A revolutionary life - review of the life of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

While Cuba declares 1997 "Ano del 30 anniversario de la caida en combate de guerrillero heroico y sus companeros" (the year of the 30th anniversary of the death in combat of the heroic guerrilla and his comrades), American leftists ponder the meaning of Che as model in the 1960s for the student movement in the United States, for the Black Panthers, and for La Raza Chicano movement. Although dead for years and laughed at by reactionaries as a failure, his bearded image still appears on everything from T-shirts to mud guards on trucks in Latin America. His speeches lived in the mouths of the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan guerrillas in the 1970s and 1980s, and his words reverberate now in the hills of Chiapas, Mexico.

Journalist John Lee Anderson spent five years in nine different countries interviewing friends and enemies of Che and tracking down previously unpublished documents for this very readable biography. His research makes possible serious discussion of the essential Che, fighter and Marxist theorist who disciplined himself to become the model "New Man" necessary to wage guerrilla warfare and make socialism possible:

I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution for the people who fight to free themselves and I am consequent with my beliefs. Many will call me an adventurer, and I am, but of a different type.... (623-33)

Guevara spelled out this conviction by both word and deed, inevitably separating himself from Soviet leaders who invoked peaceful coexistence. Che criticized the established communist parties of Latin American and Africa which clung to the desperate hope to be safe and socialist; of necessity, they eventually betrayed Che.

The three sections of this book take us from the cradle to the grave with "Unquiet Youth," "Becoming Che," and "Making the New Man." It is, as Booklist reports, "a significant history of the turbulent post-Second World War world of Latin America." And it is more. Anderson writes in his introduction, "It seemed clear that if one could unravel the mysteries of Che's life story, one might also shed light on some of the most relevant, but least known aspects of the Cold War era: the Cuban revolution's support for guerrilla movements, and the spawning of proxy wars in the Third World by both East and West."

From his youth Guevara was always personally adventurous. In daring personal exploits he tested the limits of the possible. He absorbed the anti-fascism of his father; on his own he read Freud, Lenin, Bertrand Russell and Neruda. But in the Buenos Aires of Juan and Evita Peron, Ernesto remained on the sidelines. Friends recall him as "observing, listening, sometimes debating, but studiously avoiding any active participation (in politics)."

The young Guevara, with the built-in arrogance of the well-born, traveled on a shoestring throughout South and Central America. For three years he lived among the poor, victims of what he came to see as comprador governments and foreign investors. As a medical student and later a doctor, he methodically kept a journal of his experiences and his reactions to them. They reveal a growing seriousness, an increasing radicalism.

Che, in company with other young idealists, went to Guatemala in the hopes of seeing socialism in action when Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala. They all fled to Mexico City when Arbenz was deposed in a military takeover engineered by U.S. business interests. It was a critical radicalizing moment in Che's life when he realized that United Fruit Company wasn't about to allow any elected government to nationalize a portion of its property.

Arbenz' big mistake, Che wrote, was to placate his middle-class allies. When he opted for land reform, he should have organized the army and the people to defend themselves and arrested those who worked for the enemy. "A few shootings" of key conspirators might have stopped the Yankees from inflicting 50 years of hell on millions of Guatemalans.

In Mexico City Che met Raoul and Fidel Castro, both espousing Marxist ideas. When they invited him to join the armed struggle in Cuba, he accepted on the spot.

In "Becoming Che" we spend days, weeks, years in the treacherous Sierra high jungle, learning to ambush Cuban soldiers, learning to accept death, bringing to poor farmers the idea of "land to the People." In the cities dissidents of all stripes - middle-class democrats, doctors, lawyers, small businessmen, illegal Communist Party members - funnel money, guns, and information to the weary fighters in the mountains. Incredibly, those grew from some twenty men to the thousands who marched on Havana in triumph in January, 1959.

Author Anderson understands the complexities of the Cuban conflict. Fidel, like Arbenz, had his own middle-class allies to placate, and they were but one of many elements: peasants, outlaws, communists, trade unionists, students and others who joined the fight against Batista. Throughout the struggle, would-be leaders jockeyed for position to take control when Batista left. One thing was clear: no matter which political tendency gained power, other "revolutionists" were bound to feel betrayed.

Fidel Castro rested his power not on U.S. interests but on his army and Cuba's peasant and working class majorities. He proved to be the consummate politician, demanding here, yielding there, threatening, placating, promising what had to be promised to carry through a revolution which could delay the inevitable U.S. military attack on the island. Eventually his tactics brought supplies, money and pledges of support even from the Cuban Communist Party which initially rejected cooperation with the upstart insurgents.

