Dec. 12, 1964 - Maj. Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Cuba’s Minister of Industry, declared in New York City today that the recent dismissals of several key officials in Havana did not signify any purge.
The bearded leader puffed on his usual long, dark cigar as he denied the existence of any internal struggle between “old guard” and “new Communists” in the Havana regime.
Wearing his olive‐green fatigue uniform, he was interviewed at the heavily guarded Cuban mission at 6 East 67th Street. About 20 policemen, including plainclothes men, were stationed in the blocked‐off street, and several more were inside.
Major Guevara said the only struggle in Cuba was between “those who want to revive the past and the Communists.” He described the Communists as “all of us.”
He had written out answers to more than a dozen questions in Spanish given him the day before because he wanted to be quoted correctly, he said. Seated on a sofa in an upstairs reception room, he read his answers in Spanish, then elaborated.
Cuba’s main problem, he said, is fighting for economic growth while facing an “imperialistic blockade” and “having to spend prodigious sums to prepare our army.”
“Our most significant accomplishments,” he said, “are in the fight for culture and health in the domestic sphere and having become one of the bearers of the flag of dignity in the international sphere.”
Guevara is regarded as the chief moving force that brought about close economic ties with the Communist bloc. He said the most important thing about the current agreement with the Soviet Union was for the delivery of Cuban sugar at 6.11 cents a pound in increasing amounts, “reaching five million tons by 1968 or 1969.” He estimated the 1965 figure at 2.5 million tons.
He said Cuba “neither begs for, nor are we hostile to, any settlement” with the U.S., but that everything depended on Cuba’s being considered an equal.
He asserted that “practically all Latin America is ready for revolution” and mentioned “liberation struggles” in Guatemala, Colombia, and Venezuela. He has advocated guerrilla warfare in Latin America.
The Cuban leader said counterrevolutionary bands trained and armed by the CIA had long been liquidated and that only “very small groups” remained as clandestine opponents in Cuba.
Guevara declined to take sides in the Moscow‐Peking dispute. The major, who has visited both countries, said Cuba’s position was to favor “the unity of the Socialist camp” because disunity “is to the advantage of you who are our enemies.”
He refused comment on the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and declined to say whether Russians still had any control over ground-to‐air missiles in Cuba.
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