Che Guevara
1) His Biography:
Che Guevara was a major communist figure during the Cuban Revolution who later became a South American guerrilla leader. He was executed by the Bolivian army in 1967 and is revered as a martyred hero by generations of lefties around the world. Guevara’s image has become a popular symbol of anti-imperialism and leftist radicalism.
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, the revolutionary leader, was born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina. Guevara became politically involved after completing his medical studies at the University of Buenos Aires, first in Argentina and subsequently in Bolivia and Guatemala.
While in Mexico in 1955, he met Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. Fidel Castro enlisted Guevara’s help in overthrowing the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. He was Castro’s military advisor and led guerrilla forces in combat against Batista’s soldiers. Guevara was put in charge of the La Cabana Fortress jail when Castro came to power in 1959. During this time, it is estimated that at least 144 people were executed on Guevara’s extrajudicial orders.
Later, he became president of the Cuban central bank and assisted in the country’s trade shift away from the United States and toward the Soviet Union. On December 11, 1964, Guevara spoke to the United Nations General Assembly, expressing his support for the people of Puerto Rico. He was appointed Minister of Industry a year later. Guevara resigned from this position in 1965 in order to spread the ideas of Cuba’s revolution around the world. He began trying to inspire the Bolivian people to revolt against their government in 1966, but he was unsuccessful. Guevara was caught and killed by the Bolivian army which was helped by the CIA in La Higuera on October 9, 1967, with only a tiny guerrilla group to back him up.
2) Main works:
The Motorcycle Diaries:
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a twenty-three-year-old Argentine medical student, decides to take a sabbatical from his studies and ride his motorcycle “La Poderosa” (The Mighty One) across Latin America and into North America with biochemist and friend Alberto Granado. It’s difficult for Guevara to say goodbye to his fiancée Chichina, but he believes he’s meant to travel and experience the world. The first stops are in Argentina, where they meet up with friends, eat and drink well, and continue to ride their dangerous bikes. Guevara contracts the flu but recovers.
They travel by boat from Argentina to Chile after departing Argentina. They are local celebrities in Chile because of their work on leprosy; a newspaper article about them and their exploits secures them housing and food on several occasions while they are there. Unfortunately, the bike crashes too many times and is unable to be revived, thus Guevara and Alberto must now embark on the next stage of their voyage as “bums without wheels.”
They fight a fire with a fire department in Chile, tour Valparaiso’s city streets, play football, and try—but fail—to go to Easter Island. Guevara attends to a poor sick woman, reflecting on how she is like all poor people who are suffering and dying, and how the government should spend more money on socially helpful activities rather than boasting about their own power.
Since they cannot afford to pay for passage, the men decide to sneak aboard a ship to escape trekking through the desert. They get away with it by hiding in the privy, which stinks so terrible that they have to tell the captain about it. They are permitted to remain and work. They see copper mines, lakes, barren expanses of bush, and the lovely town of Arica during their final weeks in Chile.
When Guevara considers how Spanish explorers in the past carried out their conquests in places like these, he is impressed. He also makes a comparison between Chile and Argentina, stating that the former is in considerably worse shape than the latter. Guevara and Alberto arrive in Peru and begin climbing the mountains in scavenged trucks. They meet Peruvians who inform them about the current status of the Peruvian poor and illuminate some parts of Peruvian history and rituals. \
Cuzco is a high point for the men, and Guevara writes about how complex the city is: there are three separate Cuzcos, according to him, that appeal to different types of visitors. They are fascinated by Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, as well as the fusion of Indian and Spanish architecture, culture, and fashion. After a few weeks, Guevara and Alberto go on to Lima, which is a long trek including many vehicle changes. Lima is attractive and modern, with influences from a variety of civilizations. The men tour museums, meet with fellow leprologists, then travel by boat to the San Pablo leper colony, where they encounter the Yaguas tribe of Indians and take a raft to Colombia.
After they arrive in Venezuela, Guevara and Alberto split up, causing Guevara to become depressed. He declares his dedication to revolution, to fighting against US imperialism, and to preparing himself for sacrifice in this great battle at the end of his travel tale.
Our America and Theirs:
In 1961, Kennedy proposed the Alliance for Progress, a free trade and development programme for the Americas, to halt the spread of revolution in Latin America. Che Guevara, dubbed “Cuba’s scraggle-bearded economic czar” by Time magazine, denounced the idea as a fresh campaign to subjugate the continent to American interests.
