Originally published at: 切·格瓦拉与何塞·马蒂——试论民主派的两种不同倾向与前途 – 曙光
Editorial Board of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Proletariat
Editorial Board of League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Proletariat
“The victory of Marxism in theory has compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists; such is the dialectic of history.”[1] Lenin’s brilliant assertion applies not only to the enemies of proletarian revolution, but also to those who travel alongside it.
Since the birth of Marxism in the mid-19th century, with the development of capitalism worldwide and the growth of the proletariat, the advance of the international communist movement, and the emergence of socialist states and even the socialist camp, the proletariat and its vanguard — the Communist Party — have increasingly become a force of decisive importance on the political stage. In order to win the support of this powerful class, some democrats from the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, or opponents of the existing order, often dress themselves up as “socialists” and their views, programs, or doctrines as “Marxism.” This is especially true in colonial and semi-colonial countries where national capitalism and the national bourgeoisie are weak, but broad masses of workers and peasants contain powerful revolutionary potential, and in the imperialist era when social contradictions are unprecedentedly sharp. Since capitalism entered the monopoly stage, some national bourgeoisie have used the banner of “socialism” to unite workers and peasants in struggles against imperialism and for national independence. Yet they have always had a principled difference from genuine proletarian socialism or communism: the former, once “the revolution has developed to a certain stage, stops short, or even betrays the revolution”[2], whereas the latter “advocates uninterrupted revolution” and “never leaves things half-done”[3]; the former demands “the establishment of a bourgeois democratic republic in which the bourgeoisie exploits wage workers”[4], whereas the latter demands “the overthrow of the bourgeoisie,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat”[5]; the former “wants a change in social conditions so as to make the existing society as agreeable and comfortable as possible for them”[6], whereas the latter, for its own complete liberation and that of all humanity, must “abolish private ownership,” “abolish classes,” and “build a new society”[7]. Because of this fundamental opposition, all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats are bound to enter into sharp conflict with the proletariat, and divisions must also arise within their own ranks, with one part “joining the ranks of the proletariat, leaving its former position and taking the standpoint of the proletariat”[8], while the other moves toward reaction.
This article will take Che Guevara and José Martí, two figures associated with Cuban independence, as examples to analyze the different tendencies and different futures of two representatives of different factions within the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democratic camp. It is hoped that this will be of some use in understanding the principled differences between the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats and the proletarian revolutionaries, and in understanding under what conditions the former can be transformed into the latter.
Before analyzing Che Guevara and José Martí, we need to understand the historical background of their lives and activities, namely Cuba and Latin America in the roughly century and a half after the independence revolutions.
The Latin American independence revolutions at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th were incomplete; they did not fulfill the tasks of the bourgeois national democratic revolution. In particular, because leadership was in the hands of the creole landowning class, feudal large landed property was not only not destroyed, but expanded and consolidated to an even greater extent than before independence. Throughout Latin America, “the land absorbed into large estates in one century of the nineteenth century equaled the land absorbed into large estates in the previous three centuries.”[9] The large landowning class, comprising about 10% of the population, and foreign large companies owned almost all the land, while small peasant holdings accounted for only one-tenth of Latin American agriculture[10]. The extreme poverty of small peasants, tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers created a narrow domestic market. Peasant personal dependence on landlords also resulted in a lack of free labor. Because the large landowners depended on cheap imported industrial goods, they were unwilling to develop domestic transport or to implement protective tariffs. Imperialism — first Britain, later the United States, Germany, and others — with its export of goods and capital, greatly displaced Latin American national capital. Under the influence of various factors, capitalist development in Latin America remained very slow. Not only did the great majority of the population (about 70%) remain agricultural, but even in 1939, before the Second World War, “the annual value produced per worker in U.S. industry was $6,340, while in Latin America it was $1,380.”[11]
The above conditions determined the characteristics of the Latin American national bourgeoisie: on the one hand, they demanded the development of capitalism in their own countries, the restriction of foreign imports of goods and capital, and, to varying degrees, land reform and the destruction of feudal relations of production in order to expand the domestic market; on the other hand, their economic strength was weak, and before their domestic market and capital had developed to a certain extent, they often depended on foreign markets and investment. Regarding the feudal large estate system, they opposed it while at the same time maintaining countless ties with it. These economic characteristics in turn determined the political weakness of the Latin American national bourgeoisie, and made it inevitable that their struggle for bourgeois democratic institutions and against “caudillo” military dictatorship would be powerless. A caudillo, or “chief,” is a military strongman who relies on the support of the large landowning class and imperialism and rules through military repression; it is a special product of Latin America’s feudal large landownership. Different large landowning factions fought incessantly, and their representatives became new caudillos through military coups or by usurping the fruits of popular revolution. Between 1824 and 1848, Mexico experienced more than 200 military coups and replaced 31 presidents. Bolivia experienced 60 “revolutions” in 74 years.[12] From 1810 to 1951, “the twenty countries of Latin America promulgated at least 125 new constitutions.” And amid the frequent changes of regime, only for a limited number of periods did “liberal” governments of the national bourgeoisie come to power; but they dared not touch feudal large landownership or imperialist rule, and their end was either overthrow by yet another coup or gradual degeneration into representatives of the large landowning class.
Emiliano Zapata, the outstanding leader of the Mexican peasant uprising. The peasant uprising for “land and liberty” led by Zapata promoted the development of Mexico’s bourgeois democratic revolution and the promulgation of Latin America’s most radical and revolutionary bourgeois constitution.
Because of the weakness of the national bourgeoisie, all political and social progress in Latin America over that century and a half was won by revolutionary workers, peasants, and petty-bourgeois masses. Under the oppression of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat comprador capitalism — the three mountains — the lives of the Latin American laboring people were extremely poor and painful. Wages for industrial workers were only one-tenth to one-third of those of workers in the United States and Canada; a Bolivian miner had to work 500 days to buy a normal suit of clothes, while the situation of agricultural workers, tenant farmers, and small peasants was even worse. “Of the 126 million people in Latin America, it is certain that no fewer than 85 million are in actual hunger.”[13] The annual mortality rate in Latin America was 23‰, more than twice that of the United States (11‰); infant mortality in Colombia reached 163‰, nearly 3.4 times that of the United States[14]. “In the United States, the average life expectancy is about sixty-three years, but in Latin America, such as Peru, it falls as low as thirty-two years.” The workers, peasants, and petty-bourgeois masses of Latin America were deprived of all means of subsistence and production, and were therefore especially revolutionary. They carried out heroic, unbroken struggles against the semi-serf system and the large estate system, for higher wages and better working conditions, and for democratic rights such as the right to organize and to vote, and from the second half of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century they launched dozens of revolutionary uprisings.
“The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.”[15] The attitude toward the masses and mass movements caused intellectuals to split. Some, representing the interests of the national bourgeoisie, advocated using the masses to oppose imperialist and feudal comprador forces, to establish a bourgeois democratic republic, and to develop national capitalism. For this purpose, they made many promises to the masses about land and freedom, but had no intention of putting them into practice. Therefore they could not win the genuine support of the masses, and under the pressure of imperialism and feudalism, often sold out the masses, betrayed the masses, and ultimately moved toward reaction. The representative of these bourgeois intellectuals is Che Guevara. Others, however, advocated uniting with the masses, relying on the masses, and relying on the people’s own strength to overthrow the “three mountains,” and to build a truly independent, democratic, and “America for the workers”[16]; some of them gradually came close to socialism. The outstanding representative of these revolutionary intellectuals is José Martí.
Outstanding leader of the Mexican peasant uprising Emiliano Zapata. The peasant uprising for “land and liberty” led by Zapata promoted the development of Mexico’s bourgeois democratic revolution and the promulgation of Latin America’s most radical and revolutionary bourgeois constitution.
The Formation of Democratic Thought
Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) was born into a national bourgeois family in Argentina. As noted above, this class had countless ties to the large landowners and big comprador bourgeoisie. Guevara’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, came from the large-landowning families of Argentina — the Guevara and Lynch families — and had once run several construction companies. Guevara’s mother, Celia de la Serna, was a descendant of the last Spanish viceroy in Peru; she inherited a large estate and a tea plantation from her family, on which the Guevara family ran a mechanized capitalist enterprise. From birth, Guevara had nothing in common with the people, and knew nothing of the suffering of the laboring masses. In fact, Guevara’s and his family’s comfortable life was built on the sweat and blood of the broad masses of workers and peasants. In 1943, in Argentina, the Ministry of Labor set the minimum monthly budget for a family of five at 147 pesos, while the average monthly wage of urban workers was only 78 pesos, and the average monthly income of agricultural workers was only about 50 pesos. In Buenos Aires, half of the workers lived in single-room dwellings. The housing of agricultural workers “was only enough to shelter one’s body, and was entirely unsuitable for human habitation. It was just four poles with grass and mud for a roof, and branches arranged as walls.”[17]Yet Guevara’s family lived in a two-story English-style villa. “In Latin America, illiteracy accounts for 75 percent or more of the population.” Yet Guevara’s family was able to support five children in higher education; among Guevara’s four siblings, two were architects, one was a designer, and one was a lawyer, while he himself studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires.
As a member of the national bourgeoisie, Guevara’s family supported bourgeois democracy and had once supported the radical President Hipólito Yrigoyen, who in office carried out nationalization of mineral resources, electricity, and railways, while also bloodily suppressing workers’ strikes in Buenos Aires and Patagonia; they opposed the Juan Perón group, which represented the interests of the large landowners and big bourgeoisie, relied in turn on German, British, and U.S. imperialism, and ruled by military dictatorship. This had an initial influence on Guevara’s thought.
