Guevarist times

Guevarist times
Fecha de publicación: 
15 October 2017
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The encampment of thousands of people, mainly youngsters from all over the world, at Vallegrande, Bolivia, very close to the place where Che Guevara passed to immortality, symbolizes the ever-lasting influence and need in the world of the example and ideas of the Cuban-Argentinean revolutionary. Among those encamped was President Evo Morales, main organizer of the dozens of cultural and political activities that have been held there to recall the heroic guerrilla half a century after his fall in combat and subsequent assassination ordered by the CIA. Along with Evo were Che’s children and brother Roberto, as well as Commander Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, a heavyweight within Cuban leadership and close comrade of Guevara in the Sierra Maestra, the invasion of the West and the Battle of Santa Clara.

It could have been very hard for a revolutionary Indian to reach the presidency and refound Bolivia without the antecedent of Che’s guerrilla, the moral example he laid down, and the cycle of popular struggles that he inspired from then on in the territory of what is today a Plurinational State. Together with Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba too are living experiences of social transformation in which the fresh and renovating thinking of Che is evident. But in many other places in the world, popular struggles find incentives in that thinking and example.

The fervor that Che arouses in Neozapatism, in the universities of Latin America and among young people across the planet is well-known.

Che spoke in Cuba last October 8th through the speech of its First Vice-President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who evoked the validity of his thinking before the mausoleum, where his remains rest, and remarked, as essential in Cuba’s foreign policy, that unforgettable phrase by the guerrilla fighter at the UN General Assembly, in which he warned that “We cannot trust imperialism in the tiniest bit, absolutely nothing”. Díaz-Canel outlines the difficult and uncertain situation humanity is facing with the new forms of accumulation of neoliberal capitalism, the military interventions, the attempts of cultural colonization and standardization, the danger of a nuclear war and climate change as a threat to the survival of mankind. In a guevarist-tone speech he stressed Cuba’s internationalist policy and in the face of the threats and sanctions against Venezuela reiterated "The unconditional solidarity of Cuba toward the Bolivarian and Chavista people, their civic-military union, and the government headed by constitutional president, comrade Nicolás Maduro Moros".

The island’s first vice-president underlined that faithful to the legacy of Fidel and Che “Cuba will not make concessions essential to its sovereignty and independence, nor will it negotiate its principles or accept conditions. The changes needed in Cuba are solely being decided by the Cuban people”.

It’s pertinent to recall at present that Guevara, who wrote in his Bolivian diary on the 14th anniversary of the attack on Moncada Barracks, “Rebellion against oligarchies and revolutionary dogmas”, granted exceptional significance to the study of the revolutionary theory in its original sources. To its permanent enrichment by means of the critical analysis of the reality that is being transformed. To the generation of a new socialist and communist awareness called to be built and surpassed daily in the revolutionary practice. To the indomitable will of struggle with the greatest attachment to principles.

To unprejudiced unity of all real revolutionaries regardless of their initials or labels of origin and to the free exercise of internationalism, indispensable requirements as much to the overthrow of capitalism as the rise of the people to the political power, and the construction of the new society.

Along with Fidel, he stood out in his practice as one of the leaders of the Cuban revolution and in the study of the experiences prior to the road to the elaboration of a veritable theory of the socialist construction, almost nonexistent when Cuba embraced that hope. The self-transformation of the human being into a “new man” as core aim of socialism and the main role of the will to produce and speed up the revolutionary transformations are probably the most valuable contributions to the revolutionary thinking of these two great men of all time.

Twitter:@aguerraguerra

Translated by Jorge Mesa Benjamin / Cubasi Translation Staff

 

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