The Political Theory of Che Guevara

by Llorente, Renzo Tramer

  Accelerating Development

  Another noteworthy aspect of Guevara’s general conception of revolution is his insistence on the possibility of accelerating the tempo and pace of the revolutionary transformation of Cuba well beyond what Marxist theory, as well as mainstream economics and political science, would judge feasible. Before turning to Guevara’s remarks on this question, it is important to underscore that, contrary to what one might assume given Guevara’s largely undeserved reputation for “voluntarism,” Guevara never disputes the Marxist premise that a revolution will not succeed in the absence of the requisite “objective conditions,” such as a given level of economic development, certain structural problems or “contradictions” that prove irresolvable within the existing sociojuridical framework, one of various kinds of political crises, oppressive or exploitative social conditions, and so on. Indeed, if Guevara believed that outbreaks of revolutionary struggle were imminent and inevitable throughout Latin America,53 it was because, in his opinion, these objective conditions already exist. It is likewise owing to his recognition of the indispensability of these objective conditions that Guevara insists that revolutions cannot be “exported” while at the same time acknowledging that revolutions do “expand ideologically,” influencing other countries besides those in which they occur; insofar as this has been the case with the Cuban Revolution, one could say that the revolutionaries “exported” their example.54 But this is very different from exporting the objective conditions that give rise to, and are necessary for the occurrence of, a revolution, which is simply not possible.

  Thus, as revolutions cannot be exported, Cuba could not export them, even if it wished to do so. While this may appear to be a trivial point, a mere truism, Guevara found it necessary to underscore this idea on a number of occasions, since other countries often accused Cuba of “exporting revolution.” For example, representatives of other Latin American countries leveled this accusation against Cuba following Guevara’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on December 11, 1964, and two days later Guevara confronted the same charge from a journalist on the American television program Face the Nation.55 Of course, Guevara also supported armed struggle in nations striving to attain their liberation and believed that Cuba, and other liberated nations, should support these liberation struggles. Was he inconsistent? In fact, there was no inconsistency in Guevara’s position, for, as Guevara himself observes in his reply to other representatives’ comments during the same UN session, exporting revolution is not the same thing as offering “assistance,” which “can be given or not given to liberation movements; above all they can be supported morally.”56 Yet one might still maintain that Guevara is inconsistent to the extent that he also claims, both before and after he began to explicitly acknowledge his Marxist convictions, to eschew interference in the internal affairs of other nations in general. For example, at the Inter-American Economic and Social Council conference held in Uruguay in August 1961, Guevara said, “We guarantee that not one rifle will be moved from Cuba, that not one weapon will be moved from Cuba for fighting in any other country in Latin America.”57 Indeed, Guevara even refused invitations from students and professors to take part in a march starting at the University of Montevideo, where he gave a speech not long after delivering the address from which I have quoted, on the grounds that joining the march could be construed as interference in Uruguay’s internal affairs.58 Yet there is no inconsistency in this regard either, assuming that Guevara subscribes to the position of the Cuban Revolution’s leadership—namely, that this principle did not apply in the case of those Latin American countries openly hostile to the revolution—that is, those countries that had broken off relations with Cuba.59 This was the case with Bolivia, for example, which had severed relations with Cuba in 1964, two years before Guevara arrived in the country with the intention of establishing a guerrilla insurgency there. (As for the Congo, an insurrection was already underway when Guevara’s contingent of Cuban forces arrived in April 1965.)

