HISTORIC ANNALS: Leo Huberman interviews Che Guevara (1961)

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Home › 1961 › Volume 13, Issue 05 (September) › Cuba and the U.S.

Cuba and the U.S.

The questions below were submitted, in writing, to Comandante Guevara by Leo Huberman during the week of the Bay of Pigs invasion; the answers were received the end of June. —The Editors

(1) Have relations with the U.S. gone “over the brink” or is it still possible to work out a modus vivendi?

This question has two answers: one, which we might term “philosophical,” and the other, “political.” The philosophical answer is that the aggressive state of North American monopoly capitalism and the accelerated transition toward fascism make any kind of agreement impossible; and relations will necessarily remain tense or even worse until the final destruction of imperialism. The other, political answer, asserts that these relations are not our fault, and that, as we have many times demonstrated, the most recent time being after the defeat of the Giron Beach landing, we are ready for any kind of agreement on terms of equality with the Government of the United States.

(2) The U.S. holds Cuba responsible for the rupture in relations while Cuba blames the U.S. What part of the blame, in your opinion, can be correctly attributed to your country? In short, what mistakes have you made in your dealings with the U.S.?

Very few, we believe; perhaps some in matters of form. But we hold the firm conviction that we have acted for our part in accord with the right, and that we have responded to the interests of the people in each of our acts. The trouble is that our interests, that is, those of the people, and the interests of the North American monopolies are at variance.

(3) Assuming that the U.S. means to smash the Cuban Revolution, what are the chances of its getting help from the O.A.S. group?

Everything depends on what is meant by “smash.” If this means the violent destruction of the revolutionary regime with the help—likewise direct—of the O.A.S., I believe there is very little possibility, because history cannot be ignored. The countries of America understand the value of active solidarity among friendly countries, and they would not risk a reversal of such magnitude.

(4) Does Cuba align itself in international affairs with the neutralist or Soviet bloc?

Cuba will align herself with justice; or, to be less absolute, with what she takes for justice. We do not practice politics by blocs, so that we cannot side with the neutralist bloc, nor, for the same reason, do we belong to the socialist bloc. But wherever there is a question of defending a just cause, there we will cast our votes—even on the side of the United States if that country should ever assume the role of defending just causes.

(5) What is Cuba’s chief domestic problem?

It is difficult to assess problems with such precision. I can mention several: the “guerrillerismo” which still exists in the government; the lack of comprehension on the part of some sectors of the people of the necessity for sacrifice; the lack of some raw materials for industries and some non-durable consumer goods, resulting in certain scarcities; the uncertainty as to when the next imperialist attack will take place; the upsets in production caused by mobilization. These are some of the problems which trouble us at times, but, far from distressing us, they serve to accustom us to the struggle.

(6) How do you explain the growing number of Cuban counter-revolutionaries and the defection of so many former revolutionaries?

Revolutions function by waves. When Mr. Huberman asked this question, perhaps it was accurate, but today there are fewer counter-revolutionaries than before Giron Beach. The counter-revolutionary attack increased slowly until it reached its climax on Giron Beach; then it was defeated and fell drastically to zero. Now that it is again attempting to raise its head and inflict new harm, our intention is to eliminate the counter-revolutionaries.

The defections of more or less prominent figures are due to the fact that the socialist revolution left the opportunists, the ambitious, and the fearful far behind and now advances toward a new regime free of this class of vermin.

(7) Can the countries of Latin America solve their problems while maintaining the capitalist system, or must they take the path of socialism as Cuba has done?

It seems elementary to us that the way of the socialist revolution must be chosen, the exploitation of man by man must be abolished, economic planning must be undertaken, and all means of assisting the public welfare must be placed at the service of the community.

(8) Are civil liberties, Western style, permanently finished while your government is in power?

This would depend on what civil rights were referred to—the civil right, for example, of the white to make the Negro sit in the rear of a bus; the right of the white to keep the Negro off a beach or bar him from a certain zone; the right of the Ku Klux Klan to assassinate any Negro who looks at a white woman; the right of a Faubus, in a word, or perhaps the right of a Trujillo, or Somoza, or Stroessner, or Duvalier. In any case, it would be necessary to define the term more precisely, to see if it also includes the right to welcome punitive expeditions sent by a country to the north.

(9) What kind of political system do you envisage for Cuba after the present emergency period of reorganization and reconstruction is over?

In general terms it may be said that a political power which is attentive to the needs of the majority of the people must be in constant communication with the people and must know how to express what the people, with their many mouths, only hint at. How to achieve this is a practical task which will take us some time. In any event, the present revolutionary period must still persist for some time, and it is not possible to talk of structural reorganization while the threat of war still haunts our island.

