The Union of Young Communists (UJC) of Cuba sponsored the event, held at the UJC’s Julio Antonio Mella leadership school. It was one of several activities taking place here as part of an international meeting to discuss opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (see accompanying article). The participants were welcomed by Juan Carlos Marsán, secretary for international relations for the UJC.

The meeting was addressed by Aleida Guevara, from the Center for the Study of Che and daughter of the revolutionary leader; Brig. Gen. Harry Villegas, a combatant of the Cuban Revolution who fought alongside Guevara in Cuba’s revolutionary war in the late 1950s as well as in international missions in the Congo in 1965 and Bolivia in 1966–67; Orlando Borrego, also a Rebel Army combatant and a close collaborator of Guevara in the Ministry of Industry during the early 1960s when Che was the head of the ministry; and Elena Díaz, dean of the Ernesto Che Guevara study program at the University of Havana.

In her presentation Aleida Guevara drew from a May 1964 talk presented by Che at a seminar organized by UJC members working at the Ministry of Industry. The speech appears in Pathfinder’s Che Guevara Talks to Young People, a Cuban edition of which was published earlier this year by the UJC publishing house Casa Editora Abril.

In that speech Che challenged the youth to "politicize the ministry" by striving to bring the broadest world and class perspectives into even the most routine tasks.

Aleida Guevara highlighted the points made by the revolutionary leader about the need for a revolutionary youth organization to approach the challenges faced by the Cuban Revolution with creativity, spontaneity, and rejecting a dogmatic, bureaucratic approach.

"It’s more effective to lead by example than to try to push somebody to do something they don’t know how to do," she said, referring to the example set by Che in leading voluntary labor brigades in the opening years of the revolution.

The November 23 meeting also marked the 43rd anniversary of the first national mobilization of voluntary labor in Cuba, organized in November 1959. On that date, 300 soldiers and officers of Cuba’s revolutionary armed forces--in their majority combatants who had fought in the Rebel Army column led by Che during the revolutionary war--joined other workers and peasants in a project to build a school complex for 20,000 children.

Speaking at the closing session of the seminar, Villegas explained Che Guevara’s political evolution as a revolutionary leader. He described how Che, as a radicalizing youth in the early 1950s, became conscious of the need for revolutionary change after witnessing firsthand the effects of imperialism’s plunder of Latin American countries. He pointed to the conclusions drawn by Guevara about how a revolution was needed for workers and peasants to take power out of the hands of the capitalist and landowning classes in Latin America.

As a youth with medical training who had joined the revolutionary movement in Cuba, Villegas said, Che concluded that "to be a revolutionary doctor he first needed to make a revolution."

In response to a question about his own experiences in Cuba’s revolutionary war, Villegas said the deepgoing social transformations carried out by the revolution was what had won him to become a communist.

Referring to the reaction by the U.S. imperialist rulers to the measures taken by the revolutionary government in nationalizing Cuba’s banking system and industry, as well as carrying out an agrarian reform, he explained how Cuba’s working people and their revolutionary leadership responded to every attack by Washington.

"It was an exchange of punches, until they left the ring," he said. "Whenever they slapped us once, we slapped them twice."

Villegas also spoke extensively about the reasons why Cubans took part in internationalist missions to the Congo and other African countries, as well as the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia. Together with other forces, it was a battle against imperialism on multiple fronts, he said.

Many of the international guests participating in the meeting will be traveling to Guadalajara, Mexico, to attend the congress of the Continental Student Organization of Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 1,000 youth from Latin America, the United States, and Canada are expected to participate in the anti-imperialist congress there.  
 
 
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