Che Guevara Talks to Young People

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  Now, compañeros, I wanted to share my opinion as a national leader of the ORI on what a Young Communist should be, to see if we all agree. I believe the first thing that must characterise a Young Communist is the honour he feels in being a Young Communist, an honour that moves him to let the world know he is a Young Communist, something he doesn’t hide or reduce to formulas. He expresses that honour at all times, so it comes from the bottom of his soul, and he wants to show it because it is his greatest pride. In addition, he should have a great sense of duty, a sense of duty towards the society we are building, towards our fellow human beings, and towards all humanity around the world. That is something that must characterice the Young Communist. And along with that there must be deep sensitivity to all problems, sensitivity to injustice; a spirit that rebels against every wrong, whoever commits it; [Applause] questioning anything not understood, discussing and asking for clarification on whatever is not clear; declaring war on formalism of all types; always being open to new experiences in order to take the many years of experience of humanity’s advance along the road to socialism and apply them to our country’s concrete conditions, to the realities that exist in Cuba. Each and every one of you must think about how to change reality, how to make it better.

  The Young Communist must always strive to be the best at everything, struggle to be the best, feel upset when he is not and fight to improve, to be the best. Of course, we cannot all be the best. But we can be among the best, in the vanguard. We can be a living example, a model for those compañeros who do not belong to the Young Communists, an example for older men and women who have lost some of that youthful enthusiasm, who have lost a certain faith in life, and who always respond well to example. That is another task of Young Communists. Together with that there should be a great spirit of sacrifice, not only in heroic ventures but at all times, making sacrifices to help the next compañero in small tasks so he can finish his work, so he can do his work at school, in his studies, so he can improve in any way.

  He must always pay attention to the mass of human beings he lives among. Every Young Communist must fundamentally be human, so human that he draws closer to humanity’s best qualities. Through work, through study, and through ongoing solidarity with the people and all the peoples of the world, he distils the best of what man is. Developing to the utmost the sensitivity to feel anguish when a human being is murdered in any corner of the world and to feel enthusiasm when a new banner of freedom is raised in any corner of the world. [Applause]

  The Young Communist cannot be limited by national borders. The Young Communist must practise proletarian internationalism and feel it as his own. He must remind himself and all of us – Young Communists and those aspiring to be communists here in Cuba – that we are a real and living example for all Our America. And not just for Our America, but also for the other countries of the world fighting on other continents for freedom, against colonialism, against neocolonialism, against imperialism, against all forms of oppression by unjust systems. He must always remember that we are a flaming torch. Just as we are all, individually, a mirror for the people of Cuba, we are also a mirror in which the oppressed peoples of Latin America and the oppressed peoples of the world who are fighting for their freedom see themselves reflected. We must be a worthy example. At every moment and every hour we must be worthy of being that example. That is what we think a Young Communist should be.

  And if someone says we are just romantics, inveterate idealists, thinking the impossible, that the masses of people cannot be turned into almost perfect human beings, we will have to answer a thousand and one times: Yes, it can be done. We are right. The people as a whole can advance, wiping out all those little human vices as we have been doing in Cuba over these four years of revolution, improving themselves as we all improve ourselves daily, intransigently casting off all those who fall back, who cannot march to the rhythm of the Cuban Revolution. It must be so, it should be so, and it will be so, compañeros. [Applause]

  It will be so because you are Young Communists, creators of the perfect society, human beings destined to live in a new world where everything decrepit, everything old, everything that represents the society whose foundations have just been destroyed will have definitively disappeared. To reach that goal we have to work every day, along the lines of improving ourselves; of gaining knowledge and understanding about the world around us; of enquiring, finding out, and knowing why things are the way they are; and always considering humanity’s great problems as our own.

  Thus, at any moment, on an ordinary day in the years ahead, after much sacrifice – yes, after seeing ourselves perhaps many times on the brink of destruction, perhaps after seeing our factories destroyed and having rebuilt them, after seeing the death, the massacre of many of us and rebuilding what is destroyed – after all this, on an ordinary day, almost without noticing it, we will have created, together with the other peoples of the world, our ideal: communist society. [Applause]

  Compañeros, speaking to the youth is a very pleasant task. You feel able to communicate certain things, and you feel that the youth understand. There are many more things I would like to say to you about our common efforts, our desires, about how, nevertheless, many of them shatter in face of daily reality and how we have to start all over after moments of weakness, about how contact with the people – the purity and ideals of the people – fills us with new revolutionary fervour. There are many more things to talk about, but we too have duties to carry out.

