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 “politicise the ministry”. That is the only way you can fight to change it from being a “cold, a very bureaucratic place, a nest of nit-picking 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 depoliticising, bureaucratising 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 “politicise the ministry” is one part of the answer he gives, voluntary work is another.
“Why do we emphasise 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 theorisers, maintain the freshness and enthusiasm of youth.”
Special appreciation is owed to Aleida March, director of Che’s Personal Archive, for her cooperation and insightful suggestions on the selection of speeches.
“To the powerful masters we represent all that is absurd, negative, irreverent, and disruptive in this America that they so despise and scorn,” Guevara told the students at the University of Havana in March 1960. But to the great mass of the people of the Americas, “we represent everything noble, sincere and combative”.
Forty years later those words continue to ring true. Guevara’s talks with young people continue to point the way forward – the way towards becoming revolutionary combatants of the highest calibre, and, in his own words, “politicians of a new type”.
January 2000
About these speeches
All the speeches have appeared previously in Spanish in Cuba, either in Revolución, the newspaper of the 26 July Movement, Granma, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, or in collections of works by Ernesto Che Guevara.
Four of the talks by Guevara were published here for the first time in English: the speech at the Central University of Las Villas; the March 1960 speech at the University of Havana; the farewell to the international volunteer work brigades; and the speech to the seminar on “Youth and the Revolution”. Two others – the speech at the opening session of the First Latin American Youth Congress, and the talk to the International Meeting of Architecture Students – were published in English translation in the 1960s but have long been out of print. The remaining two – the talk to medical students and health workers, and the speech on the second anniversary of the unification of the youth organisations, appeared in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution published by Pathfinder Press in 1987.
The October 1997 speech by Cuban president Fidel Castro was published in Granma, and by the Militant newspaper in the United States.
Something new in the Americas
(To opening session of First Latin American Youth Congress, 28 July 1960)
Inspired by the example of the Cuban Revolution, which had brought down the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista a year and a half earlier and established a government that defended the interests of Cuba’s workers and peasants, some nine hundred young people converged in Havana during the summer of 1960 to take part in the First Latin American Youth Congress. Delegates and observers attended from youth, labour, political, and solidarity organisations from every Latin American nation, as well as a number from the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, China, and many other countries.
The formal opening of the congress in the Sierra Maestra mountains on 26 July was part of the national celebration of the seventh anniversary of the attack led by Fidel Castro on the dictatorship’s Moncada and Bayamo garrisons. That audacious action in 1953 marked the beginning of the revolutionary struggle against the Batista regime. Participants in the two-week-long youth gathering reconvened in Havana on 28 July and Ernesto Che Guevara addressed its first plenary session.
The congress took place at a decisive turning point for the revolution.
Washington’s hostility towards the actions taken by the workers and peasants of Cuba had been mounting sharply since May 1959, when the revolutionary government enacted one of the central planks of the programme put forward by Fidel Castro during his trial for the Moncada attack: agrarian reform.
The law, implemented by the peasants and agricultural workers, who mobilised in support of the government decree, expropriated the vast plantations owned by US corporations and big Cuban landlords. It gave title to the land, free of charge, to 100,000 tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and squatters, and created cooperative farms that provided stable year-round employment to hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers.
Although Washington showed no interest in discussing with Cuba any formula for payment, the law also provided for the indemnification of US landowners by Cuban state bonds, payable in twenty years out of proceeds from the sale of Cuban sugar in the United States.
In June 1960, three major imperialist-owned oil trusts in Cuba announced their refusal to refine petroleum bought from the Soviet Union. The Cuban government responded by taking control of refineries owned by Texaco, Standard Oil, and Shell. US president Dwight D. Eisenhower then ordered a drastic, 95 per cent reduction in the quota of sugar Washington had earlier agreed to purchase from Cuba. Across the island, Cubans responded by proclaiming “Sin cuota pero sin bota” – without a quota but without the boot.
Youth congress participants were among those who took part in a mass rally in the wee hours of the morning 7 August where Fidel Castro read the revolutionary government’s just-adopted decree expropriating the “assets and enterprises located on national territory … that are the property of US legal entities”. The following days and nights became known in Cuba as the Week of National Jubilation. Tens of thousands of Cubans, joined by many youth attending the congress, celebrated by marching through the streets of Havana bearing coffins containing the symbolic remains of US enterprises, such as the United Fruit Company, International Telephone and Telegraph, and Standard Oil, and tossing them into the sea.
