“TO
RAISE UP A NEW LIFE”: CHE GUEVARA’S “NEW MAN”
AND THE SPIRIT OF GROUP
SACRIFICE
By Gregory Stephens
A CHAPTER FROM THE
BOOK-IN-PROGRESS
REAL REVOLUTIONARIES
INDEX:
ANTI-AMERICANISM: “MY TRUE DESTINY”
“WE CONSTITUTE A SINGLE MESTIZO RACE”
“SANITARY INJUSTICE” CHE’S VISION OF REVOLUTIONARY
CHANGE
THE NEW MAN AT HOME AND ABROAD, WITH AND WITHOUT
WOMEN
MORAL AMBIGUITY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
“WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES” (OUTRO WITH
TONGUE-IN-CHEEK)
CHE GUEVARA’S “NEW MAN” AND THE SPIRIT OF
GROUP SACRIFICE
Che Guevara had only a few hours to live. He was being
held by the Bolivian army in a mud-walled schoolhouse in the highlands village
of La Higuera. He was filthy, his long hair matted, looking like “a wild
beast.” Julia Cortés, the 22-year-old teacher of the classroom in which the
wounded Che waited, brought him some food, and they talked.
“How could a man of your physique
and intelligence get yourself in such a situation?” Cortés asked him. Guevara,
a self-proclaimed “true revolutionary,” responded:
“It’s for my ideals.”
“Do you have a wife? Children?”
“Yes.”
“My ideals come first.”
Thirty years after Che was shot on
October 9, 1967, Cortéz’ eyes still brim with emotion as she recalls this
encounter, standing in the same dirt-floored classroom where she talked with
Che. He had promised her that, if he lived, he would build a modern school. Che
often “exercized an almost mystical influence on others,” biographer Jon
Anderson notes. It is clear from the footage in The Bolivian Diary that
Che impressed Cortés deeply. But she could not understand why Che had left his wife and children behind, in order to sacrifice himself for his ideals.
Guevara had said the same thing a
quarter of a century before his death, to the first love of his life, María
“Chichina” del Carmen Ferreyra, whom he met in 1950. On the eve of Che’s departure for his first great journey through Latin America, that would lead him to a destiny he seems to have forseen even as a teenager, he wrote Chichina:
“I know how much I love you, but I
can’t sacrifice my interior freedom for you. That would be to sacrifice my
whole being, and I’ve already told you that I am the most important thing in
the world.” That youthful egotism would later be transfigured into a faith that
sacrifice for the “wretched of the earth” was the most important ideal in the
world. Che told the women who loved him that they must remain secondary to the
fulfillment of his destiny. And this destiny was a sort of faith, in truth:
that the “new man” (which he sought to embody) would transcend individualism
and racial or religious divisions, and engage in collective sacrifice (against
imperialism) to help give birth to a new liberty. He could only give himself
fully to that ideal. And Che saw the women in his life “like an obstacle in the
path of realizing his destiny,” Jorge Castañeda observes.
Che would marry two women and have children with at
least three. But like most “great men,” Guevara left his women at home to raise
his children while he was off fighting for freedom. Che tended to project the
revolution abroad, away from home; far removed his responsibilities as father,
and the specific circumstances of his own upbringing. He believed that his
search for freedom could only be fulfilled in flight from home, while
unrestrained by traditional bonds of affection and kinship. At the same time,
Che carried a radically expanded sense of kinship into the battlefield, and
into a shared commitment to fight for equal rights and justice for all.
When Che was a young man vagabonding through “our
America,” he had what he described as a “revelation” on a South American
mountain. It was a moment of transfiguration, in which a European exile told
Che that “the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and moves in your
action.” Guevara would die a violent death, he was told, as a necessary sacrifice
in the revolution which gave birth to a more egalitarian society. The young Che
vowed to “be with the people,” and to “prepare my being as if it were a sacred
place” for this sacrifice.
Che’s obsession with making a worthy sacrifice was
really a religious faith, although dedicated to a political ideal. Che’s life
is to a large degree a story of his evolution from self-absorption to a spirit
of self-sacrifice, first individual, and later collective. It is Che’s efforts
at self-transcendence, and his willingness to to dedicate his life to the
betterment of the less fortunate, that I find most inspirational. I agree with
his belief that to be “truly revolutionary” requires developing a willingness
to sacrifice for the greater good. It requires developing a sense of kinship
beyond our immediately family, class, “race,” or nation, as Che did. Yet in his
single-minded dedication to revolutionary sacrifice, Che also clearly
sacrificed many things, in human terms, which I find deeply troubling. When I
think about lessons learned from Che’s life for real revolutionaries of the
present and future, that line from Bob Marley’s “Talking Blues” continues to
ring in my ears: “Who’s going to
stay at home/While the freedom fighters are fighting?”
On his first world tour in 1959,
only months after the guerrillas had come to power in Cuba, Che wrote his
mother a revealing letter from India. Che had declined Fidel Castro’s
suggestion that he take his new bride Aleida March on this trip as a honeymoon.
“I have no home, no woman, no children, nor parents,” he reflected, and his
friends remained friends only as long as they “think politically like I do.”
Yet he felt content in “the sense of my historic duty.”
Six years later, when he departed Cuba to wage
guerrilla war in the Congo, he left behind “a bunch of kids who barely knew of
my love.” These included four children with Aleida, one daughter with his first
wife Hilda, and at least one child born out of wedlock. In his famous “farewell
letter” that Castro read to the Cuban people, Che declared: “I am not ashamed
that I leave nothing material to my wife and children. I am happy it is that
way. I ask nothing for them, as the state will provide them with enough to live
on and to have an education.”
I am reminded of a scene from the Jamaican movie Rockers,
when a Rasta musician involved in a Robin Hood scheme makes a rare, and
fleeting visit home. The mother of his children scolds him, demanding to know
who is supposed to provide for their children. Don’t worry, he tells her as he
walks out. “The culture will raise them.”
Many revolutionaries
have felt that their true family is “the people.” They have dedicated
themselves more to the liberation of their people, in a collective sense, than
to rearing their own offspring. They have the faith that their support
network--the state, the culture, or the mother(s) of their children--will
provide for their children, even when they are not physically present to
provide comfort, advice, or material support. Secure in this conviction, Che even
wrote his children a letter to be read after his death. He assured them that
“Your father has been a man who acted according to his beliefs,” and gave this
parting advice: “Grow up as good revolutionaries.”
If children learn
most by imitation, then the next generation of good revolutionaries will
presumably internalize the lesson that true revolutionaries have more important
battles to fight than raising their own children. If the revolution and staying
at home are two different things, then children will see that freedom fighters
are mostly men, while it is the women who stay home to raise the next
generation. I have not come to condemn Che Guevara for being an absentee
father, or for not having sufficiently transcended the sexism of his culture
and era. Like all of the real revolutionaries of this book, Che underwent a
metamorphosis in his concept of self, and in his sense of community. There was
something gained and something lost in the process. There are aspects of his
life that are worth emulating, and there are patterns that we may not wish to
repeat.
Che Guevara’s concept of the “true revolutionary” came
to focus on creating a “new man,” who through self-transcendence learned to
sacrifice for the good of the less fortunate, and for the benefit of future
generations. The story of Che’s evolution from self-absorption to an ethic of
sacrifice for the collective good is a truly revolutionary moment in human
history, I believe. This story merits closer scrutiny, and empathy, despite
Che’s ideological rigidity, and personal limitations. I am inspired by Che’s
capacity to reach beyond his privileged background, and to empathize with the
suffering of others. Che’s parting words to his children, “try always to be
able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of
the world,” is a value I try to teach to my own children. Che’s sense of
kinship with the underprivileged, and his zeal for replacing materialism and
greed with an ethic of disciplined sacrifice for the common good, are values
that I that find worthy of imitation, or adaptation. And Che’s advocacy of a
non-racial model of mestizaje also seems a more attractive alternative
to North American racial binaries.
But Che’s neglect of
his children, and his obsessive attempts to export violent revolutions, are
aspects of his character that call out for constructive criticism. In my view,
we need to revolutionize our attitudes about what goes on in our own homes, and
in our own back yards, before we try to export revolutions abroad. More
broadly, Che’s insistence that social and political change can only occur
through armed revolt is blind to the changes that can occur through cultural
movements, changes in lifestyles, etc. It may be more revolutionary to simplify
our lifestyles, and to wean ourselves from dependence on corporate products,
than to go out in the streets and fight symbols of these corporations. It may
be more revolutionary to bicycle and otherwise practice a sustainable
lifestyle, than to wage wars that lay waste to the land. Ecological thinking,
in fact, does not seem to have entered Che’s consciousness. His parting advice
to his children was to learn “techniques that permit the domination of
nature.” Che’s attitudes towards
nature, his attempts for force violent revolutions on peoples who resisted this
option, and his flight from the women and children in his life, all reveal
limitations in his concept of the “new man” and the true revolutionary. They
also show how he unconsciously replicated patterns deriving from imperialistic
politics, and Judeo-Christian religion, that he claimed to oppose.
In early 1951, when Che was 22 years
old, after completing his fourth year of medical school, he signed on as a
“ship’s doctor” with an Argentinian petroleum company. After travelling to many
Caribbean ports, Che returned to Argentina with an autobiographical essay
called “Anguish,” which he presented to his father. While trying to write
himself out of a depression that was probably linked both to his lover Chichina,
and his frustration over societal constraints, Che reflected: “To make a
sterile sacrifice that does nothing to raise up a new life: that is anguish.”
