field of battle in the struggle against imperialism."
Castro read a letter from Guevara which he said had been given him on April 1. The international press reported part of the letter, which was datelined Havana, as follows:
"T feel I have completed the duty which the Cuban revolution gave me. I say farewell to you. I give up all my posts as minister in the party, as a major and as a Cuban citizen."
"My only fault has been that I did not understand more fully your great qualities. I am proud of having followed you..."
“Other nations require my services and I must leave you. I leave behind my dearest memories and my most loved ones. I will take the spirit you inculcated in new fields of battle...in the fight against imperialism..."
"T free Cuba of all responsibility. Should my end come elsewhere I will take with me your example..."
Castro did not say why he chose to make the announcement at this particular time. But it was clear enough he could no longer delay it. Only the day before the news had been released that the top leadership of the Cuban Revolution had been reorganized and Guevarats name was not on the list.
Among the significant changes was the name of the party. Formerly the United Party of the Socialist Revolution, it is now the Cuban Communist party. That this is not a reedition of the old Communist party of Stalinist days is clear from the further down= grading of former Stalinist officials, a process that has been going on for some three years. The Political Bureau is solidly Castroite, including Fidel Castro, Ratil Castro, Osvaldo Dorticdés, Juan Almeida, Ramiro Valdés, Guillermo Garcfa, Sergio del Valle, and Armando Hart.
Leaders of the old Communist party still occupy prominent positions, however. Blas Roca, for instance, is included in the party secretariat. A considerable concession in this direction was the appointment of Isidoro Malmierca as director of Granma, a new daily paper representing a merger of Revolucidén and Hoy (former Communist party organ).
Malmierca was head of state security throughout the Anibal
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Escalante period. He was one of the most important figures to be removed from office at the time Escalante was ousted because of his systematic efforts to build a personal bureaucratic machine in the party and government. As head of the police, Malmierca joined with Escalante in this effort and hundreds of illegal.acts, including arbitrary arrests, were charged against him.
This appointment should serve to assure the Kremlin ideologists that tight control will be maintained over the critical propensities of Cuban journalists, particularly as they might concern Kosygin-Brezhnev,
The overall balance of the reorganization and renaming of the party, however, further emphasizes its independence from the old Stalinist machine, its identity with the activists who carried out the Cuban Revolution, and its commitment to the ideology of revolutionary Marxism,
Where does Che Guevara fit in with all this? There is no really reliable information available. The Cuban government has maintained tight security on this secret,
The bourgeois press, of course, has indulged in considerable speculation about the whereabouts since last April of the man generally regarded up to now as being among the three top leaders of the Cuban Revolution. In recent days it has reported Guevara twice arrested, once in Argentina and once in Peru, only as quickly to kill the rumors as unfounded.
Of the more serious papers, the Paris Le Monde offered the opinion in an October 5 editorial, that it was a case of "revolutionary romanticism"; that Che Guevara "felt i111 at ease in a regime that had accepted, more out of calculation than conviction, the principle of peaceful coexistence" and that he simply decided "to seek new fields of struggle."
The New York Times (October 9-10 international edition) was rather staggered, feeling that of the dozen men who survived the Granma landing and got up into the Sierra Maestra with Castro, “he is the first...to desert the leader of the revolution." Adds the Times editorial writer: "To those who knew him, he was the last to be expected to break away." The Times means a personal break with Castro in which Guevara "has now conjured himself away to some still mysterious ultima Thule of revolution somewhere in the world."
The Times continues: "Possibly it is due simply to the fact that his extreme Marxist ideas of the Cuban economy had failed and had been abandoned or changed whenever possible. A further explanation could be that whereas Premier Castro's economic and military needs have forced him into close relations with Moscow, Guevara's leaning was to Peking,"
As to that last guess, it is clear that the Times editorial writer has not been doing his home work on the voluminous material coming out of Peking. Guevara has been as conspicuously absent from Peking publicity as all the other top leaders of.the Cuban Revolution for a long time. The truth is that the Cuban revolutionists have done their utmost to indicate that within the general framework of revolutionary Marxism, their policy is an independent one, bowing to neither Moscow nor Peking.
In speculating on Guevara's departure for “a new field of battle," four outstanding facts call for consideration, They may offer a clue to the mystery.
The first one is the lengths to which Guevara went in disso= ciating himself from Cuba. He gave up his government posts, his army connection, his party standing, even his Cuban citizenship. As if this were not enough, he added: "I free Cuba of all responsibility,"
It is evident that Guevara is projecting a political course that requires the Cuban government to be demonstrably and even ostentatiously free of all responsibility for his actions. Since it is agreed by all who know him, including his bitterest foes, that whatever he does it will be as a dedicated revolutionist who puts the cause even above his most intimate family ties, why should he have to publicly dissociate himself at all? Shouldn't the Cuban government be proud of being connected with the further revolution ary activities of Che Guevara, one of its principal founders?
The second fact is the line of the declarations made by Guevara during his tour in Africa last spring. These were all designed to advance the colonial revolution, to forge bonds of solidarity between the Latin-American, African and Asian revolutions, and..ehe struck a few critical notes that evidently caused some fluttering in the dovecotes in Moscow. He spoke about the duty of "the socialist countries" to underwrite the revolution in the underdeveloped countries, not to profit in trade with these countries by taking advantage of their vulnerability on the world market where they must compete with industrially advanced countries, and he advo~ cated handing out arms freely to those who need them in revolution= ary struggles.
The third fact is very simple. Upon returning to Cuba after gaining world-wide publicity for his declarations, Guevara did not make another public statement.