APPENDIX • Monthly Review Archives

The Death and Life of Che

by John J. Simon

Topics: History , Movements

Che, as he lay murdered in Bolivia, surrounded by the CIA assets the agency mobilized to eliminate him. They killed the man but could not kill the idea. 

By the time Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–67) was executed on October 8, 1967, in La Higuera, Bolivia by soldiers under the direction of an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had become a kind of ideological “fetish” for his Washington adversaries. For them Guevara was not simply some “terrorist” or “insurgent”—words used to describe him and his Cuban revolutionary comrades then, just as they are used to describe those who resist Western imperial designs today. He was something new in the context of the post-Second World War Cold War. The United States and its clients claimed they were engaged in a struggle to staunch “Soviet aggression” Moscow saw itself as engaged in a contest of competing systems: capitalism versus socialism. But from the outset of his political life, Che’s perspective was burnished in and energized by the immiseration and oppression he confronted in the “Third World.”

Traveling through South America and witnessing its poverty and oppression in the 1940s, resisting the overthrow of Guatemalan democracy and fighting in Cuba’s revolutionary war in the 1950s, and joining a futile campaign to resist the imposition of neo-colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa in 1965, Guevara developed a profound understanding that economic exploitation, political domination, and their consequences—violence and racism, disease and starvation—were integral to the “world system” of the West, led by the United States. Three decades before it became a central mantra of progressive and radical struggle, Che challenged the globalization of wealth as a rip-off of “this great mass of humanity” as he called the numberless inhabitants of Asia, Africa, and “his” America in his speech to the United Nations in 1964.  Responding for them he cried “enough!” (During this visit he met with, among others, MR’s Harry Magdoff who asked what socialist intellectuals could do. Not untypically Che responded “teach us.”)

In the days that followed, Che returned to Havana where, with Fidel Castro’s support, he resigned all of his government positions—he had been minister of industry and president of Cuba’s national bank—and quietly joined the anti-imperialist struggle, first in Africa and later in the poorest part of Latin America in the Bolivian highlands. Both of these campaigns failed, the latter resulting in his murder. One would have thought that the State Department could have successfully gloated. But confounding the U.S. propaganda machine, the worldwide response was first to mourn (and in some instances mythologize) and then to celebrate Guevara’s life: to make good use of his words and his image to mobilize multitudes in the decades-long struggle against imperialism.

It wasn’t only relatively privileged university students who hung Che posters on their walls. Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s resonant image could also be found in rude dwellings without electricity or plumbing whose occupants understood the terms of the struggle as well as Che did. Indeed, in his final hours, to one of his captors who wanted to know why he fought, Guevara responded, “Can’t you see that state in which the peasants live? They are almost like savages, living in a state of poverty that depresses the heart, having only one room in which to sleep and cook and no clothing to wear, abandoned like animals….Just as he is born [the peasant] dies without ever seeing improvement in his human condition.”

One should not forget that Che was a prolific writer, trenchant as well as elegant. His essay, “Socialism and the New Man in Cuba,” was first published in the Uruguayan left-wing magazine Marcha, in 1965. In that piece, considered by many to be his defining statement on the nature of socialism, Che argued that it was not the case that the individual disappears under socialism; rather, he asserted, the individual is at the moral heart of the revolutionary struggle, an ongoing undertaking in which even one’s life can be given.

He also wrote Guerrilla Warfare (1960), a handbook for armed struggle but also widely read by student revolutionaries in the first world who saw it as a metaphor for the ongoing fight for social justice even in the face of apparently insuperable odds. And he is widely remembered for his “Create Two, Three…Many Vietnams, That Is the Watchword,” written for the January 1966 opening conference of Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL, also referred to as the Tricontinental, founded at Guevara’s urging). In that letter Che called for worldwide support for the Vietnamese revolution as but one form of the kinds of struggles necessary in the battle for socialism. He concluded with the ringing statement,

If we, on a small point on the map of the world, fulfill our duty and place at the disposal of the struggle whatever little we are able to give—our lives, our sacrifice—it can happen that one of these days we will draw our last breath on a bit of earth not our own, yet already ours, watered with our blood. Let it be known that we have measured the scope of our acts and that we consider ourselves no more than a part of the great army of the proletariat. But we feel proud at having learned from the Cuban revolution and from its leader [Fidel Castro] the great lesson to be drawn from its position in this part of the world: “Of what difference are the dangers to a man or a people, or the sacrifices they make, when what is at stake is the destiny of humanity?”….

Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear, if another hand reaches out to take up our arms, and other men come forward to join in our funeral dirge with the rattling of machine guns and with new cries of battle and victory.

Nearly four decades later, in 2006, Evo Morales, a coca farmer, the son of indigenous peasants, and newly elected president of Bolivia, remembered Che and “the millions all over Latin America who have fallen” and promised that “We will carry on fighting for the liberation of Bolivia and the Americas….The struggle that Che Guevara left uncompleted, we shall complete.”