On this second anniversary, at this time of feverish construction, of ongoing preparations for the country’s defence, and of the speediest possible technical and technological training, we must always ask ourselves first and foremost: What is the Union of Young Communists and what should it be?
The Union of Young Communists should be defined by a single word: vanguard. You, compañeros, must be the vanguard of all movements, the first to be ready to make the sacrifices demanded by the revolution, whatever the nature of those sacrifices may be. You must be the first in work, the first in study, the first in defence of the country. You must view this task not just as the full expression of Cuba’s youth, not just as a task of the organised masses, but as the daily task of each and every member of the Union of Young Communists. And to do that, you have to set yourself real, concrete tasks, tasks in your daily work that won’t allow the slightest let-up.
The job of organising must constantly be linked to all the work carried out by the Union of Young Communists. Organisation is the key to grasping the initiatives presented by the revolution’s leaders, the many initiatives proposed by our prime minister, and the initiatives coming from the working class, which should also lead to precise directives and ideas for subsequent action. Without organisation, ideas, after some initial momentum, start losing their effect. They become routine, degenerate into conformity, and end up simply a memory. I raise this warning because too often, in this short but rich period of our revolution, many great initiatives have failed. They have been forgotten because of the lack of an organisational apparatus needed to keep them going and bring them to fruition.
At the same time, each and every one of you should know that being a Young Communist, belonging to the Union of Young Communists, is not a favour someone has done for you. Nor is it a favour you are doing for the state or for the revolution. Membership in the Union of Young Communists should be the highest honour for a young person in the new society, an honour you fight for every minute of your lives. In addition, the honour of remaining a member of the Union of Young Communists and maintaining a high standing in it should be an ongoing effort. That is how we will advance even faster, as we become used to thinking collectively and acting on the initiatives of the working masses and of our central leaders. At the same time, in everything we do as individuals, we should always be making sure our actions will not tarnish our own name or the name of the association to which we belong.
Now, two years later, we can look back and observe the results of our work. The Union of Young Communists has tremendous achievements – defence being one of the most important and spectacular.
Those young people, or some of them, who first climbed the five peaks of Turquino, others who were enrolled in a whole series of military organisations, all those who picked up their rifles at moments of danger – they were ready to defend the revolution each and every place where an invasion or enemy action was expected. The young people at Playa Girón were worthy of the high honour of being able to defend our revolution. [Applause] At Playa Girón they had the honour of defending the institutions we have created through sacrifice, defending what the people have accomplished over years of struggle. Our entire revolution was defended there in seventy-two hours of battle. The enemy’s intention was to create a sufficiently strong beachhead there, with an airfield that would allow it to attack our entire territory. They intended to bomb mercilessly, reduce our factories to ashes and our means of communication to dust, ruin our agriculture – in a word, to sow chaos across the country. But our people’s decisive action wiped out that imperialist attack in just seventy-two hours. There, young people, many of them still children, covered themselves with glory. Some of them are here as examples of that heroic youth. As for others, only their memory remains, spurring us on to new battles that we will surely have to fight, to new heroic responses in the face of imperialist attack. [Applause]
At the moment when the country’s defence was our most important task, the youth were there. Today, defence is still at the top of our concerns. But we should not forget that the watchword that guides the Young Communists [study, work, and rifle] is a unified whole. The country cannot be defended with arms alone, with just our preparedness. We must also defend the country by building it with our work and preparing the new technical cadres to speed up its development in the coming years. These tasks are now enormously important, and are on the same level as the use of weapons themselves. When these problems were raised, the youth once again were there. Youth brigades, responding to the call of the revolution, invaded every corner of the country. And so, after a few months of hard battle in which there were additional martyrs of our revolution – martyrs in education – we were able to announce something new in Latin America: Cuba was a territory of the Americas free of illiteracy.18 [Applause]
Study at all levels is also a task of today’s youth; study combined with work, as in the case of those students picking coffee in Oriente, [Applause] using their vacations to pick that bean so important to our country, to our foreign trade, and to ourselves, who consume a tremendous amount of coffee every day. That task is similar to the literacy campaign. It is a task of sacrifice that is carried out joyfully, bringing student compañeros together once more in the mountains of our country, taking their revolutionary message.
But this task is very important, because in this work the UJC, the Young Communists, not only give but receive. In some cases they receive more than they give. They gain new experiences: new experiences in human contact, new experiences in seeing how our peasants live, in learning what work and life are like in the most remote places, in everything that has to be done to bring those areas up to the same level as the cities and to make the countryside a better place to live. They receive experience and revolutionary maturity. And compañeros who carry out the tasks of teaching reading and writing or picking coffee, of being in direct contact with our people, helping them while far away from home, receive much more than they give – I myself can vouch for this. And they give a lot!
