Edward Galeano, writing in Monthly Review, March 1966 wrote this:
"He (Che) was totally committed -- 'as one must be' -- to the
difficult task of building socialism in Cuba. Of all the leaders
he was the most austere and bore the closest resemblance, in his
capacity for sacrifice, to the Christians of the catacombs, Con-
vinced as he was that the mystique of socialism on the march and
the faith of the people in the new world aborning should be the
motive force of development, he rejected the excessive use of
material incentives and of systems of payment which might give
each person the hope of "becoming a Rockefeller". It was clear
to see that Che was not a 'desk man' he was a maker of revolutions,
and I hope he continues to be one," Galeano in writing this article shortly after Che 'disappeared' commented that he felt as if he was writing an obituary and now as we reproduce these words they are being used for this sad task. Guevara will be remembered for many things: his leadership of the Cuban Revolution; his writings on guerilla warfare; his dramatic call from the depths of the Bolivian jungle for the opening of new fronts to confront the Imperialists and to defend the Vietnamese Revolution; and his final brutal murder at the hands of the Bolivian 'gorillas'. But one thing may be overlooked in the tributes to Guevara the revolutionary and that was his raison d'etre, his driving motive, the creation of a 'new' man, freed from the alienation of capitalist society and educating himself in the norms of a new society, a socialist society. Guevara illustrated his ideas on this subject in a letter to Carlos Quijano of the Uraguayan radical weekly Marcha, which is available here in Mnglish under the title "Notes on Socialism and Man"* Guevara took as his main thesis, the argument by the ideologists of capitalism that “socialism, or the period of building socialism into which we have entered is characterized by the subordination of the individual to the state". He took as his non-theoretical, practical evidence, the history of the Cuban experience and its reliance at every stage on the individual. He showed how from the attack on the Moncada barracks; to the landing of Granma ("In this stage, in which there was only the germ of socialism, man was the basic factor. We put our trust in him--individual, specific, with a first and last name--~ and the triumph or failure of the mission entrusted to him depended on his capacity for action"); to the stage of guerrilla struggle where there developed two distinct elements - the mass, whom it was necessary to mobilize and its vanguard which created the subjective conditions necessary for victory; and through to the taking of power and the stage culminating in July of the same year (1959) when President Urcutia (representative of the national bourgeousie) resigned under mass pressure. "There now appeared in the history of the Cuban Revolution a force with well-defined characteristics which would systematically reappear -- the mass. This many faceted agency is not, as is claimed, the sum of units of the self-same type, behaving like a tame flock of sheep, and reduced, moreover, to that type by the system imposed from above. It is true that it follows its leaders, basically Fidel Castro, without hesitation; but the degree to which he won this trust corresponds precisely to the degree that he interpreted the people's desires and aspirations correctly and to the degree that he made a sincere effort to fulfill the promises he made", *Socialism and Man, Pioneer Book Service, 8 Toynbee St. Price 2/6 / (Cont'd...)