One could say that Che spent the
rest of his life looking for a way to make a worthwhile sacrifice that would
help “raise up a new life.” I want to focus on some racial, religious, and
gendered dimensions of that sometimes quixotic quest. I am interested in the
personal roots and psychological motives behind Che’s late crusades in the
Congo and in Bolivia, where his obsession with collective sacrifice took on its
most troubling form, as a dogmatic faith that was clearly imperialistic in
practice, although egalitarian in its announced intentions.
Che was born as Ernesto in Rosario, Argentina on June
14, 1928. He was the first child of parents who were considered “high society,”
although not monied. His mother Celia and his father Ernesto Guevara Lynch both
had leftist inclinations, and were strongly anti-clerical. Guevara Lynch wanted
to return to Buenos Aires, but Ernesto’s asthma attacks prevented this. Guevara
Lynch recalled that among his son’s first words were “papito, inyección”—daddy,
my shot (anti-asthma injections). So the family settled at a higher elevevation
in the provincial town of Alta Gracia, in the northern province of Córdoba.
Here Ernesto was exposed to more ethnic diversity and cross-class friendships
than would have been the case in Buenos Aires.
Many character traits of the adult known as Che were
clearly evident in the child Ernesto. The boy frequently “escaped to the bush”
to avoid his parents’ arguments, or their desultory efforts to discipline him.
Ernesto grew up pampered, and rather wild. As a young man, he rebelled against
the constraints of class privilege, and his debilitating asthma. Over time,
Ernesto came to see his asthma as a symbol of “the malignant shackle of
heridity” that he was determined to overcome, or transcend. Some of his earlier
rebellions were more superficial, attempts to outrage upper-class adults. One
of his nicknames as a youth was “Chancho,” or pig, because of his slovenliness.
He bragged about going weeks at a time without a bath.
But his
revolutionary aspirations became visible while he was still a teenager. At age
19, Ernesto wrote a poem that eerily prefigures his future. Fearing that it was
his destiny to “die by drowning,” an allusion to his asmtha, the young Guevara
proclaimed:
“I
am going to overcome destiny.
Destiny
can be achieved by willpower.
[I
will] die fighting…riddled with bullets.”
By age
22 Guevara was already imagining a worthy sacrifice that would help “raise up a
new life.” By age 23, while travelling across Latin America, he was linking his
desire for a glorious death to a liberating group sacrifice. In 1952, for
instance, he wrote that Peru “awaits the blood of a truly emancipating
revolution.” After having passed his final medical exams in early 1953, Guevara
announced to his family his “conversion” to Marxism, and wrote a travel book in
which he made public his desire to “die as a sacrifice” in a socialist
revolution.
Yet Ernesto’s insecurities and awarness of the gap
between his ideals, and the way he actually lived, sometimes came to the
surface. From Mexico in late 1954, shortly before he met Fidel Castro, Guevara
wrote his mother Celia that “deep down…I am a complete bum” who could not
submit to the “iron discipline” of any political party, including Communists.
Guevara found his destiny, and an
“iron discipline” to which he could submit, in Fidel Castro. He believed that
Castro was the first “good thing” Cuba had produced since José Martí. Like
Martí, Castro was seen by many as the embodiment or the harbinger of a new,
democratic way of life in Cuba. At least until the early 1960s, Castro also,
like Martí, had appeal to allies across the political spectrum. “It’s only
someone like him I could go all out for,’ Che declared.
Guevara was already announcing his
determination to turn himself into “an authentic revolutionary,” in late 1953,
on the way to Guatemala. Among Cuban exiles in Mexico, in 1954, the young man
Cubans called “Che” already felt free to lecture others about the nature of
“true revolutionaries.” Yet although Guevara sometimes came across as
self-righteous, he evoked intense loyalty and even devotion among many associates.
He walked the walk. Che showed a fearlessness in battle, and a tremendous
self-discipline. Once in power, his capacity for work, and his lack of interest
in material comforts, were legendary. When he declared that the revolutionary
“new man” was capable of sacrifice, he practiced what he preached. Calling on
Cubans to engage in collective sacrifice through voluntary labor, he himself
set the example. The filmed images of Che cutting sugar cane and hauling bags
of rice become became part of the iconography of both Che and the revolution he
represented. It reinforced his image, as Castañeda says, as “a leader willing
to sacrifice himself along with the rest.”
Shortly after Cuban guerrillas took
power, Che wrote a straightforward definition of a revolutionary: “A guerrilla
is a social reformer who… responding to the protests of the people…fights to
change the social regimen that keeps all his brothers in misery.” The notion of
revolutionaries as social reformers who, following the will of the people, fought
for structural change in societies suffering from great inequality, had
widespread appeal not only in Cuba, but across Latin America and in other parts
of the world.
To achieve real social transformation, revolutionaries had to be
prepared to make many sacrifices. One of the most important sacrifices was to
destroy or transcend the “I,” the self-centered ego of individualism, in order
to develop a love for a broader family, “the people” or “the masses.” When he
was in prison with Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1956, Che responded to a letter of
motherly concern from Celia by writing: “I [have] identified totally with my
comrades of the cause…The concept of ‘I’ disappeared totally to give place to
the concept of ‘us.’ It… was (and is) beautiful to be able to feel that removal
of I.”
This was the gospel that Che
preached during the five years he was a political leader in Cuba. He spoke
often of the need for Cubans to engage in collective sacrifice in order to
achieve full independence. He was particularly critical of those, such as
“individualistic” unversity students, who seemed to remind him of his formerly
self-absorbed self.
A new life could not be raised up
through mere individual sacrifice, because of the collective nature of the old
order’s oppressive power—which Che defined as imperialism. Such a rebirth
required a transformation in collective consciousness, to facilitate collective
sacrifice. Che’s public declarations on the topic of collective sacrifice took
on religious overtones. Jon Anderson describes Che, as age 32, as having become
“the high priest of international revolution,” whose public speeches and
writings expressed “the beauty he felt in the collective sacrifice for
liberty.” His words functioned as “a liturgy, used to convert.” And Che found
many young Cubans eager to put into practice this ideal of a “quota of
sacrifice,” not only for their homeland, but for the benefit of people who were
suffering in other lands.
Increasingly Che’s concept of
collective sacrifice took on some of the same language of religious traditions
to which he was at least consciously opposed. “The blood of the people is our
most sacred treasure, but it must be used in order to save the blood of more
people in the future,” declared Che in 1962. This is a clear expression of his
faith in the necessity, and the possibility, of developing an ethic of
inter-generational solidarity. Sometimes this verged into a disturbing
fanaticism. Che seemed almost disappointed that the Cuban Missile Crisis did
not end in a nuclear holocaust. His own words seem to reflect a desire for an
atomic blood sacrifice. Che spoke of the Cubans as a people who “are willing to
atomically immolate themselves so that their ashes will serve as the foundation
of new societies.”
Che’s use of the word immolation—a
sacrificial killing—is perhaps a reference to the Buddhist monks in Vietnam who
doused themselves in flames, to protest the killing brought about by foreign
troops in their homeland. But rather than individual acts of self-immolation,
Che conceived of a collective immolation as the only effective means to
confront imperialism, so that a new way of life could arise, Phoenix-like, from
the collective funeral pyre. Which brings to mind Bob Marley’s pessimistic
conclusion in the late song “Real Situation”:
“It
seems like total destruction the only solution”
However admirable Che’s ends, his
means often seemed all-too-similar to the practices of the imperialist armies
he opposed. For instance, Che told his fellow guerrillas in Bolivia in December
of 1966 that “Bolivia must be sacrificed so that the revolutions in the
neighboring countries may begin.” Isn’t this perspective similar to the
announced intention of U.S. military invention in Vietnam, to “destroy a
village in order to save democracy”?
Che’s belief in the heroic,
revolutionary “new man” was nothing if not a faith. He himself described his
“conversion” to a Marxism as “something akin to a faith.” The correlation
between the religious faith he rejected, and its unconscious continuance in his
new, political faith is often explicit: “I can’t be religious, I’m a
communist.” The return of the repressed!
Yet his version of communism, of revolutionary change,
had all the trappings of religious faith. After his disastrous attempt to
foment revolution in the Congo, he admitted as much: “I have left with more
faith than ever in guerrilla warfare, but we have failed completely.”
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen.”
The harder it was to find evidence of real
revolutionaries in the actually existing world, the more he clung to this faith
with the zeal of a true believer who will not be dissuaded by facts. Where were
his impossibly altruistic true revolutionaries, after all? Communist leaders in
Latin America did not support violent revolution, objecting that conditions
weren’t ripe. So Che revised his theory, arguing that a foco (a vanguard
band of guerrillas) could generate support among the people after
beginning violent resistance. As
Castañeda observes, “it was without doubt the lack of real revolutionaries that
led Che to theorize that they were not necessary.” This was a form of magical
thinking, a faith: true revolutionaries might not exist in the real world in
sufficient numbers to change the power structure, but a small band of guerillas
(read, the revolutionary “new man” and his disciples) could convert the masses
to their cause, if they were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.
People often tell us
more about themselves with their hatred, than with their loves or passions. And
we become like what we oppose, if we focus too obsessively on that opposition.
This was often the case in Che’s attitudes about Christianity, and his
anti-U.S. tirades.
Writing to his mother from a Mexican jail, Che
proclaimed with the zeal of a recent convert: “I am all the contrary of a
Christ. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my
disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed
to a cross or any other place.” Yet as Castañeda illustrates repeatedly, “from
a young age he had yearned for a Christ-like destiny—to be an exemplary
sacrifice.” Che’s messianic urge had a macho, Latin American twist. Prior to
his disastrous expedition to the Congo in 1965, he told Egyptian President
Nasser that the decisive moment in a man’s life was when he confronted death.
