Vijay Prashad
On 9 October 1967, in southern Bolivia, near the barren and desolate village of La Higuera, the Bolivian Army — under instructions from the government of the United States — trapped the isolated guerrilla column led by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Che, a hero of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, believed that Cuba — only 140 kilometres away from the mainland of the United States — would remain vulnerable unless other revolutions succeeded in the world. His reaction to the violent US bombardment of Vietnam had been similar — not enough to defend Vietnam, he had said, but it was necessary ‘to create two, three, many Vietnams’.
Failure to spark revolution in Congo led Che to Bolivia, where its army trapped him. He was eventually captured and brought to a schoolhouse. Mario Terán Salazar, a soldier, was tasked with the assassination. Che looked at this quivering man. ‘Calm down and take good aim’, he told him. ‘You’re going to kill a man’. Che died on his feet.
From man, Ernesto Guevara (1928-1967) became a myth. It is difficult not to be moved by the life of this Argentinian doctor who became a revolutionary. His tutelage in revolutionary thought came from his experiences amongst the lepers of Venezuela and the tin miners of Bolivia, amongst the revolutionaries of Argentina and the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Reality radicalised him. Only later would he recount that he had been influenced by – as he put it – ‘the doctrine of San Carlos’, his sly reference to Karl Marx.
Swearing Before Stalin
In 1953, in Mexico, Guevara met Hilda Gadea – a revolutionary from the Peruvian APRA (Popular Revolutionary Alliance of the Americas). Gadea schooled Guevara in Marxist theory and in the radical currents then inflaming the region. They moved to Guatemala in September 1954, which was then in the midst of a major struggle against the United States government and US-based corporations. A democratically elected government led by Jacobo Árbenz attempted to conduct basic land reforms, which ran afoul of the United Fruit Company. Guevara was marked by the role of this corporation in governing Guatemala.
To his aunt Beatriz, he wrote, ‘I have had an opportunity to go through the land owned by United Fruit, and this has once again convinced me of the vileness of these capitalist octopuses. I have sworn before a portrait of old, tearful Comrade Stalin not to rest until these capitalist octopuses have become annihilated. I will better myself in Guatemala and become a true revolutionary’.
When the US initiated the coup against Arbenz’ government, Guevara took to the streets. No good came of it. Guevara and Gadea fled to Mexico. It was there that they – thanks to Gadea – met Raul Castro and eventually his brother Fidel. Not long after, Guevara would board a rickety boat – the Granma – with the Castros and 79 others to launch the Cuban Revolution.
When their boat arrived in Cuba, the military killed 70 of the revolutionaries. The survivors rushed inland and – with sheer grit – proceeded to build the peasant army that eventually overcame the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista at the close of 1958.
In 1965, Fidel Castro reflected on the victory in Cuba. His thoughts about the subjective side of history are worth taking into consideration, particularly in a time when the world seems to drift further and further away from revolutionary possibilities. Castro had a strong sense of destiny and of conviction,
Revolutionaries of conviction, who feel a cause deeply, who have a theory and are capable of interpreting that theory in accordance with the facts are, unfortunately, very few. But if and when there are men with such convictions, even though they be only a handful, then where the objective conditions for revolution exist, there will be revolution. For history makes the objective conditions, but man creates the subjective conditions.
In July 1967, a few months before Che was assassinated, Cuba hosted the Latin American Organisation of Solidarity (OLAS). The motto of the conference conveyed the bravado of the revolutionaries: the duty of a revolutionary is to make a revolution. It was as clear as what Castro, Che, and others had done a decade earlier.
Building Socialism
The revolution was greeted by the flight of wealth. Batista shifted $424 million of Cuban reserves to US banks. The fleeing oligarchy and vindictive US corporations conducted a scorched earth campaign: taking whatever they could from a country that had already struggled with the drain of its wealth. Even before the official US embargo began, US corporations and banks tried to strangle the revolutionary government. Loans were not forth
Loans were not forthcoming. In a late night meeting, Castro asked if there were an economist amongst them. Che raised his hand. He became the head of the economy. Later when Castro asked him about these credentials, Che answered that he thought Castro had asked ‘who is a communist’. Che took to his task with energy and determination. He would reshape the Central Bank, formulate industrial policy, and debate with his comrades the idea of incentives for workers. These were all fundamental tasks, which Guevara conducted with dignity and passion.
The basic policy of the Cuban Revolution was sobre la marcha, learn by doing. This was because many of the highly skilled workers who had no commitment to the young revolution fled the country into exile; three thousand of the six thousand doctors, for instance, left Cuba. Guevara, and others innovated: militants from the revolutionary war joined students and workers to fill the gaps in the state offices. They did not bring the skills of management, but they had enthusiasm. Guevara insisted on political education classes, but also classes on skills – precise skills inherited from the best of modern science and management. The new revolutionary regime had to answer the basic questions of the people: questions of starvation, illiteracy, ill health, and indignity. If these were not taken seriously and answered – with food, education, healthcare, and dignity – then the revolution would falter.
