• £2.00/S3.50/20FF. Cheque payable to P. Rousset, JIRE, Postbus 53290, 1007 Amsterdam, Netherlands.
* 1968 in France
tion in China in 1966-67. At the beginning of the 1968 events they were stronger than we were, but we won out in comparison to them through 1968. • Did the JCR grow fast in 1968?
Yes, we had enormous prestige because we were identified from the beginning with the radical wing of the movement, with the 22 March. For example, we were the only national political current which fully participated on the night of 10 May - the "night of the barricades'.
The growth of the JCR, and the Ligue communiste révolutionaire which we became later, came from the combination of two things: our participation in the movement when the Maoists were a bit discredited, and the campaign of our comrade Alain Krivine in the 1969 presidential elections.
Most far-left groups, showing their left infantilism, had no idea of utilising those elections. It was not obvious, and it was particularly difficult to do it, but it was a good idea, and it was this which within a year gave us a big space to expand. • After the strike, the JCR was banned
Both then and again in 1973! But it was an advantage in some ways. Because if you don't have the crazy line of the Maoists and if you have some real links with the workers movement, illegality is a formality and gives a certain prestige. We had to reorganise for four months, and 20 people were jailed until September or October, but it was not a big problem for us. • How could things could have been done better? Do you think that the potential of 1968 led some people to artificially high expectations?
Obviously it was a high point, with potentialities which were not used, but we should remember with what strengths we
We were formed in 1966, defending the very idea that the working class still existed, when all kinds of people were arguing that everyone was bourgeois now. Suddenly within two years we had a real, live general strike. It is very good for you!
There were obviously other potentialities even for a small organisation if we had only had more experience and more maturity. The real question you are raising is firstly one of an estimation of 1968.
This is not an academic question. Should we say it was a mountain or just a small hill? The truth may be between the two. But what it represents depends on what we do now: if nothing more happens, then it was just a big peak followed by a general decline. Now is the moment we
Some say it was the last big strike of
the nineteenth century working class. But perhaps it was the first big strike of the twenty-first century. We don't know, and it depends on what we do now.
A more balanced view of 1968 is not that it was a revolutionary strike - though sometimes we insist on stressing the political potentialities. A colder assessment shows that the consciousness of the working class had been formed by the years of prosperity and expansion, the welfare state, democratic rights.
1968 was not a revolutionary crisis like those of the 1920s or 1930s: that is true, and sometimes in polemics with the CP we insist too much on the revolutionary character of the situation.
Perhaps we have been more objective in our polemics with the Lambertists, though at first we did not know how to express why we felt that the situation was not revolutionary but was pre-revolutionary. Yes, there was a deep movement of the working class that was shaking the bourgeoisie: but there was no 'subjective
, no revolutionary leadership rooted strongly in the working class.
The strength of the bureaucracy has something to do with the level of consciousness of broader layers of the working class. We can now see that better.
It is true that there were also many more illusions in Maoist currents, partly because of the view that the working class was finished. They expected revolution now, immediately. They went rapidly into decline. Their very illusions, coupled with the frustrations of what happened in Europe and then in China do not justify but explain why so many right wing intellectuals have come from Maoist currents.
Social democrats tend to interpret 1968 in cultural and sociological terms: some say 1968 was a success because of what the SP was able to do in government - realising democratic aspirations, legali-
Of course this is absurd: in many countries all this and more has been achieved without 1968. It doesn't explain anything about the peculiarities of such a movement, why a general strike involving millions of people took place, and so on.
There is a general move to depoliticise the interpretation of 1968. We have to defend the real political content and the dynamics of that upsurge. And not just to celebrate, but to give it some present political meaning. * * In 1968 Daniel Bensaid was a prominent leader of the student movement at Nanterre university. Today he is a leading member of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionbooknotes
From Che Guevara's FBI file... Che Guevara and the FBI: The U.S. Political Police Dossier on the Latin American Revolutionary, Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 1997) $US18.95 [paper], pp. 213. Reviewed by Jim Cockroft
Che Guevara and the FBI is a bombshell. It reproduces and annotates a selection of documents on Che Guevara from FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Huge chunks of the materials have been blackened out, but what remains is still devastating.
