Guevara wrote this article as an introduction to a book entitled The Marxist-Leninist Party, published by the National Directorate of the United Party of the Socialist Revolution.
This small book aims to introduce party members to the extensive and very rich body of Marxist-Leninist ideas.
The choice of themes is simple and effective. It includes a chapter from the Manual of Marxism-Leninism by Otto V. Kuusinen and a series of speeches by Fidel Castro. The selection is good, because the chapter from the Manual of Marxism-Leninism synthesizes the experiences of fraternal parties and offers a general outline of what a Marxist-Leninist party should be and how it should act. The section containing speeches by compañero Fidel presents the course of our country’s political history through the words — in some cases autobiographical — of the revolution’s leader.
The two things are closely linked: the general theory as an expression of the experiences of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist parties around the world, and the practical application of these general ideas to our special characteristics. From the peculiarities that form the framework of the development of social phenomena in this part of the world, one should not infer that historical exceptions exist. Rather, the specific case of Cuba fits into the general framework of the theory, which is the fruit of the experience of the international workers’ movement, adding new experiences to it.
The manual shows us with dazzling clarity what a Marxist-Leninist party is: “Persons united around common ideas, who join together to give life to Marxist ideas, that is, to carry out the historic mission of the working class.” It also explains that a party cannot exist isolated from the masses; that it must be in permanent contact with them; that it must practice criticism and self-criticism and be very severe with respect to its own errors; that it must base itself not only on negative concepts of struggle against something, but also on positive concepts of struggle for something. It explains that Marxist parties cannot just sit back and wait for the objective and subjective conditions — which are formed through the complex mechanism of the class struggle — to meet all the necessary requirements for power to fall into the hands of the people like ripe fruit. The manual teaches about the leading and catalyzing role of the party: the vanguard of the working class, the leader of its class, which knows how to show it the road to victory and speed the way to new social conditions. It insists that even in moments of social ebb, it is necessary to know how to retreat and keep cadres firm in order to gain strength from the next wave and thereby advance closer toward the party’s fundamental goal in the first revolutionary period: conquering power.
Naturally, the party must be a class party. A Marxist-Leninist party could hardly be anything else. Its mission is to find the shortest route to achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its best members, its leading cadres, and its tactics all come from the working class.
One cannot conceive of beginning the building of socialism with a party of the bourgeois class, with a party having a lot of exploiters in its ranks, and with these exploiters entrusted with setting its political line. Clearly, a group of this sort can lead the struggle only in a national liberation stage, up to a certain level and under specific circumstances. In the following stage, the revolutionary class would become reactionary, and new conditions would be established that would require the appearance of a Marxist-Leninist party as the leader of the revolutionary struggle. Already, in Latin America at least, it is practically impossible to speak of liberation movements led by the bourgeoisie. The Cuban Revolution has polarized the forces. Faced with the dilemma of choosing between the people or imperialism, the weak national bourgeoisies choose imperialism and definitively betray their country. In this part of the world the possibility is almost totally gone for there to be a peaceful transition to socialism.
If the Marxist-Leninist party is able to foresee the coming historical stages, and is capable of becoming the banner and vanguard of the people even before having completed the national liberation stage — speaking of the colonial countries — then this party will have accomplished a dual historical mission, and it will be able to face the tasks of building socialism with greater strength, with greater authority among the masses.
Then there is the Cuban experience — a rich experience because of all that is new, because of all its vigor in this period of the development of the Latin American revolution, and also because of the rich lessons to be drawn from its mistakes, which are analyzed and corrected publicly, in contact with the masses and facing the judgment of public opinion.
Particularly important are the speeches of compañero Fidel referring to the United Party of the Socialist Revolution and to the methods of work employed in the ORI, which mark two fundamental stages of our development. In the first speech [of December 2, 1961], Fidel talks about the previous confusion of a thoroughgoing revolutionary who, having now arrived at the pinnacle of the ascending road in the evolution of his thinking, proclaims, without any doubts and to the whole world, his Marxist-Leninist convictions. He does this not by making a simple verbal affirmation, but by pointing out the features, the most outstanding events in his evolution as a leader, in the evolution of the movement and the party toward a fusion aimed at forming the United Party of the Socialist Revolution.