Guevara’s entire emphasis in the ministry of finance and industry was to create a ‘new human’, a human being filled with the idea that they would be productive to build a new society. Productivity did not have to come from the whip, from the fear of unemployment and starvation; this was the incentive of capitalism. Productivity, under socialism, would come from the sense of freedom and the voluntary desire to create a society of prosperity and equality. It was this new moral framework that motivated Guevara’s agenda to build socialism.
Marx did not leave many lessons on the building of socialism, and – as far as Guevara was concerned – the USSR had faltered in its ability to create a ‘new human’. There were too many concessions made to the capitalist mode of production, particularly the law of value and the insistence on material incentives. Such concessions would allow the society to drift away from the socialist promise and – by stealth – restore capitalism. This was what Guevara said in many public speeches. This is why he promoted the idea of voluntary labour, and why he insisted on the creation of new kinds of incentives, new kinds of human possibilities. Lessons needed to be taken from the textbooks of capitalist management, but not the lesson of material incentives. That had to be set aside. If a new society had to be created, it had to be created through a new moral fibre.
Suffocation of Cuba
In 1961, Che wrote, ‘Dark days lie ahead for Latin America’. He knew that the forces of imperialism, led by the United States, would not rest until it had undermined the revolutionary process. ‘Once the war against imperialism is launched,’ he wrote, ‘it is essential to be consistent, to strike hard where it hurts, without pause, never giving ground but moving constantly forward, constantly counterattacking, continually meeting any new aggression with ever stronger pressure from the masses of the people’. Cuba’s new government organised the people into the Committee to Defend the Revolution, arming the people with both ideas and weapons. This is why they were able to vanquish the invasion at Bay of Pigs. This is why Cuba’s revolution has not been overcome over these past decades.
The US had set an embargo against the island in 1962. It suffocated Cuba. The Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano went to interview Che in 1964. ‘I don’t want every Cuban to wish he were a Rockefeller’, Guevara said. He wanted to build socialism, a system that ‘purified people, moved them beyond egoism, saved them from competition and greed’. It was a daunting task, made difficult by the poverty of the treasury and of the population; although the Cuban people’s spirit drove them to volunteer their labour to build their resources.
‘Cuba will never be a showcase of socialism’, Guevara told Galeano, ‘but rather a living example’. It was too poor to become paradise. It could however exude love for its own people and for the world. For Guevara, love was everything, key to his idea of socialism. In a letter to his five children written en route to Bolivia, Guevara wrote, ‘Always be able to feel deep within your being all the injustices committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality a revolutionary can have’.
Che on the Move
Che, who had travelled around Latin America as a young man, had a powerful commitment to internationalism. It was clarified by the fact that as an Argentinian he felt no compunction about participation in the Cuban revolution, or that later he would travel to the Congo and to Bolivia to assist revolutionary movements there. To be alive in the world was to be alive to the internationalist spirit, to fight against the narrowness of family and national boundaries, of ascribed identities, of suffocating barriers. This was part of why Che was a natural person for the revolution to send on its first major ‘goodwill mission’ in 1959 to Egypt, Syria, India, Burma, Japan, Indonesia, Ceylon, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Morocco.
It was equally important that Che’s itinerary took him to the key countries of the Bandung conference of 1955, and the main countries (Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia) that were preparing the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Belgrade in 1961. He was, therefore, sent into the heart of the Third World Project. There is no mistaking the choice of countries. This was essentially to take Cuba, and later Latin America, into the new ‘non-aligned’ grouping that had first been established between the newly independent African and Asian countries (the Bandung Conference was known as the Asian-African Conference). Thanks to the journey of Che, Cuba played a fundamental role in the founding of the NAM, where Cuba’s President Osvaldo Dorticós gave one of the key speeches.
During Che’s travels, he studied carefully agrarian reform laws in India, Japan, the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria), and Yugoslavia. He was interested in the agricultural institutes set up by the new governments in Egypt and India, projects which Guevara would later set up in Cuba.
Across the Third World — including in Gaza — Guevara walked around dressed in military fatigues. This was despite the fact that he came as the head of the Cuban Economic Commission. Why was Guevara in his military uniform? It is worth seeing what Franz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth about Castro’s appearance in the United Nations in his fatigues.
Castro sitting in military uniform in the United Nations Organisation does not scandalize the underdeveloped countries. What Castro demonstrates is the consciousness he has of the continuing existence of the rule of violence. The astonishing thing is that he did not come into the UNO with a machine-gun; but if he had, would anyone have minded? All the jacqueries and desperate deeds, all those bands armed with cutlasses or axes find their nationality in the implacable struggle which opposes socialism and capitalism.
