We publish below the introduction by Mary-Alice Waters to Che Guevara Talks to Young People, which Pathfinder has just published in English and Spanish.

Waters, who oversaw the editing of this book, is the president of Pathfinder Press and editor of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory.

Copyright © 2000 by Pathfinder, reprinted by permission. Subtitles are by the Militant.  
 

Ernesto Che Guevara July 28, 1960  

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS 
Che Guevara Talks to Young People is not a "Che for Beginners." The legendary Argentine-born revolutionary, who helped lead the first socialist revolution in the Americas and initiate the renewal of Marxism in the 1960s, speaks as an equal with the youth of Cuba and the world. He never talks down. He sets an example as he urges young people to rise to the level of revolutionary activity and scientific thought necessary to confront and resolve the historic contradictions of capitalism that threaten humanity.

He challenges them to work—physically and intellectually. To learn to be disciplined. To become revolutionists of action, fearlessly taking their place in the vanguard on the front lines of struggles, small and large. He urges them, as they grow and change through these experiences, to read widely and study seriously. To absorb, and to make their own, the scientific and cultural achievements not only of their own people but of all previous civilizations. To aspire to be revolutionary combatants, knowing that a different kind of society can be born only out of struggles by men and women ready to put their lives and their lifetimes on the line for it. He appeals to them to politicize the work of the organizations and institutions they are part of, and in the process politicize themselves. To become a different kind of human being as they strive together with working people of all lands to transform the world. And along this line of march, he encourages them to continuously renew and revel in the spontaneity, freshness, optimism, and joy of being young.  
 

'Truly a communist'

"Che was truly a communist," Cuban president Fidel Castro told the solemn assembly in the city of Santa Clara on October 17, 1997, as the remains of Guevara and six of his fellow combatants were interred at the site of a memorial in their honor, thirty years after they fell in combat in Bolivia. Che based himself on objective laws, Castro said, the laws of history, and had unqualified confidence in the capacity of human beings, ordinary working people, to change the course of history. In the process of making a socialist revolution on the doorstep of Yankee imperialism, Che insisted, the workers and peasants of Cuba would remake themselves as social beings with a new consciousness, a new set of values, a new world view, a transformed relationship to one another. They would set an example for all.

In his preface to these speeches, Armando Hart underscores that on this question as on others, Guevara—and the Cuban Revolution he was part of—came "radically closer to Marx" than most of those in the second half of the twentieth century who claimed to speak in the name of communism. "If this revolution is Marxist," Guevara told the nine hundred participants in the First Latin American Youth Congress in the summer of 1960, it is "because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx." Deeply rooted in the history, culture, and politics of his Latin American homeland, Guevara brought to that social reality and its traditions of struggle a scientific understanding of the universal laws of the history of class societies. He combined a renewal of Marxist orthodoxy in theory with the example of physical and moral courage that earned him the name, the Heroic Guerrilla.

In the pages that follow, Guevara draws frequently on his own experiences to explain to others why the image of the lone, self-sacrificing hero—the image in which many later tried to remake Che himself—is nothing but the exaltation of bourgeois individualism, the flip side of the coin of the dog-eat-dog reality of capitalism. It is the opposite of the revolutionary cooperative course of the toilers, the course that made the Cuban Revolution possible.

Speaking to a group of medical students and health workers in August 1960, Guevara describes how his youthful idealism when he was studying to be a doctor led him to dream of being a famous researcher, "of working tirelessly to achieve something that could really be put at the disposal of humanity, but that would be a personal triumph at the same time. I was, as we all are, a child of my environment."

As he traveled throughout the Americas, however, and learned firsthand of the economic, social, and political realities of imperialist domination, he came to recognize the futility of such a course. "The isolated effort, the individual effort, the purity of ideals, the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals—all that is for naught if the effort is made alone, solitary, in some corner of Latin America, fighting against hostile governments and social conditions that permit no progress.

"A revolution," Guevara said, "needs what we have in Cuba: an entire people who are mobilized, who have learned the use of arms and the practice of unity in combat."

Before he could be a revolutionary doctor, there was a revolution to be made. Once set on that line of march, Guevara never turned back.

From a young student rebel attracted to revolutionary ideas, Guevara—like other great communist leaders before him, starting with Marx and Engels themselves—was won to the popular revolutionary vanguard fighting arms in hand for liberation from oppression, exploitation, and all the accompanying indignities. Along that trajectory of revolutionary action by the toilers combined with systematic, disciplined, hard work and study, Guevara emerged as one of the foremost proletarian leaders of our epoch. The opening of the first socialist revolution in the Americas, whose victory Guevara helped to assure, the example of internationalism set by the entire leadership of the revolution, and Guevara's own contributions captured in speeches and writings he left us, initiated a renewal of Marxism that was not limited to the Americas.

By consistently taking the political and theoretical conquests of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as his guide, by making the early years following the October 1917 revolution a point of reference, Guevara worked to lay a foundation that would help lead the Cuban Revolution to a different fate than that suffered by the regimes and parties of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It is no accident that his name and example are associated so closely with what is called in Cuba the Rectification process, the policies initiated by Cuban president Fidel Castro in 1986 (well before "the meringue fell" across Eastern Europe, as Cubans say) that strengthened Cuban working people and set the revolution on a course enabling it to survive the severe test of political isolation and economic hardship in the 1990s known as the Special Period.

