Che Guevara Talks to Young People. Ernesto Che Guevara

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 concerning 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