Vol. 72/No. 42      October 27, 2008

The program took place on the 41st anniversary of the death of Ernesto Che Guevara, a central leader of the Cuban Revolution.

With Falú in the studio was Martín Koppel, managing editor of the Militant, who was introduced as having interviewed close collaborators of Guevara who remain leaders in revolutionary Cuba today, including Víctor Dreke and Harry Villegas. The other participants in the debate were two right-wing opponents of the Cuban Revolution: Jesús Marzo Fernández, a former Cuban government official who left the island in 1996; and Humberto Fontova, author of a book called Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. The latter two were connected through phone hook-up from Miami and New Orleans, respectively.

Falú began by noting that Guevara is known around the world as “an Argentine doctor who left his profession and his native land to seek the emancipation of the wretched of the earth.” While some look at Guevara as a hero, she said, opponents of the Cuban Revolution view him as an “open wound.”

“What is your opinion of who Che really was,” Falú asked the panelists.

“Che was a revolutionary,” said Koppel, “who together with Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and other leaders, organized workers and peasants in Cuba to take power out of the hands of the ruling rich and carry out a socialist revolution that has benefited the great majority.”

Guevara “had a scientific understanding of the world,” Koppel noted, “one that can explain the capitalist financial crisis we are living through today. Che’s political perspective is needed by working people today who are resisting the attacks on our wages, jobs, and living standards.” He mentioned workers who demonstrated across the United States over the last two years to demand legalization for undocumented immigrants as an example.

Marzo stated that Che “refused to recognize the laws of economics and wanted to return to the ideas of 1917 [referring to the Russian Revolution], ideas totally obsolete in the world we live in.” Fontova claimed there was no civil war in Cuba prior to the overthrow of Batista, that hardly any guerrillas were killed, and that the revolutionaries won only because the army of the dictatorship would not fight.

Koppel noted that the revolution led by the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement was “a massive struggle by workers and peasants that succeeded in removing a government that had the support of the most powerful empire in the world. For the past 50 years they have successfully defended their socialist revolution against U.S. aggression. That is the example Washington hates.”

Koppel pointed to the mobilization of young teachers that wiped out illiteracy in Cuba in one year, the land reform that has guaranteed land for peasants—compared to debt-burdened farmers in the United States who continue to be driven off their farms—and measures to outlaw racist discrimination, as well as the nationalization of capitalist property.

Marzo asserted that there was no racism against Blacks during the Batista years of the 1950s.

That claim, Koppel replied, “is contradicted by the reality known by millions in Cuba and around the world, and proves that these gentlemen’s [Marzo and Fontova’s] disagreements are with the facts of history themselves.”

Asked by Falú why Guevara went to the Congo and later to Bolivia, Koppel said it was part of the Cuban Revolution’s internationalist solidarity, which also included sending hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteer combatants who helped defeat the South African invasion of Angola and contributed to the downfall of the apartheid regime. He noted that the revolutionary column that Guevara led in Bolivia in 1966-67 was “not a utopian adventure” but a recognition of the class struggle that was brewing in the region and that exploded in revolutionary upsurges in South America in subsequent years.

Guevara’s revolutionary perspective is attractive to many workers and youth in the United States and worldwide, Koppel said, “because it is needed in the world we live in today.”  
 
 
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