Civil liberties lawyers Michael Ratner and Michael Smith decided to publish these laundered items because they illustrate the obsessive concern of U.S. police agencies with not only the Cuban revolution and its possible spread but also, and more emphatically, with Che. Also, they illustrate how the U.S. government manipulates the press, including the New York Times. Finally, they provide readers with a quick easy-to-understand snapshot of how thorough and incompetent U.S. snooping and police agencies are in their monitoring of anyone suspected of dissent, a practice that has grown more sophisticated and ominous since Che's 1967 murder in Bolivia on orders from the CIA. (Declassified documents on the last months prior to Che's death are still amazingly scarce.)
The documents reproduced here are must start from.
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION:
Revolutionary strategy today
Daniel Bensaid
30 International Viewpoint #301 naire, French section of the Fourth International.
only the tip of the iceberg. Although they consist largely of CIA reports sent to the FBI, they come only from the FBI archives. Ratner and Smith are now conducting a quest for the rest of the CIA's voluminous reports on Che, some of which are still classified.
In their introduction to Che Guevara and the FBI, Ratner and Smith point out that the FBI legally "was not supposed to
be involved in international political intelligence work anymore than its younger and bigger brother, the CIA, was supposed to involve itself in American domestic affairs" (p. 4). Their book blows the lid on that not so well kept secret!
The young Che
The FBI started its dossier on Che in
1952, when, apparently, Che was in
Miami. The FBI photocopied his passport and took his fingerprints. A 1958 CIA document claims Che "had a police record in Miami," where he "was arrested and interrogated during the Korean War" (p.31).
Yet a 1964 CIA report says that upon his arrival in Miami Che "was turned back by
U.S. immigration authorities" (p.117).
Reliability of reports submitted to U.S. security agencies is always problematic, because the informants are often contradictory, prejudiced, self-serving, and stupid. One report alleges that Cubans will not be attracted to communism because they like "to idle in the sun or dance to their native rhythms" (p.6).
Other CIA gems on Che relayed to the FBI in the 1956-66 period include reports that Che "has never studied medicine, "has no negro strain in him," "hates to wash and will never do so," and "is fairly intellectual - for a "Latino'."According to the same sources, Che's mysterious absence was not "motivated by problems with Fidel," his farewell letter to the Cuban people was "fictitious," and Che was killed while landing on the coast of the Dominican Republic in a "yellowpainted pocket submarine.
The CIA began its spying on Che in 1954 when Che was one of millions of voices protesting the CIA-directed military coup that overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president Jácobo Arbenz in order to protect United Fruit Company's idle lands being distributed to peasants. By the time of Che's 1956 arrest in Mexico City, U.S. spy agencies had bundles of reports on him. This suggests that they probably had files on thousands of other Latin Americans who at the time were not well known. Che in Cuba
Reports on Che and others in Fidel Castro's guerrilla camps of the Sierra Maestra in 1956 were clearly obtained by informants who spoke with or overheard Che. The CIA, fresh from its experiences in Europe, Iran, and Guatemala, was once more infiltrating possible communist insurgencies. Yet it showed no comprehension of why Latin Americans were unhappy with U.S. policies in Latin America. Instead, it attributed anti-U.S. feelings to "an attitude which is fairly common among young 'Latin Americans'." Attitude indeed!
Che Guevara and the FBI sheds new light on the events immediately following the defeated U.S.-led Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) invasion of Cuba in 1961. Memoranda sent by presidential adviser Richard Goodwin to President Kennedy about his meeting with Che at the Punta del Este conference of the Organisation of American States (OAS) reveal that Che, speaking as head of the Cuban delegation, sought a modus vivendi between Cuba and the United States. Goodwin viewed Che as the one Cuban official most "dedicated [to] communist views" (p.73).