Analyzing himself, compañero Fidel recognizes that he had absorbed a large number of backward ideas from society. He recounts how instinctively he struggled against these and how he was forged through the struggle. He recounts his doubts and explains the reasons for them and how they were resolved.
During this stage, the July 26 Movement was something new, something very difficult to define: Fidel Castro, the hero of Moncada, a prisoner on the Isle of Pines, trains a group of expeditionaries who have as their mission to reach the shores of Oriente Province, to start the revolutionary fire in that province and separate it from the rest of the island at first, or to advance inexorably, in accordance with objective conditions, to Havana itself, in a succession of more or less bloody victories.
Reality struck us hard. The subjective conditions needed to bring about that end had not yet been established. We had not followed all the rules of revolutionary warfare, which we would later learn with our blood and the blood of our brothers during two years of hard struggle. We were defeated, and it was then that the most important history of our movement began. Then it showed its true strength, its true historical merit. We realized we had committed tactical errors and that some important subjective factors were missing. The people were conscious of the need for change but were not certain it was possible. The task was to create that certainty, and it was in the Sierra Maestra that the long process began that served as the catalyst for the entire movement on the island, eventually provoking uninterrupted hurricanes, uninterrupted revolutionary fires throughout the territory.
It began to be demonstrated with deeds that the revolutionary army — providing a correct orientation to the faith and enthusiasm of the people, and given favorable conditions for the struggle — could gradually increase its strength through the proper use of weapons and one day destroy the enemy army. That is a great lesson in our history. Before achieving victory, the relationship of forces kept changing until it became overwhelmingly favorable to the revolutionary movement. The necessary subjective conditions to carry out the change were created, and we brought about the crisis of power essential for a change to take place. Latin America was given a new revolutionary experience. It was demonstrated that the great truths of Marxism-Leninism are always fulfilled. In this case, it was shown that the mission of the leaders and of the parties is to create all the necessary conditions for taking power and not to become new spectators of the revolutionary wave being born from within the people.
At the same time, by demonstrating the need for the armed nuclei that can defend the people’s sovereignty against surprises, attacks and destruction, the Cuban experience shows how important it is for the armed struggle to be fought on the terrain most favorable for guerrilla warfare, that is, the most rugged rural areas. This is another of the revolution’s contributions to our struggle for the emancipation of Latin America. We went from the countryside to the city, from lesser to greater, creating the revolutionary movement that culminated in Havana.
Elsewhere, Fidel clearly states that the essential quality of a revolutionary is to know how to interpret reality. Referring to the April 1958 strike, he explains that we were unable to interpret the situation at that time and thus we suffered a catastrophe. Why was the April strike declared? Because within the movement there were a series of contradictions between what we called the Sierra and the Llano. These surfaced over the analysis of what elements should be considered fundamental to a victory in the armed struggle, and each wing had a diametrically different view of what these elements were.
The Sierra was ready to defeat the army as many times as necessary, to win battle after battle, to seize its weapons and to arrive some day at the total seizure of power on the basis of its Rebel Army. The Llano was for generalized armed struggle throughout the country culminating in a revolutionary general strike that would expel the Batista dictatorship and establish the rule of “civilian” authority, making the new army “apolitical.”
The clash between these views was constant and not the most appropriate for the unity of command necessary at moments like that. The April strike was prepared and decreed by the Llano with the consent of the Sierra leadership, which despite serious doubts about the outcome did not feel capable of preventing it, and with the explicit reservations of the PSP, which warned of the danger in time. The revolutionary commanders went down into the plains to help with the strike and that was how Camilo Cienfuegos, our unforgettable army chief, began his first incursions into the Bayamo region.
The roots of those contradictions went deeper than mere tactical disagreements. The Rebel Army was already proletarian in its ideology, and it thought in terms of the dispossessed class. The Llano continued to be petty bourgeois, with future traitors among its leadership and heavily influenced by the milieu in which it worked.
