Che signed on as the third of the band to sail in the Granma.
He became a commander in Fidel Castro's Rebel Army, which began its struggle in the teeth of political opposition from the Cuban Stalinists, organised in the so-called Popular Socialist Party.
The old Communist Party had from 1938 to 1944 played a despicable role in alliance with Batista, who saw them as a convenient means of controlling the working class through the Cuban Confederation of Workers. The CPeven had two ministers in Batista's government The Cuban Stalinist strategy in the 1950s was to seek an alliance with sections of Cuban capitalists against Batista. This policy was only dropped late in 1958, when it was clear that the armed campaign waged by Castro's and other guerrilla forces was winning the upper hand.
Despite this, after the Revolution it was not the Stalinists, but the small Cuban Trotskyist forces who were repressed in 1961. Activists were jailed for selling literature.
Guevara, while conceding that the smashing of their printing press had been a mistake, in 1962 defended the repression of the Trotskyists whose call for the working class to exert pressure on the government was prejudicing the discipline necessary at this time!
He insisted that You cannot be for the revolution and against the Cuban Communist Party!
Indeed Guevara himself went out of his way to identify himself with the wretched PSP tradition. He even spoke at the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the PSP' snewspaper Hoy, which had begun life under the legal protection of Batista, claiming that the party 'was the ideological precursor of our revolution'.
Politically, Guevara's version of Marxism was a Stalinist version. He described the Stalinist-dominated Communist parties without qualification as Marxist-Leninist.
In formulating his theoretical views on 'Building a Party of the Working Class' (1963) it is clear that his party model is a Stalinist model, with no internal democracy, no right to form tendencies and factions: none of Trotsky's critique of Stalinism and bureaucratism in the USSR was taken on board.
There was a contradiction here, of course. Unlike the official Communist Parties, Guevara was no fan of alliances with the national bourgeoisies in Latin America or elsewhere: his view was in fact much closer to the Trotskyist conception of 'permanent revolution':
"Faced with the dilemma of choosing between the people or imperialism, the weak national bourgeoisies choose imperialism and definitively betray their country. In this part of the world the possibility is almost totally gone for there to be a peaceful transition to As late as 1967, Che appeared to embrace the same tacit commitment to