Che

Sam Pawlett rsp at uniserve.com
Tue Oct 19 11:35:16 PDT 1999


"There are no frontiers in the struggle to the death. We cannot remain indifferent in the face of what occurs in any part of the world. A victory for any country against imperialism is our victory, just as any country's defeat is a defeat for us all. The practice of proletarian internationalism is not only a duty for the people's ins truggle for a better future, it is also an inescapable necessity. If there were no other basis for unity, the common enemy should constitute one.

"From this a conclusion must be drawn: The development of the countries that now begin the road to liberation must be underwritten by the socialist countries. We say it in this manner without the least desire to blackmail anyone spectacular..It is a profound conviction. There can be socialism only if there is a change in man's consciousness that will provoke a fraternal attitude toward humanity on the individual level in society that builds or has built socialism and also on a world level in relation to all the peoples who suffer imperialist oppression."

"How can 'mutual benefit' mean selling at world market prices raw materials that cost unlimited sweat and suffering to the backward countries and buying at world prices the machines produced in the large automated factories of today? If we establish that type of relationship betwenn the two groups of nations, we must agree that the scoailist countries are, to a certain extent, accomplices to imperialist exploitation. It can be argued that the amount of trade with teh underdeveloped countries constitutes an insignificant part of the foreig n trade of the socialist countries. It is a great truth but it does not do away with the immoral nature of the exchange. The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the West."

Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, speech to the Second Econmic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity, October 25, 1965 Algiers. [Che was a keen student and friend of Baran and Sweezy.]

"In an interview with Che a few weeks after the crisis(Cuban missile crisis, SP), Sam Russell a British correspondant for the socialist Daily Worker, found Guevara still fuming over the Soviet betrayal. Alternately puffing on a cigar and taking blasts from an inhaler, Guevara told Russell that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off. Russell came away with mixed feelings about Che, calling him "a warm character whom I took to immediately...clearly a man of great intelligence though I thought he was crackers from the way he went on about the missiles." Jon Lee Anderson, *Che Guevara, A Revolutionary Life.* p545 [I highly recommend this book.]

"Hunger, thirst, weariness, the feeling of impotence against the enemy forces that were increasingly closing in on us, and above all, the terrible foot disease that the peasant call mazamora--which turned every step our soldiers took into an incredible torment-- had made us an army of shadows. It was difficult to advance, very difficult. Our troops physical condition worsened day by day and the meals-- today yes, tomorrow no, the next day maybe-- in no way helped to alleviate the level of misery we were suffering."

Che, September 18, 1958, Diaries.

"



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list