“If he confronts death, he will be a hero, whether or not he is successful.” If
he did not confront death, he would never be more than a mere politician. For
Che, being remembered as a politician, rather than as an emblematic new man,
would be a meaningless sacrifice of his life. His messianic urges were apparent
to some of his closest allies: Algerian leader Ben Bella warned him against
playing messiah with the African people.
Like many who reject the religious culture in which
they were raised, Che and his fellow revolutionaries had been primarily exposed
to to conservative manifestations of faith: Christians who had lost sight of
Jesus as social reformer and revolutionary. Yet it is a tribute to the
continuing, often unconscious power of Christian culture, that Che’s life, the
Cuban revolution, and opposition to Castro, were all suffused with Christic
imagery. Reinaldo Arenas recalled that when the Cuban rebels entered Havana,
many wore “crucifixes hanging from chains made of seeds.” The weekly magazine Bohemia
printed an artist’s rendition of Fidel-as-Christ, even with a halo. The flip
side of this was also in evidence: in 1960, the last remaining opposition paper, Diario de la Marina, compared Castro to
“the Antichrist.” Cuban expatriates in Miami would follow this lead into the 21st
century, demonizing Castro, and in the process often mirroring in practice what
they hated.
There are countless examples of Che’s use of Christian
imagery. He described “the fault of [not being] truly revolutionaries” as the
“original sin” of artists and intellectuals. When he was trying to translate
the revolution to Cuban peasants, who had been brought up as Catholics, Che
described their trials as a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress in which individuals
found redemption by sacrificing for the Common Good. In Guerrilla Warfare
he repeated a saying about guerrillas being “the Jesuits of warfare.” In some
ways, one could accurately say that Che had a “Christian unconscious.” He
exhibited a “Calvinist zeal” in punishing backsliders. When he wrote that “I
have no home, no woman, no children,” there was an echo of Jesus’ saying that
“the son of man has no home.”
Che’s unequivocal solidarity with the less fortunate
was in practice a radically new form of kinship much like that voiced by Paul
in Romans 9:25. Expressing his faith in a non-ethnic form of kinship, Paul
re-imagined this passage from Hoseah:
“Those who were not my people I will call my people, and the unloved I
will call beloved.” Che, like Paul, rejected “my kinship by race” (Rom. 9:3),
and in its place argued for kinship in the shared faith of the struggle for
equal rights and justice. This required an abolition of the “I,” and of merely
racial or national forms of identity, in order to sight the new community of
faith that was “neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither slave
nor free.” (Gal. 3:28)
Even Che’s economic policy has Christian parallels.
His fierce opposition to giving economic incentives to workers based on their
production is strangely similar to Jesus’ parable of a boss who pays all his
workers the same, no matter when they arrive. (Matthew 20)
The Christian imagination has
traditionally been just as animated by what it opposes, as what it proposes, or
worships. And the anti-Christ of Che’s faith was clearly the United States.
ANTI-AMERICANISM: “MY
TRUE DESTINY”
Che Guevara’s first wife Hilda once encountered her husband
giving an earnest political pep talk to their infant daughter Hildita, shortly
after she had been born in Mexico. Che described to Hidita a day in the future
in which she would join forces with “the whole world fighting against Yankee
imperialism.”
Cuban tobacco
magnate Napoleón Padilla described Che as “violently and unreasoningly
anti-American.” (Che had tried to convert him, before telling him to “go join
his gringo friends”). In Che’s Us vs. Them worldview, it wasn’t enough to be
pro-Cuban or even pro-Communist. To be a true revolutionary, one had to be
virulently anti-American (that is, North American). Che saw Americans as the
fountainhead of imperialism, and he did not believe that they could be
redeemed, nor their system reformed.
Even Che’s friends remarked on his obsessive
refutation of almost all things North America. This implacable opposition
underlay many other ideological rigidities. The Algerian leader Ben Bella, a
close friend of Che’s and a fellow anti-imperialist, described Guevara as “a
tremendously likeable man, but terribly dogmatic and stubborn in his
ideological positions.” Che was, as
William James once observed of Freud, “a man obsessed with fixed ideas.”
Even as a teenager, Guevara had exhibited pronounced
anti-gringo tendencies. By his early 20s, he was prone to conspiracy theories
about North Americans as “dark princes of evil.” Thoughout the years of
“vagabonding” in Latin America, the young Guevara portrayed a head-on, violent
confrontation with Yankee imperialism as not only inevitable, but desirable. An
apocalyptic confrontation with imperial North America became for Guevara, from
an early age, a personal myth, a political philosophy, and a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
Before the Cuban revolution had run its course, Che
was already writing his mother: “When this war is over, I’ll start a much
longer and bigger war of my own: the war I’m going to fight against the
Americans. I realize that this will be my true destiny.”
Throughout his Cuban
sojourn, Che strove to overcome a sense of fatalism in Latin America regarding
North American imperialism. Just before the Bay of Pigs, he wrote of the need
to awaken “the consciousness of the possibility of victory through violent
struggle against the imperialist powers and their internal allies.” Soon after
this invasion, known in Latin America as Playa Girón, Che met with an assistant
to President Kennedy, Richard Goodwin, at an Organization of American States
conference in Uruguay. He relayed his thanks for the invasion, observing that it
had transformed relations between the small island nation and its neighboring
superpower. Indeed, the Bay of Pigs seemed to prove Che doubly right: that a
confrontation with the U.S. was inevitable, and the Cuban David could stand up
to the Yankee Goliath.
Che’s “evil empire”
view of the U.S. was the cornerstone of his efforts to “develop the
revolutionary consciousness” of those he hoped to mobilize against their
“common enemy.” Without this political mythology, strengthened by continuing
U.S. military interventions, Che’s calls for collective sacrifice would have
been meaningless. Although Che was
certainly a true believer in his anti-Americanism, he was also quite conscious
of the function of a shared enemy in political mythology. “The presence of an enemy,”
he wrote, “stimulates a revolutionary euphoria and creates the necessary
conditions to bring about fundamental changes.”
Like Malcolm X, Che
used a mythologized, often demonized enemy as a mobilizing tool to create a
“culture of opposition.” And like Malcolm, Che had plenty of historical
justification and contemporary evidence for perceiving North Americans (“the
white man,” as Malcom said, or “gringos” and “yanquis”, as Che saw them) as an
oppressive group who frequently used violence to perpetuate unequal relations
(master/servant, or First World/Third World).
I will not rehash
the story of U.S. military interventions in Latin America, except to note that
the 1901 Platt Amendment gave Washington the right to intervene in Cuba’s
internal affairs at will. Cuba’s 20th century history explains why
Fidel Castro’s distrust of North Americans, and their representatives in Cuba,
was shared by many of his countrymen. The wider context of U.S.-Latin American
relations is a necessary backdrop to understand why the young Che expressed “a
growing indignation” over “how the gringos treat America” (“nuestra América,”
that is). The way of life (level of consumption) in North America and other
“capitalist monopolies is based in the misery of our countries,” Che argued.
When the Kennedy administration reacted to political unrest in Latin America by
instituting the Alliance for Progress, Che concluded that Latin Americans had
two alternatives: revolution, or money (co-optation). Developing countries
would either be attracted to revolutionary change, or the siren song of
individual wealth being promoted by North American capitalists. Either they
would fight for equal rights and justice for all, or they would be seduced by
capitalism’s get-rich-quick schemes, which worsened inequality.
At times, Che tried to moderate the perception that he was innately
anti-North American. While still fighting in the Cuban Sierra Maestra, he told
an Argentine journalist: “In reality we don’t push anti-Yankism. We are against
the U.S. because the U.S. is against our peoples.” Che genuflected to the Cuban
patriot and martyr José Martí as a legitimating forefather for the
anti-imperialist politics he was advocating. “It is precisely in Martí’s land
where I am adhering to his doctine.” Yet while Martí had lived “in the entrails
of the monster” for many years, and understood the inter-penetrations between
North America and “our America,” Che maintained the distance necessary to keep
his hatred pure. He only visited North America twice, a layover in Miami in
1953, and a stay in New York in December 1964 when he spoke to the United
Nations.
Che did not make much of a distinction between North Americans and
imperialism. The Yankees were the cornerstone of the oppressive system. He went
to extremes that not even Malcolm had preached: not only “loathing” and
“hatred” of imperialism (with its predominantly North American face), but
“extermination” of imperialism and its supporters. Faced with such a “hiena,”
arms should be distributed in the socialist block without charge, like manna,
in order to fight against “the great enemy of the human race: the United States
of North America.”
Che’s obsessive anti-Americanism in
some ways seems to have been an effort to distance himself from his own class
and racial background. His hatred of injustice was heartfelt, but he also
seemed to hate in North Americans what was a repressed part of his own self.
Guevara was considered “white” in South America (as well as in Africa), and he
was reminded of this often in his travels. His own father was of Irish
ancestry, and considered a “blue blood” in Argentine society. Che had been a
spoiled child, and a beneficiary of class privilege. And South Americans of
other countries often viewed Argentines much as the young Guevara viewed the
United States: as arrogant and imperialistic. The memory of his own early
self-indulgence and privilege seems to have been a constant prod in his
compulsion to practice the self-sacrifice he preached. And the racial
inequality of imperialism seems to have outraged him in a uniquely personal
way.
Che’s transformation from a privileged “white” Argentine
to Third World revolutionary icon is a fascinating journey. It has parallels
with other fair-skinned freedom fighters who came to be seen as representative
of the aspirations of darker-skinned people (Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du
Bois, Bob Marley, Subcomandante Marcos, etc.). The transfiguration of Che’s
attitudes about “race,” or cultural difference, was progressive for his time.
