Che’s Economist: Remembering Jorge Risquet
October 2, 2015
Che’s Economist: Remembering Jorge Risquet
by Helen Yaffe
Interviewing Risquet
Ten years ago, I met with the veteran socialist and commandante to interview him for my doctoral thesis. My discussion with Risquet did not, however, focus on Cuba’s revolutionary armed forces or his role in Africa. I was in Cuba working with archives and conducting interviews to investigate the economic ideas of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in the Cuban Revolution.[2] Risquet’s name had been added to my interview ‘wish list’ after consulting declassified documents from the British embassy in Havana dated 1967 and 1968 detailing the ‘top personalities in Cuba’. Listed as the new Minister of Labour, Risquet was described as: ‘A bearded, youngish man, who appears to be steadily rising in favour.’[3] I met Risquet in his office where he sat in the middle of a large, tidy desk. His distinctive black bushy beard had thinned and turned white. For several hours Risquet patiently answered my questions, showed me old newspaper clippings and journal articles and told me the stories behind the black and white photos hanging on the wall. He gave me a signed a copy of his book, El Segundo Frente del Che en el Congo (Che’s Second Front in the Congo) (2000).
The making of a revolutionary
Risquet was born in 1930. Gleijeses described him as ‘the descendant of an African slave, her white master, a Chinese indentured servant, and a Spanish immigrant.’[4] His early childhood were years of economic depression, revolutionary upheaval, democratic opening and then violent reaction as Batista took control of Cuba with US support in 1934. Risquet’s parents were cigar makers who belonged to a politically progressive worker collective with cheeconomicscommunist sympathies. ‘My parents were semi-literate’, he told me. ‘My father had completed 4th grade and my mother knew how to read but not write.’[5] In 1943, aged 13, Risquet joined the Revolution Cuban Youth (Juventud Revolucionaria Cubana), youth wing of the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), later renamed Socialist Youth. Within two years he was elected onto the executive committee. In 1953, ‘Risquet was the first Cuban to meet Angola’s first president Agostinho Neto in 1953, in Bucharest, Romania, at the Fourth World Festival of Youth and Students’.[6] The following year, as a representative of Cuba and Latin America on the organising committee of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, aged 24 years, he travelled to Guatemala where he met Ernesto Guevara (not yet ‘Che’) who had befriended the exiled Cuban revolutionary, Ñico Lopez. Che was two years his senior.
Following Batista’s coup, Risquet joined the urban underground resistance in Havana. It was a perilous existence. After being captured, tortured and incarcerated, he made it to the Sierra Cristal in Oriente Province, where Raul Castro had opened up the Second Front. There he directed political education for the troops. On 1 January 1959, he entered Santiago de Cuba with Raul and Fidel Castro’s Rebel Army columns.
Political and military roles in the Revolution
Risquet became head of the Culture Department of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) in Oriente province, in charge of political instruction. He carried out numerous political roles between 1959 and 61 as well as serving as head of army operations. He recalled: ‘During those first years my work involved guiding the political tasks of the revolution. I went on to occupy more military roles too.’ Risquet joined the political leadership in Oriente province of the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations [ORI] formed by merging the three insurrectionary organisations which had participated in Batista’s overthrow.’ As a veteran of the PSP, Risquet’s role was particularly important in opposing the sectarianism (mainly from PSP stalwarts) which threatened unity between those groups. The ORI became the United Party of the Socialist Revolution [PURS] in 1962 and Risquet was deputy leader in Oriente. When PURS became the Cuban Communist Party in 1965 Risquet was named among its 100-strong Central Committee. Between 1973 and 1990, he served on the Cuban Communist Party’s Secretariat and its Politburo from 1980 to 1991. He was also a long-standing member of Cuba’s National Assembly of Peoples’ Power.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/ches-economist-remembering-jorge-risquet/
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