It would seem justifiable to surmise that the Kosygin-Brezhnev team lodged a stiff protest in Havana over Guevara's revolutionary declarations in Africa and certain criticisms that had come to their attention,
It would also seem justifiable to conclude that it was decided to make a concession to the Kosygin-Brezhnev team in this matter, for
Cuba is extremely vulnerable under the enormous pressure of the North American imperialist colossus, only ninety miles away, and there is no other source of large-scale and effective material support except the Soviet Union. In relation to this, Castro has followed a most circumspect policy, evidently calculating that if there is to be an error it must be on the side of caution. The security of the Cuban fortress through maintenance of the best possible relations with the Soviet Union has, in fact, been the main axis of his foreign policy.
What happened between Castro and Guevara, we, of course, do not know. The top Cuban revolutionists, in their inner circle, have spoken frankly and often heatedly since they first constituted their team on every problem they faced. This occasion was most likely no exception,
But the incident may have brought out more clearly than ever before, the excruciating dilemma the Cuban revolutionists face. They have no choice but to do everything they can, including making painful concessions, to keep solid ties with the Soviet Union. On the other hand they are well aware that Moscow's policy of "peaceful coexistence" constitutes a grave and standing danger to their revo-= lution. The Cuban Revolution must receive fresh support from other revolutions, above all in the Western Hemisphere, linking up with them within a certain time limit if it is not to suffer eventual defeat. This fundamental need has constituted the frame of refer ence of Cuban policy in relation to the rest of Latin America, Thus from the very beginning, Havana has appealed without let up to the peoples of Latin America to follow the Cuban example.
Guevara's name has been associated most intimately with the specific Cuban pattern -- guerrilla warfare -- not because his views on this are any different from those of the others, but because he took time to write a manual about it and to picture the Cuban example in detail as a practical way to achieve similar success in other countries where conditions might be propitious. His manual has been absorbed down to the last phrase in more than one guerrilla camp in the great cordillera running from Mexico down through the Andes,
And yet five years have gone by with no new victory. In fact a very grave defeat was suffered through the counterrevolutionary coup d'état that brought Gen. Castelo Branco to power in Brazil in April 1964,
Let us now fit in the fourth fact. This is Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam which began February 7, reaching a bloody erescendo precisely as Guevara returned to Cuba from his Afro=-Asian tour. Havana's reaction to the escalation of the Vietnam war was quite different from either Moscow's or Peking's.
The Kosygin-Brezhnev team crawled under the bed. Its protests have not gone an inch beyond permitting students to stage a demonstration in front of the American embassy in Moscow, breaking a few win-
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dows. This, along with the hackneyed verbal protests that might be used in protesting the buzzing of a Soviet trawler, were discounted in advance by the Pentagon. In fact, the Kremlin bureaucrats have displayed such an ignominious attitude that the State Department has good grounds for presenting them as having a "common interest" in the escalation of the aggression,
Peking has done better, at least in displaying capacity to scream. Yet Peking, too, has failed to this day to undertake vigorous counteraction. And if it is correct for Mao to bear in mind the vulnerability of China to a nuclear attack in the absence of strong support from Moscow, he has still assiduously refrained from carrying out even the repeated promise to send volunteers -- if needed,
Havana, in contrast, came out very quickly with a suggested course of action calling for the firmest response as the only realistic way to stem the North American imperialist aggression and turn it back. These proposals were advanced by Castro himself in several public declarations; and the Cubans indicated their seriousness by earmarking material aid (shiploads of sugar) for the struggle.
The Cubans realize that not only is the defense of their country involved in Vietnam but that of the whole colonial revolution and all the workers states. Moreover, they can see what is likewise clear to millions of people throughout the world -- Johnson's escalation of. the war threatens to end in a nuclear conflict. In brief, the White House has. placed the fate of humanity at stake.
To Guevara, above all, it must therefore seem that extraordinary efforts must be made to overcome the setbacks, to reverse the effect of the defeat in Brazil, to move more energetically than ever before to achieve another victory, to bolster the defense of the Cuban Revolution by advancing the world socialist revolution at any point where an opportunity might be found or created.
Is it so extraordinary to conceive a revolutionist like Guevara dedicating himself to personal responsibility in such a course? There is nothing of "revolutionary romanticism" in it at all. It is the same dedication to a great cause that made him a socialist in the first place and which gives meaning to existence for every revolutionary socialist in the world today. Besides, Guevara has taken some of the toughest assignments in the Cuban Revolution, serving as a kind of "troubleshooter" from the start.
Such a decision on his part would automatically require his complete dissociation from the Cuban government, which must of course "coexist" with other governments, including those of completely opposite class character. In particular his activities could not be permitted to endanger relations with Moscow, If our surmise is cor= | rect, Guevarats "new field of battle in the struggle against imperialism" is something primarily on the level of revolutionary Marxist party politics, which is internationalist to the core and flatly in
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opposition to the dangerously subservient line of the Kremlin and the unimpressive performance of Peking.
It is pointless, in the absence of definite information, to discuss whether this was the best possible move for Guevara «~ whether whatever he can do in his new role is not more than offset by the harm of his dropping from public view.
In any case the central political problem facing the Cuban revolutionists, and Guevara's involvement in it, is clear enough, As partisans of their revolution, we can only wish the Cubans well in their heroic efforts to safeguard its conquests and to strengthen their beleaguered fortress; and we hope that Guevara is able to do something effective to counter the passivity of Moscow and Peking, to help make up for the defeats and setbacks of the recent period, to break out of the encirclement and open up the possibility of reversing the headlong plunge taken by North American imperialism toward a nuclear catastrophe.