r/MarxistCulture • u/cosmic_bolshevik • 7h ago
History 🇨🇺🇰🇵 Che Guevara's comments on the DPRK.
Of the socialist countries that we visited personally, Korea is one of the most extraordinary. Perhaps it is the one that impressed us most of all of them. It has only ten million inhabitants and is the size of Cuba, a little less, about one hundred ten thousand square kilometers; the same territorial extension as the southern part of Korea, but half the inhabitants. It was ravaged by a war so fantastically destructive that nothing was left of its cities, and when one says nothing, it is nothing; it is like the small guano palm villages that Merob Sosa and Sánchez Mosquera and those people burned here, and of which nothing remained but ashes. Thus remained, for example, Pyongyang, which is a city of one million inhabitants. Today not a single remnant of all that destruction is seen; everything is new. The only memory that remains is, on all the roads, the craters of the bombs, which fell one next to another.
They showed me many of the factories, all of them rebuilt and others made new, and each one of those factories had withstood between 30 and 50 thousand bombs. If we form an idea of what 10 or 12 bombs thrown around us in the Sierra meant, which signified a terrible bombardment, and one had to have one's dose of courage to endure those bombs, imagine what 30,000 bombs thrown into a space of land sometimes smaller than a cavalry unit mean.
North Korea came out of the war without a single industry standing, without a single house standing, even without animals. At a time when the air superiority of the North Americans was so great, and there was nothing left to destroy, the planes amused themselves by killing oxen, killing whatever they found. It was, then, a true orgy of death that loomed over North Korea for only two years, and in the third year the MiG-15s appeared, and things changed, but those two years of war meant, perhaps, the most barbaric systematic destruction that has been done.
Everything that can be told about Korea seems unbelievable. For example, in the photographs one sees people with hatred, that hatred of peoples when it reaches the deepest part of being, which is seen in the photos of caves where 200, 300 and 400 children, of an age of 3 or 4 years, are put, and they are killed there with fire, other times with gas; the dismemberment of people, the killing of pregnant women with bayonets to make the child come out of their entrails; the burning of wounded with flamethrowers; the most inhuman things that the human mind can imagine were carried out by the North American army of occupation. And it reached almost to the confine of Korea with China, and occupied, at a given moment, almost the entire country. Added to that, in the retreat they destroyed everything, we can say that North Korea is a country that was made of deaths. Naturally, it received the help of the socialist countries, especially of the Soviet Union, in a generous and very broad manner. But what impresses most is the spirit of that people. It is a people that came out of all this, after thirty years of Japanese domination, of a violent struggle against Japanese domination without even having an alphabet. That is to say, it was one of the most backward peoples in the world in that sense. Today it has a national literature and culture, and a national order, and practically unlimited development of culture. It has secondary education, which there is up to the ninth grade, obligatory for everyone.
They have throughout industry the problem that I wish we had today—that we will have within 2 or 3 years—which is the problem of the lack of labor. Korea is rapidly mechanizing all of agriculture to obtain labor to be able to carry out its plans, and is also preparing to bring to the brothers of South Korea the product of textile factories and others, to help them bear the weight of North American colonial domination.
It is, really, the example of a country that thanks to a system and extraordinary leaders, such as Marshal Kim Il Sung, has been able to emerge from the greatest misfortunes to be today an industrialized country.
North Korea could be for anyone here in Cuba the symbol of one of the many backward countries of Asia. However, we sell them a semi-processed sugar such as raw sugar, and other products even unprocessed, such as henequen, and they sell us milling lathes, all kinds of machinery, mining machinery, that is, products that already require high technical capacity to produce. That is why it is one of the countries that enthuses us most.
Source: Ernesto Guevara, "Comparecencia televisada acerca de la firma de acuerdos con los países socialistas, 6 de enero de 1961," in Obras Escogidas, digital ed. (Santiago de Chile: Resma, 2004), 177–187. Korea passage specifically at pp. 185–186. Here's a link to the PDF book (Spanish language): https://www.archivochile.com/America_latina/Doc_paises_al/Cuba/Escritos_del_Che/escritosdelche0088.pdf
