BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
HAVANA - A range of conferences, cultural activities, and other events are taking place here and throughout Cuba to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Ernesto Che Guevara and his fellow combatants in Bolivia.

One of the main political events in the weeks leading up to the October 8 anniversary was an international conference sponsored by the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) and its magazine Tricontinental. The gathering, "Twenty-First Century: Legacy and Relevance of Che's Work," was held here September 25-27.

Guevara, Argentine by birth, became one of the central leaders of the Cuban revolution that brought down the U.S.- backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and opened the road to the first socialist revolution in the Americas. He was one of the outstanding Marxist leaders of the 20th century. In 1966 - 67 Guevara led a nucleus of revolutionary combatants from Bolivia, Cuba, and elsewhere in Latin America fighting to overturn the military dictatorship in Bolivia and bring to power a government in the interests of workers and peasants. In the process, they sought to create the conditions out of which could be forged the leadership of a Latin America-wide movement of toilers capable of winning the battles for land reform and independence from imperialist domination and initiating the socialist revolution on the continent.

On Oct. 8, 1967, the Bolivian military, in close collaboration with Washington, captured Guevara after he was wounded in battle and murdered him the next day.

The conference also marked the 30th anniversary of the magazine Tricontinental, which in a special inaugural issue in April 1967 published what was to be Guevara's last major political article, "Create Two, Three.. Many Vietnams - That Is the Watchword." The article had been written in November 1966, prior to his departure for Bolivia. OSPAAAL was founded at the Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, held in Havana in January 1966 and attended by anti-imperialist fighters from around the world.

The Message to the Tricontinental, as Guevara's article is widely known, contained Che's assessment of the world political situation. It called on revolutionary forces everywhere to come to the aid of the Vietnamese national liberation fighters and outlined the prospects for revolutionary struggle, especially in Latin America.

The 30th anniversary meeting here brought together more than 100 people from Cuba and 35 other countries. They included members of Cuba solidarity groups, representatives of political parties and organizations, academics, and individuals from Guatemala, Bolivia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Italy, Austria, Ireland, the United States, Angola, Libya, Australia, Malaysia, and China, and elsewhere.

The opening event of the conference was attended by some 200 people, among them José Ramón Balaguer, member of the Political Bureau of the Cuban Communist Party; Manuel Piñeiro, member of the party's Central Committee; and Aleida Guevara, daughter of Che Guevara. Former Egyptian foreign minister Murad Ghaleb, currently president of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia and Africa, and OSPAAAL general secretary Ramón Pez Ferro welcomed participants to the event. Pez Ferro and Tricontinental editor Ana María Pellón were the main organizers of the three-day gathering.

The keynote talk was given by Eusebio Leal, head of the historical office of the city of Havana. Leal pointed to the 30-year-long efforts by capitalist spokespeople, from Washington on down, to falsify Che Guevara's record as a revolutionary internationalist leader and to separate him from the Cuban revolution, in which he played a central leadership role and which forged him as a communist. In today's world, Leal stressed, anti-imperialist fighters "must read and study Che's writings and works."

Cuba's aid to liberation struggles
The conference celebrated the publication of the 30th anniversary issue of Tricontinental, devoted entirely to Che Guevara. The issue features an extensive interview with Piñeiro. A commander of the Rebel Army by the end of the revolutionary war, the magazine notes, Piñeiro served for a number of years after the 1959 victory as "the head of the General Directorate of Intelligence [DGI] of the Interior Ministry, which among other responsibilities was in charge of ties to revolutionary movements in the Third World." In this work he collaborated closely with Cuban president Fidel Castro and Guevara. Later Piñeiro was head of the Americas Department of the Communist Party's Central Committee until his retirement several years ago.

The special issue of Tricontinental also features articles by and interviews with a number of other prominent figures whose lives and struggles crossed paths with Guevara's. This includes Víctor Dreke, second in command of the Cuban revolutionaries who fought with Guevara in the Congo in 1965, and Manuel Cabieses, editor of the Chilean magazine Punto Final, who recounts the details of how Che's field diary, captured by the Bolivian army, was smuggled out of that country to be published in Cuba and around the world.

The anniversary issue had quickly sold out and was reprinted in a larger run prior to the conference.

One of the highlights of the meeting was a session at which Piñeiro spoke briefly and then for an hour and a half answered questions about Cuba's aid and participation in anti- imperialist struggles in the Congo and throughout Latin America, including Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. He responded to numerous questions related to the Bolivian campaign, in which he was closely involved.

`Bolivian campaign a political victory'
Asked whether the guerrilla led by Guevara in Bolivia was a debacle because of the capture and murder of many of its combatants by the U.S.-backed Bolivian army in 1967, Piñeiro replied, "It was a failure in concrete military terms. But politically it was a great victory. Che set an example of internationalism in aiding other peoples in their fight to free themselves from Yankee domination, an example that still resounds around the world to this day."

Another highlight was the launching of the new reprint of Pombo: un hombre de la guerrilla del Che (Pombo: A Man of Che's Guerrilla) by Brig. Gen. Harry Villegas, a firsthand account of the Bolivian campaign published by Havana-based Editora Política. Villegas, still known by his nom de guerre, Pombo, vividly recounted parts of that experience in 1966 - 68, including how the group of combatants he led after Che's assassination eluded the Bolivian army's encirclement and lived to continue the revolutionary struggle.