It was a secondary struggle for internal control within the framework of the great revolutionary struggle for power. The recent events in Algeria can be explained clearly through analogy with the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionary wing did not allow itself to be displaced from power and fought until power was completely in its hands. The liberation army was the genuine representative of the revolution that triumphed.
The clashes broke out periodically, and a unified command was achieved (although it was still not heeded by everyone) only when Fidel was appointed prime minister, some months after the triumph of the revolution. Until that point, what had we accomplished? As Fidel put it, we had acquired the right to begin. We had only reached the end of one stage, based on a fight to the death against the existing system in Cuba, represented by the dictator Batista. But the fact that we had consistently followed a revolutionary line aimed at improving the condition of our society and liberating it as much as possible from all economic shackles forced us into a head-on struggle with imperialism.
Imperialism has been a very important factor in the development and deepening of our ideology. Each blow dealt by imperialism called for a response. Each time the Yankees reacted with their habitual arrogance, by taking some action against Cuba, we had to adopt the necessary countermeasures, and thereby the revolution deepened.
The Popular Socialist Party entered this front, and the compañeros who had long been members of the revolutionary movement and the compañeros who had come to power through the struggle in the Sierra began the task of fusion. Already at that time Fidel had warned against some dangers of sectarianism, and he criticized those who rubbed other people’s noses in their own 15 or 20 years of party membership, as well as the sectarianism of the “bearded ones” from the Sierra or the “shoot’em-ups” from the cities.
During the period of the armed struggle, there was a group of compañeros who tried to protect the movement from compañero Fidel’s apparent caudillismo and they made the mistake — which would be repeated later on during the period of sectarianism — of confusing the great merits of the revolution’s leader and his undeniable talent of commanding, with an individual whose only concern was assuring the unconditional support of his followers and establishing a caudillo system. It was a fight waged by a group of compañeros on the basis of false principles; a fight that did not end on January 1 nor even when Fidel became Prime Minister, but only much later, when the right wing of the July 26 Movement was destroyed. That is how, for opposing the people’s will, traitors such as [Manuel] Urrutia, [José] Miró Cardona, [Manuel] Ray, Huber Matos, David Salvador, and many others fell.
After the total victory over the right wing, there arose the need to structure a party: the United Party of the Revolution, the champion of Marxism-Leninism in the new conditions of Cuba. It had to be an organization linked to the masses through rigorously selected cadres of a centralized, yet flexible, organization. For all of this, we blindly put our confidence in the authority gained by the Popular Socialist Party over many years of struggle, giving up almost all of our organizational criteria. In this way, a series of conditions were created that allowed the fruit of sectarianism to ripen.
In this process of structuring, compañero Aníbal Escalante was put in charge of organization and a dark — although happily, very short — stage in our development began. Mistakes were made in methods of leadership. The party was losing its essential links with the masses, losing democratic centralism and its spirit of self-sacrifice. At times, through real juggling acts, persons without experience and without merit were put in leadership positions simply because they had accommodated themselves to the status quo.
The ORI lost its function as an ideological motor force — and its corresponding control over the entire productive apparatus — and became an administrative apparatus. Under these circumstances, warnings that should have come from the provinces explaining the series of problems that existed there got lost, since those who were supposed to analyze the work of the administrative officials were precisely the ORI leaders who were carrying out a dual function: party and public administration.
Fortunately, the stage of mistaken concepts, great big mistakes, and mechanical transplants has come to an end. The old foundations of this sectarian concoction have been broken.
In the face of these problems, the decision of the National Directorate, headed by Fidel, was to turn to the masses, to appeal to the masses. A system of consultation with all work centers was established in order for the masses to elect exemplary workers, with the possibility that these would be selected to join the nuclei of the party, of a party intimately linked to the masses.
As part of these changes in the party, its education system was reformed. In the past period the “enlightened” and the “professors of Marxism” had been given priority. Now, first place would go to the best workers, to men who — through their attitude toward the revolution, their daily work, their enthusiasm, and their spirit of self-sacrifice — had demonstrated the superior qualities required of members of the leading party.
