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Ernesto (Che)
Guevara de la Serna
Che Guevara - Though communism may have lost its fire, he
remains the potent symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of
revolution - Ariel Dorfman - 140699
-Time
Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles
of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to my
generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world.
Like so many epics, the story of the obscure Argentine doctor
who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the
emancipation of the poor of the earth began with a voyage. In
1956, along with Fidel Castro and a handful of others, he had
crossed the Caribbean in the rickety yacht Granma on the mad
mission of invading Cuba and overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio
Batista. Landing in a hostile swamp, losing most of their
contingent, the survivors fought their way to the Sierra
Maestra. A bit over two years later, after a guerrilla campaign
in which Guevara displayed such outrageous bravery and skill
that he was named comandante, the insurgents entered Havana and
launched what was to become the first and only victorious
socialist revolution in the Americas. The images were thereafter
invariably gigantic. Che the titan standing up to the Yanquis,
the world's dominant power. Che the moral guru proclaiming that
a New Man, no ego and all ferocious love for the other, had to
be forcibly created out of the ruins of the old one. Che the
romantic mysteriously leaving the revolution to continue, sick
though he might be with asthma, the struggle against oppression
and tyranny.
His execution in Vallegrande at the age of 39 only enhanced
Guevara's mythical stature. That Christ-like figure laid out on
a bed of death with his uncanny eyes almost about to open; those
fearless last words ("Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a
man") that somebody invented or reported; the anonymous burial
and the hacked-off hands, as if his killers feared him more
after he was dead than when he had been alive: all of it is
scalded into the mind and memory of those defiant times. He
would resurrect, young people shouted in the late '60s; I can
remember fervently proclaiming it in the streets of Santiago,
Chile, while similar vows exploded across Latin America. !No lo
vamos a olvidar! We won't let him be forgotten.
More than 30 years have passed, and the dead hero has indeed
persisted in collective memory, but not exactly in the way the
majority of us would have anticipated. Che has become ubiquitous:
his figure stares out at us from coffee mugs and posters,
jingles at the end of key rings and jewelry, pops up in rock
songs and operas and art shows. This apotheosis of his image has
been accompanied by a parallel disappearance of the real man,
swallowed by the myth. Most of those who idolize the incendiary
guerrilla with the star on his beret were born long after his
demise and have only the sketchiest knowledge of his goals or
his life. Gone is the generous Che who tended wounded enemy
soldiers, gone is the vulnerable warrior who wanted to curtail
his love of life lest it make him less effective in combat and
gone also is the darker, more turbulent Che who signed orders to
execute prisoners in Cuban jails without a fair trial.
This erasure of complexity is the normal fate of any icon. More
paradoxical is that the humanity that worships Che has by and
large turned away from just about everything he believed in. The
future he predicted has not been kind to his ideals or his
ideas. Back in the '60s, we presumed that his self-immolation
would be commemorated by social action, the downtrodden rising
against the system and creating — to use Che's own words — two,
three, many Vietnams. Thousands of luminous young men,
particularly in Latin America, followed his example into the
hills and were slaughtered there or tortured to death in sad
city cellars, never knowing that their dreams of total
liberation, like those of Che, would not come true. If Vietnam
is being imitated today, it is primarily as a model for how a
society forged in insurrection now seeks to be actively
integrated into the global market. Nor has Guevara's
uncompromising, unrealistic style of struggle, or his ethical
absolutism, prevailed. The major revolutions of the past quarter-century
(South Africa, Iran, the Philippines, Nicaragua), not to mention
the peaceful transitions to democracy in Latin America, East
Asia and the communist world, have all entailed negotiations
with former adversaries, a give and take that could not be
farther from Che's unyielding demand for confrontation to the
death. Even someone like Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for
the Chiapas Maya revolt, whose charisma and moral stance remind
us of Che's, does not espouse his hero's economic or military
theories.
How to understand, then, Che Guevara's pervasive popularity,
especially among the affluent young?
Perhaps in these orphaned times of incessantly shifting
identities and alliances, the fantasy of an adventurer who
changed countries and crossed borders and broke down limits
without once betraying his basic loyalties provides the restless
youth of our era with an optimal combination, grounding them in
a fierce center of moral gravity while simultaneously appealing
to their contemporary nomadic impulse. To those who will never
follow in his footsteps, submerged as they are in a world of
cynicism, self-interest and frantic consumption, nothing could
be more vicariously gratifying than Che's disdain for material
comfort and everyday desires. One might suggest that it is Che's
distance, the apparent impossibility of duplicating his life
anymore, that makes him so attractive. And is not Che, with his
hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, the perfect
postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious '60s, that
disruptive past confined to gesture and fashion? Is it
conceivable that one of the only two Latin Americans to make it
onto TIME's 100 most important figures of the century can be
comfortably transmogrified into a symbol of rebellion precisely
because he is no longer dangerous?