What marked the complete formation of Guevara’s bourgeois democratic thought was his two journeys through Latin America in his youth. Some say this was the period when Guevara came to know the poverty and suffering of the people and gradually developed “socialist thought.” But Guevara remained separated from the people; he fundamentally did not understand the miserable life of the masses, and was even less able to become their representative. Regarding Guevara’s much-hyped experience of treating leprosy patients “for free,” in reality he went to the San Pablo leper colony in Peru as a “researcher” and “leprosy expert,” as a bourgeois intellectual. There he received money and material support and preferential treatment from the local authorities, and often went boating, fishing, playing soccer, swimming, attending banquets, and so on[18]. Standing in such a lofty position above the masses and living such an indulgent, detached life, how could even the slightest true sympathy for the oppressed possibly arise? His main activities during this period were to participate in bourgeois reform activities in various countries and to come into contact with all sorts of bourgeois figures.
In June and July of 1952, Guevara went to Colombia, where he saw the high-handed rule by which landlords, the church, and big bourgeoisie used military police to restrict civil liberties; he himself was also at one point arrested by the pro-U.S. conservative government[19] as a political activist. In 1953, Guevara went to Bolivia and witnessed the reform of Paz Estenssoro, which was of a national capitalist character[20]. In December, Guevara went to Guatemala to participate in the struggle against the armed overthrow by U.S. imperialism of Árbenz’s national bourgeois regime[21]. In the final moments of the Árbenz government, Guevara took part in a youth organization supporting Árbenz and called for the creation of militias to resist the Armas mercenaries backed by U.S. imperialism.
The experience of traveling through Latin America, especially in Guatemala, had a profound impact on Guevara. Even in 1958, during the so-called “socialist” revolution in Cuba (of course, before 1960–1961 Guevara had quite truthfully not called himself a socialist, communist, or Marxist), Guevara still declared: “In the past and in the present I have always been a staunch admirer of Colonel Jacobo Árbenz’s democratic government.”[22] What kind of “democratic government” was Guevara admiring? Guatemala’s Foreign Minister Jorge Torriello once summed it up: “The entire policy of our government never left the scope of representative democracy. Its three basic and important objectives were: to consolidate and fully respect democratic freedoms; to transform the semi-feudal and semi-colonial economy into an economy of capitalist type, in order to raise the living standards of Guatemalan citizens; and to defend national sovereignty and independence.”[23] In short: achieve national independence, implement bourgeois democracy, and develop the capitalist economy. Such a program was not socialist at all; rather, it was precisely the demand for “a state whose recognized task is to consolidate capital’s domination and labor’s enslavement,” and to “make bourgeois rule an even more comprehensive rule”[24]. This shows that Guevara was the representative of the national bourgeoisie’s interests. Although this class had temporary, partial common interests with the proletariat and the broad laboring masses on the issues of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism, its fundamental interests as an exploiting class were wholly opposed to and in sharp conflict with the latter. Guevara’s admiration for Mexico’s Lázaro Cárdenas also shows that he was not a socialist. He called Cárdenas “the greatest president in the history of the republic”[25], yet the Cárdenas government did not “collectivize the means and instruments of production, did not monopolize foreign trade, did not turn the state into the owner of factories, houses, land, and commercial enterprises”[26]; in other words, it was entirely non-socialist in character.
Guevara said: “It was in Guatemala that I finally became a revolutionary.” This shows that, in addition to his basic bourgeois democratic ideas, his thoughts on armed struggle and anti-U.S. imperialism had also already taken shape in Guatemala. Although Árbenz held a certain degree of political power, he never controlled the military, and even at the final moment failed to mobilize the masses to defend the regime. In the face of a massive rebellion, Árbenz went into exile abroad; his hope that resignation would secure the “partial retention” of the reform achievements by the coup group was likewise destroyed as the confiscated lands were returned. From this, Guevara concluded that in a national democratic revolution, power must be seized and consolidated through armed struggle.[27] At the same time, U.S. imperialism’s subversion of national governments in various countries also made Guevara realize that the United States was the greatest obstacle and the fiercest enemy of the independence cause of the Latin American countries, and that no semi-colonial, semi-feudal country could resist powerful U.S. imperialism on its own. Therefore, it was necessary to strike at it throughout the Americas and even worldwide, especially at its “weak links” under U.S. imperialist rule. In fact, this idea that a country’s national democratic revolution can only win by striking at feudalism and colonialism on an international scale is not the “world revolution” theory or “internationalism” of the “proletariat,” nor anything new. In Latin America itself, more than a century before Guevara’s activities, Bolívar and San Martín had already put such ideas into practice; only at that time their enemy was not the United States but Spain. Moreover, this bourgeois idea of a “world revolution” is also fundamentally different from proletarian internationalism. For the bourgeoisie, opposing one exploitative system beyond the confines of a single country is only out of the shared anti-feudal interests it has with the bourgeoisie of other countries, and only in order to establish or consolidate another exploitative system in its own country, namely capitalism. The proletariat, however, can only finally liberate itself by liberating all humanity; its struggle against the bourgeoisie around the world is in the interests of all laboring people and for the abolition of all systems of exploitation.
Guevara and the Cuban Revolution
Guevara and the Cuban Revolution
Guevara became world-famous because he and Castro jointly led the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s. But this revolution was not a socialist revolution; it was a national democratic revolution of capitalist character, and one that was usurped by the landlord-comprador bourgeoisie. As a result, although Cuba broke away from the rule of U.S. imperialism and its lackeys, it soon fell under the control of Soviet revisionist social imperialism. Guevara’s weakness and compromise as a representative of the national bourgeoisie were fully reflected in his participation in leading the Cuban Revolution and in the Castro regime after the revolution.
Before analyzing the Cuban Revolution and the building of the Castro regime and Guevara’s role in it, we need to understand the general background of the outbreak of the revolution.
After the achievements of the Ten Years’ War of Liberation (1868–1898) were usurped by U.S. imperialism, Cuba remained under U.S. control for a long time. In 1933, an uprising broke out in Cuba, and the people overthrew the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, which represented the interests of the large landowning class, the commercial comprador bourgeoisie, and U.S. imperialism. They abolished the “Platt Amendment,” which stipulated Cuba as an exclusive sphere of influence of the United States and granted the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba and establish military bases there, thereby promoting the promulgation of the bourgeois-democratic Constitution of 1940. However, the uprising did not establish a revolutionary regime; the reactionary army, police, and bureaucratic apparatus were still retained. U.S. imperialism and its agents also changed methods and used reformist deception to fool the people. Soon after Machado was overthrown, the representative of the large landowners and big comprador bourgeoisie, the soldier Fulgencio Batista, launched a coup and seized command of the army. Batista long relied on the army to influence Cuban politics, especially after becoming president for a second time with U.S. backing after World War II, when he intensified the betrayal of national sovereignty and imposed brutal rule. He successively abolished the 1940 constitution, dissolved parliament, declared the People’s Socialist Party[28] illegal, banned strikes and mass meetings, and subjected the opposition to torture such as whipping, electric shocks, and gouging out the eyes. In Batista’s Cuba, “the American sugar companies, ‘each could have its own police, any worker who dared protest was to be imprisoned or flogged, all managers and technicians were North Americans, and they treated Cuban workers like dogs.’ … The United States had a military mission in Batista’s army, directly controlling the leadership of the Cuban army.”[29] Since the day Batista came to power, the Cuban people had never for a moment stopped resisting; protests, strikes, rallies, and armed uprisings broke out one after another, and a revolution was rapidly brewing.
It was under these circumstances that Guevara considered Cuba precisely the “weak link” in the U.S. imperialist chain that he had imagined. At the same time, he was attracted by Castro’s so-called “armed anti-U.S.” line and eventually joined the plan to overthrow Batista’s regime. To understand Guevara’s compromising nature as a representative of the national bourgeoisie and his close connection with the landlord-comprador bourgeoisie, it is also necessary to introduce Castro, Guevara’s “close comrade-in-arms” and the number one figure of the Cuban Revolution.
Fidel Castro was a representative of the Cuban large landowning and big comprador bourgeoisie. His father, Ángel Castro, was a Spanish soldier who came to Cuba during the Spanish-American War to suppress the popular uprising. Later, he made his fortune through service to the United Fruit Company and speculation, and owned a large plantation of nearly 10,000 mu employing about 500 workers, supplying raw materials to American sugar factories. Castro himself was a bourgeois adventurer full of ambition. At university, in order to争夺 the leadership of the student movement, he joined hostile political gangs and engaged in all sorts of brawls, kidnappings, and shootings. Someone said: Castro was “a man without principles, hungry for power, who would ‘share both fortune and misfortune’ with whichever group was helpful to his political future.”[30] As for his later claim after the revolution that he had “always adhered” to “Marxism-Leninism,” Castro said at the time: “If I were Stalin, I would be a communist.”[31] The broad struggle against Batista by the various classes and strata of Cuban society in the 1950s gave this shameless political prostitute and personal careerist an unprecedented opportunity.
In fact, Castro originally did not oppose Batista; he even had contact with him and expressed willingness to support his plan for armed seizure of power.[32] However, as popular dissatisfaction with Batista grew, Castro suddenly transformed himself into a “revolutionary” who “opposed dictatorship.” By drawing together various political groups, Castro assembled around himself an organization called the “Movement”[33], which aimed to seize power through armed uprising. This organization “beyond hostility toward the Batista regime, could hardly be said to have any ideology at all”[34]; for quite a long time it did not even put forward any national democratic program regarding land reform and nationalization, and was entirely a tool for Castro and the heads of various groups to realize their personal ambitions.