In some ways, his life, especially in Cuba, illustrates the strengths of the
Latin American notion of mestizaje, or mixed-race identity, in contrast
to North America’s historic fixation on a black-white racial binary. Yet
because of Che’s “blind faith” in revolutionary change, so similar to the
religious faith he rejected, he ended up taking positions in relation to Africans
in the Congo, and to indigenous people in Bolivia, quite like a missionary, or
a “father knows best” imperialist.
In Guevara’s memoir of his South American journeys
(translated as The Motorcycle Diaries), he recalled a party given on his
24th birthday in Peru. Ernesto gave a speech in which he dismissed
national divisions in Latin America as “illusory” and “completely fictitious.”
He then proclaimed: “We constitute a single mestizo race, which from Mexico to
the Straits of Magellan presents notable ethnographic similarities.” This is an
archetypal expression of mestizaje that has has been voiced by numerous
Latin American revolutionaries, reformers, and artists, from José Martí, to José Vasconcelos in The Cosmic Race,
to the Cuban group Los Van Van:
“Somos le mezcla perfecta
la combinación mas dura”
(we are the perfect mixture, the most kick-ass
combination)
The reality was somewhat different. Guevara had been
reminded at numerous stops of his Latin American journey that people in other
countries, especially indigenous peoples, saw him as white, a professional, and
an Argentine, all of which gave him privileges unavailable to the peasants that
Guevara idealized. Those who knew Guevara commented on his “clear white skin”
or “very white skin.” Che described himself as white numerous times.
With his beard, beret, and revolutionary rhetoric,
Che’s “whiteness” became invisible to many revolutionaries such as Malcolm, and
to youths who later consumed images of Che as the iconic Third World
revolutionary. Yet his “whiteness” or essentially European ethnicity and
cultural orientation would become a major issue again later in life, when Che
attempted to export the Cuban model of revolution to the Congo and to Bolivia.
These were regions where people of European ancestry were almost entirely
absent, where Che was inevitably viewed with deep-seated suspicion, and where
the concept of mestizaje had a limited application.
Che’s attitudes about “race” were a work in progress.
During same period when the young Ernesto idealistically described Latin
Americans as “a single mestizo race,” he also revealed his stereotyped views
about people of African descent, who were almost unknown in his native
Argentina. After a visit to Caracas, he wrote that “those magnificent examples of
the African race…have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with
washing.” Blacks were, in the young Guevara’s view, “indolent and fanciful.”
Che’s
early view of the mestizo as “the truest Latin American of all” was limited
primarily to the “unholy union” [the “vast bloodletting”] between “the Indian
and the European.” But as Che moved north into Central America and the
Caribbean (selling images of the black Christ in Guatemala), he had his
consciousness raised. Castro and the Cubans were central to this process. Cuba
had been one of the last countries in the Western hemisphere to outlaw slavery.
Ending racial discrimination was a shared goal of Cuban revolutionaries from
Martí to Castro. Non-racialism had been a central aspect of Martí’s vision of a
Cuba (and Latin America) free from North American domination. This was one of
the reasons why Castro frequently invoked Martí, and why Che compared Castro to
Martí. Fighting against North American imperialism of necessity required
rejecting North American racialism. When the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén
described Che as combining the best of Martí and José de San Martín (the
Argentine “Liberator”), it was understood that the goal of transcending
national and racial boundaries was an important part of what united these
revolutionaries.
Che was moved by a
genuine shame and by outrage over racial discrimination (as was Martí), but
also by a tendency to romanticize racial “otherness,” a commonplace attitude
among “white liberals” to this day. Shame, Marx believed, is a revolutionary
sentiment. Sometimes so, as a starting point, but it is also frequently a
reactionary emotion. Our compulsion to make amends can be redemptive, and lead
to justice. But it can also also lead us into blind corners. All too often,
shame leads people to romantize the victim, the other.
Castañeda describes
Guevara as “a man excessively fascinated by the enchantment of otherness.” On
the face of it, this was primarily a strength, expanding Che’s sense of
kinship. As a military commander and later an employer, he was remarkably free
of racialism. Many young Afro-Cubans in fact saw Che as a role model, and were
willing to “take up his cross” and follow him on suicidial missions to foreign
lands. Che gave voice to and largely lived out the ideals of a non-racial
society, much as had other advocates of non-racial democracy, from Frederick
Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. For instance, Che was an
eloquent advocate of inclusion in Cuban institutions, arguing that “the
university must paint itself black, mulatto, worker, and peasant.”
From this basis (an imagined community of a
non-racial, anti-imperial worker’s upopia), Che began to envision much broader
forms of solidarity and kinship. In a 1960 article titled “America from the
Afro-Asian Balcony,” Guevara argued that Cuba was not only “the first signal of
America’s awakening,” but an ally and indeed a model to “hundreds of millions
of Afro-Asians.” The newly independent countries shared the dream of freedom,
Che argued, from economic deomination in the post-colonial world. Their shared
enemy (imperialism, with a North American face) transcended their geographic
divisions and their differences of language and
ethnicity. Che described himself as
“one brother more” who, along with millions of “brothers” from Asia and Africa,
were willing to join forces in order to “destroy…colonial domination.”
Speaking to the Cairo-based Afro-Asian People’s
Solidarity Organization, and in meetings with heads of states across the world,
Guevara adapted parts of the language and worldview developed through the
struggle against slavery. He agitated against “economic slavery,” and decried
the continuing existence of “colonial slaves.” As Che learned more about
atrocities in Africa, his own comments became more and more racialized, seeking
not only to mobilize Third World countries against imperialism, but more
specifically against “the white race.” Guevara in fact viewed his crusade as a
new abolitionism, calling for “the abolition of the exploitation of man by
man,” as well as the abolition of mere individualism.
Afro-Asian leaders shared Che’s goals
(self-determination), but criticized his means. Che’s utopian vision ran
aground on the realpolitik of the Sino-Soviet conflict, and the racial tensions
that plagued the decolonization process. Egyptian President Gamal Nasser tried
to dissuade Che from arriving, uninvited, in the Congo with a Cuban guerrilla
force. Nasser told the headstrong Argentine that a white man leading blacks in
Africa would look like a Tarzan. Similarly, Algerian leader Ben Bella warned
Che about the racialized context of de-colonization in Africa. Indeed, it was
South African mercenaries, hired by the governments against whom Che was
fighting, that ran Che and his Cuban fighters out of the Congo. Local
tribespeople did not seem to differentiate much between Che and the South
African mercenaries: both were fair-skinned foreigners sowing unwanted havoc.
Che’s own men tried to get him to admit that they had no support on the ground.
But he did not follow any advice, aside from a rushed recruitment of
Afro-Cubans, who were sent to Africa without being told what they were being
“volunteered” for.
Che’s post-racial
idealism had real-world limits. He told an Afro-Cuban associate that he
wouldn’t be able to participate in a revolutionary expedition to Argentina
because “there are no blacks there.” (This also ended in a complete and bloody
failure). He sent his close associate Ulíses Estrada home from Prague, where
Che was hiding out after the African fiasco, because he feared that a
dark-skinned man attracted too much attention.
Throughout his life
Che romanticized what the politically correct today call “people of color.” He
imagined that if people were not European, then they would naturally share his
(anti-imperial, anti-“white”) ideology. Che was so “bewitched” by otherness
that he obsessively projected “non-existent political virtues, ” Castañeda
observes, onto peoples and counties whom he believed would follow his
revolutionary lead. The Third World would serve him in bringing to a head the
“inevitable” confrontation with imperialism and its North American masters.
Since the Congolese leaders were not European, Che assumed they “had to
be revolutionaries,” writes Castañeda; the peasants of the Bolivian highlands “had
to rush to take up arms,” simply because they were indigenous. Che never seems
to have fully understood how his obsessive quest for a Christ-like exemplary
sacrifice led him into political myopia. He did recognize, in broad terms, the
script he was following. But he did not seem to realize the degree to which he
was projecting personal needs onto his third-world subjects.
Emilio Aragonés has
observed that Che came to the Congo “in love with Africa.” He imagined Africa
as a sort of no-man’s land, not completely divided up into spheres of influence
among superpowers. This perception, shared by many long before and after Che,
left him free to project his own hopes onto Africa. Che’s attitude was of
course part of a long tradition of people who have projected millenial
expectations onto Africa. As with the Rastas, or Marcus Garvey much earlier,
Africa was like a screen onto which Che projected deep psychological needs.
Like the Rastas, Che expected Africa to serve his own needs and ambitions,
although he understood his sojourn there as one of selfless service. He was to
be deeply disappointed: Africans did not measure up to Che’s revolutionary
expectations, or meet his psychological needs. His soldiers from the Congo
would not fight; they were obsessed with witchcraft, and they would not even
carry their own backpacks. In a broader sense, Che ran aground on a reef that
has stymied many other would-be-saviours of Africa: the Africans did not yet
have a concept of a “pueblo,” or nationhood. They seemed endlessly prone to
tribal divisions. They were apparently incapable of the sort of broad-based
sense of shared interests that would make possible the selfless sacrifice to
which Che believed true revolutionaries should aspire.
There were similar
dynamics in Che’s final, and fatal, attempt to wage revolutionary war in
Bolivia. But his final “calvary,” as Castañeda terms it, was shaped less by
“race” than by the uniquely Latin
American notion of indigenismo: the projection of the deepest political
or spiritual aspirations in Latin America onto its dispossessed, indigenous
inhabitants. (This is central to why the Zapatistas enjoyed such broad
international support for their post-Guevarist revolution in 1990s Mexico).