Che Guevara's profound Marxism informs every page of this book. "On the most basic level," he told the international meeting of architecture students in Havana in September 1963, "our country has what is scientifically called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and we do not allow anyone to touch or threaten the state power of the proletarian dictatorship. But within the dictatorship of the proletariat there can be a vast field for discussion and expression of ideas."

As Armando Hart observes, Guevara set the example and tirelessly educated those he influenced, especially young people, on the need for the socialist revolution to take and hold the moral high ground against the old ruling classes who claim to speak in the name of freedom and justice, of beauty and truth. With his trenchant sense of humor, he helped those he worked with comprehend the class character of all such questions.

Among the many delightfully rich moments readers will encounter in the speeches that follow is Guevara's lesson in the practical connection between the class foundations of ethics and aesthetics. Speaking to architecture students in 1963, and explaining that technology is a weapon that serves different classes for different ends, Che pointed to a mural on the wall of the auditorium. He remarked that there is a weapon depicted in the mural, "a U.S.-made M-1, a Garand rifle. When it was in the hands of Batista's soldiers and they were firing on us, that weapon was hideous. But that same weapon became extraordinarily beautiful when we captured it, when we wrested it from a soldier's hands, when it became part of the arsenal of the people's army. In our hands it became an object of dignity."  
 

Unyielding dialectical materialism

A similar thread of scientific clarity and an uncompromising dialectical materialism on questions such as education and human nature, links Guevara to fundamental writings of Marx, such as his 1845 "Theses on Feuerbach." Criticizing the mechanical materialism of some of the progressive bourgeois forces of the time, Marx wrote: "The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated." Human nature is not an immutable characteristic of human beings considered as abstract individuals, he said, but concretely "the ensemble of the social relations."

In his farewell remarks to the international volunteer work brigades, Guevara asks: "Have the people of this country made a revolution because that's just the way they are?"

"Absolutely not," he answers.

"The people are the way they are because they are in the midst of a revolution." Through their actions, they are forging different social relations and a different understanding of themselves and the world—thus becoming different individuals, creating a different "human nature," on the road to becoming socialist men and women.

"We learned to respect the peasant," Guevara told the Latin American Youth Congress in July 1960. "We learned to respect his sense of independence, his loyalty; to recognize his age-old yearning for the land that had been snatched from him; and to recognize his experience in the thousand paths through the hills.

"And from us, the peasants learned how valuable a man is when he has a rifle in his hand, and when he is prepared to fire that rifle at another man, regardless of how many rifles the other man has. The peasants taught us their know-how," Guevara said, "and we taught the peasants our sense of rebellion. And from that moment until today, and forever, the peasants of Cuba and the rebel forces of Cuba—today the Cuban revolutionary governnment—have marched united as one."

Youth must march in the vanguard, Guevara insists throughout, taking on the hardest tasks in every endeavor. That is the only road toward becoming leaders of other women and men—just as the officers in the Rebel Army won their stripes on the battlefield. Youth must learn to lead not only their peers, but revolutionists older than themselves as well. You must be a model "for older men and women who have lost some of that youthful enthusiasm, who have lost a certain faith in life, and who always respond well to example," Guevara told the UJC leaders in October 1962.

Above all, you must be political. "To be apolitical is to turn one's back on every movement in the world," he says to the international meeting of architecture students.

And to the youth working at the Ministry of Industry—which he himself headed at the time—Guevara explained the need to "politicize the ministry." That is the only way you can fight to change it from being a "cold, a very bureaucratic place, a nest of nitpicking bureaucrats and bores, from the minister on down, who are constantly tackling concrete tasks in order to search for new relationships and new attitudes," he told them. Only by bringing the broadest world and class perspectives—and the most uncompromising acceptance of the laws of motion of modern history—into the most routine of tasks can you counter the depoliticizing, bureaucratizing pressures of day-to-day existence that can undermine the morale, confidence, and combativity of even the best revolutionary fighters.

No one can be a leader, Guevara told the UJC cadres, "if you think about the revolution only at the moment of decisive sacrifice, at the moment of combat, of heroic adventure, at moments that are out of the ordinary, yet in your work you are mediocre or less than mediocre. How can that be?"

If "politicize the ministry" is one part of the answer he gives, voluntary work is another.

"Why do we emphasize voluntary work so much?" asks Guevara. "Economically it means practically nothing." But it is "important today because these individuals are giving a part of their lives to society without expecting anything in return.... This is the first step in transforming work into what it will eventually become, as a result of the advance of technology, the advance of production, and the advance of the relations of production: an activity of a higher level, a social necessity" that we will look forward to in the way we now anticipate a Sunday off.

Along that line of march "you will automatically become the youth's vanguard," Guevara told the UJC members at the Ministry of Industry. You will never have to sit around engaging in theoretical discussions about what youth should be doing. "Stay young, don't transform yourselves into old theoreticians, or theorizers, maintain the freshness and enthusiasm of youth."  
 

Special appreciation is also owed to Aleida March, director of Che's Personal Archive, for her cooperation and insightful suggestions on the selection of both the speeches and photos.

The invaluable photo signature and internal photo pages were assembled with the help and knowledge of Delfín Xiqués of Granma, Manuel Martínez of Bohemia, and Juan Moreno of Juventud Rebelde.

Readers who are unfamiliar with many of the names and historical events referred to throughout will find the glossary notes and list of further reading at the end especially helpful.  
 

Forty years later those words continue to ring true. Guevara's talks with young people continue to point the way forward—the way toward becoming revolutionary combatants of the highest caliber, and, in his own words, "politicians of a new type."

Mary-Alice Waters 
January 2000  
 
 
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