The Militant - July 30, 2001 -- Che on lessons from Lumumba on the fight against imperialist rule

Vol.65/No.29 July 30, 2001

Che on lessons from Lumumba on the fight against imperialist rule

Printed below are excerpts from an Oct. 29, 1961, speech by Ernesto Che Guevara, a central leader of the Cuban Revolution. The speech was given at the inauguration of the Patrice Lumumba sulphate metals factory, located in the Cuban town of Santa Lucía in Pinar del Río province. Thousands of workers from the area, as well as African youth studying in Cuba, attended the ceremony, which took place nine months after the U.S.-backed assassination of the Congolese anti-imperialist leader.

In his speech Guevara refers to the fact that Lumumba, in response to an imperialist-backed secession in Katanga province--while faced with a government and army ridden by divisions and factions conciliatory to imperialism--requested United Nations troops to help defend the newly independent government. Washington and Brussels used the UN cover to intervene militarily in the Congo, organizing the overthrow and assassination of Lumumba.

The complete text of the speech appears in Spanish in Vol. 5 of Ernesto Che Guevara: Escritos y discursos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977), a nine-volume collection of Guevara's writings and speeches. The translation is by the Militant.

*****
BY ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA
The name of this plant represents an entire memory and an entire lesson. The Ministry and the workers here have named it after the Congolese martyr Patrice Lumumba.

We can show the African students who today honor us with their presence in our land, studying and learning new professions, how Cuba is open to the world and is great enough to embrace as its own all the sacred names, all the martyrs who have fallen, and unfortunately will continue to fall, in the long struggle by humanity to achieve its full liberation. That is why Patrice Lumumba is a symbol, a symbol that unites us with all the unredeemed peoples of the world.

However, it is also a lesson. Lumumba was murdered by imperialist troops, but he was also a victim of his own errors. He was unable to see in time that you can't believe the imperialists, that you can't give a single inch on the road to liberation, that you can never halt the people when they begin to fight against the empires.

He believed in their word, he believed in the United Nations, he believed in [Dag] Hammarskjold, the secretary general, who was nothing more than a servile imperialist gusano. He believed all the lies, and he thought that, armed only with the naked truth, not backed up by physical weapons, by an entire armed people, that it was possible to fight against everything belonging to the past, against those enemies who are also our own enemies. And at the first weakness, the first time a halt was made in the revolutionary road, Lumumba was arrested and savagely murdered.

They murdered him because they knew he could not be bought off. They murdered him because he was an authentic expression of his people. They murdered him because he was a popular hero. But they also murdered him because he was unable to see in time that a people on the road to their liberation can never be halted.

There you have it, comrade workers, as a lesson--the name of Patrice Lumumba.

Related articles:
Patrice Lumumba: 'We fought to win our freedom'
Malcolm X on U.S. intervention in Congo
Viewers of 'Lumumba' in New York buy wide range of revolutionary books

Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home