I wouldn't be too sure. I suspect that the young of the world
grasp that the man whose poster beckons from their walls cannot
be that irrelevant, this secular saint ready to die because he
could not tolerate a world where los pobres de la tierra, the
displaced and dislocated of history, would be eternally
relegated to its vast margins.
Even though I have come to be wary of dead heroes and the
overwhelming burden their martyrdom imposes on the living, I
will allow myself a prophecy. Or maybe it is a warning. More
than 3 billion human beings on this planet right now live on
less than $2 a day. And every day that breaks, 40,000 children —
more than one every second! — succumb to diseases linked to
chronic hunger. They are there, always there, the terrifying
conditions of injustice and inequality that led Che many decades
ago to start his journey toward that bullet and that photo
awaiting him in Bolivia.
The powerful of the earth should take heed: deep inside that T
shirt where we have tried to trap him, the eyes of Che Guevara
are still burning with impatience.
Ariel Dorfman holds the Walter Hines Page Chair at Duke
University. His latest novel is The Nanny and the Iceberg.
Ernesto (Che) Guevara de
la Serna (1928-1967) - Nickname "Che" derived from Guevara's
habit of punctuating his speech with the interjection che, a common
Argentine expression for a friend - Source
Kirjasto
Latin American revolutionary leader, who rejected both capitalism and
orthodox Soviet communism. Like T.E. Lawrence (1888 1935), better known
as 'Lawrence of Arabia', Guevara lived an adventurous life. Guevara's
tragic early death in Bolivia created a legend that still lives. He once
said that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love",
but he also wrote influential works of guerrilla warfare.
"The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the
people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.
The guerrilla band is not to be considered inferior to the army against
which it fights simply because it is inferior in fire power. Guerrilla
warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which
possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against
oppression." (from Guerrilla Warfare, 1960)
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born in Rosario, Argentina into a middle-class
family of Spanish-Irish descent. Celia de la Serna y Llosa, his mother,
had lost her parents while she was still a child. Celia was raised by
her religious aunt and her older sister, Carmen de la Serna, who married
in 1928 the Communist poet Cayetano Córdova Itúrburu. Guevara's family
was liberal, anti-Nazi and anti-Peronist, and not very religious. With
Celia's fortune, the family lived comfortably, although Ernerto Guevara
Lynch, Ernesto's father, managed to spend much of it in his unlucky
business ventures. In his youth Guevara read widely and among his
reading list in the 1940s were Sartre, Pablo Neruda, Ciro Alegría, and
Karl Marx's Das Kapital. He also kept a philosophical diary and in
Africa 1965 Guevara planned to write a biography of Marx.
In 1953 Guevara graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, where he
was trained as a doctor. During these years Guevara read Stalin and
Mussolini but did not join radical student organizations. He made long
travels in Argentina and in other Latin America countries. At the same
time his critical views about the expanding economic influence of the
United States deepened. In 1952 he made journey with his motor bike, an
old Norton 500 single, around South America. The journey opened his eyes
about the situation of the Indians and was crucial for the awakening of
his social conscience. Like Jack Kerouac later in his book On the Road
(1957), Guevara recorded his impressions in The Motorcycle Diaries. "The
person who wrote these notes died the day he stepped back on Argentine
soil," Guevara wrote in his diary. "Wandering around our 'America with a
capital A' has changed me more than I thought."
After witnessing American intervention in Guatemala in 1954, Guevara
radicalized and become convinced that the only way to bring about change
was by violent revolution. He wrote in a letter to home: "Along the way,
I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit,
convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses
are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin
that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated."
In Guatemala Guevara met Hilda Gadea. They married 1955 and had one
child. Guevara was arrested with Fidel Castro in Mexico for a short
time. He had joined Castro's revolutionaries to overthrow the Batista
government. In 1956 they loaded 38-feet long motor yacht Granma full of
guerrillas and weapons and sailed to Cuba, landing near Cabo Cruz on
December 2.
They made their base in the mountains of Sierra Maestra, attacking
garrisons and recruiting peasants to the revolutionary army. In the
areas controlled by the guerrillas, Guevara started land reform and
socializing process. In spite of his chronic asthma, Guevara enjoyed the
hard conditions and war. Land reform become the slogan, the "banner and
primary spearhead of our movement" as Guevara described it in an
interview, that made eventually peasants participate in the armed
struggle. Guevara was respected by his men, although considered violent
- he shot Eutimio Guerra who had cooperated with dictator Fulgencio
Batista's army.
In the mountains Guevara met Aleida March in 1958, 24-year-old
revolutionary fighter, and she became Guevara's second wife in 1959. He
continued to write his diary and composed also articles for El Cubano
Libre. A selection of Gurvara's articles, which he wrote between 1959
and 1964, was published in 1963 as PASAJES DE LA GUERRA REVOLUCIONARIA.