Che’s earlier travels through Bolivia and neighboring countries had led him to
believe that the Indians of Latin America would provide the natural staging
ground for launching a continental and hemispheric revolution. Again, he would
be deeply disappointed. The Bolivian Indians feared Che and his men, and
betrayed them at every turn. What they wanted and needed most were more
practical things. Like Julia Cortés, the schoolteacher Che talked to on the day
he died, they needed schools in which their children could achieve literacy,
and not guns for an armed uprising that would inevitably be self-destructive.
“SANITARY INJUSTICE”:
CHE’S VISION OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE
One particularly Latin American
inflection of Che’s “new man” came from the tradition of Argentine gauchos.
These “good bandits” (in the eyes of many) are a variant of the Robin Hood
myth, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Che clearly understood
himself as operating within this lineage. He named his failed military
invervention in Argentina “Operation Sombra,” and gave to the principal
operatives the names of famous Argentine gauchos, such as Martín Fierro. As
Hugo Chumbita observes in Jinetes Rebeldes (Rebellious Riders), the
gauchos remain “an enduring legacy in the conscience of [Argentina],” even
though they were largely wiped out by the military. Che would have identified
with the defiance of political and military authorities by these “primitive
rebels,” to borrow the terminology of Eric Hobsbawm. In their solidarity with
the multi-ethnic campesinos of Argentina, the gauchos set a template for Che.
These lines from “The Poem of Martín Fierro” could express Guevara’s own desire
to be a “suffering servant”:
“My sorrows are those of my
brother,
and when they see my pain,
they will be looking at their own
mirror.”
Gaucho, Robin Hood, Latin American guerrilla, quixotic
crusader, and Christic (or anti-Christic) self-sacrificing “new man”—these were
some models Che drew on in creating his own myth to live by. They were threads
Che wove together in a unique and yet instantly recognizable heroic narrative,
a revolutionary example he believed could catch a fire internationally.
Two forms of myopia made Che’s life tragic, and limit
the degree to which people who want to be truly revolutionary can emulate him
as a model. First, Che insisted that revolutionary change can only occur
through violence, and this became a blind faith. And second, he
over-generalized the lessons of the Cuban revolution.
Less than a month after the Cuban rebels took power in
Havana, on January 27, 1959, Che gave a speech in which he made sweeping claims
for the Cuban revolution. “The example of our revolution,” Che proclaimed, has
“demonstrated that a small group of men supported by the people and without
fear of dying were it necessary, can overcome a disciplined regular army and
defeat it.” In Che’s view, “The Revolution is not limited to the Cuban nation
because it has touched the conscience of America.” He would endlessly repeat
and later broaden these claims. Fanon wrote in 1961 that since July 1954, the
question everywhere for colonized peoples was “what must be done to bring about
another Dien Bien Phu?” For Che, the answer had to be the Cuban model—his
script for creating “many Vietnams.”
Che focused ever more obstinately on one obsession:
“to reproduce the Cuban model in other latitudes,” as Castañeda writes. If this
was a delusion, it was widely shared. Osvaldo de Cárdenas was a 17-year-old in
1960 when he became an intelligence operative for Che, assisting foreign
guerillas. “We were convinced that the destiny of Cuba was to inspire
revolutions all over Latin America,” he later recalled. Che himself said that
the revolution could happen “en cualquier lado, hasta el Córdoba” (anywhere,
even in Córdoba), an allusion to his hometown.
Che’s Manichean view of revolutions became a
self-parody. “A true revolution cannot be disguised,” he argued. “It must be
carried out in a life-and-death struggle against imperialism from the very
first moment.” As a script for revolutionary change, this became a
self-fulfilling prophecy. “Guerrilla warfare…has as its final goal the conquest
of political power,” he insisted. And once having obtained political power, its
“imperative” was to “liquidate the oppressing classes.” It appears that Che’s
version of revolutionary change, although it put power in the hands of
previously excluded peoples, did nothing to alter the underlying culture of
violence.
Like his contemporary Frantz Fanon, Che’s conception
of violence as the sine-qua-non of revolutionary change was
romanticized. Che described violence as “the mid-wife of new societies” which
should be embraced, not feared. In this “struggle to the death,” the sacrifice
of innocents was sometimes necessary, in Che’s view. In a revealing
conversation with Nicolás Quintana, at a time when Guevara was in charge of
executions of former police informers and torturers, Che conceded that
revolutions were sometimes “ugly.” But he argued that “sanitary injustice”
could be employed “at the service of future justice.”
To Dr. Mitrani, a former associate at the Mexico City
General Hospital, Che insisted: “in this thing you have to kill before they
kill you.” As the Cuban revolution’s leading theoretician, Che was often
described as the “brains of the revolution.” But his worldview struck even some
close friends as rigidly violent. Mario Monje, a rare associate who could get
away with criticizing Che, told him: “You have a machine gun stuck in your
brain and you can’t imagine any other way to develop an anti-imperialist
struggle.” From the time he was barely out of his teens, until his final
crusades, Che repeated his determination to “go out with a machine gun in my
hand.”
Since Che was able to convince so many idealistic
youths that the only possible solution to injustice was armed struggle, some
troubling questions arise. True revolutionaries, in Che’s view, had to be
willing to participate in group sacrifice. And they had to follow orders from
the revolutionary vanguard. Who, then, was the real revolutionary willing to
take down with him? Aren’t we talking about a “Samson solution” here? And who
is to determine the ethics of group sacrifice? Where do we draw the line
between a Che Guevara, and a Jim Jones?
It was a short path
from the time in Mexico when Guevara described himself as a “bum” lacking
self-discipline, to his role a few short years later as high priest of Third
World revolution. In less time than it takes to earn a college degree, “El Che”
transformed himself from a leftist bum to a guerrilla adventurer, and then into
a revolutionary icon who demanded standards of self-sacrifice that very few
could follow. Indeed, one could describe Che’s concept of self-sacrifice as
inhuman, since one had to cease being human, in many senses, in order to be
capable of ascending to the rarified heights of the Guevarian “new man.” The
Guevara that emerged was a “harsh angel,” as Alma Guillermprieto says. So far
did Che remove himself from ordinary human wants and needs that he did seem
unearthly, not unlike an angel sent by a bloodthirsty deity.
It is easy to lose
sight of the compassion that drove Che, which was so often manifest in his
actions, beneath the fierce gaze. Che’s self-portrait made it difficult for us
to judge him in human terms. At least, his quest to be a new man challenges us
to re-evaluate what it means to be fully human. Take his description of a battle
shortly after the Granma had landed on Cuban shores. On the run, Che was forced
to choose between a backpack of medicine, and a box of ammunition. “El Che”
chose the firepower: the tools of destruction rather than the instruments of
healing. He was convinced that weapons were the only thing that could lead to
societal healing—the collective health that would come from establishing a new
society of equal rights and justice, in which medicine was a right and a part
of the social contract, rather than a commodity.
Let us acknowledge:
sometimes implacable anger is a necessary prelude to the practice of an
inclusive compassion that is more than merely gestural. Moreover, Che’s type of
compassion
is similar to the “radical egalitarianism” advocated by Jesus, Buddha,
and other teachers and political revolutionaries. Such a revolutionary
compassion could not be conceived of or enacted within the context of mere
individualism. This sort of compassion, which requires an inclusive sense of
kinship, is probably not possible within the constraints of capitalism as we
know it. After all, a core ideology of free-market capitalism (or
neo-liberalism, a variant of what Che called imperialism), is this: “people had
no rights beyond what they can obtain in an unregulated labor market.” You can get anything you want in the Babylon
system as long as you can pay for it.
To care about those
who cannot pay, and to feel a sense of kinship with them, requires something of
the spirit of the beehive.
Beneath the exterior
of the “harsh angel,” there remained something of the healer in Che--a part of
the ethic of the healing profession in which he was trained. Although Guevara
dowplayed his role as a doctor, he continued to write and speak about his ideal
of the doctor in revolutionary society who practiced “social medicine.” It
seems to me of great significance that although the African peasants Che lived
among in the Congo had almost no interest in Guevara as a guerrilla, they
swarmed around him in great numbers to seek his services as a doctor.
Che could inspire
great love because of his selfless dedication, even as he was sometimes a
brutal and seemingly inhuman taskmaster. Somehow, those two extremes, the ethic
of selfless love and sacrifice, and an aura of harshness and inhumanity, were
part of the same package. In one of his most famous quotes, Che wrote: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing
ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.
It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”
What kinds of love? True revolutionaries must “idealize their love for the
people, for the most sacred causes…They cannot descend with small doses of
daily affection, to the places where ordinary men put their love into
practice.”
Greater love has no man than this,
than that he lay down his life for his friends. But in addition to asking, who
will Che’s true revolutionary take down with him at the moment of supreme
sacrifice, we must also ask: who will
the real revolutionary leave behind, when he ascends to the places where
extraordinary men reside?
THE “NEW MAN” AT HOME
AND ABROAD, WITH AND WITHOUT WOMEN
In late 1967,
shortly before his death, Che told his bedraggled band of guerillas in Bolivia
that “revolutionaries [are] the highest step in the human ladder.” The context
illustrates the gap between Che’s ideals, and the reality in which he lived. He
made this statement after having stabbed his own horse in the neck. He and his
men were half-starved and isolated, having been shunned by the Bolivian
peasants they hoped to ”liberate.” Che seems to have become emotionally
stunted, but he sought to remind his men of the redemptive ideal to which they
aspired.
Che’s concept of the
“new man” was developed in opposition to the individualism and materialism of
the United States. When the French Marxist economist René Dumont suggested to
Che that agricultural workers be paid for off-season work, to give them a sense
of co-ownership, Guevara reacted violently. He would not help create “a second
American society,” he said.
