution must have a class content, a socialist content. And for this to happen, there must be a transformation of the youth so that they become a genuine motor force. In other words, all the bad habits of the old, dead society must be eliminated. One cannot think about a technological revolution without at the same time thinking about a communist attitude towards work. This is extremely important. We cannot speak of a socialist technological revolution if there is not a communist attitude towards work.

  This is simply the reflection in Cuba of the technological revolution taking place as a result of the most recent scientific inventions and discoveries. These are things that cannot be separated. And a communist attitude towards work consists of changes taking place in an individual’s consciousness, changes that naturally take a long time. We cannot expect that changes of this sort will be completed within a short period, during which work will continue to have the character it has now – a compulsory social obligation – before being transformed into a social necessity. In other words, this transformation – the technological revolution – presents the opportunity to get closer to what interests you most in life, your work, your research, your studies of every type. And one’s attitude towards this work will be something totally new. Work will be what Sunday is now – not the Sunday when you cut cane, but the Sunday when you don’t cut cane. In other words, work will be seen as a necessity, not something compelled by sanctions.

  But achieving that requires a long process, a process tied to the creation of habits acquired through voluntary work. Why do we emphasise voluntary work so much? Economically it means practically nothing. Even the volunteers who cut cane – which is the most important task from an economic point of view – don’t accomplish much. A volunteer cutter from this ministry cuts only a fourth or a fifth of what a cane cutter who has been doing this his whole life does. It has economic importance today because of the shortage of labour. It is also important today because these individuals are giving a part of their lives to society without expecti
ng anything in return, without expecting any kind of payment, simply fulfilling a duty to society. This is the first step in transforming work into what it will eventually become, as a result of the advance of technology, the advance of production, and the advance of the relations of production: an activity of a higher level, a social necessity.

  We will advance if at every step we bring together the ability to transform ourselves, generalising our attitude towards study of the new technology, with the ability to perform in our workplaces as the vanguard. And if you get into the habit of turning productive labour little by little into something that, over time, becomes a necessity, then you will automatically become the youth’s vanguard, and you will never have to wonder what you should be doing. You will simply do what at the time seems to make the most sense. You won’t have to go searching for what youth might like.

  You will automatically be youth, as well as representatives of the most advanced youth. Those who are young, young in spirit especially, don’t ever have to worry about what to do in order to please others. Just do what is necessary, what seems logical at the time. That’s how youth will become leaders.

  Today we have begun a process of, let us say, politicising this ministry. The Ministry of Industry is really cold, a very bureaucratic place, a nest of nit-picking bureaucrats and bores, from the minister on down, who are constantly tackling concrete tasks in order to search for new relationships and new attitudes.

  Now, the youth organisation here was complaining that even though they had organised things, this place was empty on the days when I didn’t show up, and they wanted me to raise this. Well, I can raise it, but I can’t tell anyone to come here. What’s going on? Either there is a lack of communication or a lack of interest, and this hasn’t been overcome by the people in charge of doing so. This is a concrete task of the ministry. It is the task of the youth organisation, to overcome the indifference within the ministry. Of course, there is always room for self-criticism; and the assessment that not enough has been done to stay in constant communication with people is always appropriate.

  That’s true, but it’s also important that self-criticism be complete: because self-criticism is not self-flagellation but rather an analysis of a person’s attitude. Moreover, the enormous amount of work on one’s shoulders, one task after another all piled up, makes it more difficult to have a different type of relationship and to pursue a more human relationship, one could say, a relationship less directed through bureaucratic red tape.

  This will come in due time: when work is not so urgent, when there are a whole number of cadres to lean on, when all tasks are always fulfilled, when lack of confidence in work done is no longer one of the disgraceful features of this entire stage of our revolution.

  Today, it is necessary to check documents personally, double-check statistics personally, and errors are often still found. So once this stage has disappeared – and it is on the road to disappearing; it will soon disappear – when all the cadres are stronger, when each of us has advanced a little more, then of course there will be time for different types of relations. Naturally this doesn’t mean a minister or a director going around asking everybody how their families are doing. Rather, we will be able to organise relations that enable us to work better both within the ministry and outside it, so we get to know each other better.

  The aim of socialism today, in this current stage of building socialism and communism, is not simply to create shiny factories. These factories are being built for human beings in their totality. Man must be transformed in conjunction with advances in production. We would not be doing our job if we were solely producers of commodities, of raw material, and were not at the same time producers of men.