For the media Cuba was a hot subject - New York Times, Paris Match and
Latin American papers sent reporters to the mountains to make stories of
the revolutionaries. At the same time when Guevara was in the mountains,
his uncle was Ambassador to Cuba.
Guevara rose to the rank of major and led one of the forces that invaded
central Cuba in the late 1958. After the conquest of power in January
1959 Guevara gained fame as the leading figure in Castro's government.
He attracted much attention with his speeches against imperialism and US
policy in the Third World. He argued strongly for centralized planning,
and emphasized creation of the 'new socialist man'. In his famous
article, 'Notes on Man and Socialism', he argued that "to build
communism, you must build new men as well as the new economic base." The
basis of revolutionary struggle is "the happiness of people," the the
goal of socialism is the creation of more complete and more devoped
human beings.
In a discussion on September 14, 1961 Guevara opposed the right of
dissidents to make their views known even within the Communist Party
itself. However, privately Guevara was critical of the Soviet bloc, but
so was also Nikita Khruschev. When the executions of war criminals
started Guevara acted as the highest prosecuting authority. The
condemned were soldiers found guilty of murder, torture and other
serious crimes. Because Guevara was a doctor, one of his friends once
asked how he could work in such a position. Guevara's answer was like
from Western movies: "Look, in this thing you have to kill before they
kill you." In 1959 Guevara adopted formally the nickname Che and was
granted honorary Cuban citizenship. He was visited by such intellectuals
as de Beauvoir, and Sartre who saw in him the "most complete human being
of our age". The most famous picture of Guevara was taken by Alberto
Diaz Gutiérrez, known professionally as Korda. He declined to take
royalties when the picture became worldwide icon. When a British
advertising agency appropriated the image for a vodka ad Korda rejected
the idea: he never drank himself," said the photographer, "and drink
should not be associated with his immortal memory."
From 1961 to 1965 Guevara was minister for industries, and director of
the national bank, signing the bank notes simply 'Che'. He traveled
widely in Russia, India and Africa, meeting the leading figures of the
world, among others Jawaharel Nehru and Nikita Khruschev. Guevara was
also the architect of the close relations between Cuba and the Soviet
Union. Although good relationships with Moscow become the cornerstone of
Castro's foreign policy, Guevara followed the emergence of the Maoists.
In 1965 Guevara made public his disappointments in Algiers and described
the Kremlin as "an accomplice of imperialism". Guevara's dismissal from
the ministry followed immediately on his return from Algiers.
To test his revolutionary theories Guevara resigned from his post as a
politician. He had published highly influential manuals Guerrilla
Warfare (1961) and Guerrilla Warfare: A Method (1963), which were based
on his own experiences and partly chairman Mao Zedong's writings.
President John F. Kennedy had Guerrilla Warfare rapidly translated for
him by the CIA. Guevara stated that revolution in Latin America must
come through insurgent forces developed in rural areas with peasant
support. The is no need for right precondition for revolution -
guerrilla warfare can begin the activities. In his last article,
'Vietnam and World Struggle', Guevara outlined his global perspectice
for revolutionary struggle, and stressed the dual role of hate and love.
"And he did have a saving element of humor. I possess a tape of his
appearance on an early episode of "Meet the Press" in December 1964,
where he confronts a solemn panel of network pundits. When they address
him about the "conditions" that Cuba must meet in order to be permitted
the sunshine of American approval, he smiles as he proposes that there
need be no preconditions: "After all, we do not demand that you abolish
racial discrimination…." A person as professionally skeptical as I.F.
Stone so far forgot himself as to write: "He was the first man I ever
met who I thought not just handsome but beautiful. With his curly
reddish beard, he looked like a cross between a faun and a Sunday-school
print of Jesus…. He spoke with that utter sobriety which sometimes masks
immense apocalyptic visions." (Christopher Hitchens in New York Review
of Books, July 17, 1997)
During his disappearance from public life Guevara spent some time in
Africa organizing the Lumumba Battalion which took part in the Congo
civil war. He was not happy how Laurent Kabila fought against Joseph
Mobutu, although his first impression on Kabila was positive. "Africa
has a long way to go before it reaches real revolutionary maturity,"
Guevara concluded in his diary.
