¡CHE VIVE! ¡La lucha Sigue! - CHE LIVES! The struggle continues!
Born June 14, 1928 this month we celebrate what should have been Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s 87th birthday. Unfortunately this revolutionary hero had his life cut short during one of his internationalist missions in Bolivia in 1967. However Che Guevara continues to be a face recognized throughout the world as a symbol of resistance, rebellion and socialism. But while many know the face, few have had the chance to really study his ideas. In honour of Che Guevara`s Birthday, Fire This Time wanted to share a few poignant quotes from his famous letter `Socialism and Man in Cuba`.
"Capitalism is a race of wolves: he who arrives does so only at the expense of the failure of others."
"Socialism is young and makes mistakes. We revolutionaries often lack the knowledge and the intellectual audacity to face the tasks of the development of the new human being by methods different from the conventional ones, and the conventional methods suffer from the influence of the society that created them (once again the topic of the relation between form and content appears). Disorientation is great and the problems of material construction absorb us."
“It is not a question of how many kilograms of meat are eaten or how many times a year someone may go on holiday to the sea shore or how many pretty imported things can be bought with present wages. It is rather that the individual feels greater fulfillment, that he has greater inner wealth and many more responsibilities. In our country the individual knows that the glorious period in which it has fallen to him to live is one of sacrifice; he is familiar with sacrifice.”
“Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality. This is perhaps one of the great dramas of a leader; he must combine an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decision without flinching. “
“Revolutionary leaders must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth to avoid falling into dogmatic extremes, into cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. They must struggle every day so that their love of living humanity is transformed into concrete deeds, into act that will serve as an example, as a mobilizing factor.[…] If his revolutionary eagerness becomes dulled when the most urgent tasks are carried on a local scale and if he forgets about proletarian internationalism, the revolution that he leads cease to be a driving force and it sinks into a comfortable drowsiness which is taken advantage of by imperialism, our irreconciliable enemy, to gain ground. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary need. This is how we educate our people."
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