The presentation was one of many such events held as part of Venezuela's Second International Book Fair November 9-19 (see front-page article).

The panel included Enrique Ramos, president of the National Youth Institute of Venezuela; Luis Vizcay of the UJC; Euris Ospino of the Youth of the Fifth Republic (JVR), affiliated with Venezuela's governing party, the Movement of the Fifth Republic; and Emily Paul of the Young Socialists in the United States.

Che Guevara Talks to Young People was first published by Pathfinder Press in 2000 in both English and Spanish. It includes speeches by Guevara between 1959 and 1964. A Cuban edition was released by Editora Abril, publishing house of the UJC, later in 2000.

“This book has previously been presented in Cuba and other countries,” Barrios told the audience of 60. “But we couldn't let the opportunity of this fair pass without also presenting here a title that is so important to the future of humanity.” As the book explains, in 1955 Argentine-born Ernesto “Che” Guevara joined the movement led by the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army, headed by Fidel Castro, to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. Originally the troop doctor, Guevara became commander of one of the main columns. The victory by Cuba’s workers and farmers in January 1959 opened the door to the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

As a central leader of the new revolutionary government, Guevara served as a world spokesperson, president of the National Bank, minister of industry, and in other duties. In 1965 he led a column of Cuban internationalist volunteers to join anti-imperialist combatants in the Congo. He later headed a guerrilla campaign against the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Bolivia and was killed by its army in October 1967 in a CIA-organized operation.  
 
Transforming universities
“The most significant thing for me in rereading this book the last few days is the relevance for today of what Che told young people more than 40 years ago,” said Luis Vizcay of the UJC.

Vizcay quoted Guevara’s December 1959 speech to university students in Santa Clara. “The university should color itself black and color itself mulatto—not just as regards students but also professors. It should paint itself the color of workers and peasants…because the university is the patrimony of no one but the people of Cuba,” Guevara said.

Che was addressing a real problem the Cuban Revolution set out to resolve, Vizcay said. When the revolution triumphed in 1959, the class composition of the student body and faculty at Cuba's three universities reflected the exploitative society workers and peasants were fighting to leave behind.

“This is a reality at universities in many countries of the Americas today,” Vizcay said, where those lacking financial resources and youth of oppressed nationalities have much less chance of being students.

Vizcay pointed out that Che had abandoned his dream of becoming a famous medical researcher—a lone, self-sacrificing hero, an image that aggrandizes bourgeois individualism—to become a revolutionary combatant, a communist.

“I began the ups and downs of my career as a university student, a member of the middle class, a doctor who shared the same horizons, the same youthful aspirations you have,” Guevara told students in Santa Clara. “In the course of the struggle, however, I changed and became convinced of the imperative need for revolution.”

Che joined struggles to eradicate imperialism, which, Vizcay said, is the main cause of today's social ills that plague our continent—from poverty to preventable diseases to unemployment. Guevara knew that what was born in Cuba with the revolution “could become an example for the peoples of the world,” the UJC leader said.  
 
Book distributed across Venezuela
Enrique Ramos of the National Youth Institute, part of Venezuela's Ministry of Education, called attention to one point that particularly delighted him from Che’s 1963 speech to an international conference of architecture students held in Cuba.

Explaining that technology is a weapon that serves different ends for different classes, Che pointed to a mural on the auditorium wall depicting a U.S.-made M-1 Garand rifle. “When it was in the hands of Batista's soldiers and they were firing on us, that weapon was hideous,” Guevara said.

“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 that weapon became an object of dignity.”

Ramos reported that the National Youth Institute is now distributing Che Guevara Talks to Young People at youth centers across the country known as Casas de la Juventud. The day before, Ramos had helped inaugurate such a center in the nearby city of Maracay (see accompanying box).

Speaking on behalf of the JVR, Euris Ospino said that Che Guevara inspires young people to become rebels.  
 
The need to make a revolution
“The first thing Che teaches us, which he gave his life fighting for, is the need to make a revolution,” said Emily Paul of the Young Socialists. “This can only be done by joining and building a revolutionary organization rooted in the working class."

She noted that the YS, together with the Socialist Workers Party, aims “to educate and organize young people to join the working-class struggle to make a socialist revolution in the United States, to emulate the example of the Cuban Revolution in the belly of the imperialist beast.”

Paul quoted what Guevara told a group of medical students and health workers in August 1960. “To be a revolutionary doctor … there must first be a revolution,” Che had told them, drawing on his own experience as a young person. Once set on that course of helping make a revolution, Che never turned back, Paul said.

In his speeches, she said, Che emphasizes the need to be disciplined, to study, to absorb Marxism in order to be effective.

"The Young Socialists work to emulate the example Che explains here," Paul said. She pointed to involvement by YS members this year in the mass working-class mobilizations calling for the legalization of all immigrants, as well as actions to demand "U.S. hands off Venezuela and Cuba!" and U.S. troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Korea.

Speaking to youth working at Cuba's ministry of industry in 1964, which he headed at the time, Guevara explained the need to "politicize the ministry." That was the only way, he said, to change it from being a "cold, a very bureaucratic place, a nest of nit-picking bureaucrats and bores, from the minister on down."

The Young Socialists, Paul said, “are becoming more politicized through our work with others to promote Pathfinder’s newest book, Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution." She described a meeting on this book she had helped build four days earlier at the University of California in Los Angeles (see front-page article). Events such as this, she said, are providing new opportunities to educate Asian Americans and others in the United States about the Cuban Revolution and win them to supporting—and emulating—its example.  
 
Revolutionary cadre for a lifetime
A half-hour discussion followed the presentations.

One of those who spoke was Isnel Pérez, who had worked at Cuba's ministry of industry just after Guevara left that assignment. Pérez explained how Che "worked tirelessly to train revolutionary cadres who would dedicate their lives to building a new society."

A Venezuelan student pointed out that defenders of imperialism try to sanitize Che by plastering his photos on T-shirts, disco walls, and beer mugs in order to erase what he actually said and fought for. "We need programs like this so young people can know the real Che," he said.

A young woman added that the book needs to be distributed in working-class barrios throughout Venezuela.

Most of the audience were Venezuelans who found out about the event from the book fair program or flyers at the Pathfinder booth and elsewhere. Nearly 40 copies of Che Talks to Young People were sold leading up to and during the meeting.
 
 
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'Books Liberate' is theme of 2006 international book fair in Venezuela
Venezuelan gov't opens youth centers for education, recreation in working-class areas  
 
 
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