The backstage drama that unfolded when Kennedy’s special envoy Richard Goodwin had a friendly contact with Che at a late-night party is described in the introduction. The book includes previously unpublished content, including as Che’s broadcast speech outlining the Alliance for Progress’s issues.
The Che Reader:
This collection of essays by Ernesto Che Guevara, widely regarded as a great revolutionary, highlights his principled ideas and praxis in the battle against capitalism and US imperialism. Insightful speeches, analytical essays, and personal letters not only provide a primer on the Cuban revolution, but also examine the need of worldwide solidarity, reflect on violent opposition, and explain capitalism’s fatal flaws.
The Bolivian Diary:
The last year of Che Guevara’s life is chronicled in this new edition of his diary, which details Che’s efforts to mount a guerrilla insurgency against Bolivia’s military regime. When he was seized by the Bolivian Army in October 1967, it was discovered in his backpack. Fidel Castro’s “A Necessary Introduction” exposes the lies of an earlier, pre-emptive version prepared by the C.I.A. to discredit Che and the Bolivian mission, as well as the Cuban Revolution itself.
3) His philosophy:
Guevarism:
Che Guevara came up with a set of ideas and conceptions that he dubbed “Guevarism” . Antiimperialism and Marxism were central to his ideas, which he supplemented with reflections on how to carry out a revolution and build a socialist society that gave him his own personality.
Guerrilla warfare:
Che Guevara was a pivotal figure in the armed conflict. He devised a comprehensive philosophy about guerrilla warfare called foco based on his personal experiences. When “objective conditions” for a revolution existed in a country, he believed that a tiny “focus” guerrilla vanguard might establish “subjective conditions” and spark a wider uprising. He claimed that the guerrillas, peasants, and land reform all had a close relationship. This viewpoint set him off from pure labour-industrial socialism, and it drew him closer to Maoist ideals. Guerrilla Warfare is a textbook that discusses the tactics and strategies utilised in Cuban guerrilla warfare.
Che, however, also felt that violent resistance had no place in some situations, and that instead, peaceful procedures such as participation in representative democracy were required. Although Che stressed that this approach should be nonviolent, he also stated that it should be “extremely combative, very daring,” and that it should only be abandoned if the population’s support for representative democracy was destroyed.
The new man:
The birth of Marxist humanism was the main axis on which he drove his political-theoretical military work. To put it another way, Che contends that it is critical to distinguish between Marx’s humanism and bourgeois humanism, as well as traditional Christian, humanitarian, and other forms of humanism. Che’s liberation of man, like Marx’s, is expressly engaged in a proletarian class perspective, in contrast to all abstract humanism that professes to be “above class” (and is, in the end, bourgeois). Thus, he declares, radically opposing “bad humanism,” that “the realisation of their potentialities can only be realised by the revolution of the workers, peasants, and other exploited classes, which eliminates man’s exploitation by man and establishes rational domination and collective of men (proletarians) on their social life process.”
4) His influence today:
Guevara has become a legendary political figure since his death. His name is frequently associated with uprisings, revolutions, and socialism. Others, on the other hand, recall that he was merciless and ordered the execution of detainees in Cuba without trial. Guevara’s life has been the topic of countless books and films, notably The Motorcycle Diaries, and continues to spark public attention (2004).
Guevara would linger on as a powerful symbol, larger in death than life in certain respects. Che was nearly often referred to simply as Che, much like Elvis Presley, who was such a well-known figure that his first name was enough to identify him. Many on the political right denounced him as ruthless, vicious, bloodthirsty, and all too prepared to use violence in the name of revolution.
In the chaotic 1960s, however, Guevara’s romanticised image as a rebel loomed big for a generation of young leftist radicals in Western Europe and North America. Guevara’s whiskered face appeared on T-shirts and posters almost immediately after his death. The iconic image, with his face frozen in a stubborn look and framed by a red-star-studded beret and long hair, was adapted from a photo taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960, at a commemoration for those slain when a ship carrying guns to Havana detonated.
Che’s image was worn as a statement of disobedience at first, then as the embodiment of radical chic, and finally as a kind of abstract emblem whose original meaning may have been lost on its wearer, while he remains an everlasting motivation for revolutionary action for others.