Over the next three months, Cuban workers and peasants mobilised in the millions, supported and organised by their new government, to defend their revolution. They occupied factories and fields and strengthened their volunteer militias. By late October virtually all imperialist-owned banks and industry, as well as the largest holdings of Cuba’s capitalist class, had been expropriated by the workers and farmers government. They had become the property of Cuba. This transformation of property relations in city and countryside opened the first socialist revolution in the Americas.
Delegates to the Latin American Youth Congress worked in three commissions through 8 August. They discussed and adopted resolutions
, among others, extending their support to revolutionary Cuba, calling for international solidarity against Yankee imperialism, backing admission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations, and demanding an end to racist discrimination and the creation of jobs and economic opportunities for youth throughout the Americas.
Compañeros of the Americas and the entire world:
It would take a long time to extend individual greetings on behalf of our country to each of you, and to each of the countries represented here. We nevertheless want to draw attention to some of those who are representing countries afflicted by natural catastrophes or catastrophes caused by imperialism.
We would like to extend special greetings tonight to the representative of the people of Chile, Clotario Blest, [Applause] whose youthful voice you heard a moment ago. Nevertheless, his maturity can serve as an example and a guide to our fellow working people from that unfortunate land, which has been devastated by one of the most terrible earthquakes in history.1
We would also like to extend special greetings to Jacobo Arbenz, [Applause] president of the first Latin American nation [Guatemala] to fearlessly raise its voice against colonialism, and to express the cherished desires of its peasant masses through a deep-going and courageous agrarian reform. We would like to express our gratitude to him and to the democracy that fell in that country for the example it gave us, and for enabling us to make a correct appreciation of all the weaknesses that government was unable to overcome. Doing so has made it possible for us to get to the root of the matter, and to decapitate in one blow those who held power, and the henchmen serving them.
We would also like to greet two of the delegations representing the countries that have perhaps suffered the most in the Americas. First of all, Puerto Rico, [Applause] which even today, 150 years after freedom was proclaimed for the first time in the Americas, continues fighting to take the first – and perhaps most difficult – step of achieving, at least formally, a free government. And I would like the delegates of Puerto Rico to convey my greetings, and those of all Cuba, to Pedro Albizu Campos. [Applause] We would like you to convey to Pedro Albizu Campos our deep-felt respect, our recognition of the example he has shown with his valour, and our fraternal feelings as free men towards a man who is free, despite being in the dungeons of the so-called US democracy. [Shouts of “Get rid of it!”]
Although it may seem paradoxical, I would also like to greet today the delegation representing the purest of the North American people. [Ovation] I would like to salute them not only because the North American people are not to blame for the barbarity and injustice of their rulers, but also because they are innocent victims of the rage of all the peoples of the world, who sometimes confuse a social system with a people.
I therefore extend my personal greetings to the distinguished individuals I’ve named, and to the delegations of the fraternal peoples I’ve named. All of Cuba, myself included, open our arms to receive you and to show you what is good here and what is bad, what has been achieved and what has yet to be achieved, the road travelled and the road ahead. Because even though all of you come to deliberate at this Latin American Youth Congress on behalf of your respective countries, I’m sure each one of you came here full of curiosity to find out exactly what is this phenomenon born on a Caribbean island that is called the Cuban Revolution.
Many of you, from diverse political tendencies, will ask yourselves, as you did yesterday and as perhaps you will also do tomorrow: What is the Cuban Revolution? What is its ideology? And immediately a question will arise, as it always does in these cases, among both adherents and adversaries: Is the Cuban Revolution communist? Some say yes, hoping the answer is yes, or that it is heading in that direction. Others, disappointed perhaps, will also think the answer is yes. There will be those disappointed people who think the answer is no, as well as those who hope the answer is no.
