Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution
By Mike Gonzalez
Bookmarks 2004
186 pages, $28
REVIEW BY CHRIS SLEE
Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution is a critique of Che's political theory and practice. Mike Gonzalez argues that Che's understanding of revolution was fundamentally flawed. He claims that Che did not share Karl Marx's view of socialist revolution as the self-emancipation of the working class, but instead believed that a small number of revolutionaries could and should make a revolution on behalf of the masses.
Gonzalez acknowledges that Che was a sincere and courageous revolutionary, but asserts that his strategy was based on "a kind of military vanguardism". Gonzalez claims that "Che's conception of the revolution only acknowledged the role of those who carried the arms and did the fighting", and underestimated the political dimension of the struggle.
Gonzalez is also critical of Che's ideas about building a socialist society, characterising his emphasis on revolutionary consciousness and commitment rather than material incentives as "revolutionary utopianism".
Some of Che's actions do appear to confirm some of Gonzalez's criticisms. Che attempted to initiate a guerrilla war in Bolivia in 1966-67 with a small force of guerrilla fighters, without carrying out prior political work in Bolivia to win popular support and build a strong party or movement capable of leading a successful struggle. As a result, Che's guerrilla force was isolated from the Bolivian workers and peasants, and was easily crushed by the Bolivian dictatorship with the aid of the CIA. This tragic episode could indeed be described as an example of "military vanguardism".
But to look only at Che's failure in Bolivia would be one-sided. Che was part of the team that led a victorious revolution in Cuba. And while the Cuban revolutionary government made mistakes, some of which reflected voluntarist or "utopian" tendencies, it also achieved enormous gains for the workers and peasants, including in the areas of health, education, job security, and relative economic and social equality.
Gonzalez, while acknowledging the gains of the Cuban Revolution in health and education, considers that Cuban society is undemocratic, and that this is a result of the alleged failure to involve the working class in making the revolution. He highlights the errors made by the leadership, and not their ability to correct many of their errors. He highlights the lack of elections in the early years of the revolution, ignoring the subsequent adoption of the People's Power system of elections at the local, regional and national level.
Gonzalez argues that the Cuban Revolution was made by a guerrilla army, with the masses (especially the urban working class) playing little or no role, and that Che's writings provided a theoretical justification for this substitutionism.
Gonzalez is wrong — the working class was actively involved in making the Cuban Revolution. Gonzalez mentions the failed general strike of April 1958, but not the successful insurrectionary general strike that accompanied the entry of the guerrillas into Havana in January 1959.
Nor does he mention the four subsequent general strikes of shorter duration during 1959. These strikes were part of the ongoing process of organising the workers and peasants to defeat capitalist resistance to the deepening of the revolution.
The government formed immediately after the insurrection included not only revolutionaries such as Fidel Castro but also liberal bourgeois figures who had opposed the Batista dictatorship but did not want radical economic changes. Workers and peasants mobilised in support of Castro and his radical reform program and against the attempts of bourgeois liberal Â鶹´«Ã½ of the new government to block the reforms. These strikes and demonstrations helped force out the bourgeois elements from the government.
The leadership of the July 26 Movement (named after the 1953 attack on the Moncada army garrison that launched the revolution) also realised after the failure of the April 1958 strike that any future general strike had to be much better prepared and should only occur when objective conditions were ripe. But it never renounced the idea of a general strike. This is clear from Che's account of a J26M leadership meeting held on May 3, 1958, to discuss the failure of the strike, which is published in Ocean Press' Che Guevara Reader.
"The analysis of the strike demonstrated that subjectivism and putschist conceptions permeated its preparation and execution. The formidable apparatus that the July 26 Movement seemed to have in its hands, in the form of organised workers' cells, fell apart the moment the action took place."
Che explains that the leaders of the J26M urban underground had been "opposed to any participation by the Popular Socialist Party in the organisation of the struggle". This had led to "the conception of a sectarian strike, in which the other revolutionary movements would be forced to follow our lead". They had also thought it would be possible for the capital city to be seized by J26M militias, "without closely examining the forces of reaction inside their principal bastion".
The meeting "raised the need for unity of all working-class forces to prepare the next revolutionary general strike, which would be called from the Sierra" (in the mountains, where Castro was based).
Che added that the movement "did away with various naive illusions of attempted revolutionary general strikes when the situation had not matured sufficiently to bring about an explosion of that type, and without having laid the groundwork of adequate preparations for an event of that magnitude".
Gonzalez quotes selectively from the May 3 meeting, quoting Che's statement, "The guerrilla conception would emerge triumphant from that meeting", but ignoring Che's discussion of the preconditions for "the next revolutionary general strike".
For Castro and Che, guerrilla warfare was not counterposed to urban mass struggle. The aim of the general strike called by Castro to coincide with the entry of the guerrillas into Havana was to contribute to the complete disintegration of the old army and police. This would not only prevent the formation of a new military-dominated government by Batista's associates and other conservative forces after Batista himself had fled; it would open the way for the implementation of a radical democratic program and the subsequent advance to a socialist revolution.
The leaders of the Cuban Revolution did, however, make serious errors in their attempts to spread the revolution to other parts of Latin America, underestimating the difficulty of repeating the Cuban guerrilla experience to countries where the preconditions for its success did not exist. Small groups of guerrillas could not substitute for revolutionary parties with a strong base of support among the workers and peasants.
It is necessary to critically examine the failure of the attempts by Che and others to spread the revolution beyond Cuba. But to look only at the failures without recognising and learning from the success of the Cuban Revolution is a big mistake.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 9, 2005.
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