Words from Ernesto Guevara on his visit to Korea 1960
By: Revolución Internacional
Tags: Marxism, Socialism, Cuba, North Korea, Dprk

From all the socialist countries that we have personally visited, Korea is one of the most extraordinary. This country might be the one that impressed us the most. It only has 10 million inhabitants and has the size of Cuba, a bit less, like 110 000 km. The same territory as the south of Korea but half the people, it was isolated by a war so incredibly destructive that nothing was left from their cities and when i say nothing i mean nothing. Its like the small guano villages that Merob Sosa and Sánchez Mosquera ( military men from Batista’s dictatorship) and those kind of people used to burn here, from which nothing remained but ashes. That’s how it was, for example, Pyongyang, which is a city of a million citizens. Today you can’t see any trace of all that destruction, everything is new. The only memories left are, in all roads, all streets and all train lines, the holes from the bombs that fell one close to each other.



They showed me many of the factories, all of them rebuilt and others built from scratch, and every single one of them had endured between 30 and 50 thousand bombs. If we think about what 10 or 12 bombs dropped on the Sierra were , they were a terrible bombardment, one would have to have a doses of courage to withstand those bombs, what 30 thousand bombs is when dropped on a surface of land, sometimes smaller than an infantry?!



North Korea left the war with not a single industry standing, not a single house standing, without animals even. In an age in which the air superiority of the north Americans was so big, that they had nothing left to destroy, aviators had fun killing oxen, killing what they could find. It was then, a true orgy of death what was upon North Korea in just 2 years. In the third year the Mig-15 were introduced and things changed. But those 2 years of war might be the most barbaric systematic destruction ever committed.



Everything we can say about Korea is unbelievable. For example, in pictures you can see people with hate, that people’s hate when it gets to one’s core, you can see it in the pictures of the caves were 200,300 and 400 three or four year old children hide, were they got murdered by fire or gas. The disembowelment of people. Killing pregnant women through bayonet stabbings to make their children come out their wombs, burning the wounded with flamethrowers…the most inhumane things that one could imagine were committed by the north american army occupation. And they almost got to the border of Korea with China, almost all the country at one moment. Also counting that they destroyed everything during the withdrawal, we can say that North Korea is a country built over deaths. Naturally it received help from socialist nations, specially help from the soviet union in a very generous and vast way. But what impresses me the most is the spirit of that people. They are people who went through Japanese domination for 30 years, from a violent struggle against Japanese dominance, without an alphabet. It was one of the most underdeveloped countries of the world in that aspect. Now they have literature and national culture, and a national order and a practically unlimited development of culture. They have secondary education, which last until ninth grade, its obligatory for everyone.



They now have a problem in all industries that we wished we had today- that we will have in 2 or 3 years-, its the problem of a lack of work force. Korea is quickly mechanizing its agriculture to achieve workforce and fulfill its plans, they are also preparing themselves to bring products from their cloth factories and others to their brothers in South Korea so they can overcome the burden of north american colonialist dominance.



It, truly is, the example of a country which thanks to its system and extraordinary leaders, like Marshall Kim Il Sung, has been able to overcome the biggest misfortunes to become an industrialized country now. North Korea could be for anyone here in Cuba, the symbol of one of the many underdeveloped countries of Asia. However we sell them semi refined sugar like raw sugar, and other raw products, like henequen and they sell us lathe-mill machines, all kinds of machinery, mine machinery, in other words, products that require high technical capacity to produce. That’s why it is one of the countries that we are the most enthusiastic about.