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Vol. 75/No. 37      October 17, 2011

 
Che: Need to practice
solidarity to build a new Cuba
(Books of the Month column)
 

Below is an excerpt from Che Guevara Talks to Young People. The collection of speeches by Guevara from 1960-64 is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. Born in Argentina in 1928, Guevara joined the July 26 Movement led by Fidel Castro in 1955 and became a central leader of the Cuban Revolution.

He was captured and murdered in a CIA-organized operation in Bolivia in 1967, where he led a guerrilla unit as part of efforts to help extend socialist revolution in the Americas. The following speech was given Aug. 19, 1960, to medical students when the Ministry of Public Health was extending health care to peasants throughout the country. Copyright © 2000 by Pathfinder Press, Aleida March/Che’s Personal Archive. Reprinted by permission.

BY ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA  
Some time ago, a few months, a group of students here in Havana, recently certified as doctors, did not want to go to the countryside and were demanding extra payment for doing so. From the viewpoint of the past, this was not out of the ordinary … .

But what would happen if it were not those boys—the majority of whose families could afford several years of study—who completed their courses and were now beginning to practice their profession? What if instead 200 or 300 peasants had emerged, as if by magic, from the university lecture halls?

What would have happened, simply, is that those peasants would have run immediately, and with great enthusiasm, to attend to their brothers and sisters. They would have asked for the posts with the most responsibility and the hardest work, in order to show that the years of study they had been given were not in vain. What would have happened is what will happen within six or seven years, when the new students, children of the working class and the peasantry, receive their professional degrees of whatever type. [Applause]

But let’s not approach the future with fatalism and divide people into children of the working class or peasantry and counterrevolutionaries. Because that is simplistic, because it is not true, and because there is nothing that educates an honorable man more than living within a revolution. [Applause]

None of us, none of the first group that arrived on the Granma,1 who established ourselves in the Sierra Maestra2 and learned to respect the peasant and the worker, living together with him—none of us had a past as a worker or peasant. Naturally, there were those who had had to work, who had known certain wants in their childhood. But hunger, true hunger—that none of us had known, and we began to know it, temporarily, during the two long years in the Sierra Maestra. And then many things became very clear.

We, who at the outset severely punished anyone who touched even an egg of some rich peasant or landowner, one day took ten thousand head of cattle to the Sierra and said to the peasants simply: “Eat.” And the peasants, for the first time in many years—some for the first time in their lives—ate beef.

In the course of the armed struggle, the respect we had for the sacrosanct ownership of those ten thousand head of cattle was lost, and we understood perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. [Applause] And we learned it there, we who were not sons of the working class or the peasantry. So why should we shout to the four winds that now we are the superior ones and that the rest of the Cuban people cannot learn too? Yes, they can learn. In fact, the revolution today demands that they learn. It demands they understand that pride in serving our fellow man is much more important than a good income; that the people’s gratitude is much more permanent, much more lasting than all the gold one can accumulate. [Applause] …

We must then begin to erase our old concepts and come ever closer to the people, and with an ever more critical spirit as we do so. Not in the way we got closer before, because all of you will say: “No, I am a friend of the people. I enjoy talking with workers and peasants, and on Sundays I go to such and such a place to see such and such a thing.” Everybody has done that. But that is practicing charity, and what we have to practice today is solidarity. [Applause] We should not draw closer to the people in order to say: “Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you with our science, to demonstrate your errors, your lack of refinement, your lack of elementary knowledge.” We should go with an investigative zeal and with a humble spirit, to learn from the great source of wisdom that is the people. [Applause] …

Often we should change all our concepts … also, at times, our medical concepts. We will see that diseases are not always treated as one treats an illness in a big-city hospital. We will see that the doctor also has to be a farmer, that he has to learn to cultivate new foods and, by his example, to cultivate the desire to consume new foods, to diversify the nutritional structure in Cuba—so meager and so poor in an agricultural country that is potentially the richest on earth. We will see that under these circumstances we have to be a little bit pedagogical, at times very pedagogical. We will see that we also have to be politicians; that the first thing we have to do is not to offer our wisdom, but to show we are ready to learn with the people, to carry out that great and beautiful common experience—to build a new Cuba.  
 
 
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