This is the kind of education that best suits youth who are being educated for communism. It is a kind of education in which work ceases to be an obsession, as it is in the capitalist world, and becomes a pleasant social duty, done joyfully to the rhythm of revolutionary songs, amid the most fraternal camaraderie and human relationships that raise us all up and give us new energy.
In addition, the Union of Young Communists has advanced a lot on the organisational level. There is a big difference between that weak embryo that was formed as a branch of the Rebel Army and this organisation today. There are Young Communists all over, in every workplace, in every administrative body. Wherever they can have an effect, there they are, Young Communists working for the revolution. The organisational progress must also be considered an important achievement of the Union of Young Communists.
Nevertheless, compañeros, there have been many problems along this hard road, great difficulties, gross errors, and we have not always been able to overcome them all. It is obvious that the Union of Young Communists, as a younger organisation, a younger brother of the Integrated Revolutionary Organisations [ORI], must drink from the fountain of experience of compañeros who have worked longer in all the tasks of the revolution. And it is obvious they should always listen, and listen with respect, to the voice of that experience. But youth must also create. Youth who do not create are a true anomaly. And the Union of Young Communists has been a bit lacking in that creative spirit. Through its leadership it has been too docile, too respectful, and not decisive in addressing its own problems. That is now breaking down. Compañero Joel [Iglesias] was telling us about the initiatives regarding work on state farms. That is an example of how total dependency on the older organisation, which is becoming absurd, is beginning to break down, of how the youth are beginning to think for themselves.
Because we, and our youth along with us, are recovering from a disease that fortunately did not last very long but had a lot to do with holding
back the ideological development of our revolution. We are all convalescing from the disease called sectarianism.19 And what did sectarianism lead to? It led to mechanical imitation; it led to formal analyses; it led to separation of the leadership from the masses. It led to these things even within our National Directorate, and this had a direct reflection here in the Union of Young Communists.
If, disoriented by sectarianism, we were unable to hear the voice of the people, which is the wisest and most instructive voice, if we were unable to feel the pulse of the people so we could turn that pulse into concrete ideas, precise guidelines, then even less could we transmit these guidelines to the Union of Young Communists. And since the dependency was absolute and the docility very great, the Union of Young Communists was like a small boat adrift, depending upon the big ship, our Integrated Revolutionary Organisations, which was also adrift. So, the Union of Young Communists took a series of minor initiatives, all it was capable of then, which at times became transformed into crude slogans, manifestations of a lack of political depth.
Compañero Fidel made serious criticisms of the kind of extremism and sloganeering well known to all of you, such as “The ORI is the greatest!” and “We are socialists, go, go, go! …” All those things that Fidel criticised and that you are so familiar with were a reflection of the illness affecting our revolution. That era is over. We have completely eliminated it.
Nevertheless, organisations always lag behind a bit. It’s like a disease that has rendered a person unconscious. Once the illness breaks, the brain recuperates and mental clarity returns, but the arms and legs remain slightly uncoordinated. Those first days after getting out of bed, walking is unsteady, then little by little becomes surer. That is the road we are now on. And we must objectively assess and analyse all our organisations so we can continue our housecleaning. So as not to fall, not to trip and fall to the ground, we must realise that we are still walking unsteadily. We must understand our weaknesses in order to eliminate them and gain strength.
This lack of initiative is due to a long-standing ignorance of the dialectic that moves mass organisations, forgetting that an organisation like the Union of Young Communists cannot be just a leadership organisation that sends directives to the ranks all the time and doesn’t listen to anything they have to say. It was thought that the Union of Young Communists, that all Cuba’s organisations, had one-way lines, one-way lines of communication from the leadership to the ranks, without any line that went the other way and brought communication back from the ranks. Yet it was through a constant two-way exchange of experiences, ideas, and directives that the most important guidelines – those that could focus the work of our youth – would have to emerge, at the same time identifying the places where our work was weakest, the areas where we were failing.
We still see today how the youth – heroes, almost like in the novels – who can give their lives a hundred times over for the revolution, who can respond massively to whatever specific task they are called upon to do, nevertheless sometimes do not show up at work because they had a Union of Young Communists meeting. Or because they stayed up late the night before discussing some initiative of the youth organisation. Or sometimes for no reason at all, with no justifiable reason. So when someone looks around at a volunteer work brigade to see where the Young Communists are, it often turns out there are none; they haven’t shown up. The leader had a meeting to attend, another was sick, still another was not fully informed about the work.
