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,” Guevara said, “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.”
Youth must march in the vanguard, Guevara insists throughout, taking on the hardest tasks in every endeavour. That is the only road towards becoming leaders of other women and men – just as the officers in the Rebel Army won their stripes on the battlefield. Youth must learn to lead not only their peers, but revolutionists older than themselves as well. You must be a model “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”, Guevara told the UJC leaders in October 1962.
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