  So, Guevara accepts many standard Marxist assumptions about the importance of “objective conditions” for revolution and does not depart from Marxist theory at all in his views on the kinds of conditions required for the establishment of a socialist society. In Cuba, however, a revolution had taken place even though the objective socioeconomic conditions required for socialism did not yet exist, on account of Cuba’s underdevelopment. For Guevara, the absence of these objective conditions need not—and did not—constitute an insurmountable obstacle to the creation of socialism in the near future, for he holds that it is possible, and eminently desirable, to dramatically accelerate the development of these conditions. In other words, he holds that it is possible, in certain circumstances, for a country to make rapid progress in its development, advancing by quemando etapas—that is, by leaps and bounds, which is just another way of saying “to go as quickly as possible in the building of socialism.”60 In practical terms, this would require, among other things, expediting the modernization of agriculture, an acceleration of job training (especially in technical fields), optimal use of new technology, and a major commitment to intensive industrial development. Since proceeding “by leaps and bounds” entails a contraction of the process of economic development, and this contraction is achieved in part by omitting some steps constituent of traditional patterns of economic growth and evolution, Guevara’s notion is largely synonymous with the more familiar notion of “skipping stages” of development. In any case, while it is certainly no wonder that Guevara should think it desirable to hasten the advent of socialism (since it is an extremely desirable goal), we might well wonder why he should think it was possible to do so, why it was the case, as he remarks at the beginning of 1962, that Cuba had “all of the conditions to advance at an extraordinary speed.”61 The answer lies in Guevara’s belief that individuals’ enthusiasm and determination could play a critical role in enabling Cuba to dramatically reduce the amount of time required to push development forward.62 In other words, a certain level of commitment and ardor will generate the disposition to sacrifice and interest in problem-solving needed to shorten the amount of time that economic development, and in particular the kind of development required to lay the foundations for socialism, normally requires. The idea of compressing and skipping stages was, as Manuel Monereo has rightly observed, something of an obsession for Guevara.63 If he was optimistic about the possibility of harnessing revolutionary enthusiasm and fervor to this end, it was no doubt in part because of the favorable international context briefly noted in the preceding chapter: Guevara seems to have assumed, and not unreasonably, that this particular historical context, marked by the appearance of national liberation movements, the recent setbacks for US imperialism, and so on, might heighten, or at the very least help to sustain for some time, ordinary Cubans’ prodigious enthusiasm for, and commitment to, the revolution during the first several years of its existence. These were some of the “exceptional historical circumstances” that led Guevara to believe that it would be possible, at least to the extent that Cuba adopted his system of economic and industrial management (briefly discussed in the following chapter), to hasten the development of “consciousness” and thereby the development of the forces of production.64 There were, in short, “objective” factors informing Guevara’s belief that the “subjective” conditions for “skipping stages” in building socialism in Cuba were especially favorable. But even where the conditions were less favorable, revolutionary struggle could still make it possible to skip stages. In reflecting on his experience in the Congo in 1965, for example, Guevara insists that the Congolese will pass “through the different stages of history at breakneck speed,” proceeding from a state that was “in some cases . . . close to primitive communism . . . to feudalism . . . to the most advanced concepts.”65

  The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

  One familiar Marxist concept that Guevara often invokes in his reflections on the revolutionary process is “t
he dictatorship of the proletariat,” which is surely one of the most widely misunderstood and distorted of Marxist concepts. As Hal Draper has convincingly shown, “For Marx and Engels . . . ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ meant nothing more and nothing less than ‘rule of the proletariat’—the ‘conquest of political power’ by the working class, the establishment of a workers’ state in the immediate post-revolutionary period.”66 That is, it refers, to borrow Harold Laski’s definition, to “an organisation of society in which the state-power was in the hand of the working class, and used with all the force necessary to prevent it being seized from them by the class which formerly exercised its authority.”67 Guevara uses the term in this broad, original Marxist sense and, accordingly, regards the dictatorship of the proletariat as a form of “democracy,”68 a form of majority rule or rule by the people. In Guevara’s view, the Cuban Revolution had established such a “dictatorship,” at least once it had adopted an unmistakably socialist orientation.69 Guevara’s identification of this period of the revolution with the dictatorship of the proletariat is significant in that it reflects his belief that this form of rule, this “dictatorship,” can be established “in the countries that are beginning the building of socialism”70 and not only after the creation of socialism, the “lower stage” of communism. This belief represents a departure from what Marx himself appears to maintain in his “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” as Guevara himself acknowledges,71 but one that seems justified and reasonable given the nature of the transitional period whose basic features Guevara sought to understand and theorize.

  Aside from this particular modification of Marx’s notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, two other aspects of Guevara’s construal of this concept are worth mentioning briefly. First, Guevara claims, in “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” that the dictatorship of the proletariat involves a dictatorship not only over “the defeated class” but also over “individuals of the victorious class.”72 Guevara’s point in this passage is that the new state, which he elsewhere calls a “proletarian state,”73 will find it necessary to heighten the political consciousness of the many workers whose revolutionary commitment lags well behind that of the “vanguard group,” which is “ideologically more advanced”; this consciousness-raising consists in fostering an understanding of the workers’ new responsibilities, which on one occasion, a televised speech from June 1960, Guevara identifies with the duties to produce, save (i.e., avoid waste at work), and become organized so as to be able to give more (rendir más) to the revolution.74 This new class consciousness is to be achieved by “incentives and pressures of a certain intensity.”75 The kinds of measures to which Guevara alludes here—the “pressures” that he has in mind are doubtless mainly exhortation, moral suasion, the promotion of socialist emulation, and so on—are hardly comparable to the measures constitutive of the dictatorship over the “defeated class,” some of which I discuss below, but the passage has proven controversial nevertheless.76 Significantly, nearly half a century before Guevara spoke of the proletariat exercising its dictatorship over itself, the extremely influential Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács presented a similar idea in almost identical terms. Lukács observed that it may be the case that, after having overthrown the bourgeoisie, some members of the proletariat fail to realize that “the strengthening of labour discipline and thereby raising productivity” is in their own interest. Should this occur, it will be necessary, writes Lukács, for the proletariat to create “a legal order by means of which the proletariat compels its individual members . . . to act in accordance with their class interests,” in which case “the proletariat . . . exercises dictatorship even against itself.”77 There is no indication that Guevara also had the creation of “a legal order” in mind when referring to “pressures of a certain intensity,” but even if that were the case the proletariat’s dictatorship over itself would still have little in common with that which the proletariat exercises over the “defeated class.”

