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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 | |
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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." (in 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 said 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 stated 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 – not "Patria on Muerte! Venceremos!" – was 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. Though considered violent, Guevara was respected by his men – 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". 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 leading figures of the world, among them Jawaharel Nehru and Nikita Khruschev. Guevara was also the architect of the close relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union. Though good relationships with Moscow became 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 argued 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, but 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." (in 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 hands 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). This 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." The most famous photograph 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." 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. 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:
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