  By the way, I’ll take this opportunity to explain to you why I’m saying goodbye to you, with an ulterior motive, perhaps. [Laughter] I’m saying goodbye because I am going to fulfil my duty as a volunteer worker at a textile factory. [Applause] We have been working there for some time now, involved in emulation with the compañeros of the Consolidated Spinning and Textile Enterprise in another textile plant, and we are also involved in emulation with the compañeros of the Central Planning Board, who work in another textile plant. I want to tell you honestly that the Ministry of Industry is in last place in the emulation. We have to make a bigger, greater effort, repeatedly, to move ahead, to meet the goal we ourselves set of being the best, of aspiring to be the best, because it hurts us to be last in socialist emulation.

  What happened is simply what has happened to a lot of you. The emulation is cold, a little bit artificial, and we have not known how to get in direct contact with the mass of workers in that industry. We have a meeting tomorrow to discuss these problems and try to resolve all of them, to find a common ground, a common language, an identity between the workers from that industry and ourselves, workers from the ministry. After we do that, I am sure our output will increase, and we will be able to at least fight a clean, honourable battle for first place. At any rate, at next year’s meeting we’ll tell you what happens. So until then. [Ovation]

  Youth must march in the vanguard

  (To closing of Ministry of Industry seminar on “Youth and the Revolution”, 9 May 1964)

  In May 1964 members of the Union of Young Communists working in the Ministry of Industry organised a week-long seminar on “Youth and the Revolution”. They met in the ministry’s auditorium six consecutive nights after work. The closing session was addressed by Guevara, who had headed the ministry since its creation in February 1961.

  When the Ministry of Industry was formed, it was given authority over 287 enterprises with some 150,000 workers. Under Guevara’s leadership, the ministry set about creating an integrated and centralised national structure of industrial enterprises, giving the working class greater leverage in determining economic and social priorities. Through this effort, the revolutionary government confronted many key challenges in leading the transition to socialism.

  In organising the planning and management of Cuban industry, Guevara emphasised that advances in the productivity of labour depended, first and foremost, on the transformation of the political consciousness of the working class as the toilers carried out the revolutionary task
of building socialism. As workers developed their technical and administrative skills and also organised volunteer work brigades to meet pressing social needs, they would develop new, communist attitudes towards work. “We can undertake the task of creating a new consciousness because we have new forms of relations of production,” Guevara wrote in February 1964, a few months prior to the seminar. Cuba’s legacy of imperialist-imposed economic backwardness did not bar this course, he insisted. “The development of consciousness can advance ahead of the state of the productive forces in any given country” once the means of production belongs to society, no longer to individual owners.

  The goal is that “man-as-commodity” ceases to exist, Guevara explained in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” in early 1965. In the transition to socialism, man “starts to see himself reflected in his work and to understand his full stature as a human being through the object created, through the work accomplished. Work no longer entails surrendering a part of his being in the form of labour power sold, which no longer belongs to him, but represents an expression and extension of himself, a contribution to the common social existence in which he is reflected.”

  Guevara also helped to lead the ongoing political regroupment of revolutionary forces in Cuba. In 1961 the 26 July Movement had initiated a fusion with the Popular Socialist Party and Revolutionary Directorate, both of which had joined in the revolutionary overthrow of the Batista dictatorship. This process culminated in October 1965 in the founding of the Communist Party of Cuba, with Fidel Castro as first secretary of the party’s Central Committee.

  As in the previous speech, clarification of the political challenges Guevara addresses here, including the character and leadership of a revolutionary youth organisation and its activities, was an indispensable part of advancing the fusion process.

  Compañeros:

  Some time ago, I was invited by the youth organisation to give closing remarks to a series of presentations and discussions through which the organisation was showing clear signs of life within the framework of the political work of the ministry.

  I was interested in talking with you, giving you some of my opinions, because I have often had a critical attitude towards the youth – not as youth per se but as an organisation. In general, however, my critical approach has not been backed by suggestions for practical solutions to the problem. In other words, my role has been something like a sniper, a role not in keeping with other responsibilities I have, including as a member of the leadership, of the party secretariat, and so forth. There have been conceptual questions over the character of a youth organisation that we have never totally agreed on. We have always thought that the youth, as an organisation, had somewhat of a mechanical approach. And in our opinion, this prevented it from becoming a genuine vanguard. Naturally, all these problems ended up being discussed for a long time.

  The youth organisation was in fact born under our direct guidance, in its first embryonic form, when the Association of Rebel Youth was formed, subordinate to the Rebel Army’s Department of Instruction. Later on it separated off, acquiring its own political characteristics.

  Although I held a critical attitude towards the youth, this attitude was not always accompanied by proposals for systematic and concrete work. This is a very complex problem because it relates to everything that involves the party’s organisation. From a theoretical point of view – and not just with regard to the youth – we have a series of concerns we still have not been able to fully resolve. What is the role of the party? I’m not talking about its role in abstract, general terms, with which we are all familiar. But what should the party’s approach be in each of the various fronts where it has to function? To what degree does it participate in public administration? What should be its degree of responsibility? What should be the relationship, for example, between the various levels of public administration and the party?

