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Vol. 79/No. 39 November 2, 2015
(Books of the Month column)
‘To be a revolutionary doctor, there
must first be a revolution’
The Spanish-language edition of Che Guevara Talks to Young People is one
of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. It contains eight talks
given between 1959 and 1964 by the Argentine-born revolutionary who
helped lead the first socialist revolution in the Americas in Cuba. The
selection is from “To Be a Revolutionary Doctor, You Must First Make a
Revolution,” a speech given Aug. 19, 1960, at a gathering of several
hundred medical students and health care workers in the assembly hall of
the Confederation of Cuban Workers. Copyright © 2000 by Pathfinder
Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA
Almost everyone knows that a number of years ago I started out my
career to be a doctor. And when I started, 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 of being a
famous researcher. I dreamed of working tirelessly to achieve something
that could really be put at the disposal of humanity, but that would be
a personal triumph at the same time. 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
got to know it intimately. Except for Haiti and the Dominican Republic,
I have visited — to one degree or another — all the countries of Latin
America. Given how 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 due to lack of
resources, with the numbness that hunger and unrelenting punishment
cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child becomes an
accident of no importance, as is often the case among those classes in
our Latin American homeland who have been dealt the heaviest blows. And
I began to see there was something that seemed to me almost as important
as being a famous researcher or making a substantial contribution to
medical science: it was helping those people. …
Then I realized a 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 — all that is for
naught if the effort is made alone, solitary, in some corner of Latin
America, fighting against hostile governments and social conditions that
permit no progress. A revolution needs what we have in Cuba: an entire
people who are mobilized, who have learned the use of arms and the
practice of unity in combat, 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 do a
job of social welfare effectively? How does one reconcile individual
effort with the needs of society?
Once again we have to recall what each of our lives was like prior to
the revolution — what each of us did and thought, as a doctor or in any
other public health function. We must do so with profound critical
enthusiasm. And we will conclude that almost everything we thought and
felt in that past epoch should be filed away, and we should create a new
type of human being. If each one of us is his own architect in doing so,
then creating that new type of human being — who will be the
representative of the new Cuba — will be much easier.
It is good for you — those present here, residents of Havana — to absorb
this idea: that in Cuba a new type of human being is coming into
existence, one that cannot be entirely appreciated in the capital, but
that can be seen in every corner of the country. Those of you who went
to the Sierra Maestra on July 26 must have seen two absolutely
unheard-of things: an army with picks and shovels, one that takes such
pride in marching in the patriotic celebrations in Oriente province with
its picks and shovels ready, side by side with the militia compañeros
marching with their rifles. [Applause] But you must also have seen
something much more important: You must have seen some children who by
their physical stature appear eight or nine years old, but who are
nevertheless almost all thirteen or fourteen. They are the most
authentic children of the Sierra Maestra, the most authentic 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, despite all the advances of modern science, when
those children for the first time came to school at night and saw
electric lights, they exclaimed that the stars were very low that night.
Those children, whom some of you would have seen, have now been brought
together in schools where they are learning everything from the ABCs
right up to a trade, right up to the very difficult science of being a
revolutionary.
These are the new types of human beings emerging in Cuba. They are being
born in isolated places, in remote points in 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 or any other medical worker into the
revolutionary movement. Because the revolution’s tasks — of training and
nourishing the children, educating the army, distributing the lands of
the absentee landlords among those who sweated every day on that same
land without reaping its fruit — those are the greatest works of social
medicine that Cuba has achieved.
Related articles:
End 55-year US embargo against Cuban Revolution!
Fidel Castro: ‘Imperialists worry about our example’
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