In keeping with this we changed all the criteria and began a new period of strengthening the party and its methods. Opening up before us is a wide and bright road of socialist construction, in which the party’s task is to lead. This leadership will not be a leadership of mechanical and bureaucratic orders; of narrow and sectarian control; of issuing commands; of advice that has to be followed just because some leaders say so, or because of their past ideas or long record, rather than on the basis of the living example that they are setting.
The party of the future will be intimately linked to the masses and will absorb from them those great ideas that will then take shape as concrete guidelines. It will be a party that will strictly apply its discipline in keeping with democratic centralism and, at the same time, where there will permanently be discussion and open criticism and self-criticism, in order to continuously improve our work. At this stage it will be a party of cadres, of the best. These cadres will have to carry out their dynamic task of being in contact with the people, of transmitting their experiences to higher bodies, of transmitting concrete guidelines to the masses, and of marching in the front ranks. The cadres of our party must be first in study, first in work, first in revolutionary enthusiasm, first in sacrifice. At all times they must be better, purer, and more humane than all the others.
One must always remember that a Marxist is not an automatic, fanatical machine aimed at a certain target like a guided missile.
Fidel deals explicitly with this problem in one of his speeches [on April 11, 1962]:
Who says that Marxism is the renunciation of human feelings, comradeliness, love for a compañero, respect for a compañero, consideration for a compañero? Who says that Marxism means not having a soul, not having feelings? Indeed it was precisely love of man that gave birth to Marxism. It was love of man, of humanity, the desire to combat the distress of the proletariat, the desire to fight poverty, injustice, suffering and all the exploitation of the proletariat, that gave rise to Marxism from Karl Marx’s mind precisely when it had become possible for Marxism to emerge. It arose precisely when a real possibility emerged — and more than a real possibility, the historical necessity — of the social revolution, of which Karl Marx was the interpreter. But what made him become that interpreter if not the abundance of human feelings of men like him, like Engels, like Lenin?
Fidel’s assessment is fundamental for the member of the new party. Always keep it in mind, compañeros, engrave it in your memories as the most effective weapon against all deviations. A Marxist must be the best, the fullest, the most complete of human beings — but, above all, a human being. He must be a party member who lives and vibrates in contact with the masses; a leader who shapes into concrete guidelines the masses’ sometimes unformulated wishes; a tireless worker who gives all to his people — a self-sacrificing worker who gives up his hours of rest, his personal tranquility, his family or his life for the revolution, but who is never a stranger to the warmth of human contact.
On the international arena our party will have extremely important duties. We are the first socialist country in Latin America, an example for other countries to follow, a living experience for other fraternal parties to grasp; a living, recurring, and changing experience that brings all its successes and errors out into the light of public knowledge. In this way its example is more educational, and its aspiration is not to be held up solely to those already professing their conviction in Marxism-Leninism, but before the popular masses of Latin America.
The Second Declaration of Havana [of February 4, 1962] is a guide for the proletariat, the peasantry, and the revolutionary intellectuals of Latin America. Our own attitude will be a permanent guide. We must be worthy of the position we hold. We must work every day thinking of our America and must increasingly strengthen the foundations of our state, its economic organization, and its political development. We must do this so that, at the same time that we improve ourselves internally, we can also convince the peoples of Latin America more and more of the practical possibility of starting on the road to socialist development, at the current stage in the world relationship of forces.
All this without forgetting that the breadth of our emotions in the face of the aggressors’ outrages and the peoples’ sufferings cannot be limited to the framework of Latin America, nor even to the framework of Latin America and the socialist countries together. We must practice true proletarian internationalism and feel as an affront to ourselves every aggression, every insult, every act against human dignity and against man’s happiness anywhere in the world.
We, the members of a new party in a newly liberated region of the world and in new situations, must always hold high the banner of human dignity raised by our [José] Martí, who was a guide for so many generations and is present today, as fresh as ever, in Cuba’s reality: “Every true man must feel on his own cheek every blow dealt against the cheek of another.”