  Here is one of the tasks of the youth: to give impetus to, and to lead through example, the production of the man of tomorrow. In this production and leadership, the production of oneself is included, because nobody is perfect, far from it. Everyone needs to be improving themselves through work, through relations with other people, through serious study, critical discussions – these are all things that contribute to the transformation of people. We know all this because five long years have passed since our revolution triumphed, and seven long years since the first of us landed and began the struggle, the final stage of the struggle. Whoever looks back and thinks about what he was like seven years ago will realise that we have travelled far, very far, but there is still a long way to go.

  These are the tasks, and the most important thing is for the youth to understand their role and their fundamental task. They shouldn’t inflate that role more than is merited. They should not consider themselves the centre of the socialist universe. Rather, they should see themselves as an important link, a very important one that points towards the future.

  We ourselves are already on the decline, even if geographically speaking we might still be situated among the youth. We have carried out many hard tasks, we have had the responsibility of leading a country through tremendously difficult times, and naturally all this ages us, it wears us out. Within a few years the task of those of us remaining will be to retire to winter quarters so that new generations can occupy our posts. In any case, I think we have played an important role, and have done so with a certain amount of dignity. But our job will not be complete unless we know the right time to step aside. And another task in front of you is to create the people who will replace us. That we can be forgotten as a thing of the past will become one of the most important gauges of the work carried out by the youth as a whole and by the entire people.

  Che and his men come as reinforcements

  (Fidel Castro pays tribute to Che and his comrades, 17 October 1997)

  In 1965 Che Guevara resigned his political, military, and other responsibilities. “Other nations of the world summon my modest efforts of assistance,” he wrote in a letter of farewell to Fidel Castro. In October 1967 Guevara was killed in Bolivia while fighting to topple the US-backed military dictatorship in that country and to link up with rising revolutionary struggles in his native Argentina and elsewhere in the Southern Cone of Latin America.

  In the more than three decades since his death in combat, Guevara’s communist political legacy has remained central to the course of the Cuban Revolution. His example continues to inspire millions of working people and youth both in Cuba and throughout the world.

  In 1997 Guevara’s remains, buried in great secrecy by the Bolivian regime, were uncovered there, together with those of six other revolutionary combatants from Bolivia, Cuba, and Peru who fought by his side. Their next of kin requested they be brought to Cuba, where hundreds of thousands of Cuban workers and youth mobilised to pay tribute to the combatants and to express their determination to remain true to their revolutionary course.

  The speech that follows was given by Cuban president Fidel Castro on 17 October, at a solemn ceremony in Santa Clara, where the remains of the combatants were interred at the site of a monument dedicated to the memory of Ernesto Che Guevara.

  Relatives of the comrades who died in battle; invited guests; residents of Villa Clara; compatriots: [Applause]

  With deep emotion, we are living through one of those moments that is not often repeated.

  We did not come to bid farewell to Che and his heroic comrades. We came to greet them.

  I view Che and his men as reinforcements, as a detachment of invincible combatants that this time includes not just Cubans. It also includes Latin Americans who have come to fight at our side and to write new pages of history and glory.

  I view Che, furthermore, as a moral giant who grows day by day, whose image, whose strength, whose influence has multiplied throughout the world.

  How could he fit below a tombstone?

  How could he fit in this plaza?

  How could he fit solely in our beloved but small island?

  Only the world he dreamed of, which he lived and fought for, is big enough for him.

  The more that injustice, exploitation, inequality
, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and misery prevail in human society, the more Che’s stature will grow.

  The more that the power of imperialism, hegemonism, domination, and interventionism grow, to the detriment of the most sacred rights of the peoples – especially the weak, backward, and poor peoples who for centuries were colonies of the West and sources of slave labour – the more the values Che defended will be upheld.

  The more that abuses, selfishness, and alienation exist; the more that Indians, ethnic minorities, women, and immigrants suffer discrimination; the more that children are bought and sold for sex or forced into the workforce in their hundreds of millions; the more that ignorance, unsanitary conditions, insecurity, and homelessness prevail – the more Che’s deeply humanistic message will stand out.

  The more that corrupt, demagogic, and hypocritical politicians exist anywhere, the more Che’s example of a pure, revolutionary, and consistent human being will come through.

  The more cowards, opportunists, and traitors there are on the face of the earth, the more Che’s personal courage and revolutionary integrity will be admired. The more that others lack the ability to fulfil their duty, the more Che’s iron willpower will be admired. The more that some individuals lack the most basic self-respect, the more Che’s sense of honour and dignity will be admired. The more that sceptics abound, the more Che’s faith in man will be admired. The more pessimists there are, the more Che’s optimism will be admired. The more vacillators there are, the more Che’s audacity will be admired. The more that loafers squander the product of the labour of others, the more Che’s austerity, his spirit of study and work, will be admired.