Ernesto
(Che) Guevara Lynch de la Serna, (14.06.1928-9.10.1967).
Argentine Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader
At two years old he developed asthma from which he suffered all
his life, and his family moved to the drier climate of Alta
Gracia (Cordoba) where his health did not improve. Primary
education at home, mostly by his mother, Celia de la Serna. He
early became a voracious reader of Marx, Engels and Freud which
all were available in his father's library, it is probable that
he had read some of their works before he went to secondary
school (1941), the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, Cordoba, where he
excelled only in literature and sports. At home he was impressed
by the Spanish Civil War refugees and by the long series of
squalid political crises in Argentina which culminated in the
'Left Fascist' dictatorship of Juan Peron, to whom the Guevara de
la Sernas were opposed. These events and influences inculcated in
the young Guevara a contempt for the pantomime of parliamentary
democracy, and a hatred of military politicians and the army, the
capitalist oligarchy, and above all the US dollar/ imperialism.
Yet although his parents, notably his mother, were anti-Peronist
activists, he took no part in revolutionary student movements and
showed little interest in politics at Buenos Aires University
(1947) where he studied medicine, first with a view to
understanding his own disease, later becoming more interested in
leprosy. In 1949 he made the first of his long journeys,
exploring northern Argentina on a bicycle, and for the first time
coming into contact with the very poor and the remnants of the
Indian tribes. In 1951, after taking his penultimate exams, he
made a much longer journey, accompanied by a friend, and earning
his living by casual labor as he went : he visited southern
Argentina, Chile, where he met Salvador Allende, Peru, where he
worked for some weeks in the San Pablo leprosarium, Colombia at
the time of La Violencia, and where he was arrested but soon
released, Venezuela, and Miami. He returned home for his finals
sure of only one thing, that he did not want to become a
middle-class general practitioner. He qualified, specializing in
dermatology, and went to La Paz, Bolivia, during the National
Revolution which he condemned as opportunist. From there he went
to Guatemala, earning his living by writing
travel-cum-archaeological articles about Inca and Maya ruins. He
reached Guatemala during the socialist Arbenz presidency;
although he was by now a Marxist, well read in Lenin, he refused
to join the Communist Party, though this meant losing the chance
of government medical appointment, and he was penniless and n
rags. He lived with Hilda Gadea, a Marxist of Indian stock who
forwarded his political education, looked after him, and
introduced him to Nico Lopez, one of Fidel Castro's lieutenants.
In Guatemala he saw the CIA at work as the principal agents of
counterrevolution and was confirmed in his view that Revolution
could be made only be armed insurrection. When Arbenz fell,
Guevara went to Mexico City (September 1954) where he worked in
the General Hospital. Hilda Gadea and Nico Lopez joined him, and
he met and was charmed by Raul and Fidel Castro, then political
emigres, and realized that in Fidel he had found the leader he
was seeking.
He joined other Castro followers at the farm where the Cuban
revolutionaries were being given a tough commando course of
professional training in guerrilla warfare by the Spanish
Republican Army captain, Alberto Bayo, author of Ciento cincueto
preguntas a un guerrilleo, Havana 1959. Bayo drew not only on his
own experience but on the guerrilla teachings of Mao Tse-tung,
and 'Che', as he was now called (it means chum or buddy and is
Argentinian origin), became his star pupil and was made a leader
of the class. The war games at the farm attracted police
attention, all the Cubans and Che were arrested, but released a
month later (June 1956). When they invaded Cuba, Che went with
them, first as doctor, soon as a Commandante of the revolutionary
army of barbutos. He was the most aggressive, clever and
successful of the guerrilla officers, and the most earnest in
giving his men a Lenist education: he was also a ruthless
disciplinarian who unhesitatingly shot defectors, as later he got
a reputation for cold-blooded cruelty in the mass execution of
recalcitrant supporters of the defeated president Batista. At the
triumph of the Revolution Guevara became second only to Fidel
Castro in the new government of Cuba, and the man chiefly
responsible for pushing Castro towards communism, but a communism
which was independent of the orthodox, Moscow-style communism of
some of their colleagues. Che organized and directed the
Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria to administer the new
agrarian laws expropriating the large land holders; ran its
Department of Industries; was appointed President of the National
Bank of Cuba; forced non-communist out of the government and key
posts and acting obstinately against the advise of two eminent
French Marxist economists who were called in by Fidel Castro and
who wanted Che to advance much more slowly and of the Soviet
advisers, he pushed the Cuban economy so fast into total
Communism, and into crop and production diversification, that he
temporarily ruined it.
In 1959 he married Aledia March and together they visited Egypt,
India, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Yugoslavia. Back in Cuba,
as Minister for Industry he signed (February 1960) a trade pact
with the USSR which freed the Cuban sugar industry from
dependence on the teeth of the US market; in it is foreshadowing
his failure in the Congo and Bolivia, in an axiom which proved to
be hopelessly misleading; ' It is not always necessary to wait
until the conditions for revolution exist: the instructional
focus can create them.' And, with Mao Tse-tung, he believed that
the countryside must bring the revolution to the town in
predominately peasant countries. Also at this time, he glorified
his own kind of communist philosophy. ( published later in the
Socialism and Man in Cuba, March 12 March 1965). It can be summed
up in him ' Man really attains the state of complete humanity
when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell
himself as a commodity.' He was moving away from
"Moscow", towards Mao, and beyond into what is
essentially the old idealistic, Anarchism. His formal breach with
the Soviet Communist came when, addressing the Organization for
Afro-Asian Solidarity at Algiers (February 1965) he charged the
USSR with being a 'tacit accomplice of imperialism' by not
trading exclusively with the Communist bloc and by not giving
underdeveloped socialist countries aid without any thought of
return. He also attacked the Soviet government for its policy of
coexistence; and for Revisionism. He initiated the Tricontiental
Conference to realize a program of revolutionary,
insurrectionary, guerrilla cooperation in Africa, Asia and South
America. On the other hand, after a halfhearted attempt to come
to some kind of terms with the USA, he was also attacking the
North Americas, at the UN as Cuba's representative there, for
their greedy and merciless imperialist activity in Latin America.
Che's intransigence towards both capitalist abd communist
establishment forced Castro to drop him (1965), not offically,
but in practice. For some months even his whereabouts were a
secret and his death was widely rumoured: he was in various
African countries, notably the Congo surveying the possiblities
of turning the Kinshasa rebellion into a Communist revolution, by
Cuban-style guerrilla tactics. He returned to Cuba to train
volunteers for that project, andf took a force of 120 Cubans to
the Congo. His men fought well, but the Kinshasa rebels did not,
they were useless against the Belgian mercenaries and by autumn
1965 Che had to advise Castro to withdraw Cuban aid.
Che's final revolutionary adventure was in Bolivia: he grossly
misjudged the reveloutionary potential of that country with
disastrous consegquences. The attempt ended in his being captured
by a Bolivian army unit and shot a day later.
Because of his wild, romantic appearance, his dashing style, his
intransigence in refusing to kowtow to any kind of establishment
however communist, his contempt for mere reformism, and his
dedication to violent, flamboyant action, Che became a legend and
an idol for the reveloutionary- and even the merely discontented-
youth of the later 1960s and early 70's a focus for the kind of
desperate revolutionary action which seemed to millions of young
people the only hope of destroying the world of bourgeos
industrial capitalism and communism
From A Dictionary of Modern Revolution Written by Edward Hyams
Copyright 1973, published by Taplinger Publishing Co, Inc
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Copyright ©1998. S-Petersburg. Russia. All rights reserved.