Che denied that the building of socialism meant the “abolition of the individual.” Rather, the individual was the essence of the revolution: the Cuban struggle had depended on those individuals who fought and offered their lives for it. A new notion of self, however, had emerged in the vortex of that struggle—“the heroic stage” that had been attained when those same individuals “vied to achieve a place of greater responsibility, of greater danger, and without any other satisfaction than that of fulfilling their duty. ... In the attitude of our fighters, we could glimpse the man of the future.”
