BY MARTÍN KOPPEL AND MARY-ALICE WATERS
HAVANA - "Che was fighting to change society. He said that to be part of this process, universities must become factories to produce revolutionaries."

Fernando Vecino Alegret, who fought in the Rebel Army and worked with Ernesto Che Guevara during Cuba's revolutionary war in the late 1950s, was addressing 200 students, professors, and international guests at the close of a conference at the University of Havana on "Che: Man of the Twenty-First Century." Vecino Alegret is currently the minister of higher education.

The October 1 - 4 gathering was sponsored by the university's Ernesto Guevara Studies Program, together with the Personal Archive of Che Guevara, directed by Aleida March.

A wide variety of political, academic, and cultural events are taking place throughout Cuba to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Guevara and his fellow revolutionary combatants in Bolivia. Some of these meetings, like the University of Havana conference, have been marked by the participation of veteran revolutionaries who fought and worked with Che - in the Cuban revolutionary war, in the workers and farmers government during the decisive early years, and in the national liberation struggles in the Congo and Bolivia. These speakers have taken up Che's legacy for today, appealing to the new generation of Cubans to do with their lives what the previous generations of revolutionary fighters did with theirs. In addition to the meetings, a wealth of articles, interviews, and books by these veteran cadres is appearing in the Cuban media.

These initiatives share a common thread with a book published here earlier this year called Secretos de generales (Secrets of generals). In it, 41 Cuban generals address Cuban youth today by recounting their own participation in revolutionary battles in Cuba and around the world.

Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba's National Assembly and member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba, opened the conference at the University of Havana. "How should we apply Che today?" he said. "This is the question asked by revolutionaries, those of us who are fighting to transform the world."

Alarcón described how Guevara, while shouldering major responsibilities in the revolutionary government, made time to write about big political questions, from the struggle against imperialism, which he wrote about with a scientific understanding, to the challenges of building socialism. Noting Guevara's argument that it is impossible "to defeat capitalism with its own fetishes," he said the disintegration of the Soviet regime was "not a defeat for Che but rather his vindication." In Cuba today, he concluded, to advance the revolution "we need Che more than ever." (See full text of Alarcón's speech beginning on page 8.)

Relatives of Guevara and individuals who had worked with him spoke at several panel discussions during the conference. They included Armando Hart, longtime Cuban leader and currently director of the Office of the José Martí Program; Brig. Gen. Harry Villegas, who fought with Che in the Cuban revolution, the Congo, and Bolivia; Aleida Guevara March, the revolutionary leader's daughter; Orlando Borrego, former head of the sugar ministry; and Enrique Oltuski, deputy minister of fishing. The latter two worked closely with Guevara in the Ministry of Industry in the early 1960s. Aleida March, Guevara's widow and comrade-in- arms, participated in all the conference sessions and read the final declaration at the conclusion of the gathering.

`Lessons for new generation of fighters'
Borrego highlighted Guevara's contributions to economics and politics in the transition to socialism. Pointing to the "lessons that the new generations of fighters must not forget," he explained that "while Che's boldness and bravery as a guerrilla fighter is often emphasized, the great contribution he made to the world revolution through his theoretical work is not always fully appreciated."

He underscored Guevara's conviction that deepening political consciousness among working people "is essential to the building of a new society that is qualitatively different from capitalism's commodity-based society. Che concluded that `Man is the conscious actor in history, and without that consciousness marking his entire social being, there can be no communism.' "

Borrego also recalled how Guevara, while heading the Ministry of Industry, devoted many hours after the regular workday to studying politics, economics, and science, and encouraged his collaborators to do likewise. "Monday nights he studied applied mathematics and statistics. On Thursdays we would rigorously study political economy until daybreak. Together with Capital, Karl Marx's crowning work, Che delved into Marx's 1844 philosophical manuscripts," Borrego said.

Oltuski spoke on "Che's human dimension." He read vivid accounts by several individuals who had collaborated with Guevara. One was by the Mexican revolutionary Arsacio Vanegas, who gave military training near Mexico City to the initial recruits of the Rebel Army before they left for Cuba on the Granma expedition in December 1956. Vanegas recounts how Guevara refused to be excluded from strenuous military exercises on account of his asthma.

Vecino Alegret, who himself had been part of an aborted second expedition of fighters from Mexico to Cuba in late 1957, described some of the times he had met Che, particularly after the 1959 revolutionary victory. At that time Vecino Alegret was a student at the University of Havana.

"In the early months of 1959, the Central University of Las Villas offered Che an honorary doctorate in education. At that time the class struggle was in full swing, and the universities still had not been transformed," Vecino Alegret explained. Most of the professors who hadn't already left Cuba were holdovers from before the revolution, and they had diminished authority, while the revolutionary students had considerable influence.

Attacked class differences at university
"Che hated the class and caste differences that were widespread throughout the university. He decided to accept the honorary degree, but he refused to put on the gown and mortarboard. No one could convince him to put it on. He simply draped the gown over his arm," Vecino Alegret reported. The professors felt deeply offended, but the students loved it.

"Shortly afterward, Che went to the University of Oriente in Santiago," he continued. Speaking there to a student body that was still disproportionately white in its social composition, "Che declared that the university `should be dressed in black and mulatto, like the people of Santiago.' "

At another panel discussion devoted to the topic of "Che and youth," Aleida Guevara March was the featured speaker. She explained Che's view that a socialist society - where private ownership of the factories, fields, and natural resources has been abolished, along with the exploitation of one human being by another - cannot be built by relying on capitalist methods, which perpetuate the old social relations. It must be based on "consciousness and solidarity, not personal selfishness," she emphasized.

During the discussion period, Guevara March responded to a student who questioned the usefulness of voluntary social labor in Cuba today because it is often organized in a bureaucratic manner and results in little productive activity. "Yes, voluntary labor is important in developing consciousness," she stressed. Agreeing that if not politically led it will become demoralizing and wasteful, she added that voluntary labor is an advance "only if people gain a sense that they are useful in society. The one time I cut sugarcane as part of a mobilization of voluntary work, I developed a deep respect for the cane cutters, the hard work they do, and their contribution to society."

She also noted that some young people today doubt whether it was worth it for hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteers to have gone to Angola in the 1970s and '80s to help defend that nation's sovereignty against invasion by the apartheid regime. "Did we ask anything in exchange when we went there? No," said Guevara March, who carried out an internationalist mission in Angola as a doctor, as she had also done in Nicaragua. "Our struggle in Cuba is intimately tied to the struggle for the liberation of all oppressed people." The victory in Angola also contributed to Namibia's independence and hastened the end of the apartheid regime, she noted.

Guevara March told the audience that when she traveled to Brazil she saw "a rich country, but one with people living in the streets and children stricken by drugs. Some day there will be a social explosion there." Seeing the conditions there, she concluded, "strengthened the ideas that I have learned through our revolution."  
 
 
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