  The second aspect of Guevara’s notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat worth underscoring is his insistence on the compatibility of this form of rule with broad freedom of discussion and debate. To be sure, Guevara never claims that there is complete freedom of discussion in Revolutionary Cuba. In his view, and as he would put it in his lengthy press conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August 1961, full freedom of expression existed neither in Cuba nor in the capitalist nations, but in Cuba the masses who had been oppressed until recently—all of the peasants and workers—could now express themselves, and this increased their options in life.78 Regarding his reasons for saying that full freedom of expression does not exist in Cuba, Guevara explains on more than one occasion that the revolution will not tolerate the expression of certain views. As he tells students and professors of architecture in a speech delivered in September 1963, “the only thing we do not permit is blackmail through ideas, or sabotage of the Revolution”; in other words, “the only thing we demand is that the general lines of the state in this stage of socialist construction be respected.”79 This is why the revolution does not allow, for example, public criticism from those who do not feel any ties to the revolution and denies a hearing to those who claim to be dissenters but do nothing more than speak for the United States.80 Yet, while “we do not permit the dictatorship of the proletariat to be attacked, . . . within it there exists a wide margin of discussion and expression of ideas.”81 The position that Guevara articulates, however sketchily, in this passage (which likewise comes from the architecture conference and is preceded by a reference to debates with artists who remained in Cuba but did not sympathize with socialism) bears a great resemblance to Fidel Castro’s well-known encapsulation of the revolution’s cultural policy presented at the National Library barely two months after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, on June 30, 1961: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing” (dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, nada).82 In any event, there is no reason to question the sincerity of Guevara’s support for “a wide margin of discussion,” since we know that he encouraged vigorous policy debates with his collaborators and colleagues, not least of all when it came to his own ideas on economic management.83 Guevara himself would emphasize, during a meeting with collaborators in August 1963, that he always allowed his colleagues to say whatever they wanted, even about him, the only condition being that they also do their work.84 In addition, and perhaps more significantly in this regard, as Minister of Industries Guevara went so far as to issue a circular, applicable to all workplaces within his ministry, that prohibited managers from conducting any interrogations of workers with respect to their ideology. We could also note here Guevara’s decisive intervention, in 1964, in defense of Trotskyists facing imprisonment or his condemnation of the vandalization of a Trotskyist publisher that prevented it from bringing out a Cuban edition of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution.85

  Containing the Counterrevolution

  The main function of the dictatorship of the proletariat is, of course, to ensure a revolution’s success by eliminating any resistance from the counterrevolution—that is, from those who wish to undo the revolution and overthrow the government that defends it. But how does one identify the counterrevolution—many people who do not embrace a given revolutionary project will not actively oppose it, let alone constitute a threat to its existence—and what measures are justified in attempting to thwart its designs?

  Before considering Guevara’s views on counterrevolutionaries and the appropriate methods for dealing with them, it is important to point out that the counterrevolution, supported from the outset by the US government, was a very real threat in Cuba following the January 1959 victory of the Rebel Army. There were many bombings, frequent acts of sabotage, countless attempts at economic destabilization in one form or another, an insurgency in Cuba’s Escambray Mountains, and on and on. (It is perhaps not widely known that the most famous, most frequently reprinted photograph of Guevara, taken by Alberto Kord
a on March 5, 1960, is an image captured at the funeral for several dozen victims of an act of sabotage that had occurred the previous day. This funeral was also, incidentally, the first time that Fidel Castro uttered the slogan Patria o muerte [“Fatherland or death”].86) Moreover, though internal counterrevolutionary resistance would sharply decline after the early years of the Cuban Revolution, as many who would support or join the counterrevolution went into exile and the Cuban state efficiently suppressed the activities of those counterrevolutionaries who remained on the island, actions undertaken by counterrevolutionary groups abroad, and most notably those who operated out of South Florida, would continue for decades.87 And this threat to the survival and consolidation of the Cuban Revolution was compounded by the devastating economic embargo imposed by the United States in late 1960.88