POSITION
A sector of the leadership of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo [Guatemalan Workers party -- the Communist party] has come out in strong support of Fidel Castro's speech criticizing the attitude of the Venezuelan Communist party leadership on the question of armed struggle and reaffirming the Leninist doctrine that a Communist is first of all a revolutionary fighter. Gabriel Salazar, a member of the Secretariat, and José Maria Ortiz Vides, a member of the Central Committee, together with various leaders of the Rebel Armed Forces [FAR], issued a statement which was printed in the March 20 Granma, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Cuba. [The text is also available in the March 26 English edition of Granma.]
"If, yesterday, the action of Cuban students was determined by their uncompromising struggle against imperialism and corrupt politics," the statement declares, "today the attitude assumed by Comrade Fidel realistically reflects the determined struggle of revolutionaries throughout the continent against imperialism and corrupt politics, and against the ideological roots of this latter evil: reformism. This reformism has entrenched itself in the prestige of the struggle of the peoples, workers and peasants, and acted as a hindrance to the dynamic force of the anti-imperialist movement in Latin America.
The statement has some harsh things to say about the reformists: "The discussion concerns the new facts and their new and dynamic formulation in contrast to the sterile, unimaginative, weak, stereotyped, carbon-copy thinking of organizations that call themselves Communist, of cadres and leaders who have become complacent with time and with the development of a supposedly 'national' bourgeoisie, content to play the peaceful role of ‘opposition' to the oligarchies and imperialism. Artless clichés and politicking are used to disguise their submission and to justify their lack of political development and revolutionary activity and their ideological poverty."
Asserting their own independent position, the Guatemalan Communists continue: "The revolutionary movements, and particularly the armed movements, must unite closely and combatively to confront U.S. imperialism and the native oligarchies, externally, and the submission of rightist, conservative leadership, internally....In the same way that Lenin, in the past, pointed out and combatted the danger of opportunism, present-day revolutionaries must free themselves from stereotyped thinking and from copying, cleanse revolutionary activity of that deviation which historically leads to a position somewhat to the left of the national bourgeoisie. It is necessary to combat the source of ideological poverty in the bits and pieces of strategy and tactics employed by some Communist parties that have lost their proletarian essence."
In their opinion, "Comrade Fidel's speech will be epoch-making in our continental struggle against imperialism through its exposure of pseudo-Marxists and pseudo-revolutionaries who have exploited the good faith of thousands of combatants who respect the revolution, socialism and the parties. On this point there can be no conciliation. And we refer not only to thinking, but to our practical experience and the way to stimulate and carry out the revolution within the context of the conditions in Latin America."