Trabajo Voluntario

1961 · The Revolutionaries · Work 1080 of 1,871

A voluntary work brigade on a school building site in Havana on a morning in early summer, a chain of about fifteen men passing concrete blocks hand to hand from a stack at the kerb to the half-built wall of grey concrete blocks, the wall only shoulder high, every man in the chain carrying a block, the men bare-headed or in straw hats, in a variety of plain work shirts, white, pale blue, checked, faded khaki, with rolled sleeves, timber scaffolding lashed at the joints, sand and gravel heaped on the pavement, palms and a low apartment terrace behind, a plain rendered wall to the left with a Cuban flag hanging flat against it, the chain seen from the side and slightly below with the stack of blocks at the left edge of the frame and the wall at the right edge, the third man from the left in the chain is the man, the same size and the same distance from the camera as the men on either side of him, in a plain olive work shirt and trousers and the only black beret in the chain, dark wavy hair reaching his collar below the beret, a concrete block held in both hands as the others hold theirs, his face turned toward the camera as he passes the block on, low morning sun.

Who
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928–1967) was an Argentine doctor who became one of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution and an icon of the radical left. Born in Rosario in 1928, he studied medicine in Buenos Aires, travelled through South America and met Fidel Castro in Mexico. At the end of 1956 he landed in Cuba with Castro's force; of 83 men, 17 survived. After two years of guerrilla war he entered Havana on 2 January 1959. In the first months that followed he commanded the fortress of La Cabaña, while revolutionary tribunals convicted supporters of the ousted dictator Batista as war criminals and had them shot. He then headed the National Bank, and from February 1961 the new Ministry of Industries. At the United Nations in 1964 he said that Cuba had executed people, was executing people and would go on doing so as long as necessary. In 1965 he left Cuba, waged guerrilla wars in the Congo and in Bolivia and failed both times. On 8 October 1967 Bolivian soldiers captured him; the next day he was shot on the orders of the army command. Alberto Korda's portrait photograph turned him into an image known around the world.
The moment
On Sunday, 4 June 1961, Guevara had been Minister of Industries for a little over three months. At the corner of 13th and 4th streets in the Havana district of Vedado, young people from many countries, members of the International Union of Students, had spent three days building a school without pay as a sign of their solidarity with the revolution. The minister gave the closing speech; beforehand he worked with them for several hours. Rather than a formal address, he offered to answer the questions they had probably not been able to settle while working and across the language barrier. This unpaid work, trabajo voluntario, was a programme he had made his own; his first stint was on 22 November 1959, building a school city for some 20,000 children of the Sierra Maestra. The picture shows a chain of men passing concrete blocks to a half-built wall; the third from the left, in the black beret, is Guevara.
The other side
A minister carrying blocks, and that was exactly the point. Voluntary work was not to be measured by its economic value, Guevara said; above all it developed the workers' consciousness. In April 1961 he had denounced the "dangerous specialisations" of underdeveloped, dependent countries. Cuba's sugar simply went to other customers: from 1959 to 1961–62, by a US State Department estimate, exports to the Sino-Soviet bloc rose by about 3.4 million tonnes and those to "Free World" markets fell by 3.1 million. The philosopher and Guevara biographer Stephan Lahrem calls the economic policy Guevara was responsible for an utter fiasco.

What the sources leave open: What the site at the corner of 13th and 4th looked like, at what time of day Guevara was there, what the volunteers wore and whether a flag hung there is not recorded; site, chain and flag are typified. The details of the day come from Cuban state sources. How many death sentences at La Cabaña go back to Guevara is disputed. His face follows a 1961 photograph by Alberto Korda.

Further reading

Sources