BY CHRIS REMPLE
PITTSBURGH - One hundred fifty people, most of them youth and students, crowded into a meeting on the University of Pittsburgh campus November 13 to hear a discussion of Che Guevara's legacy for fighters today. Chairs were brought in from other rooms and even then, people stood and some sat in the aisles.

The meeting was sponsored by the Pittsburgh Cuba Coalition; the Cuba Studies Group of the Center for Latin American Studies at the university; the Pittsburgh delegation to last summer's World Festival of Youth and Students in Cuba; the Socialist Workers Party; the Campus Coalition for Peace and Justice, a central group in the fight to prosecute the cops who killed Jonny Gammage; the Western Pennsylvania Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal; and several other organizations.

José Moreno, a Cuban professor of sociology at the university, chaired the meeting. "It is a great honor to be here tonight to commemorate Ernesto Che Guevara," he said, and introduced the speakers: Rafael Noriega, the third secretary of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, D.C.; Mary-Alice Waters, the editor of The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara, Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Guevara, and Pombo: A Man of Che's `guerrilla' by Harry Villegas; Dennis Brutus, a professor and poet from South Africa and a longtime opponent of the apartheid regime that was overthrown in 1994; and Gustavo Machín, also of the Cuban Interest Section.

Waters placed the commemoration of Che in the context of world politics. "This meeting is not about the past, not about history, but about today," she said. The Argentine-born revolutionary's "example, his legacy, his writings are weapons in the struggles of today. Che Guevara is about the strength of the Cuban revolution today - as the Cuban people are demonstrating."

Waters noted, "The question is posed often by many different people and forces: Why is Che, 30 years after his death, still the lightning rod that he is; why does he continue to be looked to by thousands, even millions, especially young people coming into consciousness of the world and trying to figure out what needs to be done? The world Che lived in, the world that made him a revolutionary, a fighter, remains the world we live in today."

Waters concluded her remarks by paying tribute to the Cuban people whose determination to defend their revolution forced the U.S. rulers to retreat from their plans to invade Cuba 35 years ago, in October 1962, over the pretext of Soviet missiles being installed for Cuba's defense.

She pointed out that their courage and determination, not the wisdom of U.S. president John Kennedy or Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev, tipped the balance against a U.S. invasion.

Prof. Dennis Brutus related the important role of Cuban troops in helping defend the sovereignty of Angola and defeat the South African army at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988.

The South African forces first invaded Angola in 1975, right after that country won independence from the Portuguese colonial rulers.

Immediately, Brutus explained, "when the MPLA [People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the governing party in Angola] appealed for help, the Cubans sent troops, advisers, and arms to confront the South African army and decisively defeat it. This was the most important military event in the history of apartheid."

Brutus linked this to the Cuban defense of the African liberation struggle, when Guevara and a team of Cuban veterans went to the Congo to fight alongside revolutionaries there. He also paid tribute to the campus-based divestment movement of the 1980s, which sought to force universities to cease investing in companies doing business in South Africa.

Rafael Noriega stated, "I was a very young boy when Che was killed. I was eight years old. This means that since my earliest days, I learned about Che and about Fidel, as well as other heroes of our revolution.

"I don't have enough words to say what Che means for us. Che means justice and human solidarity... He was a citizen of the world, a man of the 21st century." Acknowledging the interest in Che's life and ideas, he noted proudly, "Thirty years have passed and Che's legacy has grown, having an impact even among people who might not know that much about Che."

During the discussion, a questioner asked what Guevara would think if he came back to life in today's world, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in eastern Europe. Noriega responded, "We have no fetishes. We are trying to develop our economy and defend our social achievements. This attitude toward people was not present in the eastern bloc. The Soviet leaders were not examples of leaders of humanity. They destroyed themselves."

Waters noted that Guevara would be proud of the revolutionary response of the Cuban people and their determination to find a socialist road forward despite the economic war waged by Washington.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home