  These are problems that have not been set down in rules, and that we are all familiar with. They are problems that create frictions at various levels. Take the National Directorate [of the party] and the Council of Ministers – here the interdependence of the two bodies is clear, and often the individuals involved are the same. Beyond this, each of these bodies functions independently. Certain work habits are created in each, concepts that clash in real life, and for which we have yet to find practical solutions. Obviously, this also has to do with the fact that there are different conceptual approaches at work, none of which has been able to prove itself more efficient and rational than the other. In fact, these concepts come from analysing the deep problems that have occurred inside the socialist camp – from the very moment the first socialist revolution triumphed, from the October Revolution of 1917 up to the present.

  These concepts must be analysed and studied in depth, particularly in light of the specific features of our revolution. This revolution began as a mass movement supporting an insurrectional struggle, without the formation of an organic party of the proletariat. It later merged with the party representing the proletariat, the Popular Socialist Party, which to that time had not been leading the struggle.

  Owing to these characteristics, our movement is fully impregnated by the petty bourgeoisie, both on the individual level and politically. In the course of the struggle and the revolution, each of us kept evolving, since the majority of the revolution’s leaders, in terms of their class background, come from the petty bourgeoisie, and some even from the bourgeoisie.

  This kind of baggage gets dragged along for quite a period of time; it cannot just be cut out of the minds of men overnight. This was so even when the socialist character of the revolution was declared – it was a declaration after the fact; there already was a socialist revolution because we had wrested the majority of the key means of production. But politically we were not moving forward evenly in step with all the advances the revolution was making on the economic level and in certain ideological areas.

  This characteristic of our revolution means we have to be very cautious in characterising our party as the leader of the working class as a whole, and above all with regard to its concrete relations with each of the different administrative bodies, the army, the security apparatus, and so on.

  Our party does not yet have statutes. Our party still is not even completely formed. So the question is: Why don’t we have statutes? There is plenty of experience; that is to say, experience that goes back almost fifty years. So what is going on? The answer is that there are certain questions about this experience that we are still trying to come to grips with, questions to which you cannot just give a spontaneous or superficial answer, because they have extremely important implications for the revolution’s future.

  In Cuba the ideology of the old ruling classes maintains its presence through the consciousness of individuals, as I indicated earlier. In addition, it remains present because it is constantly being exported from the United States – the organising centre of world reaction – which physically exports saboteurs, bandits, propagandists of all sorts, and whose constant broadcasts reach the entire national territory with the exception of Havana.

  In other words, the Cuban people come in permanent contact with imperialist ideology. This is then repackaged here in Cuba by propaganda outfits scientifically organised with the goal of projecting the dark side of our system, which necessarily has dark sides because we are in a transitional period and because those of us who have led the revolution up to now were not professional economists and politicians with a lot of experience, backed by an entire staff.

  At the same time, they promote the most dazzling and fetishistic features of capitalism. This is all introduced into the country, and sometimes it finds an echo in the subconscious of many people. It awakens latent feelings that had barely been touched owing to the speed of the process, to the huge number of emotional salvos we have had to fire to defend our revolution – where the word “revolution” has merged with the word “homeland”, has merged with defence of every single one of our intere
sts. These are the most sacred of all things for every individual, regardless of class background.

  In face of the threat of thermonuclear aggression, as in October [1962], the people came together automatically. Many who had never even done guard duty in the militias showed up to fight. Everyone was transformed in the face of this clear injustice. Everyone wanted to demonstrate their determination to fight for their homeland. This was also a decision by people faced with a danger from which they could not possibly escape by remaining neutral, since neither embassies nor anything else will be considered neutral by an atomic bomb; everything is annihilated.

  That is how we have been advancing, by leaps, uneven leaps, the way all revolutions advance, deepening our ideology in certain areas, learning even more, developing schools of Marxism.

  At the same time, we constantly worry about coming to positions that could stop the revolution’s progress and introduce through the back door petty-bourgeois concepts or imperialist ideology by way of these critical attitudes about the party’s tasks throughout the state apparatus. That is why the party is not yet properly organised today. That is why we have not yet achieved the necessary degree of institutionalisation at the top levels of the state.

  But we are also trying to address several other questions. We need to create something new, which we feel should precisely reflect the relationships that should exist between the masses and those in positions of power, both directly and through the party. We have made various trial runs along these lines: pilot projects of various types of local administration – one in El Cano, a different one in Güines, yet another in Matanzas. Through these trial runs we are constantly observing the advantages and disadvantages of all these different systems – which contain within them the germ of a higher type of organisation – for the development of the revolution and above all for the development of centralised planning.