The result is that the fundamental attitude, the attitude of being a vanguard of the people, of being that moving, living example that drives everybody forward as the youth at Playa Girón did – that attitude is not duplicated at work. The seriousness that today’s youth must have in meeting its great commitments – and the greatest commitment is the construction of socialist society – is not reflected in actual work. There are big weaknesses and we must work on them, work at organising, work at identifying the spot that hurts, the area with weaknesses to be corrected. We must also work so that each one of you achieves a clear consciousness that you cannot be a good communist 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?
You already bear the name Young Communists, a name we as a leadership organisation, as a leadership party, do not yet have. You have to build a future in which work will be man’s greatest dignity, a social duty, a delight, the most creative activity there is. Everyone will be interested in their work and the work of others, in society’s daily advance. How can it be that you who today bear that name disdain work? There is a flaw here, a flaw in organisation, in clarifying what work is.
This is a natural human flaw. People – all of us, it seems to me – much prefer something that breaks the monotony of life, something every once in a while that suddenly reminds us of our own personal worth, of our worth within society. I can imagine the pride of those compañeros who were manning a cuatro bocas,20 for example, defending their homeland from Yankee planes. Suddenly, one of them is lucky enough to see his bullets hit an enemy plane. Clearly, that is the happiest moment of a man’s life, something never to be forgotten. And those compañeros who lived through that experience will never forget it. But we have to defend our revolution, the revolution we are building, day in and day out. And in order to defend it we have to make it, build it, strengthen it, through the work that youth today don’t like – or at the very least they put at the end of their list of duties. That is an old-fashioned mentality that dates back to the capitalist world, where work was indeed a duty and a necessity, but a sad duty and sad necessity.
Why does that happen? Because we still have not been able to give work its true content. We have not been able to link the worker with the object of his labour; and at the same time, imbue the worker with a consciousness of the importance of that creative act that he performs every day. The worker and the machine, the worker and the object to which he applies his labour – these are still different and antagonistic things. And that has to be changed, because new generations must be formed whose main interest is work and who know how to find in work a permanent and constantly changing source of fresh excitement. They need to make work something creative, something new.
That is perhaps the weakest point in our Union of Young Communists today, and that is why I am insisting on it. That’s why, amid the happiness of celebrating your anniversary, I am adding a small bitter drop in order to touch that sensitive spot, and to call on the youth to respond.
Earlier today we had a meeting at the Ministry [of Industry] to discuss emulation.21 Many of you have probably already discussed emulation at your workplaces and have read that long paper about it. But what is the problem with emulation, compañeros? The problem is that emulation cannot be led by papers that contain production rates and orders and that put forward a model. Rates and models are necessary later on in order to compare the work of enthusiastic people who are involved in emulation. When two compañeros begin an emulation, that is, each one seeking to produce more on his machine, after a while they find they have to set up some standards to measure who is getting the most out of his machine, to determine product quality, the number of hours worked, what condition the machines are in when they finish, how they maintain them, any number of things.
But if instead of giving these production standards to these two compañeros who are involved in emulation, all we do is give them to two others who are thinking only about getting home, then what good are they? What purpose do they serve? We often set production goals and develop models for something that does not exist. But models must have content. Production goals have to limit and define an already existing situation. They must be the result of emulation, carried out anarchically if you will, yes, but enthusiastically, overflowing in every workplace in Cuba. Then, automatically, the need for standards and goals will appear. But emulatio
n to fulfil production goals, no. That’s how we have dealt with a lot of problems. That’s how formal we’ve been in dealing with a lot of things.
I asked at that meeting why the secretary of the Young Communists hadn’t been there, or how many times he had been there. He had been there once or a few times, and other Young Communists had never attended. But in the course of the meeting, as we discussed this and other problems, the Young Communists and the local party unit and the [Federation of Cuban] Women and the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution and the union all naturally became very enthusiastic. Or at least they were filled with anger, with bitterness at themselves – with a desire to improve, with a desire to show they could do what has not been done: that is, motivate people. And suddenly everybody made a commitment that the whole ministry would become involved in emulation on all levels, that they would discuss production rates later, after they got emulation going, and that within two weeks they could present the concretes, with the whole ministry actively involved in emulation. That indeed is a mobilisation. The people there have already understood and sensed – because each of those individuals is a great compañero – that there was a weakness in their work. Their dignity was wounded, and they went about taking care of the problem.
That is what has to be done, remembering that work is the most important thing. Pardon me if I repeat it once again, but the point is that without work there is nothing. All the riches in the world, all humanity’s values, are nothing but accumulated work. Without that, nothing can exist. Without the extra work that creates more surpluses for new factories and social institutions, the country will not advance. No matter how strong our armies are, we will always have a slow rate of growth. We have to break out of this. We have to break with all the old errors, hold them up to the light of day, analyse them everywhere, and then correct them.
Che Guevara Talks to Young People Page 10