At root, Guevara was
opposed to monetary exchange as the sole norm of human relations. What he
proposed as the more attractive alternative was utopian: moral stimulus. For
people to be open to moral incentives that inspired sacrifice for society,
rather than economic incentives that only inspired self-interest, there first
had to be a revolution in consciouness. This became Che’s mission in his last
years: a revolution in values that retrained people to have a sense of kinship
with, and responsibility for, a larger community. Moral stimulus was held up as
la palanca (the driving force) in the creation of new human beings.
Again, beneath all the talk of armed resistance as the only path to political
change, Che’s concept of what motivated human beings was more spiritual than
political. And underneath his anti-Americanism, Che’s focus upon creating a new
consciousness and “new categories of values” (as in the speech “Creating a New
Attitude”) had a rather North American ring, almost New Age at times.
Guevara’s thinking in fact can be
placed within a long line of self-realization literature. For instance, the
idea that interdependence was the highest human ideal, surpassing independence,
was a gospel preached with stunning success by Stephen Covey to corporate
leaders in the 1990s.
“Social living is the
best,” as the reggae singer Burning Spear put it. I fully agree with the notion
that we need a radically expanded sense of kinship, whether the message comes
from a Jesus or a Che, from Rastafarian radicals or from best-selling
motivational speakers. Other inspirational aspects of Che’s life can also be
recognized as part of much broader streams of human thought: the primacy of
consciousness change as a forerunner to social change; and the importance of
maintaining spaces in which moral values still guide human relations, rather
than all interactions being solely or primarily shaped by economic
considerations.
But I want to return
to the question of who and what is left behind, when the revolutionary new man
ascends to places beyond the realms “where ordinary men put their love into
practice.” Because I am drawn inevitably to the conclusion that the blind spot
at root of Che’s “machine gun in the brain” is located precisely in his flight
from domestic relations.
In a revealing passage, Guevara wrote: “the leaders of
the Revolution have children who in their first babblings do not learn the name
of their fathers; and women who are a part of the sacrifice that they must make
in order to lead the Revolution to its destiny.” On one trip abroad, he
confessed to Nasser: “I have broken two marriages.” Aleida in practice played a
secondary role in Che’s life; in his absense, she ran their house, and raised
their children. Che was absent at the birth of own his children because of his
globe-trotting. Even when he was in Cuba, Che was only home on Sunday
afternoons, dedicating even Sunday mornings to volunteer labor. Aleida
remembered that he “never stopped at home.” That was only a slight exaggeration:
even on the rare occasions when he was actually at home, Che mostly retreated
to his rooftop office.
Che chose to forego a honeymoon. He
resisted Fidel’s efforts to send Aleida on trips with him abroad. He even tried
to forebid his men—including himself—from seeing their women when they were
training in Cuba for missions abroad. He thought their dedication should be
total—like a boxer embracing celibacy while training for a championship bout.
In contrast to the young man who copulated with a
servant behind his Aunt Beatriz’ back, the mature Che was something of a sexual
puritan. He tried to prevent his men from whoring when they were abroad, not
only because he expected total dedication, but because he was concerned about
the impression that promiscuity might give to people inclined to view Cubans,
Latin Americans, and people of African descent as over-sexed, or undisciplined.
By and large Che seems to have been very strict with himself, once in power,
regarding sexual temptation.
But Che’s machismo changed little, extending even to
his treatment of his children. In a letter from Africa to his sons Camilo and
Ernesto, Che told them that if he were still alive at the end of the century,
and if imperialism still existed, they would either fight it together, or “go
together to the moon on a spaceship.” Che, and the lifestyle he imagined
passing on to his sons, was always in flight from home, going on missions
abroad, and shooting missiles at eternal enemies that could not be reasoned
with, only liquidated. It was a life-and-death struggle without a visible end
game. Weapons might change hands, but the culture of violence went
unchallenged, in the world according to Che.
MORAL AMBIGUITY IN THE
REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
Che Guevara could not tolerate ambiguity, as Jorge
Castañeda stresses. This was partly psychological and partly physiological.
Only in situations where battle lines were clearly drawn, without ambiguity,
did Guevara’s body produce the adrenaline that provided relief from his chronic
asthma. Che saw the world, morally and politically, in black and white. He was
a perfect icon for the 1960s in that way. Guevara was like a character in the
traditional Latin American novel, which Carlos Fuentes describes as “a
simplistic epic: the exploited man has to be good, by nature, and the man that
exploits is intrinsically bad.” Which is still the way that most admirers of
Che, and would-be “true revolutionaries,” seem to view the world.
But with the development of “an authentic social revolution” that
radically transforms a country’s structure, rather than just substituting one
dictator or ruling class for another, a new element is introduced: ambiguity
(or moral relativity). Because, as Fuentes notes, “in the dynamic revolution the
heroes can be villains, and the villains heroes.” Isn’t that a pretty good
description of both Che, and at times, those “villains” he opposed? In
attempting to embody the heroic “new man” as “true revolutionary,” didn’t Che
sometimes take on villanous qualities? And weren’t the villains he opposed
also, sometimes, perceived as heroic figures in the territories Che wished to
liberate? (Latin American elites wanted trade with North America, and most
people loved North American movies and popular culture).
But for a man who viewed North
Americans as “the great enemy of mankind,” such nuances were useless. It was
either/or: either side with the Gringo imperialists, or be willing to sacrifice
all in the Guevarian revolution. “There are no other alternatives,” he wrote.
“Either a socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution.” And for Guevara,
a socialist revolution required total sacrifice, and hence, freedom from
ambiguity. “There is no life outside it,” he believed.
Although Guevara did
want to carry his revolution into “centers of entertainment,” he imagined this
as being conducted by warriors who were a “cold killing machine” driven by
“relentless hatred of the enemy,” rather than by entertainers who seduced the
enemy with visions of a more attractive alternative. Che did not seem capable
of imagining a revolution in consciousness inspired by freedom fighters whose
turf was edutainment, rather than armed resistance: stars such as Bob Marley,
who thought that “music is the biggest gun, because it save.”
Friends say Che had
no sense of melody or rhythm (like Freud, another ideologically rigid
trailblazer). Perhaps there is a connection between Che’s tone-deafness, and
his context-deaf obsession with exporting revolution only through armed
resistance. Che preached that the struggle against imperialism had to be armed
uprisings in “el campo” (the countryside). He thus foreclosed the possibility
of resistance in “el campo de cultura” (the domain of culture). “There are no
artists of great authority who at the same time have great revolutionary
authority,” he believed.
So there is an irony in the fact
that Che’s memory has been preserved, above all, within popular culture: in
songs known throughout Latin America, such as “Hasta Siempre”; in the
continuing reproduction of for-profit images of Che; in videos that place him
squarely with the flow of Latin American popular music that expressed
liberatory ideals.
Che surely believed in the importance of icons. He
spoke of the emulation of new men as being “the base which constantly moves the
masses.” But as Oscar Martí observes, “One becomes a hero not by dint of doing
heroic actions but by the image acquired in doing them—by the spell cast
by others.” Many of Che’s actions were indeed heroic. But the way in which people
emulate a heroic icon like Che may have little to do with the actions or
beliefs of the actual human being who trod this earth. We have to be aware of
unconscious forces here: of the needs and desire which shape people’s longing
for heroes, and of the commercial forces that shape these desires.
I find that Che Guevara, who struggled so mightily to
erase his personal ego, compels me to speak in personal terms. In many ways, I
find his fierce struggle to transform our conceptions of identity and community
to be far more attractive that the sorts of models we get in free market
capitalism. These commercial icons are almostly invariably materialistic and
self-absorbed. Only rarely do they question the status quo in a fashion that is
more than “merely gestural.”
But when I think about the spell Che continues to cast
in terms of longing for messiahs, a lust for blood sacrifice, and the tendency
to project images of an unredeemable enemy onto entire continents, or races,
then I am deeply troubled. In this sense the spell cast by Che has been all too
myopic, often with tragic and bloody consequences.
The spell cast by
Che moves me to say that I reject the pattern of the sacrificial or
self-sacrificing hero or saviour. I do not believe in redemption by blood sacrifice.
I do not believe that violence can be used to end or
heal violence.
I do not believe in the idea of a sacrifice to end the
practice of sacrifice.
I do not believe in the shedding of blood to prevent
more shedding of blood.
My daughter Sela developed early on an aversion for
images of the bloody Christ, which we saw everywhere in Mexico. Having taught
her to pray to a “Great Spirit” rather than a specific deity, I had to answer
her questions. She instinctively rejected the crucified Christ, but embraced
the Jesus who taught that we must become like children to enter a transformed
world. This is a lesson that has only been partially assimilated by humanity.
Those who follow are deceived by the spell the teachers cast—or that is cast by
followers who retouch icons to meet their own needs. If both the enemies and
the followers of our heroes sacrifice them, or worship them as sacrificial
victims, aren’t they reinforcing the same pattern? And where does the
sacrificing end?
The aspiration to revolutionary sacrifice
remains a religious ideal. Far be it from me to try to jettison religious
ideals: history has taught us time and time again that this is impossible. The
repressed merely returns again in a disguised form. But we need to become more
conscious of the underlying patterns which we repeat. Often these patterns are
myopic scripts which have little to do with the liberatory ideals of the
spiritual or political teachers who inspire us.
We need to write new scripts. To emancipate ourselves
from mental slavery, and to give ourselves permission to imagine the
possibility of creating new patterns which are truly ®evolutionary. And not
reactionary, or self-destructive.
“WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES” (AN EPILOGUE WITH TONGUE IN CHEEK)
Is there something
“truly revolutionary,” an essence worth keeping, or re-creating, in the
mythology Che helped craft, and which took on a life of its own, a spell,
after his death?