Several panel discussions took place during the conference. They took up the themes of "Solidarity, anti- imperialism, and Che's ethics before the challenge of the third millennium," "The role of the alternative media in face of disinformation and globalization by the dominant transnational corporations," and "Che and the FBI."

Among the panelists were Fernando Martínez Heredia, author of the book Che, socialismo y el comunismo (Che, socialism, and communism); Luis Suárez, a professor associated with the University of Havana; Delia Luisa López, chair of the Che Studies program at the University of Havana; U.S. attorneys Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith; former Tricontinental editor Mirtha Muñiz; and Chilean writer Marta Harnecker.

Is imperialism stronger today?
The opening panel, on "Solidarity, anti-imperialism, and Che's ethics before the challenge of the third millennium," was the one that elicited the most lively discussion among conference participants, who expressed differing views on the evolution of world capitalism. Taking up points made by panelists, some conference participants argued that the world Guevara acted in and wrote about no longer exists, that Che's political course is no longer an alternative because imperialism is much so stronger today.

Kiva Maidanik, a Latin America specialist from the former Soviet Union, expressed this view most sharply. While Guevara's ideas deserved to be studied for the future, he said, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was such a colossal defeat for the forces of progress in the world that "we are living in a new historic epoch," different from the one Che knew. The rise of "neoliberalism and globalization" has shifted the relationship of forces to the disadvantage of those fighting for socialism, Maidanik stated. Later in the discussion, a member of the Bolivian Communist Party returned to this point, insisting that it was dangerous to underestimate the strength of imperialism, which he asserted was now more powerful than ever.

Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and a speaker on the opening panel, had presented a different perspective and responded in her summary remarks to some of the points made during the discussion. "Are we living in a new era? No," she replied. "Ours is fundamentally the same world order that has existed since the beginning of the century. This remains the imperialist epoch. What has changed is that imperialism is weaker than ever, not stronger."

Waters noted that the question of our epoch is the question of communist leadership in struggle. "There are no hopeless situations for imperialism," she said, if the working-class has no communist leadership to lead it in conquering power from the capitalist exploiters and war makers. World War II was a horrible example of an imperialist slaughter made possible by the absence of communist leadership in the world working class in the face of what seemed to be terminal crises for major capitalist powers in the 1930s.

"That is why Che's course is more necessary than ever to chart a road forward for humanity," Waters said. (The presentation that Waters summarized in her opening remarks, "Che Guevara and the Imperialist Reality," appears elsewhere in this issue.)

Che's hatred for imperialism
Another highlight of the conference was an evening with several individuals who were family members or had worked with Che. It was held at La Cabaña, a Spanish colonial fortress - now a military museum - that served briefly as Che's headquarters following the triumph of the revolution.

The speakers - Villegas, Aleida Guevara, Enrique Oltuski, and Oscar Fernández Mell - painted a vivid portrait of Che as a person. Aleida Guevara, who was only a child when she last saw him, spoke about her memories of Che as a loving father and what she had learned about him from her mother and others of his closest comrades in arms, including those on the panel.

Fernández Mell, a doctor by profession, fought with Guevara in the Rebel Army and later worked with him in other responsibilities, including the Congo guerrilla campaign. In addition to Che's love for and confidence in the capacities of men and women in struggle, Fernández Mell said, Guevara had an abiding hatred for imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism, based on his concrete knowledge and experience throughout the Americas.

Oltuski, leader of the July 26 Movement in Las Villas at the end of the Cuban revolutionary war and later a close collaborator of Guevara in the Ministry of Industry, spoke about the crucial role Che played during the mass working- class mobilizations in 1960 that led to the expropriation of Cuba's domestic- and imperialist-owned industries.

When the revolutionary leadership embarked on these measures, Oltuski noted, Guevara was barely 31 years old and Oltuski himself was 29. "We were a bunch of kids," he said. "We had studied Capital and other works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but we had some big questions to answer: how exactly are we going to go over to socialism? The books didn't tell us what to do. We spent hours discussing these questions into the early hours of the morning as we figured out how to go forward."

The conference closed with the reading of the final declaration adopted by the participants and a speech by Tomás Borge, a leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Other Events Mark Guevara's Death
HAVANA - The OSPAAAL conference was one of several events taking place around the 30th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. The Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC), for example, sponsored a "Meeting to Study Ernesto Che Guevara: Socialism and the Roads to Efficiency" here on September 25 -26. The 200 participants, including academics and workers, also heard presentations from relatives and former associates of the revolutionary leader.

Other events are being organized on university and college campuses. One is an October 1 - 4 conference sponsored by the Che Studies Program at the University of Havana.

Cuban youth and others are participating in a number of international commemorative events. One is a ceremony that will take place in the village of La Higuera, Bolivia, site of Guevara's assassination. Two caravans of youth, initiated by the Continental Organization of Latin American Students (OCLAE) are converging on La Higuera, one starting from Mexico City and the other from Buenos Aires. This coincides with a conference on Che's legacy in Rosario, Argentina, sponsored by the magazine América Libre.

The major political event in Cuba in the coming weeks is the fifth congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, scheduled for October 8 - 10 to coincide with the 30th anniversary. Following the congress, ceremonies to honor Guevara and his fellow combatants are planned in Havana October 11 - 13. A procession will travel from Havana to Santa Clara, where the combatants' remains - recently returned from Bolivia - will be buried, during a major ceremony that will take place October 17.

An international conference on socialism and Guevara's legacy is scheduled here October 21 - 23, sponsored by the Communist Party of Cuba.

- M.K.  
 
 
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