Regarding Castro, Guevara not only never understood his class essence, but also maintained a close relationship with him (until a major split between the two in 1965), praising him highly in both public and private letters and even venerating him as the “special condition of the Cuban Revolution” and a “force between heaven and earth”[35]. In 1955–1956, Guevara participated in planning and carrying out Castro’s military adventure of secretly training an expeditionary force in Mexico and landing in Cuba. From 1956 to 1959, Guevara led the “July 26 Movement,” that is, Castro’s armed forces, in the struggle against Batista’s regime. After the victory of the Cuban Revolution, Guevara successively oversaw land reform, served as president of the National Bank, and later as Minister of Industry in Castro’s government.
The victory of the Cuban Revolution was not achieved through military action by different bourgeois factions, but through the anti-government struggle of the various classes and strata of society, especially the laboring masses, while the Castro faction seized power by using reformist means to deceive the people and maneuvering among various forces.
Castro’s 1956 expedition was a complete failure. Eighty-two armed men, including Guevara and Castro, landed in southeastern Cuba by yacht; after disembarking, they were quickly surrounded by government forces: 50 were killed, 20 captured, and only 12 made it to the Sierra Maestra in Oriente Province. Throughout the Cuban Revolution, the battles waged by the armed bourgeois factions[36] were all small-scale. Even in the Battle of Santa Clara, which made Guevara famous overnight and was hailed as the opposition’s “decisive victory” over government troops, the guerrilla force under his command numbered only about 300. Meanwhile, the Cuban people launched a powerful nationwide wave of anti-Batista struggle, causing divisions within the ruling class. As early as February 1955, Cuban railway workers, sugar workers, and 25,000 sugarcane workers almost simultaneously declared a strike against wage cuts and demanding better working conditions. Although Batista’s government brutally suppressed the strike, even declaring martial law and machine-gunning the strikers, the strike still persisted, forcing plantation owners to accept some of the workers’ demands. In November, large-scale student demonstrations broke out in Havana and several other cities; many citizens joined in and engaged in armed clashes with the military and police. In December, in protest against the authorities’ brutal repression of demonstrations and the arrest of student leaders, schools launched an indefinite strike. In October 1956, the head of Cuban army military intelligence and the chief of staff were seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in Havana. In November, an uprising broke out in Santiago, and the insurgents engaged in street fighting with police. In July 1957, a strike broke out in Santiago, involving nearly the entire city’s residents. In September, a mutiny occurred at the naval base in Cienfuegos, led by opposition officers who sought to overthrow Batista and prevent further development of the people’s movement. The commander of government troops in Oriente Province, Eugenio Cantillo, also hoped to reach a secret agreement with Castro so that Batista would step down and he himself would take over as president. Since Batista’s dictatorship had become notorious and tottering, some within U.S. imperialist circles also advocated ending support for Batista and instead finding a new agent. In 1958, the United States announced an arms embargo on Cuba and recalled its ambassador.
Under such conditions, the Castro faction greatly expanded its armed forces, then reached agreements with almost all bourgeois factions, and used its relative military advantage to become the leader of the anti-Batista alliance. What the Castro faction used to attract the masses into the guerrillas was land reform in the areas under its control, but this reform was extremely conservative and wholly inadequate; it did not distribute land to peasants free of charge, but instead “bought out the original owners.” In Cuba, where landlords monopolized all the land nationwide (47% of which was held by 2,000 of the largest estate owners) and poor peasants owned nothing, this top-down method that preserved many old relations greatly suppressed the revolutionary enthusiasm of the peasant masses. In October 1957, the Castro faction and the bourgeois party the Cuban People’s Party jointly signed the Sierra Maestra Manifesto, calling for “the establishment of a broad popular revolutionary front, including all opposition parties, all popular organizations, and all revolutionary forces.”[37] In May 1958, Castro was appointed commander-in-chief of Cuba’s “all revolutionary forces,” and the pro-U.S. bourgeois politician Manuel Urrutia was designated as provisional president after Batista’s overthrow. In July, the “July 26 Movement,” the Cuban People’s Party, the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and the “Directorio Revolucionario”[38] jointly signed the Caracas Pact, establishing the “Revolutionary Civic Front.” At the last moment before Batista’s regime was overthrown, the People’s Socialist Party also shifted to armed struggle, and the Castro faction’s dominant position was formally established.
On January 1, 1959, Batista fled by plane to the Dominican Republic. The next day, Castro’s armed forces entered the capital Havana, and the Cuban Revolution was declared victorious. According to the agreement, Urrutia became provisional president, and Castro soon became prime minister. However, with the fall of the common enemy and the failure of Castro’s attempt to seek U.S. support[39], the contradiction between the Castro faction and the various pro-U.S. bourgeois factions came to the surface, and their alliance ended in a large-scale purge by the former, which held the armed forces. At the same time, the Castro group rapidly turned toward the Soviet revisionists, and Guevara played an important role in this process.
In May 1959, under Guevara’s direction, Cuba carried out its first land reform. This reform was still extremely incomplete: private individuals could still own up to thirty caballerías, or about 6,000 mu of land — previously, about 80% of Cuban farms, fourteen out of 160 thousand households, owned no more than 150 mu of land.[40] Moreover, the confiscated lands, whether belonging to private landlords or foreign companies, were still compensated: bonds with a 20-year term and an interest rate of 4.5% were issued at the land’s appraised value.[41] In June, the United States issued a statement protesting that the compensation valuation was too low. In July, Urrutia resigned as president, and many pro-U.S. figures went into exile in the United States. In February 1960, Cuba invited Mikoyan to visit Havana; Guevara, as president of the Cuban National Bank, held several talks with him, and the two sides signed an agreement under which the Soviet Union would buy one million tons of Cuban sugar and provide a 100 million dollar loan for twelve years. From October to December, Guevara visited the Soviet Union, China, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, and other countries, and on behalf of the Cuban government signed the Soviet-Cuban joint communique, in exchange for the Soviet revisionists’ annual purchase of 2.7 million tons of Cuban sugar and other economic and technical “aid,” declaring that Cuba and the Soviet Union had “completely identical views on international issues and on the internal affairs of the two countries,” thereby acknowledging the revisionist policies of “peaceful coexistence,” “peaceful competition,” and “peaceful transition” put forward by the Khrushchev renegade clique at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. The “Bay of Pigs invasion” marked the complete rupture of U.S.-Cuban relations. In April 1961, about 1,500 anti-government armed men landed at Girón Beach on Cuba’s southwest coast under the cover of American bombers. In addition, since an anti-Castro rebellion backed by the United States had already broken out in the Escambray Mountains of Cuba in 1959–1960, the Castro group afterward completely turned toward the Soviet revisionists. In May 1961, Castro, contrary to his previous behavior, publicly announced that Cuba would henceforth become a “socialist country,” and claimed that he was now and had always been a “Marxist-Leninist.” Guevara, for his part, was ahead of him in saying at the First Latin American Youth Congress in August 1960 that the Cuban Revolution was “Marxist.” In 1961, the three factions of the Castro group — the “July 26 Movement,” the People’s Socialist Party, and the “Directorio Revolucionario” — were integrated into the “Integrated Revolutionary Organizations,” later renamed the United Party of the Socialist Revolution of Cuba (1962) and the Communist Party of Cuba (1965).
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the time when Guevara came closest to the Soviet revisionists. Faced with the United States’ ongoing plots to overthrow the Castro regime, Cuba sought aid from the Soviet revisionists. In 1962, Guevara went to Moscow as a member of the Cuban delegation to negotiate and signed the plan for the deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba by the Soviet revisionists. In July, the Soviet revisionists began secretly transporting medium-range missiles to Cuba. In October, they openly deployed missiles in Cuba, attempting to nuclear-blackmail the United States into withdrawing its medium-range missiles deployed in Turkey in 1959. However, U.S. imperialism quickly adopted counter-blackmail measures, sending large naval and air forces to blockade Cuban waters, assembling in Florida and neighboring states the largest landing force since World War II, and preparing to launch all missiles. In the end, the Soviet revisionists compromised with U.S. imperialism, withdrew all ships, bombers, and nuclear weapons from Cuba, and Khrushchev told Kennedy that he agreed to send a United Nations representative to Cuba for “on-site verification.” In order to “oppose U.S. imperialism,” Guevara did not hesitate to bring wolves into the house; he not only brought Soviet revisionist weapons and troops into Cuba, but also pushed the world to the edge of an imperialist nuclear war, fully reflecting Guevara’s weakness as a representative of the national bourgeoisie. Although his attitude toward U.S. imperialism was comparatively firm, he could not recognize the common essence of capitalist imperialism and social imperialism, and even fantasized about using the Soviet revisionists to oppose the United States, only to be betrayed in the end. After that, although Guevara gradually distanced himself from the Soviet revisionists and sometimes openly criticized them, he never gave up his illusions in them, much less took any practical action against them.
From 1961 to 1965, Guevara served as Cuba’s Minister of Industry and advocated a comparatively centralized state capitalist system, rapid industrialization, and agricultural diversification; his views sparked a “Great Debate” on economic policy in Cuba. In 1962, Castro invited “Marxist economists” from various countries to discuss the two major domestic economic lines: one, proposed by Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, formerly a member of the People’s Socialist Party and then chairman of the National Land Reform Commission, and formerly a minister in Batista’s cabinet, called for following the Soviet revisionists’ “Liberman reform,” expanding enterprise autonomy, implementing independent accounting and material incentives, and vigorously developing sugarcane cultivation in agriculture; the other, proposed by Guevara, demanded strict budgetary control over enterprises through state planning and rapid industrialization, advocated “voluntary labor,” and in agriculture favored diversified farming.