Che won Fidel's abiding respect. In spite of fierce asthma attacks that made him helpless, Che was daring, often reckless in battle, always ready to sacrifice his life. He developed a guerrilla ethic: comradeship under fire brings fraternity, a spirit of love and purpose that transforms the ego-ridden individualist human being into the socialist "New Man." "Consider yourselves already dead," he told volunteer disciples. It was the double mission of the guerrilla to fight and to change. To pick up the rifle was to assume both obligations.

Che was tough. Chivatos (informers) were a constant threat. Fidel could order the first execution; Che was the man who carried it out and who, on a daily basis, let every revolutionary know he would do it again as an essential duty. After victory, Che met head-on dissidents who cried foul when the new Cuban government nationalized what industry there was, took over plantations and mines and began to give land to the peasants. He personally oversaw the trial and execution of hundreds of "traitors" and spoke openly about how:

the revolution has to be radical ... to destroy the roots of evil that afflicted Cuba ... in order to eliminate injustice. Those who resist losing their privileges are counterrevolutionaries.

During this early period Castro sent Che overseas to set up trade agreements in Europe and Asia. Later, he headed the newly formed Department of Industrialization and even became head of the National Bank. Che succeeded in all these jobs, helping to transform Cuba from the playground of U.S. gangsters to an austere experiment in socialism. Convinced that the revolution would fail without international support, Che became the architect of the alliance whereby the Soviets bought Cuban sugar - although he later questioned increasing Soviet influence over the Cuban economy.

Expecting U.S. invasion and assassination attempts, Che solicited arms for defense from around the world. But being a bureaucrat was not enough. He wrote to his mother, "I have an absolutely fatalistic sense of my mission which strips me of all fear." His goal was to initiate revolutions everywhere. As a seasoned guerrilla fighter, he led a small military force into Africa - a fiasco - and then led a group of insurgents into Bolivia. He hoped eventually to establish a foco in Argentina.

Che organized his last public speech (at the "Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity," Algeria, February, 1965) around international socialist solidarity. He openly challenged the socialist powers to commit to this principle.

There can be socialism only if there is a change in man's consciousness that will provoke a new fraternal attitude toward humanity on the individual level in the society that builds or has built socialism and also on the world level.... How can 'mutual benefit' mean selling at world market prices goods that cost unlimited sweat and suffering to the backward countries and buying at world prices machines produced in the large automated factories of today?

Che considered such practices "immoral." Established socialist powers should not profit from third world need but underwrite the cost of transforming underdeveloped nations into socialist societies. Because of his open advocacy of armed revolution, Moscow accused Che of following the "Maoist" line and even of espousing theories of the hated Trotskyites. On his part, Che was deeply disappointed to see the class nature of Soviet society which fifty years after the revolution afforded special privileges to government and party officials.

The Soviet rationale was that caution and compromise were necessary in order to avoid nuclear war, to save millions in New York, Moscow, London and Shanghai from incineration. Che could not accept that these tactics also condemned hundreds of millions of others to generations of wretchedness, hunger and terror.

Anderson does not believe in the alleged contradictions between Che and Fidel. Given first access to relevant Cuban archives, he reveals Fidel's close collaboration with and support of Che's guerrilla missions. The determining conflict in Che's life as a socialist was not with Castro but with Soviet half measures which did not include changing values as well as property relations.

After intensive consultation with Fidel, Che determined to spend the rest of his own life as a guerrilla fighter in Africa and South America. His last years clarified the conflict between socialist values and the possessive individualism of western and Soviet "personifications of capital." Castro gave what support was possible while focusing on the always daunting task of maintaining socialism in Cuba.

It is the fashion to portray Che as romantic and capricious. Anderson gives a more measured reading, placing Che's last years in Africa and South America in a different perspective. He says in his forward, "my sole loyalty is to Che Guevara himself; to write what I perceive to be his truth, not anyone else's."

Che knew no revolution was spontaneous but the result of armed focos like those in the Sierra Maestra of Cuba. However, he had come to believe that without socialist revolution on the three continents of Asia, Africa and South America, no revolution would endure. His last desperate efforts may testify to the romantic adventurism of his nature; they also reflect his mature conviction that the hour was very late, but that if enough people transformed their consciousness and committed their lives, armed revolution might still be possible. He was prepared to fail. He wrote in his farewell letter to Fidel, "one lives or dies in a revolution (if it is a real one)."

Che's implacable anti-imperialist outlook told him that once having understood the nature of imperialism, every decision made, from that point on, was either to advance the struggle or betray it. He had the bottomless optimism always to be certain that the struggle was worth his life.

Anderson has uncovered in absorbing and troubling detail the heritage of a remarkable man. Sartre's judgement was that "Che was the most complete human being of our age."

Bill Doyle is a retired professor of History, now teaching at the Santa Fe Community College. Dorothy Doyle is retired English teacher, with a weekly radio program on KSFR public radio in Santa Fe.

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