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A Tribute to Che Guevara By JR, April 2025 There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man – Che Guevara Preface
Che Guevara with a Pensive Revolutionary Look An inventory of my intellectual influences would entail a huge list beginning with the inspiration, encouragement and moral direction of my strong willed socialist Swedish/Norwegian family background mother. In high school my best friend and I had unaffectionate alcoholic fathers who were both unhappy as hell salesmen; my friend’s mother was also an alcoholic. Although we were pretty much straight “A” students we considered school a stifling bore that didn’t really answer many of the serious questions we had about politics (we admired the social democrat Tommy Douglas after hearing an inspiring speech by him) history, business, capitalism and the Christian religion that our intuitions deemed absurd and childish. In about grade 11 when we discovered Bertrand Russell in the school library we were provided with the cogent arguments that demolished religion and a whole lot else, including the immorality and exploitive nature of capitalism. How the stifling medieval preachers and clerics in our home town had not burned Russell’s book remains a mystery. I currently have about 100 books by the great mathematician/philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). All of his incredible writing and especially his three volume autobiography are must reads. Arguably the greatest intellectual still alive is Noam Chomsky (b 1928 - ) who when a linguistics professor at MIT had a huge photo of his hero Russell in his MIT office. The Catholic Church in the small town of Prince George, British Columbia (what dumb stifling monarchical names for both the province and town in which we lived) was the totally corrupt and the biggest holder of real estate in the town back then - late 1950s and early 1960s. There was no way either my friend or I would be businessmen. At UBC I studied mathematics and my best friend followed his passion of electronics and studied electrical engineering. Over the years and a lot of personal inquiries primarily by reading the books of sceptics, radicals and contrarians such as Russell, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Victor Serge, Ho Chi Minh, Leon Trotsky and being introduced to anarchism by a professor who taught a graduate course in Probability Theory and Bayesian Analysis I took, my intellectual vistas opened up and I began to question everything, in particular the systemic religious indoctrination and toxic propaganda of whitewashed history and outright fabrications I was taught, especially in high school. Science and mathematics which I loved were the only subjects one could count on for the logical consistency and truth. History began to get exciting when my own inquiries and intensive reading conflicted with most of what I had been taught. Intuitively I hated national anthems, humiliating patriotism and the mind numbing militaristic rituals at the boring now disgraced boy scouts and every sporting event but I eventually discovered good reasons for my rejections, especially the causes of every rich man’s war in history. My intellectual heroes would involve a much longer list that would include Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, Eugene Debs and Mohandas Gandhi in addition to several anarchists such as David Graeber, Emma Goldman, Mikhail Bakunin and of course Chomsky. Both Gandhi and Che Guevara were revolutionaries who were killed because of their political beliefs. But political freedom has always been a charade and big lie; if indoctrination and propaganda don’t cure you of anti-authoritarian and socialistic beliefs, the heavy hand of the police and/or military will do the job by beatings, imprisonment or death. Gandhi was a pacifist but for Che on the other hand, taking up arms was necessary and constituted a deeply obligatory moral act against an unjust undemocratic political order. Che Guevara as many ought to know, based on the literally hundreds of books written on him, was a courageous handsome charismatic Argentine physician who dealt with a lifelong asthma that would bring on not only severe coughing , but even bouts of unconsciousness. I have dozens of books on both Che and Fidel Castro, both of who are leftist revolutionary intellectuals and icons of the twentieth century who attempted to eradicate capitalism and all other exploitive immoral socio-economic ideologies. Both Fidel and Che were radicalized early; in the case of a 12 year old Fidel, it was the disgust at his own father’s unfair treatment of the farm workers on their small plantation. Incidents in Che’s young life that radicalized him were many, including the motorcycle trip across poverty stricken South America with his friend and fellow medical student recorded in the book and documentary called The Motorcycle Diaries. Although Che never lived to hear the songs below as he was eventually murdered tying to liberate Bolivia from US imperialist pillage and mass murder, thanks to the USA and its infamous butcher machine the CIA. As many readers ought to know, the CIA killed and attempted to kill many other left wing enemies of capitalism including multiple attempts on Fidel Castro who outlived the several criminal US presidents since JFK who tried. Che would have embraced the many uplifting popular songs of the 1960s and 70s such as the Hollies He Ain’t Heavy; He’s my Brother, Bill Wither’s Lean on Me and John Lennon’s Imagine. Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians - Che Guevara Above all, try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary – Che Guevara Read Che’s inspiring speech to the United Nations in New York on December 1, 1964. https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1964/12/11.htm Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/index.htm
A Modified and slightly edited email comments on Che and Fidel to my Conservative Cousin and Lifelong Friend and deceased dear Cousin Bob (despite the fact we ultimately disagreed on pretty much everything political) By JR
In a Lighter Moment – Che became hooked on Cuban Cigars Your orthodox conservative assertions on Che Guevara and Fidel Castro are all outpourings from the all-too-typical US propaganda system, the most effective in the world. In short, they are patently false. You are merely parroting assumed truisms from public toilet walls, beauty shop gossip and Fox News. Those lies have been circulating for five decades and there's not a shred of historical evidence to corroborate any of it. Just provide one shred of evidence for your claims that is not hearsay. You've made those claims before and as of yet have not provided any sources to back them up. The US government had been able to bamboozle the gullible US public about the reasons for every imperialistic war they have started, including Vietnam and the two invasions of Iraq. After millions of innocent people were slaughtered, they found out the real truth - far too late. Pre-revolutionary Cuba was a long time colony of Spain, and then the United States who stole it and many other colonies such as the Philippines from them in 1899. Both countries exploited their people, basically enslaving them, stealing their land and plundering the country of its natural resources. Havana was basically under the rule of the mafia. Those conditions of oppression and exploitation could not continue. But Cuba is just a template for the colonialism and imperialism that continues unabated today. Almost all of Latin America was under the domination of US capitalism at one time or another. Greed and lust for power are terrible things Bob, arguably the most unsavoury, venal and immoral of human propensities and attributes. Castro and Guevara faced daunting obstacles following the defeat of the US puppet dictator Batista, especially when the United States enforced the embargos that continue today. No country in the world could survive under such conditions, Canada included. Castro was not really a communist or Marxist ideologue but he was forced into the lap of the Soviet Union due to the actions of the US. His family actually had large land holdings in Cuba which he personally distributed to the peasants. Why in the hell can't Americans leave other people alone to be the authors of their own destiny? Castro was forced into taking measures he would not otherwise have taken, had the US left him alone. The embargos were devastating because many other capitalist countries followed the lead, given that the US was the dominant power after WW II. It difficult to argue with the contention of some that the Christian capitalist white man is the most rapacious greed-ridden destructive species on the planet in history, hands down. The people who made buckets of money in Cuba prior to 1959 did it on the backs of the Cuban people and a corrupt complicit political tyranny. How did your friend Bebe Ribozo make all his money in Cuba? All through hard work, personal effort and self-reliance of course since pre-revolutionary Cuba was a classic meritocracy right? The notion of a meritocracy and an even playing field with equal opportunity is one of the biggest myths and lies of the capitalist system. The problem is not so much with capitalism, communism, socialism or any other enlightened ideology since all have their merit and potential for evil. It's people who use these political and economic philosophies for their own ends (power and wealth for themselves at the expense of everything else) that destroys and sense of community, democracy and the common good, everything, including justice and fairness. Both capitalism and communism in their pure forms are vile, the end result being the same. Totalitarianism is still the global norm, despite all the lofty pronouncements of moral and political philosophers in the past 400 years.