Although Guevara’s economic line appeared in the guise of “left” opposition to revisionism, and even went on to advocate the “abolition of commodity-money relations and the law of value,” and to create a so-called “new man” through a “moral incentive” opposed to material incentives, it was in fact a thoroughly bourgeois program — and one destined to fail — for the development of national capitalism. After the victory of the Cuban Revolution, although large-scale “nationalization” was implemented and the means of production formally became state property, many enterprises were in fact still controlled by the old management personnel, and the Cuban state itself gradually became a dictatorship of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. Because the government lacked control over enterprises, the so-called “state plan” and “budget control” in place at the time were entirely superficial. Without a strict accounting system, enterprise waste of budget and illegal transactions were severe: “From 1961 to 1963, the state budget was in deficit throughout. During the same three years, enterprises under the budget system stopped remitting large sums to the state budget”; “there were an average of 20,000 violations per week, worth 20 million Cuban pesos”[42]. Under such laissez-faire conditions, because the profit rate was relatively high, capital was often invested in the traditional sugarcane sector; industrialization, especially the concentrated construction of a number of capital-intensive, long-cycle heavy industrial projects, was simply impossible, and consequently it was impossible to build a relatively independent national economy. So Guevara advocated strengthening state control over enterprises through budgets and “plans.” As for his “voluntary labor,” it was in fact merely a means used by the state to mobilize labor power. In the second half of the 1960s, Castro made large-scale use of this “voluntary labor,” even involving the army or organizing workers in a semi-militarized form to engage in sugarcane cultivation. And Guevara was not against material incentives either; this was merely a misleading formulation. In fact, within Cuba’s so-called “voluntary labor,” capitalist material incentive principles were used everywhere, only in altered form, such as converting wages into social security funds, rewarding collectives rather than individuals, and punishing workers who failed to meet production quotas. Guevara’s proposals ultimately met with serious failure, first because he detached agricultural development and one-sidedly emphasized rapid industrialization. Agriculture is the foundation of industry, but Cuba’s land reform was very incomplete, and the dominance of sugarcane cultivation in agriculture did not change, making it impossible to provide industry with sufficient raw materials and markets — in 1964, under conditions of Cuba’s extremely underdeveloped industry, light industry producing consumer goods still had a surplus worth $84 million, showing how low the people’s purchasing power was, while on the other hand there was a shortage of basic consumer goods such as food, speculators made huge profits through the black market, and the anarchic nature of capitalist production had in no way been eliminated by Guevara’s “state plan.” Faced with this situation, Guevara even hoped to import funds from the Soviet Union and other countries — in February 1965, at the Second Conference of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization in Algiers, he criticized the Soviet revisionists for their trade plunder of Cuba, while at the same time demanding that “socialist countries” provide Cuba with funds — thus moving to the opposite of independent development of the national economy. In addition, since the agricultural and foreign trade sectors were in the hands of Guevara’s opponents Rodríguez and Alberto Mora, who still implemented independent accounting and vigorously developed sugarcane production and sugar exports, the economic measures taken by Guevara ultimately suffered serious failure. Even he himself had to admit: “We didn’t begin gradually with diversified farming; instead we did too much at once... as a result agricultural production generally declined,” and Cuba “built many factories... later we discovered that many of those factories had very poor technical efficiency... and the actual effect of substituting imports was also limited”[43]. Moreover, Guevara compromised with Rodríguez and others, stating that “‘we must limit our industrial production to the minimum target,’ and also increase imports of raw materials for capital, improve or replace increasingly dilapidated equipment”[44], retreating to the position of making Cuba the Soviet revisionists’ sugar base and dumping market. In 1964, Castro visited the Soviet Union, accepted the Soviet revisionists’ “international division of labor” theory, and signed a trade agreement under which Cuba would export 24 million tons of sugar to the Soviet Union over five years in exchange for machinery and equipment. In the same year, the “Four-Year Plan” proposed by Guevara in 1961 was abandoned ahead of schedule.
After that, because the Castro group implemented an economic, political, and diplomatic policy of complete alignment with the Soviet revisionists, Guevara’s power was gradually stripped away, and he attempted to seek support from the Third World and socialist China. From late 1964 to early 1965, Guevara paid long visits to China and various African countries. In December 1964, in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Guevara openly opposed the Soviet revisionists’ policy of “peaceful coexistence,” saying: “As Marxists,” “we still believe that peaceful coexistence between states does not include coexistence between exploiters and exploited, between oppressors and oppressed.” In Africa, Guevara further denounced the Soviet revisionists as “revisionists of Marxism”[45]. Guevara’s behavior aroused dissatisfaction among the Soviet revisionist agents at home. Blas Roca, former general secretary of the People’s Socialist Party, called him “the apple that sows discord in the socialist camp,” and Rodríguez criticized his theory of “spiritual incentives” as “a serious mistake caused by ignorance or delusions confusing the public”[46]. After returning home in March 1965, Guevara was absent from almost all public activities. In October, Castro read a “farewell letter” said to have been written by Guevara to him over the radio to the entire country. In the letter, besides the usual praise for Castro, Guevara said he would go to other parts of the world to “fight imperialism,” and for this purpose officially resigned his Party and ministerial posts to Castro, renouncing his Cuban nationality as a major. By then, Guevara had already been in the Congo (Kinshasa) for about five months.
The “Guerrilla Focus Theory”
Many people regard Guevara’s departure from Cuba as a sign that he “opposed revisionism” and “broke with” the Castro group; however, this plan was actually supported by the latter. On the one hand, because of the failure of Cuba’s economic construction and the stripping away of his own power, Guevara tried to reproduce elsewhere in the world the accidental victory he had achieved in Cuba a few years earlier, using another country as a base to continue anti-U.S. activity. He believed that U.S. imperialism, with its vast resources, technology, and weapons, was powerful, and that only by “creating a second and third Vietnam”[47] throughout the world could it be defeated in an environment unfamiliar to the United States, gradually weakening U.S. imperialist power. The first place he chose was the Congo (Kinshasa), “because Africa is much farther away from the United States, and because there are greater possibilities of obtaining support in terms of military logistics (for example, from the Soviet Union, China, the Arab League, Algeria)”[48], and second was Bolivia. On the other hand, Castro was also striving to “export revolution” on a Latin American and worldwide scale. On this point, unlike other satellite parties of the Soviet revisionists, Castro and the Soviet revisionists did in fact have certain contradictions: in the first half of the 1960s, in order to restore capitalism at home and extinguish the national liberation movements abroad, the Soviet revisionists implemented a diplomatic policy of “peaceful coexistence,” seeking to ease tensions with U.S. imperialism; Castro, however, energetically supported armed anti-U.S. struggles in other countries, in order to make Cuba the center of Latin American and world “anti-imperialist revolution” and establish Cuban regional hegemony. As early as the months after the victory of the Cuban Revolution, the Castro regime had launched three armed actions in succession against the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama, all of which failed. Guevara’s “expeditions” to the Congo (Kinshasa) and Bolivia were also carried out with the approval of Castro and with personnel and weapons support from the Cuban government. In April 1965, Guevara led about 125 Cuban guerrillas equipped with the latest Soviet weapons to eastern Congo (Kinshasa) to support the local national bourgeois armed forces backing former prime minister Lumumba[49]. That autumn, when the Lumumbist armed forces were losing large areas of control under large-scale attacks by the Congo (Kinshasa) government forces and the intervention troops of U.S. and Belgian imperialism, Guevara suggested to Castro that Cuban aid be canceled, and in November left Congo (Kinshasa). In November 1966, Guevara went again to the mountainous southeast of Bolivia to organize a guerrilla force. In October 1967, Guevara was killed after being captured by the Bolivian government army.
The theoretical root of the failure of Guevara’s series of military adventures lies in his anti-Marxist “guerrilla focus theory.” The philosophical basis of this theory is subjective idealism and narrow empiricism. Marxism holds that armed struggle and violent revolution arise under conditions, namely: “the ruling class is faced with a crisis and can no longer continue to rule in the old way”; “the poverty and suffering of the oppressed classes have become extraordinarily acute, and they no longer wish to live in the old way”; “the initiative of the masses has greatly increased and is manifest in revolutionary action”[50]. Yet Guevara believed: “It is not necessary to wait until all revolutionary conditions are ripe; a focus of insurrection can create these conditions,” and that “the minimum necessary conditions for the first guerrilla focus to be established and consolidated do exist,” and these “necessary conditions” are merely that “the people’s dissatisfaction has increasingly come to the surface, provoking ever stronger reactions and forming a state of resistance.”[51] In other words, regardless of circumstances, wherever there is imperialism, oppression, and discontent, one can go there and wage guerrilla warfare. At times he leaned “left,” at other times right, and also said things like: “If a government comes to power through popular elections... guerrilla warfare cannot arise before all possible legal means of struggle have been exhausted.” Guevara separated legal from illegal means, believing that one cannot wage armed struggle while carrying out parliamentary struggle; in fact, this reflected his illusions about bourgeois democracy, which were determined by his nature as a representative of the national bourgeoisie. Moreover, when Guevara wrote Guerrilla Warfare in 1960, systematically summing up his “guerrilla focus” ideas, his entire military experience amounted to only two years, and in scale (battles of a few hundred people) and scope (the eastern half of Cuba) it was quite small; yet he took such narrow experience as a general law and tried to extend it to all of Latin America and even the whole world. As we know, the victory of the Cuban Revolution was not achieved militarily.
The essence of the “guerrilla focus theory” lies in three points: “no party leadership,” “no reliance on the masses,” and “no base area”[52].
