Speech to Cuban Medical Students
From The Motorcycle Diaries
Eight years after writing The Motorcycle Diaries1, Ernesto Che Guevara had become a central figure in Cuba’s revolutionary government. After his journey with Alberto Granado, he had traveled again through Latin America, experienced the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala and joined the Cuban revolutionary movement that eventually took power in 1959. In this speech to Cuban medical students and workers, Che reflects on his own development from medical student to political activist. —From The Motorcycle Diaries appendix.
August 20, 1960—Almost everyone knows that I started my career as a doctor a number of years ago. When I started out as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.
I wanted to succeed, as everybody wants to succeed. I dreamed about being a famous researcher. I dreamed of working tirelessly to achieve something that could really be put at the disposal of humanity, but that, at the same time, would be a personal triumph. I was, as we all are, a child of my environment.
Through special circumstances, and perhaps also because of my character, after receiving my degree I began to travel through Latin America and I came to know it intimately. Except for Haiti and the Dominican Republic, I have visited—in one way or another—all the other countries of Latin America. In the way I traveled, first as a student and afterward as a doctor, I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued punishment cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child is an unimportant incident, as often happens among the hard-hit classes of our Latin American homeland. And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.
But I continued being, as all of us always continue being, a child of my environment, and I wanted to help those people through my personal efforts. I had already traveled a lot—I was then in Guatemala, the Guatemala of [democratically elected Jacobo] Árbenz—and I had begun to make some notes to guide the conduct of a revolutionary doctor. I began to look into what I needed to be a revolutionary doctor.
The attack came, however: the [1954] coup unleashed by the United Fruit Company, the U.S. State Department, [CIA director] Foster Dulles—in reality, they are all the same thing—and the puppet [they replaced Árbenz with] Castillo Ármas. The aggression was successful, given that the people had not yet reached the level of maturity the Cuban people have today. And one fine day, I, like so many others, took the road to exile, or at least I took the road of fleeing from Guatemala, since that was not my homeland.
Then I realized one fundamental thing: to be a revolutionary doctor, or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution. The isolated effort, the individual effort, the purity of ideals, the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals means naught if that effort is made alone, solitary, in some corner of Latin America, fighting against hostile governments and social conditions that do not permit progress. A revolution needs what we have in Cuba: an entire people mobilized, who have learned the use of arms and the practice of combative unity, who know what a weapon is worth and what the people’s unity is worth.
Then we get to the heart of the problem that today lies ahead of us. We already have the right and even the obligation to be, before anything else, a revolutionary doctor, that is, a person who puts the technical knowledge of his profession at the service of the revolution and of the people. Then we come back to the earlier questions: How does one work for social welfare effectively? How does one reconcile individual effort with the needs of society?
We again have to recall what each of our lives was like, what each of us did and thought, as a doctor or in any other public health function, prior to the revolution. We have to do so with profound critical enthusiasm. We will then conclude that almost everything we thought and felt in that past epoch should be filed away, and that a new type of human being should be created. If each one of us is their own architect of that new type of human being, then creating that new type of human being—who will represent the new Cuba—will be much easier.
It is good for you—those present, the residents of Havana—to absorb this idea: that in Cuba a new type of human being is being created, which cannot be entirely appreciated in the capital, but which can be seen in every other corner of the country. Those of you who went to the Sierra Maestra on July 26 must have seen something very important . . . You must have seen children who by their physical stature appear eight or nine years old, but who nevertheless are almost all 13 or 14. They are the genuine children of the Sierra Maestra, the genuine children of hunger and poverty in all its forms. They are the creatures of malnutrition.
In this small Cuba, with four or five television channels, with hundreds of radio stations, with all the advances of modern science, when one night those children arrived at school and for the first time saw electric light, they exclaimed that the stars were very low that night. Those children, whom some of you would have seen, are now learning in the collective schools, from the ABCs right up to learning a trade, right up to the very difficult science of being revolutionaries.
These are the new kinds of human beings born in Cuba. They are being born in isolated places, in remote parts of the Sierra Maestra and also in the cooperatives and workplaces.