I might be asked whether this revolution before your eyes is a communist revolution. After the usual explanations as to what communism is (I leave aside the hackneyed accusations by imperialism and the colonial powers, who confuse everything), I would answer that if this revolution is Marxist – and listen well that I say “Marxist” – it is because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx. [Applause]
Recently, in toasting the Cuban Revolution, one of the leading figures of the Soviet Union, Vice Premier [Anastas] Mikoyan, [Applause] a lifelong Marxist, said that it was a phenomenon Marx had not foreseen. [Applause] He then noted that life teaches more than the wisest books and the most profound thinkers. [Applause]
The Cuban Revolution was moving forward, not worrying about labels, not checking what others said about it, but constantly scrutinising what the Cuban people wanted of it. And it quickly found that not only had it achieved, or was on the way to achieving, the happiness of its people; it had also become the object of inquisitive looks from friend and foe alike – hopeful looks from an entire continent, and furious looks from the king of monopolies.
But all this did not come about overnight. Permit me to relate some of my own experience – an experience that can help many people in similar circumstances get an understanding of how our current revolutionary thinking arose. Because even though there is certainly continuity, the Cuban Revolution you see today is not the Cuban Revolution of yesterday, even after the victory. Much less is it the Cuban insurrection prior to the victory, at the time when those eighty-two youths made the difficult crossing of the Gulf of Mexico in a leaky boat, to reach the shores of the Sierra Maestra. Between those youths and the representatives of Cuba today there is a distance that cannot be measured in years – or at least not accurately measured in years, with twenty-four-hour days and sixty-minute hours.
All the members of the Cuban government – young in age, young in character, and young in the illusions they held – have nevertheless matured in the extraordinary school of experience; in living contact with the people, with their needs and aspirations.
The hope all of us had was to arrive one day somewhere in Cuba, and after a few shouts, a few heroic actions, a few deaths, and a few radio broadcasts, to take power and drive out the dictator Batista. History showed us it was much more difficult to overthrow a whole government backed by an army of murderers – murderers who were partners of that government and were backed by the greatest colonial power on earth.
That was how, little by little, all our ideas changed. We, the children of the cities, learned to respect the peasant. We learned to respect his sense of independence, his loyalty; to recognise his age-old yearning for the land that had been snatched from him; and to recognise 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 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 government – have marched united as one.
The revolution continued progressing, and we drove the troops of the dictatorship from the steep slopes of the Sierra Maestra. We then came face-to-face with another reality of Cuba: the worker – both agricultural and in the industrial centres. We learned from him too, while we taught him that at the right moment, a well-aimed shot fired at the right person is much more powerful and effective than the most powerful and effective peaceful demonstration. [Applause] We learned the value of organisation, while again we taught the value of rebellion. And out of this, organised rebellion arose throughout the entire territory of Cuba.
By then much time had passed. Many deaths marked the road of our victory – many in combat, others innocent victims. The imperialist forces began to see there was something more than a group of bandits in the heights of the Sierra Maestra, something more than a group of ambitious assailants arrayed against the ruling power. The imperialist
s generously offered their bombs, their bullets, their planes, and their tanks to the dictatorship. And with those tanks in the lead, the government’s forces again attempted, for the last time, to ascend the Sierra Maestra.
By then, columns of our forces had already left the Sierra to invade other regions of Cuba and had formed the “Frank Pais” Second Eastern Front under Commander Raúl Castro.2 [Applause] By then, our strength was growing within public opinion – we were now headline material in the international sections of newspapers in every corner of the world. Yet despite all this, the Cuban Revolution at that time possessed only 200 rifles – not 200 men, but 200 rifles – to stop the regime’s last offensive, in which the dictatorship amassed 10,000 soldiers and every type of instrument of death.3 The history of each one of those 200 rifles is a history of sacrifice and blood; they were rifles of imperialism that the blood and determination of our martyrs had dignified and transformed into rifles of the people. This was how the last stage of the army’s great offensive unfolded, under the name of “encirclement and annihilation”.
What I am saying to you, young people from throughout the Americas who are diligent and eager to learn, is that if today we are putting into practice what is called Marxism, it is because we discovered it here. In those days, after defeating the dictatorship’s troops and inflicting 1,000 casualties on their ranks – that is, five times as many casualties as the sum total of our combat forces – and after seizing more than 600 weapons, a small pamphlet written by Mao Zedong fell into our hands. [Applause] That pamphlet, which dealt with the strategic problems of the revolutionary war in China, described the campaigns that Chiang Kai-shek carried out against the popular forces, which the dictator, just like here, called “campaigns of encirclement and annihilation”.
Che Guevara Talks to Young People Page 2