The “guerrilla focus theory” advocates a purely military line, claiming that “the gun commands the Party” and “the gun is the Party.” Guevara said: “The guerrilla force, as an armed core, is the people’s combat vanguard.” In other words, a small guerrilla force made up of young students and intellectuals, etc., should lead the national democratic revolution, neither relying on peasants (although Guevara believed that “in underdeveloped America, the battlefield of armed struggle should basically be the countryside,” the meaning of this sentence was in fact limited to the guerrillas fighting the government army in the mountains; he did not genuinely win over the peasants), nor on workers (Bolivian miners had a long revolutionary tradition; they organized unions and even had their own armed forces, but Guevara was not sincerely united with them and instead demanded that they abandon their independent struggle and join the “guerrilla focus”). Such a force could not possibly have a relatively thorough national democratic program, much less a program for transitioning from democratic revolution to socialist revolution. Under such theoretical guidance, it is hardly surprising that the warlords headed by Castro usurped leadership of the Cuban Revolution.
Engels pointed out: “Mass uprisings, revolutionary war, guerrilla units everywhere — this is the only method by which a small nation can defeat a larger one, or an army that is not strong enough can resist a more powerful and better organized army.”[53] Yet the “guerrilla focus theory” detached itself from the masses. How should guerrilla warfare begin? Guevara said: “It must begin with secret work. This secret work is carried out by a few founders, and it is unrelated to the actions of the people.” How should guerrilla forces expand? Guevara said: “Once it (referring to the guerrilla force — note by the author) has carried out several successful surprise attacks, its name spreads, and then some peasants who have been deprived of their land or are fighting to defend their land, as well as idealistic youths from other classes, come to join the guerrillas.” Guevara pinned all hopes on the chance victory of a small “expeditionary force” organized from abroad, believing that this would automatically attract peasants to join the guerrillas, without going among the local masses to do political work. Even in the Congo (Kinshasa), because of the language barrier, his force could barely communicate with the local people. If one does not safeguard the interests of the masses and does not carry out revolutionary propaganda among the masses, naturally one cannot expect the masses to join and support the guerrillas, nor can one expect the masses to provide information and cover for the guerrillas. The result is self-isolation from the people, leaving the government free to carry out reactionary propaganda among the masses; yet Guevara instead thought the peasants were “untrustworthy,” and everywhere he feared leaks, arresting peasants, but in the end he was still captured and killed because of betrayal.
The “guerrilla focus theory” was also a theory of roving banditry. Guevara said: “Some contemptuously call guerrilla warfare ‘hit and run.’ Guerrilla warfare is exactly like that. Hit and run, wait, observe, then hit and run again, and repeat this cycle.” Moreover, in tactics he vacillated between advocating splitting forces — “when the guerrilla force has become sufficiently strong in weapons and numbers, it should organize new columns” — thereby preventing revolutionary forces from concentrating; and advocating concentrating forces for “conventional war” — “in such a situation (referring to an attack on a heavily guarded enemy-occupied area — note by the author), the columns should gather together and form a dense front, fighting positional warfare, that is, the kind of war carried out by regular armies” — thereby compelling guerrillas, who were inferior in both numbers and equipment, to carry out tasks beyond their capacity. Moreover, without unrestricted mobile warfare and without a consolidated base area, land reform cannot be carried out and the support of poor and lower-middle peasants cannot be won; and in semi-colonial, semi-feudal Latin America, the numerous and deeply oppressed peasants are precisely the decisive force of the national democratic revolution. But Guevara not only did not build base areas, his attitude toward land reform was also extremely conservative: he said, “In the early stage of guerrilla war... as far as possible, the rich should be bothered as little as possible,” and “the right of property owners to receive cash compensation for property used for social welfare should always be respected.” As a representative of the national bourgeoisie, the bourgeois legal notion that “private property is sacred and inviolable” and the myriad ties with the feudal land system were precisely the fundamental reasons for the failure of the armed struggle he led.
In short, Guevara’s “guerrilla focus theory” was theoretically wrong and practically reactionary. His theory became widespread during a period of fierce struggle between Marxism and revisionism in the international communist movement, when the revisionists headed by the Soviet revisionists were promoting theories of “peaceful coexistence” and the parliamentary road that had already lost popular support. Yet the so-called “guerrilla focus theory” appeared at this time in a “left,” “extremely revolutionary” guise, leading many revolutionaries who opposed revisionism and upheld armed struggle, but who were influenced by petty-bourgeois ideas and had not yet found the correct direction, onto a wrong path, causing ideological confusion, damaging the national liberation and communist movements, and producing very bad effects.
From participating in reform activities of the national bourgeoisie in various Latin American countries, to jointly usurping the fruits of the Cuban Revolution with Castro, implementing economic policies aimed at developing capitalism after the revolution, at one point drawing close to the Soviet revisionists in order to resist the United States and attract investment, and then after political defeat establishing military adventure “guerrilla foci” in places such as the Congo (Kinshasa) and Bolivia and undermining local national liberation movements — Che Guevara was never a Marxist, only a comparatively radical bourgeois democrat. In the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, he read a few books by Marx and Lenin, and in order to realize a bourgeois democratic republic, and in order to gain the support of the broad masses of workers and peasants and of socialist countries, he used Marxist phrases and dressed himself up as a Marxist, but deep in his soul he was always a bourgeois king. Chairman Mao said: “The final dividing line between revolutionary, non-revolutionary, and counter-revolutionary intellectuals lies in whether they are willing to and actually do integrate themselves with the workers and peasants. Their final dividing line is solely on this point, and not on how much they say... Marxism.”[54] It was precisely because Guevara was divorced from the people — his worldview was subjective idealism and individual heroism, his eyes looked upward, and he merely treated the masses as a tool for achieving personal ends without truly understanding or relying on the power of the masses — that he gradually degenerated from opposing imperialism into compromise with social imperialism and feudal comprador forces, ultimately moving toward reaction and destruction. This is something worth profound reflection for each of us.
As for those who revere Guevara, they are just like their idol, merely using the proletarian movement for personal gain. They are a group of fake communists. Most of them come from the property-owning classes. On the one hand they are detached from labor and detached from the people; on the other hand they feel oppressed in capitalist society (under the rule of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie in the revisionist countries, there are many such people, coming from all classes — proletariat, petty bourgeoisie, and even bourgeoisie) — oppressed by officials, capitalists, parents, or teachers, dissatisfied with the status quo, and demanding certain changes that are favorable to themselves, “so as to make the existing society as agreeable and comfortable as possible for them.”[55] Because Marxism is all-powerful and correct, because Marxism is the doctrine of all the oppressed, they feel that Marxist theory can explain some phenomena in their own lives and that certain anti-oppression phrases in Marxism suit their tastes. So they call themselves “Marxists,” while at the same time “restricting, severing, and distorting Marxism in theory and practice”[56], turning it into a tool that serves only their own or their group’s interests. They hope to catch a free ride on the proletarian movement, or to make a big profit from it. Therefore, they often exhibit the characteristics of endlessly talking about revolution but getting off the train once they reach the station, of talking ultra-revolutionary but acting ultra-conservative, of endlessly speaking of the people and the proletariat, while inwardly remaining a bourgeois kingdom. True revolutionaries must keep their eyes open and see these people clearly.
It must be especially pointed out that a person’s way of life determines his political appearance. The reason these people fanatically worship Guevara is, to a large extent, nothing more than “liking the tree and its bark together,” nothing more than envy of the fame and power Guevara seized, and a pursuit of Guevara’s bourgeois way of life, while then glorifying him as the representative of that way of life. They dress Guevara up as a “communist fighter,” praise him as the embodiment of “virtue” and “conscience,” and say that he betrayed his class for the laboring people, gave up his power for the sake of “fighting revisionism and preventing revisionism,” and sacrificed his life for the “world revolution”... But “conscience is determined by a person’s... entire way of life”[57]; apart from one’s way of life, there is no such thing as virtue or conscience. Guevara’s life was always luxurious and debauched. In addition to what has already been mentioned above, he always presented himself with a high-end cigar in his mouth, quickly moved into a former Batista strongman’s mansion after the victory of the Cuban Revolution[58], enjoyed all sorts of privileges thanks to his power and status[59], and who knows how many women he deceived and toyed with[60]. Such bourgeois elements could not possibly have any common feelings with the laboring people, much less make any real sacrifices for the revolution. This false notion of separating political appearance from way of life, thus opening the way for personal opportunism in revolution and the pursuit of enjoyment, is also something we must oppose.
In contrast to Guevara, José Martí, who always maintained a flesh-and-blood connection with the people and persisted in progress in the struggle for national freedom and liberation, stands on the other end of the democratic camp.
In 1853, José Martí was born into an extremely impoverished family in Havana, Cuba. In 1869, during Cuba’s First War of Independence, Martí, then only 16, began to take part in the national liberation movement and co-founded the patriotic publication Free Fatherland with comrades. That same year, Martí was arrested for anti-Spanish activity, sentenced to six years of hard labor, and later commuted to exile in the metropole thanks to the rescue efforts of friends. During several years abroad, Martí kept writing and speaking, supporting and praising the Cuban Revolution. In 1878, taking advantage of a political amnesty, Martí returned to his homeland. He was appointed the representative inside Cuba of the Cuban Revolutionary Committee in New York, and actively participated in preparations for the 1879–1880 uprising. In 1879, Martí was arrested for planning to secretly transport weapons and ammunition into the country, and was again sent to Spain. In 1880, Martí fled through France to the United States, and for the next fifteen years traveled tirelessly, striving unceasingly to establish a revolutionary party that united anti-imperialist patriotic forces from all classes. From 1890 to 1892, with Martí’s promotion, the Cuban Patriotic League and the Cuban Revolutionary Party were successively founded. In February 1895, Cuba’s Second War of Independence broke out; Martí immediately returned to his homeland after more than ten years away and entered the fierce armed struggle. On May 5, under Martí’s chairmanship, all the insurgents decided at a meeting to convene a constituent assembly in the autumn, so as to establish a provisional revolutionary government. On May 19, Martí was unfortunately killed in a heroic charge against Spanish troops, at the age of only 42.
