Here’s something about Che I wrote for Socialist Resistance a couple of years ago. The photo was taken in the Museum of the Revolution in Havana. You can see what they are trying to do.
Che Guevara, almost uniquely among 20th century revolutionary leaders, is still a symbol of rebellion for the youth of the 21st century. Being as photogenic as Johnny Depp is always a help. But it’s the facts of his life and his very humanistic approach to socialism that guarantee his place in the history of future revolutions.
Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna as he was known to his parents was born in Argentina in 1928. He went to Buenos Aires University to study medicine where he abstained from politics. In 1949 he went motorcycling in northern Argentina and a couple of years later he travelled to Chile, Colombia and Peru. Having come from a comfortably off family this trips were his first real experience of the poverty of the farmers and Indians.
His travels took him to Guatemala which had a left-leaning government led by Jacobo Arbenz. Guevara was there when the CIA organised a coup which overthrew this government because it was giving some land to the peasantry. By this time Guevara considered himself a Marxist and, according to some accounts, he tried to organise armed resistance to the coup.
With the defeat of the Arbenz government in 1954 Guevara went to Mexico City. That’s where he met Fidel and Raul Castro . They had fled Cuba and were organising a small guerrilla army to return and overthrow a corrupt, pro-American government. The Cubans were being given a professional military training by Alberto Bayo, a veteran of the Spanish civil war.
In November 1956 Guevara sailed to Cuba with Castro’s 80 strong “army” on a boat called the Granma. They didn’t have much luck. They were noticed immediately and the group had to split up. Guevara was wounded in an ambush. Although he was the group’s doctor it was at this point that Guevara decided to abandon his medical supplies and save the ammunition the guerrillas needed.
In January the rebels successfully attacked the barracks at La Plata. By the spring of that year their military campaign has intensified and they are building support among the peasant farmers. On New Year’s day 1959 the dictator Batista fled to Miami and the revolutionaries found themselves in government.
Guevara finds himself transformed from guerrilla leader to the Director of the National Bank and the Minister for Industries. And this was when he showed himself to be at his most revolutionary. Most people who make that sort of transformation quickly find it hard to see beyond their day-to-day job. They are relieved that they are no longer sleeping in mountain forests hunted by a dictator’s army. Guevara was made of different stuff. His slogan was: “The duty of a revolutionary is to make revolutions.”
He was convinced that the Cuban revolution could only survive if there were successful revolutions in other parts of the world. For him the victory of the Vietnamese against the Americans would be a victory for the Cuban revolution. He wanted to open up new revolutionary wars and was convinced that what had worked in Cuba could succeed in other countries. In 1965 he took 100 veterans of the Cuban revolution to Congo to support Laurent Kabila. This brief episode failed. What worked in Cuba didn’t work in Africa.
Still convinced that he could support the Vietnamese by opening up a revolutionary war in Latin America Guevara travelled to Bolivia in 1966. He had a guerrilla force of 29 Bolivians, 16 Cubans and 3 Peruvians but didn’t have the support of the Communist Party or the strong Bolivian miners’ union. The result was predictable. Guevara was taken prisoner and murdered in September 1967.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called Guevara “the most complete man of his time”. He was a doctor, an economist, a banker, a revolutionary, a military theoretician and an innovative Marxist thinker. Guevara died trying to come to the aid of the Vietnamese revolution, half a planet away from Cuba. This at a time when the Vietnamese revolution was creating a new revolutionary generation in Europe and America. Guevara was the shining revolutionary star. The opposite of the old men who represented Soviet Stalinism he was the uncompromising revolutionary idealist who refused to make rotten deals with the old world.
We will leave the last word to our comrade Che Guevara: “It was precisely love for humanity which conceived Marxism…the desire to combat misery, injustice and all the exploitations suffered by the working class which made Marxism arise from the mind of Karl Marx.”
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