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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2004YouthRecollecting Che Guevaraby Brown Douglass Ernesto "Che" Guevara was born 76 years ago this month on June 14, 1928 in Rosario, Argentina. Any celebration of his life should be inseparable from a celebration and discussion of his ideas, actions, and legacy as an internationalist revolutionary. While many of us--especially young people--are bombarded with deified images of his face on posters, T-shirts, and album covers, what the mainstream does not readily show us is Che's unbending revolutionism and his complicated and sometimes contradictory body of thought. Che is probably the best known revolutionary in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly in the whole world. His start as an idealistic young doctor from a liberal middle-class family in Argentina, to a guerrilla leader and later Minister of Industry in post-revolutionary Cuba almost sounds like a fairy tale. It's that exact idealism, sometimes bordering on adventurism, that I think appeals so much to young people from all backgrounds and countries wanting to change the world. The idealism of Che, although present after his becoming a self-made Marxist in the Cuban revolution, was channeled in different ways after the taking of power from the dictator Batista. He quickly became an exemplary "socialist man," a term he used to express the new type of human being that was to emerge from the defeat of imperialism and building of socialist society. Voluntary labor, sacrifice to the state, and unending work and self-education were almost religious sacraments to him. Though his outlook on the world was many times very scientific, his "socialist" moralism made him an endearing figure to many poor Cubans who saw a man that not only talked about a new society but got his hands dirty as well. THEORETICAL LIMITATIONS The problem comes when your focus jumps from the people to the State and the Party. When the state plan becomes an abstract program of rapid industrialization and nationalization of property as it did in Cuba, the workers and peasants who made the revolution become an abstract mass as well. When before it was a private capitalist or landowner implementing their will on the workers and peasants, now it was the state implementing a Plan that didn't end up meaning worker and farmer control of production, but state control. Che's vanguardism stemmed from his belief in the guerrilla "foco" unit, to him the be-all and end-all center of revolutionary activity. Instead of a social revolution made by all the oppressed sectors, a vanguard can "guide this [revolutionary] struggle to success, including by shortcuts." The shortcuts to revolution in this case meant, under the "correct leadership," mobilizing the peasants until the workers in the city saw the need for revolutionary violence and only then uniting everyone against the oligarchy. In this way his immense belief in humanity to free itself was stunted by his fetishism of the vanguard to "correctly interpret" social conditions and implement a Plan from the outside. The internationalism that Che expressed during the building of post-revolutionary Cuba was second to none. He took many trips after the revolution as an ambassador, and also to observe the oppression and freedom struggles in other parts of the world, especially Africa. He led a group of Cubans in the Congo in the anticolonial Kinshasa rebellion. After returning home to Cuba, he gave up his government post and citizenship to fight with guerrillas in Bolivia, where he eventually died in the hands of anti-Communist Bolivians under the partial direction of the CIA. In the final statement before his death focusing on the growing Vietnam War, Che urged that the people of Latin America create "one, two, many Vietnams." His theory was summed up like this: "Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism and a call for the unity of the peoples against the great enemy of the human race: the United States of North America." He didn't live to or maybe didn't want to see that focusing on the U.S. as enemy number one and accepting a popular front mentality meant capitulating to your own home-grown dictators and forms of state-capitalism, like what happened in Castro's Cuba. I think that the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements of today can still learn a lot from Che. I think as well that unfortunately much of what we can learn from him is what not to do and what traps await a Marxist revolutionary who replaces unique theory and practice with a ready-made, all-around short-cut attitude to revolution. Hopefully Che's revolutionary humanism will live on and we can learn from his mistakes in our reaching for a new, truly human society. |
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