Martí’s life was one of sharing fortune and misfortune with the people, of being flesh and blood with them, of self-transformation steadfastly in the cause of national independence, and of being a great revolutionary democrat and anti-imperialist fighter; this is precisely his precious quality and outstanding feature.
Flesh and Blood with the People
Martí’s family was very poor. His father had originally been a peasant, later served as an artilleryman in the Spanish army, and then supported a family of eight by tailoring. Because of poverty, Martí did not enter primary school until he was twelve or thirteen; before that, he had always helped his mother with housework at home, or done odd jobs outside to supplement the family income. Under Spanish colonial rule, the Cuban people, especially Black slaves, lived in abject misery. In 1817, among the Black people who made up about half of Cuba’s population, two-thirds were slaves[61], and they suffered brutal exploitation on plantations and in mines. Later, Spanish colonizers imported roughly 600,000 Black slaves and more than 140,000 Chinese indentured laborers. The barbaric slave system was not abolished until after the 1879–1880 uprising. This left a profound impression on Martí’s young mind; he began to develop an intense hatred toward the oppressors and linked his own suffering with that of the people. When Martí later recalled his childhood, he wrote the following poem:
The round red sun breaks through the dense fog,
rising over the desert-like sea.
And high upon a branch
hangs a young slave in chains.
No, a child will never forget:
when tears of pain were falling,
he once swore before this body
to avenge all those enslaved.[62]
His first experience of arrest further deepened this thought. He was sent to a quarry for hard labor, where under the blazing sun and the whip of the prison guards, the young Martí and other patriots hauled stones from knee-deep river water and carried them on their shoulders. But the heavy labor did not crush Martí; rather, it broadened his horizons, intensified his hatred, and strengthened his will. Martí saw that everyone from elderly men in their seventies — brigadier generals who had once led anti-Spanish uprisings — to children of twelve whose parents had been arrested for opposing Spanish rule, were subjected to the most inhumane beatings and abuse by the colonizers simply for seeking the freedom and independence of their nation. He said: “In prison, some people suffered more than I did, ... I am only one link in the chain, ... I am only a drop in the sea of blood.”[63] “When others are suffering even more deeply than I am, why should I speak of myself? When others are weeping blood, what right do I have to shed tears?” “A few months ago, my life was just my mother’s kiss, and my glory was just the dream of school; my worries in life were only that I might lose my mother’s kiss forever, and my troubles in life were only losing the dream of school. What does any of that matter? I contemptuously keep silent about today’s suffering, and that contempt is more precious than all my former glory.”[64] From then on, Martí was no longer a child or student; he became a fighter for the freedom of his homeland.
From 1870 to 1875, Martí’s sentence was commuted to exile in the metropole. But he was neither bought off by the colonizers’ false compassion nor did he forget the suffering and struggle of his homeland’s people. While studying and entering university to pursue law, philosophy, literature, and linguistics, while working to support himself and pay tuition, he also actively engaged in propaganda and agitation, loudly calling for the cause of national independence. In such a hard life, Martí’s health was poor and he was often ill, yet he did not stop his work.
From 1880 to 1895, Martí worked in the United States preparing the revolutionary party’s unification. During this period, he not only remained in close contact with the people of his homeland, but also had in-depth contact with workers, women, Black people, and Indigenous peoples in the United States, expressing heartfelt sympathy and support for their struggles for their own rights. At that time, many Cuban workers lived in the United States. The newly formed Cuban proletariat actively participated in the national liberation struggle. Although they lived in poverty, they still donated a tenth of their meager wages to support the patriotic movement; this later became a conscious practice that was never interrupted before or during the Second War of Independence. Martí saw the great strength contained in the new Cuban proletariat and made them one of the main targets of his propaganda work. The newspaper of the Cuban Revolutionary Party — The Homeland — was founded by Martí with funds raised by tobacco workers. He highly praised the patriotic spirit of the Cuban proletariat: “In order to put weapons in the hands of fighters for the liberation of the homeland, they gave up bread and cheap wine for their entire families, gave up clothes and medicine for their children,” and “Cubans who, with their calloused hands, made a precious contribution to the treasury of freedom and justice... are the people of whom the homeland is proud.”
In addition to speaking to his compatriots, Martí also served as a teacher for the Black Workers’ Defense Association, gave free lectures to American workers, and enthusiastically supported their struggles. In the United States, although Black slavery had been abolished after the Civil War, reactionary plantation-owner forces were not destroyed because of bourgeois compromise; they turned newly freed Black people into tenant farmers and carried out brutal exploitation through sharecropping. Martí spoke for the oppressed and discriminated-against Black masses, firmly opposing racial discrimination. He pointed out: “The slave condition does not imply inferiority in the enslaved race,” “Black people are neither lower nor higher because they are Black,” and “there is nothing innate in Black people that is sinful or virulent.” Martí believed that skin color was not the criterion for distinguishing people; one should look at their qualities instead: “Whether white or Black, on one side are always those who value luxury and harbor selfishness, and on the other are those who are generous, magnanimous, and selfless.”[65] Moreover, Martí particularly emphasized the unity of the oppressed classes regardless of race. He believed that, on the one hand, the isolated racist tendencies existing among Black people at the time were caused by white racial discrimination and oppression; on the other hand, if Black people persisted in racism, they could not achieve true liberation.
In 1886, American workers staged a nationwide strike for the eight-hour workday. The reactionary U.S. government bought off anarchists to create incidents, manufactured the bloody Haymarket massacre in Chicago, and sentenced seven workers’ leaders to death. The day after the executions, Martí immediately wrote “The Horrible Tragedy,” denouncing the crimes of the American bourgeoisie in suppressing and persecuting workers. In this article, he enthusiastically praised several workers’ leaders sentenced to hanging as heroes in the mold of John Brown; exposed the injustice of the American legal and judicial system — the framed workers’ leaders were sentenced to death, while detective henchmen who shot children went unpunished; and, in particular, pointed out the hypocrisy of the bourgeois democratic republic — in the United States ruled by monopoly capitalists, society was increasingly splitting into two extremes, with the rich enjoying privilege and extravagant luxury, while the poor were cold and hungry and had nowhere to die. On this point, there was no difference between republic and monarchy, or between America and Europe.
Martí was filled with deep sympathy for the working class and also expressed admiration and respect for their revolutionary mentor. In an article mourning Marx’s death, he wrote: “Karl Marx has died... he was not only the great awakener of the discontent of European laborers, but also a far-sighted prophet of the causes of human poverty and human destiny... he was the noblest hero and the most far-sighted thinker in the world of labor....”[66]
In addition, because of Martí’s activities, many Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Paraguay, appointed him consul in New York, and many newspapers and magazines invited him to be a correspondent. But Martí did not thereby embark on a path of detachment from the masses and pursuit of personal success; rather, he used these opportunities to carry out revolutionary propaganda, exerting enormous influence on Latin American intellectual and cultural circles.
During the Second War of Independence, although he was not a military leader, Martí believed that at the decisive moment when the people of his homeland were fighting bravely with weapons in hand, since he had been appointed major general of the national liberation army, he too must fight on the battlefield like any ordinary soldier. Finally, in May 1895, in the Battle of Dos Ríos, Martí was unfortunately killed in a charge, and like Abdallah, the hero he had shaped at the age of 16, he gave his life to the cause of freedom and liberation of his homeland:
To prove the noble value of life,
we must struggle, not shrink from sacrifice,
for the salvation of others, if needed,
we can lay down our lives with honor.
……
Victory! ... I will die in happiness.
What is death to me — I have saved the homeland!
How beautiful death is, when we give ourselves for the homeland,
for the freedom of the homeland![67]
Martí was not only born among the laboring people, but always maintained a flesh-and-blood connection with the masses; he regarded himself as one part of the masses, not as any “hero” or “savior” standing above them. He pointed out: “The people, the sorrowful masses, are the leaders of the revolution.” “The greatness of leaders lies not in themselves — even if it appears so on the surface — but in the extent to which they serve the people....” Compared with Guevara’s individual heroism and theory of “mass backwardness,” the difference is obvious.
Persisting in Progress
Martí was not a revolutionary democrat from the beginning; he transformed from reformism to revolutionary democracy after a long and arduous ideological struggle.
During his exile in Spain, Martí was basically still a reformist. This was because Spain had erupted in a bourgeois revolution in 1868 and established a republic in 1873, and Martí at the time hoped that the bourgeois republican camp would extend the principles of “freedom,” “equality,” and “fraternity” to relations with the colonies. He wrote a series of articles appealing to the Spanish ruling class and demanding that they allow Cuban independence. However, on the colonial question, the bourgeoisie that had just seized power was no different from the deposed feudal nobility; they still hoped to plunder raw materials and enormous profits from Cuba and included Cuba in the territory of Spain in the republican constitution. Moreover, with the restoration of monarchy in Spain in 1874, Cuba’s war of independence suffered even more brutal repression. Reality made Martí realize that the liberation of the homeland could never rely on the ruling class of the metropole, but had to be won by the people of the nation themselves. So when the Spanish parliament was full of reactionary cries of “Long live Spanish Cuba!”, Martí angrily wrote: “No! ... Long live free Cuba!”
