St. George took these pictures in either late 1959 or early 1960 as Ernesto “Che” Guevara addressed a live radio audience at the national headquarters of Cuba’s largest labor union, the Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos [CTC]. By then, the CTC had refused to accept any Communist Party participation in their leadership on multiple occasions, in part because the Communists had collaborated with, not opposed, the rightwing dictator Fulgencio Batista. As late as May 1960, one union vote after another refused to endorse any Communist nominees in the CTC’s national elections. Then Fidel Castro (who publicly continued to disavow Communist alliances) and his closest advisors adopted another strategy: they relied on local CTC elections that could be announced on the fly rather than scheduled elections to secure their candidates. Uninformed workers who took the system for granted soon found that they had lost control of leadership in unions to the Communists. The result was dramatic: workers lost the right to strike, among other means of protest. Always the prophetic witness, St. George took these pictures in a moment when he might not have recognized their irony: here the Marxist Che Guevara accepts and rewards the entrepreneurialism of a young girl who made and sold handmade lapel pins featuring a photo of Fidel Castro to raise funds for the Revolution. Che also salutes the fundraising campaign of Cuba’s American-styled Boy Scouts, known as Los Exploradores.
