BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
LOS ANGELES - About 150 people attended a symposium at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) October 24-25 titled "Thirty Years Later: A Retrospective on Che Guevara, Twentieth-Century Utopias, and Dystopias." The main speakers were university professors from the United States and Mexico.

Carlos Alberto Torres, director of UCLA's Latin American Center, which sponsored the gathering, had also invited Harry Villegas, a brigadier general of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces who fought with Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba's 1956-58 revolutionary war and subsequent internationalist missions in the Congo and Bolivia. But the U.S. State Department denied Villegas a visa.

The panelists expressed counterposing views on the record of Guevara and the Cuban revolution and the relevance of Che's legacy for today. The discussion sessions were marked by sharp debate, which was especially polarized because a few dozen counterrevolutionary Cubans took part. Several of them attempted to heckle panelists or members of the audience they disagreed with. 20 de Mayo, a right-wing Spanish-language weekly here, had published a front-page appeal in its October 18 issue to "the Cuban exile community" to come to the event and protest against those "celebrating the criminal life of the Argentine mercenary Ernesto `Che' Guevara."

Participants included several dozen students, professors, and others.

José Moya, a professor at UCLA's Department of History, chaired the first session on the afternoon of October 24. "We are not here to praise Che Guevara or to bury him for that matter," he said in opening the conference. "We prefer inquiry and doubts." The 30th anniversary of Guevara's death in Bolivia is "an appropriate occasion to look upon ideological dreams and nightmares," Moya said, "at a time when what Guevara stood for, communism, is basically moribund everywhere except Cuba."

The first two speakers were Maurice Zeitlin, who teaches at UCLA's Department of Sociology and visited Cuba in the early years of the revolution, and Peter McLaren, a professor at the university's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. They both made favorable comments on Guevara's political course. "Che above all was a revolutionary socialist and a central leader of the first socialist revolution in this hemisphere," Zeitlin said. "His legacy is embodied in the fact that the Cuban revolution is alive today despite the collapse of the Soviet bloc - a revolution that has withstood assassination attempts against its leaders, poisoning of its cattle, biological warfare, an invasion at the Bay of Pigs, threats of nuclear annihilation, and a draconian embargo by the most powerful country in the world. Che taught us all that freedom, democracy, and socialism are inseparable."

In concluding his talk, Zeitlin said that in today's world those who extol the virtues of the capitalist market appear to be triumphant. "But as utopian as Che's dreams may have been, as utopian as a world of peace and plenty for all may seem, no social justice is possible without a vision like Che's."

Opponents of Cuban revolution speak
The third panelist, Jorge Castañeda, is a political science professor from Mexico who teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and at New York University. He began his speech by promoting his recently published book Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Castañeda said he only considers Guevara an object of study and that his biography is neither pro- nor anti- Guevara. He then proceeded to repeat some of the main themes in his book, which regurgitate slanders against the Cuban revolution.

Castañeda claimed that Guevara had no qualms about using capital punishment against opponents of the Cuban revolution. He said that in early 1959, while Guevara headed the La Cabaña military camp in Havana, where hundreds of prisoners were held, he signed orders for the executions of about 700 people. When a Cuban right-winger interrupted his remarks claiming the professor underestimated the killings Guevara allegedly ordered, Castañeda replied, "You should be quiet. On this point, at least, I am on your side."

Castañeda also said that he has documented a political divergence between Cuban president Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, especially on the Soviet Union. He claimed that Che was an "unconditional admirer" of the Stalinist regime in Moscow during the war against the Batista dictatorship but that he later became an open critic of the Soviet government, "while Fidel and Raúl Castro led Cuba in a firm alliance with the Soviet Union." In his book, Castañeda argues further that these alleged differences were behind the Cuban leadership's actions to conceal from Che facts about the Bolivia campaign, implying that Castro was partly responsible for Guevara's death in Bolivia.

In his summary remarks at the end of that session, Castañeda made explicit a point he touched on during his presentation. Che and the Cuban revolution have to do only with the past, he said, "they are completely irrelevant to Latin Americans today." This comment drew loud applause from the Cuban counterrevolutionaries in the audience.

Sebastián Edwards, a professor at the UCLA Department of Economics, of Chilean origin, exalted the social democratic regime of Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s "as the other side of the left, the non-communists, who were closer to the people and used humor and irony unlike the ascetic, heavy-handed, and authoritarian Guevara." He concluded by saying that the outcome of the guerrilla campaigns Guevara led in the Congo and Bolivia "showed that Che's course was a failure."

Che is about the present, not past
Early on in the discussion, Zeitlin took issue with Edwards' comparison between Allende and Guevara. "You conveniently omitted to say how and why Allende's government fell," Zeitlin stated, referring to the U.S.-backed military coup in 1973 that overthrew the Socialist Party government that had been elected in Chile three years earlier. Allende refused to arm the people and organize them to defend the reforms his government tried to implement, Zeitlin said, unlike the revolutionary regime in Cuba and despite Castro's advice to Allende to do so.

Speaking from the audience, Carole Lesnick, a member of the United Auto Workers, pointed to the victory Cuban volunteers, Namibian liberation fighters, and the Angolan army scored in Angola at the end of the 1980s against the invading forces of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa that was backed by Washington. "As Nelson Mandela pointed out, he would not have gotten out of prison without the help of the Cuban revolutionaries," she said. "That was the fruit of the internationalism of Che and his comrades - from Algeria to the Congo and Bolivia."

While the chairperson gave ample time to the Cuban rightists to express their views, a few more supporters of the Cuban revolution got the chance to take the floor.

A number of participants took on the arguments of Castañeda and other opponents of the Cuban revolution. They explained that those who faced the firing squad right after the triumph of the revolution, at La Cabaña military camp or elsewhere, were the henchmen and torturers of Batista, the U.S.-backed dictator who fled in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 1959. Many were officers in Batista's hated police. They were tried and found guilty by popular tribunals, which included Rebel Army officers, and several hundred of them were given the death penalty for their crimes against working people.

Someone from the audience pointed out that the historic record, including Che's Bolivian Diary and Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' by Villegas, shows that no fundamental political differences existed between Castro and Che Guevara. To the contrary, the government and the leadership of the Communist Party in Cuba did everything possible to collaborate with Guevara and his comrades during the Bolivia campaign.

"The communist perspective of Che and his comrades," noted garment worker Gale Shangold from the floor, "far from being a failure, is more appealing today to thousands of young people because of the miserable conditions capitalism continues to generate 30 years later. The course of Che and of the Cuban revolution is about the present, not the past. That's why people like Castañeda go to great lenghts now to do a character assassination of Che and divide him from the communist leadership in Cuba."

Tide turns towards supporters of Che
Attendance dropped to about 100 the second day of the conference. Speakers included Ralph Schoenman, of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, who said Guevara was "a revolutionary without a party or an international" and claimed that the current government in Cuba is "a totalitarian regime"; and Richard Harris, professor of Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay, who spoke favorably of Guevara's course.

During the last session, the tide turned toward supporters of the Cuban revolution. A number of students who opposed Washington's economic war against Cuba and had not spoken earlier took the floor.

Fabian Wagmister, who teaches at UCLA's Department of Film and Television, was the last panelist. He got the best response from a majority in the audience, especially the students, when he said, "Six hundred million children today live under the poverty line, and the number is growing. That's why many of us are here and find a great deal of interest in Che and Cuba. The system Che fought to change is still around and is failing miserably. You can see that today if you walk the streets of La Paz or Mexico City. One of the best things about Che is that he inspired confidence in others to dedicate their lives to fighting for a better world, just like he did."  
 
 
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