The consequences of the Pact of Zanjón made Martí understand even more clearly the reactionary nature of reformism. In 1878, after military defeat, elements of the landlord bourgeoisie within the revolutionary camp took the opportunity to compromise with Spain and signed the Zanjón Armistice. The cunning Spanish colonizers hypocritically promised to implement “political reforms,” allowing Cubans to elect their own representatives to the Spanish parliament, and promised freedom and some easing of economic restrictions to the Black slaves and contract laborers who had taken part in the independence war, while the revolutionary army handed over all its weapons and ammunition. Yet after the armistice, not a single one of the Spaniards’ promises was fulfilled. Politically, Cuba’s representatives in the Spanish parliament were in fact entirely designated by the Spanish royal family and the Cuban colonial authorities; only one-quarter of them were born in Cuba. Restrictions on elections were also very strict: only those paying 125 pesos in taxes per year had the right to vote. Economically, the property of the revolutionaries who had taken part in the Ten Years’ War was completely confiscated. The slavery that was “abolished” in 1886 merely changed form; the slaves became serfs and were still exploited by their former owners who monopolized the land, and many of the former slaves remained slaves.[68] Moreover, in order to make up for the huge consumption during the war, Spain once again tightened economic plunder of Cuba and imposed heavy taxes, further impoverishing the Cuban people. Martí thus completely broke with reformism; together with patriots led by General Antonio Maceo and the broad masses of the people who persisted in struggle, he began preparing a violent revolution armed against colonial rule. “Because one comes from the old fortress, the situation is seen more clearly; by turning the spear back, one can easily deal the fatal blow to the strong enemy.”[69] At the time, some landlord-bourgeois elements who advocated autonomism and reformism still tried to win over Martí, but Martí called these surrenderists who knelt before the enemy begging for “freedom” “beggars,” and firmly said: “Rights are not obtained by begging; they must be seized by force!”
Martí’s spirit of persisting in progress for the sake of the people’s interests is truly precious. His path of persisting in ideological struggle and self-transformation stands in sharp contrast once again to Guevara’s path of upholding the bourgeois line and ultimately moving toward reaction.
Resolute Anti-Imperialism
Martí’s anti-imperialist thought was relatively thorough. When the main enemy of Cuban independence was still Spain, he already foresaw that the emerging U.S. imperialism was scheming to replace it, and he called for abandoning all illusions that the United States might support Cuban independence, remaining vigilant, and preparing at all times to fight the new colonizer while opposing the old one. The course of history proved the correctness of Martí’s foresight. This is also fundamentally opposed to Guevara’s one-sided anti-imperialist line, which opposed capitalist imperialism but not social imperialism.
Martí also initially had some illusions about the United States, which claimed to be “democratic” and “free.” However, living in the “heart of the devil” allowed him to “know its entrails inside and out.” He quickly realized that the United States, ruled by monopoly capital, was not only marked by fierce class struggle and sharp polarization between rich and poor, but that its so-called “democratic” elections were nothing more than a carriage “driven by golden wheels”; moreover, its expansionist ambitions were constantly growing, and it was increasingly frantically pursuing a policy of colonial aggression internationally. When the U.S. imperialists convened the First Pan-American Conference, Martí pointed out that one must “under no circumstances” believe that this conference had “nothing to do with the U.S. invasion and open aggression against the countries of the American continent,” and called on Latin American countries to stand like trees “in a row and block the path of the giant in boots!”
At the same time, Martí’s views on developing independent international trade and a national economy were also more profound than Guevara’s. He pointed out: “Whoever advocates economic union advocates political union. He who buys gives orders, he who sells must bow and scrape. To guarantee freedom, one must achieve a balance in trade. If a nation wants to die, let it sell its goods to only one country; if a nation wants to live, it must sell to more than one country...”[70]
It must be pointed out that although Martí expressed sincere sympathy for the working class and socialism, he was not a Marxist. The principled differences between the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats and the proletarian revolutionaries, mentioned earlier, still existed in him.
First, Martí’s political ideal was to establish a democratic republic based on small landownership, not a socialist state based on public ownership of the means of production. Influenced by the American petty-bourgeois economist Henry George, he believed that possession of small plots of land was the guarantee of independence and freedom, opposed excessive concentration of land and property, and advocated distributing land to peasants for cultivation and, on that basis, gradually achieving equal wealth and universal happiness through a single tax levied by the state and used for public purposes. We know that because of the instability of small-scale production and the differentiation of petty producers, Martí’s view was nothing more than a utopia, and once put into practice, it would become “a land program that would most rapidly develop capitalism in agriculture”[71].
Second, Martí had no scientific class viewpoint. Although he recognized the opposition between the poor and the rich, and between workers and capitalists, he did not understand this as the opposition and struggle of classes. On the contrary, he vulgarized the concept of class, regarding it as an abstract and moral category rather than an economic and political one. He said: “People can only be divided into two classes: the class of good people and the class of bad people,” or into “the weak” and “the strong,” “the lowly” and “the proud.” This revealed his humanist thought. In evaluating the revolutionary mentor of the proletariat, on the one hand Martí considered Marx respectable because “he stood on the side of the weak”[72]. This reflects that Martí did not truly understand the strength of the proletariat, and mainly regarded them as the class suffering the most and therefore worthy of sympathy. At the same time, Martí did not distinguish the proletariat from workers in general, not understanding that the proletariat, due to its class position, production practice, and representation of new production relations, possesses a high degree of discipline and thorough revolutionary character that no other class has, but instead understood their strength narrowly in terms of numbers[73]. It is clear that his sympathy for the proletariat and laborers was still, to some extent, rooted in bourgeois humanism. On the other hand, he also believed that Marx was “a little too impatient,” and “should teach people to make up for harm in a gentle way”[74]. This shows that although Martí could firmly advocate violent revolution on the issue of national independence, gradualism and non-violence still left certain remnants in his worldview. Moreover, Martí also harbored class-collaborationist ideas; he believed the Cuban Revolution was for “the fair interests of all classes, not of any single class”[75]. The slogan he proposed — “with everyone, for everyone’s interests” — while progressive in uniting patriotic forces during the Second War of Independence, was fundamentally supra-class. And it was precisely because of the influence of this supra-class view that the Cuban Revolutionary Party platform drafted under Martí did not involve the land question — although he himself supported peasant land ownership — but merely put forward demands such as overthrowing Spanish rule and establishing a democratic republic. While uniting some anti-Spanish elements within the landlord class, it neglected to fully mobilize the peasant masses; this cannot but be considered an important reason why the Second War of Independence was later usurped by pro-U.S. forces and ultimately failed (although the deception and intervention of U.S. imperialism played the main role).
The reason such contradictions arose in Martí’s thought was that on the one hand he sympathized with the laboring people, while on the other hand he fantasized that Cuba could avoid the social ills and sharp class contradictions of developed capitalist countries such as the United States. This was determined by his social position as a petty bourgeois and by the fact that he had not thoroughly transformed himself into the proletariat and the laboring people. Of course, his early death also deprived him of the opportunity to complete such a transformation.
In short, despite his limitations, Martí remains a great revolutionary democrat and the national hero of Cuba. Although he did not call himself a socialist, he was closer to the people than Guevara, who did, and made a greater contribution than the latter to the liberation cause of the Cuban nation. Some of his precious qualities are worth learning from from the standpoint of the proletariat.