In India, Guevara – in his fatigues – met with a range of ministers from the Nehru government, including VK Krishna Menon (Defence), SK Dey (Community Development and Cooperation), Nityanand Kanoongo (Commerce), and AP Jain (Food and Agriculture). He visited the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the National Physical Laboratory, small manufacturing plants in the Okhla Industrial Estate and the Cottage Industries Emporium, villages in the Community Project Area in Pilana Block and particularly a school in that community. He joined the Planning Commission to learn about the five-year plan projects and, in particular, how the government had developed its main development agenda. Guevara was in India as the Nehru government put pressure on to dismiss the Communist government in Kerala; there is no evidence that Guevara followed events in Kerala or that he made any comment to anyone about that authoritarian aspect of Nehru’s rule.
In Delhi, Guevara stayed in the Ashoka Hotel, where KP Bhanumathy of the All-India Radio went to interview him. Her interview is a gem. She asked him about his views on a socialist economy. Flicking the ash from his Monte Carlo 4 cigar, Guevara answered,
We in the underdeveloped world have to free ourselves from the imperialist yoke, the puppet governments and their armies, and the system of exploitation in underdeveloped countries. We are colonies or dependent countries, with underdeveloped or distorted development. The objective conditions for a struggle for independence is created by the hunger of the people. A Socialist Man and a socialist economy can be achieved without being a slave to a foreign power. No underdeveloped world would ever be able to enjoy the benefit of a corruption-free structure. We, the under-developed, must come together. India has won freedom after a long struggle. I have great admiration for Nehru. He will bring economic independence and make India a powerful state. We need to build a society in which all men share the collective spirit of human individual aspirations — neocolonialism grew first in South America and has made itself present with intensity in Africa and Asia. See what is happening in Vietnam and Korea. The brutality in some countries in Asia is in a more subtle form—we in the Third World or underdeveloped world have to be united to overcome the machinations of the colonialists and imperialists.
Guevara was not blinded by what he saw. In Pilana, he wrote in his notebook of the social inequality in the country, where ‘a few have much, and many do not have anything’. In the school, he saw the evidence of that inequality.
The school, pride of the cooperative, was based on the extraordinary efforts of two teachers who were taking care of five classes that it was running. Haggard children with visible signs of illness on their faces, squatting on the ground, were listening to the explanations of the teacher.
The exertions of the teachers had to be celebrated, for they went beyond their means to give the students what was needed; but they could not meet the students’ needs, one of which was the come to school without hunger and with rest. The evidence of deprivation in the realm of necessity needed to be erased; that is the message that Che took back home to Cuba from India.
Love for Humanity
Hate was the fate of those who killed Guevara fifty years ago. The Bolivian dictator René Barrientos died a year later when his helicopter burst into flames. General Joaquín Zenteno Anaya, who led the operation against Che, was shot to death in the streets of Paris. Major Andrés Selich Chop, who led the Rangers to capture Che, was killed by the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer. Monika Ertl, a member of the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, killed Colonel Roberto Quintanilla Perez, who had announced Che’s death to the world, in Hamburg. The world could not bear to let them live peaceful lives filled with love.
Mario Terán Salazar, the soldier who shot Che, went into hiding. Many years later, in 2006, the Cuban government operated on Che’s killer to remove a cataract from his eye without charge. Che’s legacy was not revenge. It remains a doctor’s love for humanity.
Legacies
On 18 October, nine days after Che was killed in Bolivia, Fidel Castro gave an emotional speech in Havana. The death of Che, he said, was a serious blow. ‘How should revolutionaries face this serious setback? How should they face this loss’. In his Letter to the Tricontinental, Fidel reminded revolutionaries, Che had written that he would welcome his death as long as his battle cry reached a receptive ear, and as long as another hand would reach out an pick up a rifle.
His battle cry will reach not just one receptive ear, but millions of receptive ears! And not one hand but millions of hands, inspired by his example, will reach out to take up arms! New leaders will emerge. The people of the receptive ears and the outstretched hands will need leaders who emerge from their ranks, just as leaders have emerged in all revolutions. Those hands will not have available a leader of Che’s extraordinary experience and enormous ability. Those leaders will be formed in the process of struggle. Those leaders will emerge from among the millions of receptive ears, from the millions of hands that will sooner or later reach out to take up arms.
This was the hope of Fidel, that the death of Che would not create despondency but that it would inspire others to join the struggle for the most noble ends: to create a better world, a world of equality and justice.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator and a Marxist intellectual. He is an executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books.
Twenty left publishers from around the world have released a joint edition including two essential texts by Che Guevara on the 53rd anniversary of his assassination. These texts provide a clear and resolute summation of Che’s spirit of conviction, scientific insights, human compassion, and unrelenting will to achieve the victory of the oppressed over the oppressors. Access it here.
Cover Art: By Sreelakshmi Santhini Bahuleyan, IIT Guwahati
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