One Goodwin memo states that Che told him there would never be enough internal support in Cuba for an overthrow of the revolution and that in other Latin American countries "the commies would get in through popular election" or, under dictatorships, armed revolt (p.78). Note the use of the fanatical term "commies" by Goodwin, a prominent U.S. liberal
Che assured Goodwin that in time Cuba would have "free elections, [after] the establishment of a one-party system.? Che also said the Cubans were willing to make concessions to the United States, such as agreeing to no "political alliance with the East" although this would not affect their "natural sympathies." Finally, Che thanked Goodwin and Kennedy "for the invasion [that] transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal" (p.79).
Goodwin's recommendations to Kennedy were to tighten the economic blockade of Cuba, form "the Caribbean security pact to deal "with the spread of and eliminate the "peaceful coexistence which Castro is now trying to create" (p.74). Internationalism
Che's internationalism in practice was viewed in Washington as even more threatening than the example of the Cuban revolution itself. It is ironic that the CIA's super spooks seemed to be in the dark about Che's whereabouts in 1965-66 when he was first in the Congo and then in Bolivia, fighting revolutions in his attempt to cripple imperialism by creating two, three, many Vietnams." Che's efforts in the Congo against Mobutu failed, although one of the young leaders of the time, Laurent Kabila, thirty years later led the uprising that finally toppled Mobutu.
Che's efforts in Bolivia also failed, in part because his presence was constantly spotted by the U.S. military's heat-seeking infrared devices originally developed by academics at the University of Michigan. Several pages of Che Guevara and the FBI reproduce the misinformed allegations by CIA informants that Che was dead, that Fidel had ordered him executed, that Che was in one or another Third World country, when all the time he was carrying the internationalist revolutionary banner to
A final section of Che Guevara and the FBI shows Goodwin and his aides meeting with New York Times editor Ben Wells a year after Che's death in order to have the Times spread news about a Havana-Moscow split in an effort to undermine both the Cuban and Soviet governments. One Goodwin aide reports "We made every effort to emphasise *Castro = Trotsky' and emphasised how reviews * seriously things must be regarded in
Moscow when they applied the name
Trotsky in this situation"
Like Che, Leon Trotsky, murdered on
Stalin's orders in 1940, believed that socialism could not be built in one country alone because, in the words of Ratner and
Smith, "the forces of the world market would eventually restore capitalism to the
Soviet Union unless the Russian revolution broke out of its isolation and was extended abroad" (p.202).
While doing a superb job in annotating these nefarious FBI/CIA documents, Ratner and Smith skate on thin ice when they say that many of Che's speeches they reproduce here from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) "are probably the only extant copies of the speeches."
A few of the speeches may indeed be the only copies in English, but most are available in Spanish and other languages, and several are available in English. Moreover, the other copies may be more reliable, since, as a "Publisher's Note" to
Che Guevara and the FBI states, the FBIS
"should not be regarded as accurate transcriptions" (p. xiii).
Even so, it is inspiring to read Che's words here, still appropriate so many years after intellectuals and other self-styled revolutionists around the world have pronounced the ideas of guerrilla warfare and international revolutionary solidarity as dead or wrong-headed.
Che Guevara and the FBI serves to remind us of the real threat U.S. corporate capital and its political representatives in Washington saw behind the so-called "evil of communism during the Cold War years and now Cuba today and international terrorism": revolution, and its consequent constraints on corporate capital's obscenely high profits made at the expense of working people world-wide.
Che Guevara and the FBI also reminds us of why Che was not only feared in Washington but admired throughout most of the world. His statements resonate—revolutionaries as "motivated by deep feelings of love," the OAS as a "ministry of colonies," and, from his last public speech, "The practice of internationalism is not only a duty for the peoples who struggle for a better future, it is also an inescapable necessity." This review first appeared in Monthly Review, vol. 49, The Price of the Euro
De prijs van de euro (The Price of the Euro) is edited by Geert Reuten, Kees Vendrik and IIRE co-director Robert Went, the initiators of last year's Dutch and European economists' appeals questioning the Euro project from a left perspective. Contributions from 15 Dutch economists outline the negative consequences of the euro for democracy, women, the environment, social security, employment, job security and the public sector. Available in most Dutch bookshops (f35), or via the IIRE (see p.35 for address).
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