The principles of Che Guervara have quietly taken precedence over older more repressive forms of communism in Cuba, John Gerassi, editor of a collection of Guevara's speeches, said yesterday.

"The cultural revolution in Cuba has won out by convincing people, not by forcing them," Gerassi said in an interview.

"Che and his people have been fighting for moral incentives against the old Communist Party members who just wanted an efficient state," said Gerassi. By 1967, he claimed, "100 per cent of the youth supported Che's principles. Now the CDR, the official vigilante committee, is watching the bureaucrats instead of the workers and students."

Gerassi, who was fired from San Francisco State College last January for helping to organize a series of militant black protests, said that Cuban revolutionaries have expanded their activities throughout the third world to abet revolution among oppressed peoples. Most recently, he claimed, Cubans have been sent to train the Zapu and Zanu tribes in Rhodesia.

Cuban enthusiasm for further participation in third world revolutionary movements remain high. Gerassi said, even a year after Guevara's death and the collapse of the Bolivian guerrilla movement. "I think every kid in Cuba was willing to go to Bolivia with Che," he noted.

The current Mexican student revolt, Gerassi said, bears more resemblance to the unrest of American youth than to outbreaks in other parts of Latin America. The Mexican students, he noted, are largely from the middle class, and are fighting for "the humanization of society," not primarily for a share in their society's wealth.

Gerassi will speak at 8 p.m. tonight in Lowell Lecture Hall, along with Blase Bonpane, the Maryknoll priest who was deported from Guatemala for aiding the guerrillas there.