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ARMANDO HART DÁVALOS

Writing a preface to Che Guevara Talks to Young People – which has as an afterword Fidel’s speech at the monument built in the centre of the island to house the hero’s sacred remains, together with those of his unforgettable comrades – constitutes for me both an honour and a genuine challenge. I will try to share with the young reader – to whom this book is largely directed – some necessarily brief thoughts on this outstanding figure of the Americas and of contemporary world history.

It’s true that Che would speak much differently to young people today, who are living under very different conditions, than he did over three decades ago. Nevertheless, in rereading these talks, one is struck by how extremely relevant they are. These speeches confirm that Che is indeed a man of the present.

At the beginning of the 1990s it was said that all models for changing the world had disappeared, together with the possibility of finding new ones. The image of the Heroic Guerrilla, however, rises throughout the Western world as a spectre that continues to grow. And it will do so, with greater or lesser force and richness of ideas, to the extent that it reaches young people and they take up the essential part of his actions and aspirations.

José Carlos Mariátegui, one of Latin America’s great revolutionary thinkers, studied and pointed to the need for myths. He pointed out how peoples who have accomplished great feats have had to create myths among the masses. If we want to be revolutionaries in the strict sense of the word, we must study the reasons and the factors for why Che lives on in the hearts of the Americas and expresses, in a thousand different ways, the desires and aspirations of the most radical youth on various continents. Thirty-some years after his rise to immortality in the Yuro Ravine, his image resonates through plazas and streets, reviving his cry of “Ever onward to victory!” Finding the reasons behind these facts is the best way to uphold the ideas of socialism and the possibilities of revolutionary change.

The teachings and the example of Che’s sacrifice in the jungles of Bolivia have etched in the minds of the new generations for all time a sense of heroism, and of moral values in politics and history. And since the moral factor has been what’s lacking in politics and has ended up leading to revolutions, there is one conviction of Che’s that has been dramatically confirmed: without the moral factor, there is no revolution. He also spoke with eloquence, depth, and rigour about the need for a new man in the twenty-first century. Life itself has compelled this individual to be formed in the twentieth century. Recognising the enormous role of culture and moral values in the history of civilisation, and extracting from it the necessary practical consequences is Commander Ernesto Che Guevara’s most important message to young people. There is a history behind this. Civilisation never made an analysis with the necessary depth, from a scientific viewpoint, of the role of moral and spiritual values over the course of history. That is the most important intellectual challenge that the twentieth century has left to youth.

In Europe, Western and Christian culture began to evolve before the year 1000 until it achieved, with Marx and Engels, the highest level of philosophic knowledge in relation to social and economic science. In Latin America and the Caribbean, meanwhile, a line of thinking crystallised – symbolised by Bolivar and Marti – that, on a scientific basis, emphasised the power of man and the role of education, culture, and politics. The originality of Ernesto Che Guevara – as with the Cuban Revolution – consists of the following: Inspired by the spiritual heritage of Our America, and starting with his commitment to moral values, he adopted the ideas of Marx and Engels, and advocated using the so-called subjective factors to motivate and guide the revolutionary action of the masses and of society as a whole.

What is valuable and of interest from the standpoint of Marxism is that from this vantage point, Che got radically closer to Marx than did other interpretations of the ideas of the author of Capital that were prevalent during the second half of the twentieth century. The Third World perspective of the internationalist guerrilla fighters who fell in Bolivia was an implicit call to socialists to decisively orient their actions towards the Third World. The wisdom of this political and moral course was not understood and supported at the time by those who could and should have done so. For this reason, the world changed along lines favourable to the most reactionary right, ending up in postmodern chaos.

In Che’s speech in Algiers on 24 February 1964, this call took on a dramatic and polemical character. Tragically, history would prove who was right. The saddest thing for revolutionaries is that Che’s position on the role of the previously colonised or neocolonised countries was closely in line with what Lenin had brilliantly foreseen decades earlier, pointing to the importance of liberation movements that were emerging in the East. Valuable literature exists by the person who forged the October Revolution, and it should be restudied at the present time.

The inadequacy of the social sciences under the prevailing system stems from the fact that they ignore one decisive reality: today’s growing poverty, the root of the evils and anguish suffered by modern man, together with the destruction of nature. Overcoming this situation is man’s greatest challenge as the twenty-first century dawns. From the scientific viewpoint, taking up this issue – rather than pretending it doesn’t exist – is the essence of an ethical system that aspires to be built on solid foundations for the future. Ignoring human pain is the great crime of the social systems that currently exist. We are realists, but for us the reality of man is complete and whole, not partial and mean, which is the way the existing interests see reality.

Che saw and appraised reality from an ethical standpoint – in order to improve it. That is where the power of the myth he left us resides. His ideas combine the most advanced thinking of European philosophical thought – Marx and Engels – with the utopian vision of Our America – Bolivar and Marti.

The error of those who renounce utopia is in not considering the real needs that emerge from the facts that lie beneath the surface. For this reason, they are unable to conceive of tomorrow’s truths.

The essence of the Latin American culture present in Che’s revolutionary ideas consists of viewing reality and the effort to change it as indispensable elements for understanding truth and transforming the world in the interests of justice, while at the same time taking the New World’s utopian sense and converting it into an incentive for forging tomorrow’s reality. Che did not renounce either reality or hope. He was a revolutionary of science and of conscience, both of which are needed by the Americas and the world in order to confront the challenge we face in the next century.

Study carefully these works by Che and you will find a good lesson for the present and for the future.

December 1999