All that has a lot to do with the topic of our talk today: the integration of the doctor and other medical workers into the revolutionary movement. Because the revolution’s task—the task of training and nourishing the children, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the old absentee landlords among those who sweated every day on that same land without reaping its fruit—is the greatest work of social medicine that has been done in Cuba.
The battle against disease should be based on the principle of creating a robust body—not through a doctor’s artistic work on a weak organism—but creating a robust body through the work of the whole collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity.
One day medicine will have to become a science that serves to prevent diseases, to orient the entire public toward their medical obligations, and which only has to intervene in cases of extreme urgency to perform some surgical operation or to deal with something unusual in that new society we are creating . . . For that organizational task, as for all revolutionary tasks, what is required, fundamentally, is the individual. The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.
What the revolution does do, however, is to direct that capacity. Our task today is to orient the creative talent of all the medical professionals toward the tasks of social medicine.
We are at the end of an era, and not only here in Cuba. Despite all that is said to the contrary and despite all the hopes of some people, the forms of capitalism we have known, under which we have been raised and have suffered, are being defeated throughout the world. The monopolies are being defeated. Collective science every day registers new and important triumphs. And we have had the pride and the self-sacrificing duty of being the vanguard in Latin America of a liberation movement that began some time ago, in the other subjugated continents of Africa and Asia. That very profound social change also demands very profound changes in the mentality of the people.
Individualism as such, as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment, must disappear in Cuba. Individualism tomorrow should be the proper utilization of the whole individual, to the absolute benefit of the community. But even when all this is understood today, even when these things I am saying are comprehended, and even when everyone is willing to think a little about the present, about the past, and about what the future should be, changing the manner of thinking requires profound internal changes and helping bring about profound external changes, primarily social.
Those external changes are taking place in Cuba every day. One way of learning about this revolution, of getting to know the forces the people keep stored inside themselves, forces that have been dormant for so long, is to visit all of Cuba, visit the cooperatives and all the workplaces being created. And one way of getting to the heart of the medical question is not only knowing, not only visiting these places, but also getting to know the people who make up those cooperatives and work centers. Go there and find out what diseases they have, what their ailments are, what extreme poverty they have experienced over the years, inherited from centuries of repression and total submission. The doctor, the medical worker, should then go to the heart of their new work, which is as a person among the masses, a person within the community.
Whatever happens in the world, by always being close to the patient, by knowing his or her psychology so deeply, by being the representative of those who come near pain and relieve it, the doctor always has a very important job, a job of great responsibility in social life.
Some time ago, a few months, it so happened here in Havana that a group of students, recently qualified doctors, did not want to go to the countryside and were demanding extra payment for going. From the viewpoint of the past, it is more than logical that this would occur; at least it seems that way to me, and I understand it. I remember that this was the way it was, the way it was thought about some years ago. Once more it is the gladiator in rebellion, the solitary fighter who wants to ensure a better future, better conditions, and to achieve recognition for what he or she does.
But what would happen if it were not those individuals—the majority of whose families could pay for their several years of study—who completed their courses and are now beginning to practice their profession? What if instead it was 200 or 300 peasants who had emerged, let’s say by magic, from the university lecture halls?
What would have happened, simply, is that those peasants would have run immediately, and with great enthusiasm, to attend to their brothers and sisters. They would have requested the posts with the most responsibility and the most work, in order to show that the years of study given them were not in vain. What would have happened is what will happen within six or seven years, when the new students, children of the working class and the peasantry, receive their professional degrees of whatever type.
But we should not view the future with fatalism and divide human beings into children of the working class or peasantry, and counterrevolutionaries. That is simplistic, it is not true, and there is nothing that educates an honorable person more than living within a revolution.
None of us, none of the first group that arrived in the Granma, who established ourselves in the Sierra Maestra, and who learned to respect the peasant and the worker, living together with them—none of us had a past as a worker or peasant. Naturally, there were those who had to work, who had known certain wants in their childhood. But hunger, true hunger, none of us had known, and we began to know it, temporarily, during the two long years in the Sierra Maestra.