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Lenin: “The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx,” Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 2, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Ma Yanzhang: “The Struggle of Marx and Engels Against the Bourgeois Democrats,” Peking University Journal, 1976, No. 4. ↑
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Lenin: “The Attitude of the Social-Democrats Toward the Peasant Movement,” Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Ma Yanzhang: “The Struggle of Marx and Engels Against the Bourgeois Democrats,” Peking University Journal, 1976, No. 4. ↑
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Marx: “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Marx and Engels: “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Marx and Engels: “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Marx and Engels: “The Communist Manifesto,” Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Dugan: “North and South America,” cited in William Z. Foster, Outline History of the Political History of the Americas, Sanlian Bookstore, 1961. ↑
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Peña’s report on the World Federation of Trade Unions economic conference delivered in Havana in June 1949, cited in William Z. Foster, Outline History of the Political History of the Americas, Sanlian Bookstore, 1961. ↑
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William Z. Foster, Outline History of the Political History of the Americas, Sanlian Bookstore, 1961. (Unless otherwise noted, data in this section are all from this book.) ↑
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Peking University Department of History, Concise World History Writing Group: Concise World History, Modern Part, People’s Publishing House, 1974. ↑
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Kundanila: “An Opinion from a Latin American,” cited in William Z. Foster, Outline History of the Political History of the Americas, Sanlian Bookstore, 1961. ↑
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Report of the Latin American Labor Alliance Congress held in Cali, Colombia in 1944, cited in William Z. Foster, Outline History of the Political History of the Americas, Sanlian Bookstore, 1961. ↑
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Mao Zedong: “On Coalition Government,” Selected Works of Mao Zedong, one-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967. ↑
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José Martí, cited in Wu Jipeng: “José Martí, Cuba’s National Hero,” Historical Teaching, 1963, No. 3. ↑
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Sur, Efron, and Ness: Latin America in the Future World, cited in William Z. Foster, Outline History of the Political History of the Americas, Sanlian Bookstore, 1961. ↑
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Che Guevara: Motorcycle Diaries. ↑
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That is, the government of Laureano Gómez, which had bloodily suppressed a peasant uprising. ↑
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In April 1952, a popular uprising broke out in Bolivia, and the pro-U.S. military dictatorship of Hugo Ballivián was overthrown. Estenssoro, as the representative of the national bourgeoisie, became president, nationalized the mines, and carried out land reform. ↑
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Jacobo Árbenz represented the interests of the national bourgeoisie; while in office he implemented a relatively independent foreign policy and a relatively radical land reform, confiscating 554,000 hectares from the United Fruit Company and large landowners. In 1954, under the scheme of U.S. imperialism, the reactionary officer Castillo Armas launched an armed coup and overthrew the Árbenz government. ↑
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J. L. Rafetsky: A Biography of Guevara, People’s Publishing House, 1974. ↑
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Hong Yu yi: The Anti-U.S. Liberation Struggles in Brazil, Bolivia, and Guatemala, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1958. ↑
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Marx: “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Che Guevara, cited in Mark: “Che, Armed Struggle and Revolutionary Politics,” Communist Voice, August 10, 1997. ↑
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Lázaro Cárdenas, cited in Alperovich and Lavrov: Outline of Modern Mexican History, Sanlian Bookstore, 1974. ↑
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His ideas on armed struggle, namely the “guerrilla focus theory,” are anti-mass and anti-people, as we shall mention later. ↑
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The former Cuban Communist Party, founded in 1925, followed Browder’s right opportunist line during the Second World War and thereafter gradually degenerated into a revisionist bourgeois social democratic party advocating the parliamentary road. In 1940–1944 it supported and participated in Batista’s regime, and two of its senior leaders served as cabinet ministers. In 1944 it was renamed the People’s Socialist Party and allied with the bourgeois Party of the People in the presidential election. The People’s Socialist Party long opposed the armed overthrow of Batista’s regime, regarding Castro’s 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks as an “adventurist action.” Only on the eve of the Cuban Revolution’s victory did it ally itself with the “July 26 Movement,” i.e. the Castro faction, and turn to armed struggle. After the victory of the Cuban Revolution, the People’s Socialist Party became part of the Castro ruling group. In 1961 it joined the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations, which became the United Party of the Socialist Revolution of Cuba (1962–1965) and the Communist Party of Cuba (1965– ). ↑
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Li Chunhui: Draft History of Latin American Countries, Commercial Press, 1973. ↑
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Fernando Freire, Castro’s university classmate, cited in Hugh Thomas, Castro and Cuba, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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Hugh Thomas, Castro and Cuba, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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“He (Castro — note by the author) himself had no ill feeling toward Batista, and his father also knew him (Batista — note by the author) and felt grateful to him.” Castro once contacted him through his brother-in-law — Díaz Baralt, Batista’s deputy minister of the interior — saying: “If Batista returns with the purpose of seizing power by force (referring to Batista’s return to Cuba from the United States after the 1948 election — note by the author), then he could count on his help.” (Hugh Thomas, Castro and Cuba, People’s Publishing House, 1975) ↑
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Later renamed the “July 26 Movement” to commemorate Castro’s failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953. ↑
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Hugh Thomas, Castro and Cuba, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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Che Guevara: “Cuba: Vanguard of the Anti-Colonial Struggle or Historical Exception?,” cited in Daniel James, Che Guevara, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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Primarily Castro’s “July 26 Movement” and the pro-U.S. bourgeois “Second National Front of the Escambray,” which had grown to about seven thousand and about three thousand people respectively by the eve of the December 1958 victory of the revolution. ↑
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Che Guevara: Memoirs of the Cuban Revolutionary War, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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An anti-Batista student organization founded in 1954, which once organized a failed attack on Batista’s presidential palace on March 13, 1957. ↑
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Just as Castro originally did not oppose Batista, he also did not oppose the United States in the early period after the victory of the revolution; on the contrary, he vigorously sought support from U.S. imperialism for his regime. In April 1959, without receiving an official invitation, Castro made an eleven-day visit to the United States, making it the first country he visited as head of state. During the visit, Castro emphasized that the Cuban Revolution “was not red, not totalitarian, but olive-green and humanitarian,” and held talks with then U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter. However, Castro did not win favor from U.S. imperialism; Nixon said Castro either “has incredible naïve ideas about communism, or is already under communist doctrine.” U.S. imperialists were unwilling to support Castro for the following reasons: the provisional government had not fulfilled its promise to hold elections; Castro, who controlled the military, might become a second Batista; Castro was at the time gradually drawing closer to the People’s Socialist Party, the Soviet revisionist satellite party; compared with Castro, they already had many more reliable agents in Cuba in various respects, such as Urrutia, the first prime minister of the provisional government José Miró, former Cuban president Prío Socarrás, and Escambray’s Second National Front leader Gutiérrez Menoyo. ↑
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The 1946 Agricultural Survey, cited in Hugh Thomas, Castro and Cuba, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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Cuba’s second land reform in 1963 still stipulated that private individuals could own up to five caballerías, or about 1,000 mu of land, and compensation was still given for expropriated land; estates of five caballerías or more that were “well run and fully cooperated with the state in production and delivery” were not expropriated. ↑
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Mark: “Cuba in the 1960s: Bureaucrats Detach from Workers and Move Toward ‘Communism,’” Communist Voice, April 20, 1998. ↑
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Che Guevara: “The Economy of Cuba — Its Past History and Present Importance,” cited in Daniel James, Che Guevara, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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Daniel James, Che Guevara, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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Daniel James, Che Guevara, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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Same as above. ↑
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Che Guevara: “Message to the World’s Peoples.” ↑
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Che Guevara, cited in Daniel James, Che Guevara, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
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In June 1960, Congo (Kinshasa) declared independence from Belgium, and Patrice Lumumba, the representative of the national bourgeoisie, became the first prime minister of Congo (Kinshasa) by election, advocating anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and peaceful neutral foreign policies. Between July and September of that year, under armed aggression by Belgian and U.S. imperialism and the military coup of their lackey Joseph Mobutu, Lumumba’s government was overthrown; U.S. imperialism manipulated the “United Nations forces” to place Lumumba under house arrest, and later had him killed by the military clique of Moïse Tshombe. In August 1961, the U.S. manipulated the establishment of the puppet government of Cyrille Adoula; Lumumba’s deputy Antoine Gizenga compromised with imperialist forces and participated in the Adoula regime. In 1963, with the support of the Congolese masses, the Lumumbists once again launched armed struggle in the eastern and western regions of the country. In November 1965, the main forces of the Lumumbist armed groups were suppressed jointly by the Congolese government and Belgian and U.S. imperialism, though remnants continued the struggle for a considerable period. ↑
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Peking University Department of International Politics: History of the International Communist Movement, Vol. 1, Commercial Press, 1976. ↑
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Che Guevara: Guerrilla Warfare, People’s Publishing House, 1975. (Unless otherwise noted, Guevara’s words in this section are all from this book.) ↑
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Funai Su: “Creative Experience of the Revolutionary Modern Peking Opera < Dujuan Mountain >.” ↑
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Engels: “The Defeat of the Piedmontese Army,” Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Mao Zedong: “The May Fourth Movement,” Selected Works of Mao Zedong, one-volume edition, People’s Publishing House, 1967. ↑
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Marx and Engels: “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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Zhang Chunqiao: “On the Comprehensive Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie,” Red Flag magazine, 1975, No. 4. ↑
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Marx: “The Trial of Gottschalk and His Comrades,” Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 6, People’s Publishing House, 1961. ↑
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In March 1959, Guevara, through the authorities and on the pretext of “recuperating,” moved into a villa belonging to the former provincial governor under Batista. Based on his salary as an officer, he could never have afforded such a mansion. Only after public exposure by his political opponents did Guevara have to promise, “Once my health recovers a little, I will move out of this villa.” (J. L. Rafetsky: A Biography of Guevara, People’s Publishing House, 1974) ↑
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Cuba implemented a food rationing system for a period. Once, when subordinates complained that the food ration was too small, Guevara angrily said that “his family had never felt there was not enough food,” only to discover that his family enjoyed a larger ration than ordinary families. (J. L. Rafetsky: A Biography of Guevara, People’s Publishing House, 1974) ↑
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Guevara advocated a reactionary bourgeois theory of casual relations between the sexes; he once said: “No one has ever stipulated that a man must live with the same woman for a lifetime. ... Marxism is not puritanism.” Guevara had a total of four public wives or mistresses, and other licentious behavior such as extramarital affairs was countless. During a visit to Egypt, Guevara even prepared to engage in prostitution in front of Egyptian personnel, and afterward shamelessly asked his guards to “send in a few more girls like that.” (Shi Yonggang and Zhan Juan: Illustrated Biography of Che Guevara, Writers Publishing House, 2005) ↑
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1817 population census data. ↑
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José Martí: “Suddenly a Deep Crimson Ray,” Selected Poems of Martí, People’s Literature Publishing House, 1958. ↑
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José Martí: “The Political Prison in Cuba,” cited in Chen Jiarong: José Martí, Commercial Press, 1962. (Unless otherwise noted, Martí’s words below are all from this book.) ↑
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José Martí: “Hard Labor of Political Prisoners in Cuba.” (Different translation of the same article as the previous note.) ↑
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José Martí: “My Race.” ↑
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José Martí: “In Memory of Marx,” cited in Chen Jiarong: José Martí, Commercial Press, 1962. ↑
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José Martí: “Abdala,” Selected Poems of Martí, People’s Literature Publishing House, 1958. ↑
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Li Chunhui: Draft History of Latin American Countries, Vol. 1, Commercial Press, 1973. ↑
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Lu Xun: “Afterword to ‘The Tomb.’” ↑
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José Martí, cited in Regino Pedroso: “Let Him Continue to Live in the Heart of the Homeland — Speech at the Commemoration of the 110th Anniversary of the Birth of Cuba’s National Hero José Martí.” ↑
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Lenin: “Democracy and Narodism in China,” Selected Works of Lenin, Vol. 2, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
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José Martí: “In Memory of Marx.” ↑
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“In this country of many laborers (referring to the United States — note by the author), the union of laborers will be immensely powerful.” (José Martí, cited in Regino Pedroso: “Let Him Continue to Live in the Heart of the Homeland — Speech at the Commemoration of the 110th Anniversary of the Birth of Cuba’s National Hero José Martí.”) ↑
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José Martí: “In Memory of Marx.” ↑
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José Martí, cited in Selected Poems and Prose of José Martí. ↑