BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
Meetings celebrating the publication of books on display at the Eighth International Book Fair in Havana, Cuba, were an important feature of the February 4 - 10 event. On the closing day, participants marked the publication, in English and Spanish, of the diary and participant's account by Harry Villegas of the 1966 - 68 revolutionary campaign in Bolivia led by Ernesto Che Guevara.

Villegas, today a brigadier general in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, is widely known by his nom de guerre, Pombo. His book, Pombo: a Man of Che's `guerrilla' - With Che Guevara in Bolivia 1966 -68, was published in English last year by Pathfinder Press. It was translated from the original Spanish edition, Pombo: un hombre de la guerrilla del Che, released by Editora Política, the publishing house of the Communist Party of Cuba.

Speakers at this February 10 book fair event marking the publication of these two titles included Villegas; Iraida Aguirrechu of Editora Política; and Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder, who edited and wrote the preface to the English-language edition. A news report on the meeting appears elsewhere in this issue.

Below we are reprinting the talk by Waters. It is copyright Pathfinder Press 1998 and reprinted by permission.

As those who are present here this afternoon are well aware, the 30th anniversary last year of the fall in combat of Che and his comrades became the profit-making occasion for the publication of numerous books purporting to be biographies of Ernesto Che Guevara. While we need not debate here the intentions of any of the authors, each of these books in its own way presents a portrait of Che that is grotesquely unrecognizable. More important, of course, the target of the multiple character assassinations carried out in the guise of "objectivity" and "balance" is not Che alone, or even principally. The target is Fidel, and the historic example of the Cuban revolution itself.

To paint Che as a man who was murderous, cruel, egotistical, infantile, slovenly, and arrogant - as well as both naively utopian and driven by a deep-seated death wish - is to say that such is the character of socialism itself. The purpose is to try to poison the minds of a new generation of young fighters the world over who are attracted to the powerful example set by the men and women of Cuba who have shown that, whatever the challenges may be and whatever the price, they will never return to the slave barracks of imperialism.

For that the master will never forgive nor forget.

Selfless determination
None but the men and women who shared Che's hopes and dreams, as well as his scientific understanding of the world in which we live and his determination - his selfless determination - to change it could ever explain clearly and to the end what made Che Che. Why he acted as he did. How he was a product both of the world into which he was born and the struggles through which that reality - and the strugglers themselves - were transformed in the course of the Cuban revolution.

During the year in which Che's reinforcement brigade was welcomed home by the entire Cuban people, Pathfinder Press published the English-language edition of Pombo: a Man of Che's `guerrilla.' This is not simply a unique history book; it is a weapon for today's fighters. Together with books like Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and Che's Bolivian Diary itself, Pombo's account is the most effective counter yet published to those who portray Che, and the men and women who fought with him, as vestiges of a bygone historical epoch, a failed class line of march, that died with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The author, like the Cuban revolution of which he is both a product and an expression, is not only alive and well - as we can all see here today - but has never stopped fighting to find a way for working people to open a way forward for humanity.

That is why Pathfinder published, alongside Pombo: a Man of Che's `guerrilla,' the pamphlet At the Side of Che Guevara, in English and Spanish, two interviews with Harry Villegas. In them, Pombo talks not only about his youth and the conditions of life that turned him and thousands of others like him into revolutionary combatants. He also tells us what happened after the "epic chapter in the history of the Americas" that he was part of in Bolivia. The story of Guantánamo. Of Angola, of Cuito Cuanavale. Of the Special Period.

The pamphlet contains one small piece of the even more powerful panorama that is contained in Secrets of the Generals, a collection of 41 similar interviews through which the social character and internationalist course of Cuba's socialist revolution unfolds with sparkling life and clarity.

And if I may be permitted one moment of special pleading here today, it is to express our conviction and hope that a version of that magnificent collection of interviews can be prepared for publication outside Cuba as well.

Books that fighters need
Why does Pathfinder publish works such as these? In one word, because they are needed.

They are needed by working people and youth in countries like the United States who are not only looking for answers to the growing problems they face, who are not only trying to figure out how to resist, to fight back, but also - and most importantly -to develop the capacities, the virtues, the habits that will above all allow them to fight effectively and to win.