I remember buying
the paperback of Jon Anderson’s Che: A Revolutionary Life in Moe’s, a
bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, around 1999. The sales clerk noted
that they had the hardback available for the same price. I had seen the
enormous hardback. “Yeah, but I’m running out of shelf space,” I said.
“I understand that.”
He paused. ‘’But you know, a hardback will do more damage when the revolution
comes.”
It was a Berkeley
sort of joke. There were plenty of people in places like Berkeley who consumed
images of “true revolutionaries” like Che. Yet there was a sense in which he
had been reduced to parody, the tragedy returning as farce. Che-as-icon had
become a satirical weapon to be lobbed at those naïve enough to believe that
the revolution would still come. At best he was an abstract symbol of
fashionable opposition.
I have tried to
recover an understanding of what it was Che actually resisted, and the personal
obsession that drove this resistance. And above all, I have hoped to convey
some sense of the enormous discipline that his resistance required, the
sacrifices he made, and the human changes he underwent in the process. And I
have tried to look clear-eyed at the strengths and weaknesses of his life, to
determine what is worth forwarding of his revolutionary spirit.
Let us return to Che’s encounter
with the Bolivian teacher Julia Cortés, following what he had described as “a
period of low morale in revolutionary spirit,” in which Bolivian peasants were
not only uninterested in his revolutionary ideals, but betrayed him at every
step.
The people rejected what the vanguard
leader said they needed: violent revolution. They could not emulate this
example. They needed medical care, and schools. Che must have sensed that,
hours before his death, when he promised to Cortés that he would build a modern
school, if he survived. Perhaps only with death staring at him did he think
about re-awakening revolutionary spirit in that realm: to build the foundation
of revolutionary change in education.
Che could have reacted to injustice
and poverty and racism by applying himself fully to medicine. Or by trying to
“give Latin America’s poor the weapon of literacy,” Guillermoprieto observes.
Instead he vowed to become a selfless avenger who was determined to “slaughter
any enemy I lay my hands on.” But hatred and vengeance cannot feed our
children.
The only possible form of group sacrifice that is not
open to intolerance and the abuses of dictatorships, I would argue, is
sacrifice for our children, and for the earth. If the revolution Che aspired to
were to come, if it is really going to expand our chances of survival, it will
have to build on the natural inclination of parents to sacrifice for their
children. We will have to learn to think across generations, and become willing
to make sacrifices in our lifestyle for generations unseen. We will have to
feel kinship for people who do not look like us, or speak our language, that we
may not even like. Because our descendants will have to share what is left of
the world.
[This essay draws heavily on
three books published on the 30th anniversary of Che Guevara’s
death: Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Grove,
1997), Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: Vida y Muerte del Che Guevara
(Vintage Español, 1997) and David Deutschmann, editor, Che Guevara Reader:
Writings on Guerrilla Strategy, Politics and Revolution (Melbourne and New
York: Ocean Press, 1997). Although Castañeda’s magisterial biography has been
translated into English as Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara
(Knopf, 1997), I read this work in Spanish, and citations are from the Vintage
edition. Translations are mine.]
“mystical,” Jon Lee Anderson,
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Grove, 1997), 412.
Ernesto Che Guevara: The
Bolivian Diary, directed Richard
Dindo, Fox Lorber 1997/98.
“I am the most”/ “obstacle”
Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: Vida y Muerte del Che Guevara (Vintage
Español, 1997), 65-6.
Children with three women,
Castañeda 327.
José Martí used the concept
“nuestra América” (our America) to differentiate a more inclusive Latin America
from the monolithic north. “Our America” was both an alternative to and a
critique of the imperialist United States. But Martí lived in New York for over
a decade, and wrote widely about North American literature. He also cited
approvingly many aspects of the American democratic experience, although he
grew increasingly critical of the gap between North America’s theory of
democracy, and its practice. See Christopher Abel and Nissa Torrents, eds.,
José Martí: Revolutionary Democrat (Duke UP, 1986); Jeffrey Belnap &
Raúl Fernández, eds., José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to
Hemispheric Cultural Studies (Duke UP, 1998); José David Saldívar, The Dialectics
of Our America (Duke UP, 1991), Chapter One.
beehive/sacred place,
Anderson 123-4.
“no home,” Anderson 433-34;
Castañeda 214.
bunch of kids, Anderson 630.
Farewell letter to Castro, David Deutschmann, editor, Che Guevara Reader,
Writings on Guerrilla Strategy, Politics and Revolution (Melbourne and
New York: Ocean Press, 1997), 354.
grow up & domination of
nature, Guevara Reader 349; Anderson 634.
“A WORTHY SACRIFICE”
“Anguish,” Anderson 69.
“inyección,” “Ernesto Che Guevara:
hombre, compañero, amigo.” Directed by Roberto Massari, Editorial Abril, 1994.
Escape to bush/ shackle of
heredity, Anderson 18, 140.
Overcome destiny, Anderson
44.
Emancipating blood, Anderson
85.
Good thing/ all out, Anderson
179.
True revolutionary, Anderson
126, 185.
Disinterest in material
things, Castañeda 296.
Capable of sacrifice,
Anderson 455.
Along with the rest,
Castañeda 238.
“what is a Guerrilla,”
published in Revolución; Anderson 398; Guerrilla Warfare. “El Che
le entregó a un par de generaciones de las Américas la herramienta para creer.”
Castañeda 245.
Removal of I, Anderson
199-200.
Individualistic, Anderson
469.
High priest/ quota/ other
lands, Anderson 477, 637, 396.
“blood of people,” Anderson 531.
“un pueblo que está dispuesto a inmolarse atómicamente para que sus
cenizas sirvan de cimiento a las sociedades nuevas” (Castañeda, 290). Cuba’s
Soviet sponsors criticized his fundamentally theological desire for a
“beautiful death” (Castañeda, 292-3).
Bolivia must be sacrificed,
Anderson 701. Neither Guevara or Castro believed guerrilla warfare could be
successful in Bolivia. Castañeda 408.
“akin,” Anderson 165; “can’t
be religious” Castañeda, 168.
“more faith,” Castañeda, 397,
my emphasis.
Not necessary, Castañeda 301.
More instances of a Christic
iconography of Che: Castañeda 218, 246, 250.
Contrary of Christ,
Anderson 199.
Exemplary sacrifice,
Castañeda 430.
Nasser & Bella,
Castañeda 349.
Arenas, Bohemia,
Antichrist: Anderson 378-9, 472.
“original sin,” Che
Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba” (1965), in Guevara Reader, 210.
Pilgrims & Calvinist, Anderson 299, 241. Jesuits, Castañeda 24.
Paul Vitz, Sigmund
Freud’s Christian Unconsious, (New York and London: Guilford, 1988).
Frantz Fanon, another
apostle of revolutionary violence in the service of creating “new men,” wrote
that “decolonization is the putting into practice of [the gospel verse] ‘the
last shall be first and the first last’.” The Wretched of the Earth
(Grove 1963), 36-37.
Rejected economic
incentives, Castañeda 323-4.
ANTI-AMERICANISM: “MY
TRUE DESTINY”
Yankee imperialism,
Castañeda 202.
Anti-Americanism,
Anderson 421; Castañeda 200.
Gringo friends, Anderson
460.
Ben Bella on rigidity,
Castañea 359.
“fixed ideas,” William
James in letter to Thomas Flournoy, quoted in Ronald Hayman, A Life of Jung
(New York: Norton, 1999), 115.
On rare occasions Che
made exceptions for individual North Americans, referring to Harold White, for
instance, as a “good gringo” (Anderson, 137). But this does not seem to have
been anything so generalized as the category of “the good white man” that is an
archetypal category in Afro-Caribbean cultures. Richard D.E. Burton, Afro-Creole:
Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Cornell UP, 1997), 107.
“dark princes”; Che’s
early anti-American obsession: Anderson 52-3, 63, 120.
invevitable
confrontation, Anderson 132, 169; Castañeda 226.
“my true destiny,”
Anderson 322.
fatalism, Castañeda 241.
“possibility of
victory,” Anderson 505.
Goodwin, Anderson
519-20.
“revolutionary
consciousness” and “common enemy,” Castañeda 323, 359, 226.
“euphoria,” in Jean Cormier with Alberto Granado and
Hilda Guevara, Che Guevara (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1995), 279, cited in Castañeda, 221.
“culture of opposition,”
Hanes Walton, “Introduction,” in Robert Jenkins and Mfanya Donald Tryman, The
Malcolm X Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2002).
There are two extremes
in the literature about underdevelopment and U.S. imperialism in Latin America.
On the left is the hugely influential Las Venas Abiertas de América
Latina by Eduardo Galeano (The Open Veins of Latin America), written in
the years just after Che’s death. (Siglo Veintiuno, 1971/1999). The sort of
full-throated victimization voiced by Guevara and Galeano has often degenerated
into self-parody in the Latin American left and their supporters, and has
recently been mercilessly satirized in Guide to the Perfect Latin American
Idiot by Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas
Llosa (Madison Books, 2000).
John Charles Chasten, Born
in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (Norton, 2001), 288.
See especially the map of U.S. military interventions and guerrilla movementns
during the Cold War, an illustration of what fed Che’s outrage.
Anti-Yankee/Martí,
Anderson 309.
“I lived in the monster
and know its entrails: and my sling is that of David.” José Martí’s letter to
Manuel Mercado of May 18, 1895, one day before he was killed. In Obras
Completas, V. 4 (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963), p. 170.
Loathing/extermination,
Ernesto Che Guevara, “Discurso en el Conglomerado Industrial 30 de Noviembre
1964,” cited in Castañeda 336; Anderson 617.