And then many things became very clear . . . we learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. We learned it there, we who were not children of the working class or the peasantry. So why should we now shout to the four winds that we are the privileged ones and that the rest of the Cuban people cannot learn, too? Yes, they can learn. In fact, the revolution today demands that they learn, demands that they understand well that the pride of serving our fellow man is much more important than a good income; that the people’s gratitude is much more permanent, much more lasting than all the gold one can accumulate. Each doctor, in the sphere of their activity, can and should accumulate that prized treasure, the people’s gratitude.
We must then begin to erase our old concepts and come ever closer and ever more critically to the people. Not in the way we got closer before, because all of you will say: “No, I am a friend of the people. I enjoy talking with workers and peasants, and on Sundays I go to such and such a place to see such and such a thing.”
Everybody has done that. But they have done it practicing charity, and what we have to practice today is solidarity. We should not draw closer to the people to say: “Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you with our science, to demonstrate your errors, your lack of refinement, your lack of elementary knowledge.” We should go with an investigative zeal and with a humble spirit, to learn from the great source of wisdom that is the people.
Often we realize how mistaken we were in concepts we knew so well; they had become part of us and, automatically, of our consciousness. Every so often we ought to change all our concepts, not just general, social or philosophical concepts, but also, at times, our medical concepts. We will see that diseases are not always treated as one treats illness in a big-city hospital. We will see then that the doctor also has to be a farmer, that he or she has to learn to cultivate new foods and, by his or her example, to cultivate the desire to consume new foods, to diversify the food structure in Cuba—so small and so poor in an agricultural country that is potentially the richest on earth. We will then see that under such circumstances we will have to be quite pedagogic, at times very pedagogic, that we will also have to be politicians; that the first thing we will have to do is not go offering our wisdom, but showing that we are ready to learn with the people, to carry out that great and beautiful common experience—to build a new Cuba.
We have already taken many steps, and the distance between January 1, 1959, and today cannot be measured in a conventional manner. Some time ago the people understood that not only had a dictator fallen here, but a system had fallen as well. Now the people should learn that upon the ruins of a crumbled system, one must build a new one that brings about the people’s absolute happiness.
We have definitively become convinced that there is a common enemy. We know that everyone looks over their shoulders to see if someone will hear them, if someone is listening from some embassy who will transmit what they hear, before they clearly state their opinion against the monopolies, before saying clearly: “Our enemy, and the enemy of all Latin America, is the monopolistic government of the United States of America.”
If everybody already knows that this is the enemy, and if our starting point is knowing that whoever struggles against that enemy has something in common with us, then comes the second part. What are our goals here in Cuba? What do we want? Do we want the people’s happiness or not? Are we struggling for Cuba’s absolute economic liberation or not? Are we or are we not struggling to be a free country among free countries, without belonging to any military bloc, without having to consult any embassy of any great power on earth about any domestic or foreign decision we make? Are we thinking of redistributing the wealth of those who have too much, to give to those who have nothing? Are we thinking here of doing creative work, a dynamic daily source of all our happiness? If so, then we already have the goals to which we referred. At times of great danger, at times of great tension and great creation, what counts are the great enemy and the great goals. If we agree, if we all already know where we are going, then whatever happens, we must begin our work.
I was telling you that to be a revolutionary requires having a revolution. We already have it. And a revolutionary must also know the people with whom he or she is to work. I think we still don’t know one another well. I think we still have to travel a while along that road. Yet if we know the goals, if we know the enemy, and if we know the direction in which we have to travel, then the only thing left for us is to know the daily stretch of the road and to take it. Nobody can point out that stretch; that stretch is the personal road of each individual; it is what he or she will do every day, what he or she will gain from their individual experience, and what he or she will give of themselves in practicing their profession, dedicated to the people’s well-being.
If we already possess all the elements with which to march toward the future, let us then recall that phrase of José Martí, which at this moment I am not putting into practice, but which we must constantly put into practice: “The best form of saying is doing.” And let us then march toward the future of Cuba.
—Excerpt From The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto Che Guevara, Walter Salles and Cintio Vitier
1 The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey, by Che Guevara
https://www.amazon.com/Motorcycle-Diaries-Notes-American-Journey