Today, as the U.S. ruling class once again prepares deliberately and rapidly to launch a horrendous, massive assault on the people of Iraq, the revulsion of working people will grow, as will the determination to put an end to a system that can only produce more such wars - ever larger and more destructive ones - until our class proves capable of overthrowing the cowardly exploiters and war makers and thus opening the way to a different future. The fact that books such as Pombo: a Man of Che's `guerrilla' play an irreplaceable role along such a line of struggle is indicated by the reception it has received in the seven months since it came out in English. Some 2,200 copies have already been sold, along with almost 3,000 copies of At the Side of Che Guevara in both languages (more than 1,000 of these in Spanish). In addition, Pathfinder has sold 260 copies of Editora Política's edition of Pombo: Un hombre de la guerrilla de Che - and would have sold hundreds more had they been available. Most of the time since the book was published - 14 of the past 24 months - Pathfinder has had no stock.

Even more indicative perhaps is the fact that in 1997 more than 6,500 books and pamphlets by Che were sold by Pathfinder. That is not books about Che but by him, speaking for himself, in his own name. Books such as Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Socialism and Man in Cuba, and the Bolivian Diary.

In addition to numerous reviews in everything from trade union periodicals, to Spanish-language and Black community papers, to Irish republican weeklies, Pombo: a Man of Che's `guerrilla' was recommended highly by two of the top library journals in the United States. And last year the leading bourgeois journal of international relations, Foreign Affairs - in its special 75th anniversary issue - included the Bolivian Diary, in its Pathfinder edition, in its listing of the 75 most important books published in the last 75 years. Not the 75 they like the most, but the 75 even they must acknowledge are the most important.

More significant, however, is who the nearly 12,000 books by Che and his compañeros were sold to last year - and how. Not only are they to be found in bookstores and libraries around the United States and in many parts of the world. Thousands of them have been sold by volunteers staffing what we call our "guerrilla tables." Folding tables set up regularly on street corners in popular shopping areas, at plant gates, on university campuses, near high schools. They sometimes get harassed by cops who don't like the books we are selling and try to shut down the tables on the grounds that they violate some municipal ordinance or are illegally infringing on someone's private property rights. So the guerrilla tables sometimes have to stand their ground, sometimes retreat in order to retake the position later, sometimes decide to move to more defensible ground.

The photo display at the Pathfinder booth here at the book fair which some of you have seen gives a concrete idea: books sold from the back of a pickup truck at a coal mine portal; at a militant protest against police brutality and for Black rights; from a campus table; at a demonstration defending the rights of immigrant workers; at an abortion clinic under attack by ultrarightists; and more.

These are the important sales, into the hands of thinking, fighting workers awakening to their future.

In a similar way almost exactly seven years ago, some 12,000 copies in English and Spanish of Pathfinder's book U.S. Hands Off the Mideast! Cuba Speaks Out at the United Nations, were sold as Washington drove toward the last war against Iraq. That book by then United Nations ambassador Ricardo Alarcón, a collection of his speeches before the Security Council, is now once again a highly valuable propaganda weapon that is being used across the United States and around the world.

To read, to hear .. to emulate
Young people in the United States reading the book and pamphlet by Pombo were not content to read, of course. They wanted the opportunity to meet and hear a man who had become their hero, an example of the kind of person they would like to be.

In Los Angeles and in Houston they moved into action, organizing committees to secure invitations from prominent professors who would sponsor university speaking engagements for Harry Villegas. Pombo accepted with enthusiasm, but the U.S. government had a different reaction. Once again Washington demonstrated its unending fear of the Cuban revolution and its example by denying Pombo entry into the country last October to attend the conferences he had been invited to address.

In Los Angeles more than 200 students attended the protest meeting that condemned the U.S. government's action and heard a special message sent by Pombo to the event. A similar, if smaller, meeting took place in Houston.

Of one thing I can assure you: those invitations for Pombo and those meetings will not be the last. As long as the example of the Cuban revolution remains, fighting youth and workers in the United States will keep reaching out to demand the right to know the truth, and learn it firsthand.

When the Cuban combatants who had fought their way out of the encirclement in Bolivia returned to Cuba in March 1968, Fidel welcomed them with the words:

You are alive because you were aggressive, because you fought. Had you been scared, had you shown fear, you would have perished. It is precisely your ability to resist, your capacity to fight, that shows your revolutionary strength and conviction.

That is the example of the Cuban revolution that is so important in the world today. That is the example Pombo: a Man of Che's `guerrilla' has to offer new generations of fighters. Now those millions of youth and workers whose reading language is English can make this chronicle their own, and be better armed to emulate the example of the Cuban revolution, which belongs to fighters the world over.  
 
 
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