“great enemy,” Che
Guevara, “Create two, three, many Vietnams” (April 1967), Guevara Reader,
328.
Youthful anti-gringo
attitudes, Anderson 68, 82, 119; South American view of Argentina, A 81.
“white imperialist,”
Castañeda 336.
Malcolm reads Che,
Anderson 618.
“WE CONSTITUTE A SINGLE
MESTIZO RACE”
For my work on Douglass
and Marley as integrative ancestors of a nonracial democracy, see Gregory
Stephens, On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph
Ellison, and Bob Marley (Cambridge UP, 1999). For more sources on Marcos
and the Zapatistas, see Juana Ponce de León, ed., Our Word is OurWeapon:
Selected Writings of Subcomandante Marcos (New York: Seven Stories Press,
2001); John Womack, Jr., ed., Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader
(New York: The New Press, 1999); Tom Hayden, ed., The Zapatista Reader
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth/Nation Books, 2002).
Illusory/mestizo race,
Anderson 89; Castañeda 78.
Jeffrey Belnap &
Raúl Fernández, José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric
Studies (Duke UP, 1998); José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza
cósmica, bilingual edition (Johns Hopkins UP, 1925/1997).
“clear white,” Anderson
36, 381; saw self as white, Anderson 75, 80-81.
washing/fanciful,
Anderson 92.
truest Latin American,
Anderson 82.
Black Christ, Anderson
130.
Castro invokes Martí,
Anderson 171, 176-7.
Che compares Castro to
Martí, Anderson 179.
Guillen; compared to
José de San Martín, Anderson 381.
Marx on shame, Jean-Paul
Satre, “Preface,” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York:
Grove, 1963), 14.
Otherness, Castañeda
212.
Model to Afro-Cubans,
Anderson 341.
University, Anderson
449.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1983/1991).
Afro-Asians/one brother
more, Anderson 457-8.
Economic slavery,
Anderson 467; Castañeda 226. “colonial slaves”/ “’blanco’ imperial”-- Ernesto
Che Guevara, “Discurso en la asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas,” Escritos
y discursos, vo. 9 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencas Sociales, 1977), 291-2.
Also in Castañeda, 336.
Abolition of
exploitation, Che Guevara, “At the Afro-Asian conference in Algeria,”
Guevara Reader, 304. Abolition of individualism, “Socialism and man in
Cuba,” Ibid, 197.
Tarzan, Castañeda 349;
Anderson 623.
White mercenaries,
Anderson 611.
Recruiting Afro-Cubans,
Castañeda 356, 369.
Estrada, Anderson 677.
Bewitched/had to
be, Castañeda 212.
Love with Africa/no
man’s land, Castañeda 367, 347.
Che’s critique of
Africans in Congo, Castañeda 331, 345, 348, 356.
“SANITARY INJUSTICE”
Emil Ludwig, Bolívar
(Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1957/2000).
Hugo Chumbita, Jinetes
Rebeldes: Historia del bandolerismo social en la Argentina (Buenos Aires:
Javier Vergara, 2000), 252, 12.
Hobsbawm, Primitive
Rebels (1959).
“Poem of Martín Fierro,”
quoted in Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror IV: The Price of Freedom
(Public Media Video / Sogetel, 1991).
In a farewell letter to
his parents, Che spoke of mounting Rocinante, an allusion to Don Quijote’s
steed. Guevara Reader, 350.
Example/conscience of
America, Anderson 393.
Frantz Fanon, The
Wretched of the Earth (Grove, 1963), 70.
Che Guevara, “Create
Two, Three, Many Vietnams,” Guevara Reader, 313-28.
Cárdenas in Anderson 396. See
Anderson 457 on perceptions that Cuba would be a global model.
Latitudes, Anderson 296.
Córdoba, Castañeda 300.
First moment, Anderson
348; Conquest of polital power/liquidate, Anderson 582, 624.
Culture of violence,
Derrick Jensen, [
]
Midwife, Anderson 582.
To the death, Guevara Reader 302.
Sanitary injustice, Anderson 458.
Kill you, Anderson 476;
390; brains, Castañeda 228; Machine gun, Anderson 558, 488.
“armed struggle as only
solution,” Guevara Reader 350; Anderson 243.
Samson solution: see
discussion of this in my chapter on Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.
other mass suicides:
[ ]
Alma Guillermoprieto,
“The Harsh Angel,” Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America
(Vintage 2002).
Medicine or arms: Che
Guevara, “Selections from Episodes of the Revolutionary War,” in Guevara
Reader, 26.
“radical egalitarianism”—an
extension of what John Dominic Crossan calls “open commensality,” in Jesus:
A Revolutionary Biography (HarperSanFrancisco 1996), 66-74.
Capitalism as
unredeemable, in the sense of facilitating sustainability, or a sense of
kinship with those who cannot pay for services: Joel Kovel, The Enemy of
Nature: The End of Capitalism of the End of the World? (London and New
York: Zed Books, 2002).
“people had no rights,”
Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New
York : Seven Stories Press, 1999), 59, 79.
Role of doctor / “social
medicine,” Anderson 135, 478.
“Feelings of
love…ordinary men,” Anderson 636-7.
“NEW MAN” AT HOME AND
ABROAD, WITH AND WITHOUT WOMEN
Sartre, “complete,”
Anderson 468; new type, Anderson 479.
Human ladder, Anderson
722.
Individualism…criminal,
Anderson 478, 470, my emphasis. fulfilling their duty; reconcile, Anderson 636, 479.
Newness of concept of
individualism in Western history: Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search
for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton UP, 2000). It was only in the
latter 18th century, believes Sobel, that Westerners began to
“envision themselves as having a separate inner self” (p. 25). In the 17th
and 18th centuries most English people “thought of themselves not as
autonomous individuals but as part of an interdependent whole.” John Gillis,
“From Ritual to Romance: Toward an Alternative History of Love,” in Emotion
and Social Change: Towards a New Psychohistory, ed. Carol Stears and Peter
Stearns (New York: , 1988), 95-96.
Cog in a wheel, Anderson
605.
Second American Society,
Anderson 479.
Che’s opposition to
commercial model, Castañeda 318-19. Re: the incapacity to imagine an
alternative to a commercial model of human relations, see the documentary “The
Ad and the Ego” (California Newsreel); transcript
La palanca, Castañeda
324.
New categories of
values: “conciencia …los valores adquieran categorías nuevas,” Castañeda
375; (“Hombre” 259).
Stephen R. Covey, The
7 Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon & Schuster/
Fireside, 1989/;1990), 50-51.
Burning Spear, “Social
Living” (Island 1978), in dub version as “Pit of Snakes,” Raiders of the
Lost Dub (Island 1981); re-released on Dub Reggae Essentials (Hip-O
Records/Universal, 2000).
Leaders, “El socialismo
y el hombre en Cuba,” en Escritos y discursos (La Habana: Editorial de
Ciencias Sociales, 1977), tomo 8, p. 259; Castañeda 275. Two marriages,
Castañeda 362.
Aleida’s role, Castañeda
215; running house Anderson 569-72; Absent at births, Castañeda 229, 233-4,
362; Sunday, Anderson 566; never
stopped, Castañeda 295; rooftop, Anderson 566.
Honeymoon & Aleida
left from trips abroad, Anderson 425, 434.
Aunt Beatriz &
sexual puritan, Anderson 47, 174, 572.
Letters to sons and
daughters, Anderson 762.
For more on Che as a
father, see Anderson 401, 447; 566.
MORAL AMBIGUITY IN THE
REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
Epic/ “dynamic
revolution,” Carlos Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico:
Cuadernos de Joaquín Mortiz, 1974), 14-15, my translation.
No alternative, Guevara
Reader 319. “no life outside it,”
Ernesto Che Guevara, “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba,” Escritos y
discursos, vol. 8 (Havana: Ediciones de Ciencias Socialies, 1977), 261,
270. Castañeda 375.
Centers of
entertainment/relentless hatred, Anderson 719.
Tone-deaf, Anderson 89,
570; Castañeda 267.
“el campo,” Castañeda
242. “El Che coloca todo el peso de su autoridad y habilidad en el carácter
militar de la lucha en Cuba y América Latina.” (p. 243) This prevented him from
investing in struggles that took place within the realm of culture.
“artists…authority,” Guevara Reader 208. Che’s condescending
attitudes towards artist re: social change is much like that of the “Frankfurt
School” of critical theorists.
“Hasta Siempre,” a song about
Che Guevara by Carlos Puebla, has been recorded often. A recent example is a
cover in a reggae-ish style by King Mafrundi on ¡Fuerza! (Higher
Octave/Virgin, 2001). An early version of the song can be heard on “Ernesto Che
Guevara: hombre, compañero, amigo.” Directed by Roberto Massari, Editorial
Abril, 1994. This video is a repository of Latin American music, some of a
highly literary quality, that advocates social transformation.
The base, Castañeda 277.
Spell cast, Oscar Martí,
“José Martí and the Heroic Image, in Belnap and Fernandez, eds., José
Martí’s ‘Our America’ (Duke UP, 1998), 317, my emphasis.
Heroic actions: I think of how he insisted that his Cuban
soldiers in Africa live as the African peasants did, for instance—to the point
of rejecting a shipment of boots, because he did not want he and his men to
separate themselves from the people.
Sartre believed that
“violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.”
Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, 30.
“WHEN THE REVOLUTION
COMES”
weapon of
literary/slaughter, Guillermoprieto 76-77.
Sacrifice for children,
Fred Branfman, “An Open Letter to leaders of the Environmental Movement,” Salon
9-5-2002
“low morale,” a passage from Che’s Bolivian diary, August 1967.
This
is a work in progress. Please send feedback if you have any: [email protected]