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History Will Absolve Me, v. 2.0: Che Guevara

By Alexa

It was perhaps the most reproduced, recycled and ripped off image of the 20th Century.

From Caracas to Cape Town, Cleveland to Cap Haitien, one man's admittedly handsome face on a T shirt tells you more about its wearer than how well he or she fits it. Ernesto "Che" Guevara Lynch, who was murdered by United States agents under orders from Washington 40 years ago, is the face of global rebellion.

He inspires all the more intensely since he could have lived a prosperous bourgeois life as an Argentine dentist. Instead, and despite asthma, he chose a life of action, a motorcycle diarist, a comandante in a triumphant Cuban revolutionary army, a guerrilla leader in the Congo, a martyr in the mountain gulleys of Bolivia.

The word "che" is the familiar diminutive for "you" in Argentina, as in "hey, you!" It was an affectionate term that became his "official" name and the one which he used for a signature, always with a lower-case "c."

The Cuban Revolution was in its fifth year at the time Che Guevara was befriended by Fidel Castro in Mexico and offered an unknown sum of money to return with Castro to Cuba on the Granma and speak at the university.

Upon landing in Cuba, most of the 81 men on the yacht were caught or killed, and only 16 escaped into the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where peasants and farmers aided them until their forces grew into the revolutionary army that defeated Batista.

Che the Marxist
In his response to the offer from Havana University, Guevara showed the contempt for money that he openly shared with the Castro Brothers and a number of the other revolutionaries.

"It's inconceivable to me," he wrote, "that a monetary payment should be offered to an official of the Government and the (Communist) Party, for any work of whatever kind it may be. Among the many payments that I have received, the most important is to be considered a part of the Cuban people; I would not know how to gauge that in dollars and cents."

It's true he had a spell as a bank manager - but it was the governorship of Cuba's revolutionary state bank.

In Revolution In Cuba, Herbert L. Matthews wrote:

"His dedication to his revolutionary beliefs was deeply religious. Che had a missionary's faith in the innate goodness of man, in the ability of workers to dedicate themselves to ideals and to overcome selfishness and prejudices. It was the other side of the coin of his passionate indignation against injustice and exploitation of the humble. He saw the solution in an exalted form of Marxism that would bring freedom and brotherhood. Such men are born to be martyrs."

Perhaps you know these words are bitter to me; perhaps you, too, see beyond the "brand" of Che and into the stone cold killer of hundreds to thousands. For the facts are not in dispute, muchachos.

• Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads.
• He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system-the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.
• To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination.
• In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become ..."- and so on.

No man is without some redeeming qualities. In the case of Che Guevara, those qualities may help us to measure the gulf that separates reality from myth. His honesty (well, partial honesty) meant that he left written testimony of his cruelties, including the really ugly, though not the ugliest, stuff.

And so it is that thanks to Che's own testimonials to his thoughts and his deeds, and thanks also to his premature departure, we may know exactly how deluded so many of our contemporaries are about so much.

"The true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love" -- Che Guevara's diaries.

To accept the charisma of Che is to accept the terror of an avenging angel, and this may be too high a price for many people. Che's insistence of perserverance and trying to find the best path to a society in which wealth is more equitably distributed is the backbone of what's left of the Cuban revolution today, and still inspires activists around the world.

"Revolutions are ugly but necessary," Che wrote in his diaries. "Part of that revolutionary process is injustice in the service of future justice."

Whether this can be considered a necessary evil  or the tragic flaw in Che's revolution and the Cuban revolution, it remains the central question (or should) that anyone who lionizes Che should ask of herself or himself.

Che was considered even by Castro "too radical for the defense of the revolution," openly expressing dismay with the Soviet Union for not nuking the U.S. during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This from the man who believed the revolution to be "the unleashing of the bestial howling of the trimphant proletariat." Que lo que?

He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin American democracy -- a tragedy on the hugest scale.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on July 27, 2008 (boomark / email).