In 1966 Guevara turned up incognito in Bolivia where he trained and led
a guerrilla war in the Santa Cruz region. In his manual Guerrilla
Warfare, Guevara had stressed that the guerrilla fighter needs full help
from the people of the area, it is an indispensable condition, but
Guevara failed to win the support of the peasants and his group was
surrounded near Vallegrande by American-trained Bolivian troops. "The
decisive moment in a man's life is when he decides to confront death,"
Guevara once said. "If he confronts it, he will be a hero whether he
succeeds or not. He can be a good or a bad politician, but if he does
not confront death he will never be more than a politician." After
Guevara was captured, Captain Gary Prado Salmón put a security around
him to be sure that nothing happened. Guevara told him, "don't worry,
captain, don't worry. This is the end. It's finished." (from the
document film 'Red Chapters,' 1999) Guevara was shot in a schoolhouse in
La Higuera on October 9, 1967, by Warrant Officer Mario Terán of the
Bolivian Rangers at the request of Colonel Zenteno. Terán was half-drunk,
celebrating his borthday. Guevara's last words were according to some
sources: "Shoot, coward you are only going to kill a man." In order to
make a positive fingerprint comparison with records in Argentina,
Guevara's hand were sawed off and put into a flask of formaldehyde. They
were later returned to Cuba. Guevara's corpse was buried in a ditch at
the end of the runway site of Vallegrande's new airport. "Che considered
himself a soldier of this revolution, with absolutely no concern about
surviving it," said Fidel Castro later in Che: A Memoir.
Guevara's life inspired the film Che! (1969), directed by Richard
Fleischer and starring Omar Sharif (Guevara) and Jack Palance (Castro).
The fictionalized biography was criticized by James Baldwin in The Devil
Finds Work (1976): "The intention of Ché! was to make both the man, and
his Bolivian adventure, irrelevant and ridiculous; and to do this,
furthermore, with such a syrup of sympathy that any incipient of Ché
would think twice before leaving Mama, and the ever-ready friend at the
bank."
FOR FURTHER READING: Cuba: An American Tragedy by Maurice Zeitlin
(1964); Che: The Making of a Legend by Martin Ebon (1969); Che Guevara
by A. Sinclair (1970); The Marxism of Che Guevara: Philosophy, Economics
and Revolutionary Warfare by Michael Lowy (1973); The Latin American
Revolution by Donald C. Hodges (1974); The Legacy of Che Guevara, ed. by
Donald C. Hodges (1977); Shadow Warrior: The CIA’s Hero of a Hundred
Unknown Battles by Felix Rodriguez with John Weisman (1989); Che
Guevara, A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson (1997); Companero: The
Life and Death of Che Guevara by Jorge G. Castaneda (1997); Guevara,
Also Known as Che by Paco Ignacio Taibo (1997); Che in Africa: Che
Guevara's Congo Diary by William Gálvez (1999); Che Guevara, Paulo
Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution by Peter McLaren (2000) - See
also: José Martí
Selected works:
* LA GUERRA DE GUERRILLAS, 1960 - Guerrilla Warfare
* PASAJES DE LA GUERRA REVOLUCIONARIA, 1963 - Reminiscences of the Cuban
E Revolutionary War - Vallankumoussota Kuubassa
* Guerrilla Warfare: A Method, 1963
* EL SOCIALISMO Y EL HOMBRE E CUBA, 1965 - Socialism and Man
* Che Guevara Speaks, 1967 (ed. by George Lanvan)
* DIARIA DE CHE EN BOLIVIA, 1968 - Diary of Che Guevara (ed. by Robert
Scheer) / Bolivian Diary of Ernesto "Che" Guevara
* OBRAS COMPLETAS, 1968
* Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara, 1968 (ed. by
John Gerassi)
* Che Guevara on Revolution, 1969 (ed. by Jay Mallin)
* Che Guerava, 1969 (selected works)
* Che: Selected works of Ernesto Guevara, 1970 (ed. by Rolando Bonachea
and Nelson P. Valdes)
* OBRAS 1957-1967, 1970 (2 vols.)
* ESCRITOS Y DISCURSOS, 1977 (9 vols.)
* Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: Writings and Speeches of Ernesto
Che Guevara, 1987
* The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America by Ernesto Che
Guevara, 1995 (trans. by Ann Wright) - Moottoripyöräpäiväkirja (trans.
into Finnish by Aleksi Siltala, from Notas de viaje. Mi primer gran
viaje: de la Argentina e Venezuela en motocicleta) - film 2004, dir. by
Walter Salles, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Rodrogo de la Serna
* Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58, 1996 (ed. by Mary-Alice
Waters)
* Che Guevara Reader: Writings by Ernesto Che Guevara on Guerrilla
Strategy, Politics & Revolution, 1997
* Che Guevara Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings, 2000
* Che Guevara Talks to Young People, 2000 (ed. by Mary-Alice Waters)
* The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara, and Other Captured
Documents, 2000 (ed. by Danile James)
* The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo,
2001 (trans. by Patrick Camiller)
* Back on the Road: A Journey to Latin America, 2002 (trans. by Patrick
Camiller) - Tien päällä taas (trans. into Finnish by Anu Partanen, from
Otra vez)
* Che Guevara on Global Justice, 2002.
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