Ché Guevara: Man and Socialism in Cuba

Ché Guevara, with good reason, remains the hero for an entire generation of revolutionaries in the second half of the 20th Century. Perhaps his best know writing is the brief essay, Man and Socialism in Cuba.

Ché begins with the importance of the individual for the building of socialism. He recounts the importance of the individual Sierra Maestra fighters in the guerilla warfare that gave birth to the Cuban revolution, a struggle in which he played a leading role. But the heroes of the revolution are not confined to those of guerilla war. He says, "At other times of our history there have been repetitions of this utter devotion to the revolutionary cause. During the October Crisis and at the time of hurricane Flora, we witnessed deeds of exceptional valour and self-sacrifice carried out by an entire people."

After the revolution, he demands that "Society as a whole must become a huge school"and in that way "We can see the new man who begins to emerge in this period of the building of socialism." The keys are the development of true democratic participation and education: "We are seeking something new that will allow a perfect identification between the government and the community as a whole, adapted to the special conditions of the building of socialism and avoiding to the utmost the commonplaces of bourgeois democracy transplanted to the society in formation (such as legislative houses, for example) ... It is still necessary to accentuate his conscious, individual and collective, participation in all the mechanism of direction and production and associate it with the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that the individual will realise that these processes are closely interdependent and their advances are parallel. He will thus achieve total awareness of his social being, which is equivalent to his full realisation as a human being, having broken the chains of alienation."

Ché goes into detail about the post-revolutionary changes in the nature of work and the arts and how they can contribute to the development of the new socialist man.

And the essay concludes with a very important and famous statement about the importance of love: "Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality. This is perhaps one of the great dramas of a leader; he must combine an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decision without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealise their love for the people, for the most hallowed causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the terrain where ordinary men put their love into practice. The leaders of the revolution have children who do not learn to call their father with their first faltering words; they have wives who must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives to carry the revolution to its destination; their friends are strictly limited to their comrades in revolution. There is no life outside the revolution."

"In these conditions, the revolutionary leaders must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth to avoid falling into dogmatic extremes, into cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. They must struggle every day so that their love of living humanity is transformed into concrete deeds, into act that will serve as an example, as a mobilizing factor."

In this essay, despite his history as a guerilla warrior, Ché gives us an eloquent expression of the culture of peace. He stresses two of the most important aspects of a culture of peace: education and democratic participation. And he makes the case for revolutionary love, which must underlie the culture of peace.

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