Victory March Down Streets of Havana (1960) But Cuba has been forced to survive in the face of repeated aggression by the world’s most powerful nation. For more than half a century the United States has actively sought to bring down the Cuban government and replace Cuba’s socialist system with capitalism. To this end, it launched a failed attempt to invade Cuba, has made countless attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and has supported and funded Miami-based Cuban exile groups that have exploded numerous bombs in Havana and who blew up a Cuban airliner in mid-flight, killing all 78 people on board. In addition to all of these efforts to topple both the Cuban government and its socialist system, Washington has enforced the oppressive economic blockade of the tiny island for the past 60 years. Fidel Castro and Che led a revolution against the vile US puppet Batista’s illegitimate power structure and in 1959 overthrew the Batista dictator, who fled Cuba with a personal fortune estimated at over $300 million and lived out the remainder of his days in luxury in Spain and Portugal until his natural death in 1973. The purpose of the Fidel/Che revolution was to free Cuba from domination, and instead operate Cuba as a free and independent nation for the benefit of the Cuban people, most of whom were poor and illiterate. For the first time since 1500, Cuba was now its own free nation. Castro restored assets to the Cuban people that had been owned by the American corporations. Land, sugar mills, telephone and power utilities including many other properties were expropriated and taken over by the Cuban government, many of which were allotted to the people. The American corporations had suddenly lost about two thirds of their private investments in Cuba, so they were outraged. The Cuban revolution resulted in America losing its stolen property in Cuba, just like the American Revolution in 1776 had resulted in Britain losing its stolen property from Indigenous people in America. The playbook for the Batista dictatorship in Cuba served as something of a successful business model that could be replicated in country after country in Latin America and elsewhere around the world including Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. The template is basically America imposes a dictator and supplies generous foreign aid and is followed by the installed usually fascist compliant dictator brutally represses the population with murder of anyone of the political left, disappearances, imprisonment, rape and torture to create an environment of capitalist “stability” conducive to American corporate exploitation free from labour unrest and corporate regulation. The dictator of course is rewarded by a personal fortune in return. And all of this is backed by the might of the American military in the background if needed. In the process, of course, the civilian populations are oppressed, dehumanized, and subjected to horrendous suffering. These events didn’t just happen by accident or happen just a few isolated times Of course not; this crash and burn shock doctrine business model replicated over and over again in country after country, including their own which like most countries in the West where political freedom is a farce and democracy a sham driven by money. I'm presently reading a history of the Mexican revolution by Stuart Easterling and it is remarkable how similar many revolutions have been and how they were invariably co-opted by the same wealthy oligarchs they were trying to eliminate. The Russian Revolution was somewhat of an anomaly for several reasons, not the least of which was that Russia was a centuries old barbaric feudal monarchy (300 years of the Romanoff tyranny and before that Ivan the Terrible) with little or no industrialization and a mass of feudal peasants who were enslaved in peonage under abysmal conditions under the control of both the church and the wealthy land barons. Rosa Luxemburg's warning to Lenin that revolution can move seamlessly from the dictatorship of the working class to the dictatorship of a party, to be followed by the dictatorship of a committee of that party and eventually by the rule of a single man who will soon enough dispense with that committee was prophetic. The same thing has happened with capitalism which by its very nature is undemocratic and authoritarian. We've never had real democracy, not even close and what we have now is a plutocracy that seems to be heading for some sort of fascistic technocracy resembling neo-feudalism. What is happening to the United States is disturbing and depressing to say the least. It's an empire in free fall, heading for some dystopian abyss. Political discourse there, as in Canada, is farcical. Read, for example, an excerpt from an interview with one of your former presidents, the repentant John F Kennedy. JFK clearly had many regrets about the US government's callous and barbarous treatment of Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara following the revolution in 1959. This interview took place about a month before his assassination. Your judgment of Castro is dead wrong Bob; try reading some history and a few biographies that come from someone other than the likes of the conservative village idiot Sean Hannity. I can send you the e-book of Jon Lee Anderson's 1000 page biography of Che Guevara if you like but also read Volker Skierka's biography of Castro, the most balanced account of many. In fact at Nelson Mandela's funeral, Obama apparently shook Raúl Castro's hand (Fidel was obviously too ill to attend the funeral) - now all he needs to do is lift the brutal embargos that have been in effect since 1959. Cuba has free education and free health care for all. Cuba has greater longevity and much higher levels of literacy, mathematics understanding birth survival than the US. Not bad for a poor country brutalized continually by the USA. How does the greatest and richest country in the world (only according to Americans mind you) explain that? It depends on how you conceptualize the vague malleable word “great”. Before he was assassinated (which may well have been an inside job by the FBI) I think JFK had a many regrets about the stupid, cruel, intolerant and disastrous US policies against Cuba which before the Revolution was a US client state they won from Spain in 1899 and which had a brutal puppet dictator who held the populace in serfdom, illiteracy and ignorance. Consider this mea culpa: "I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear." - U.S. President John F. Kennedy, interview with Jean Daniel, 24 October 1963 Following the revolutionary takeover in Cuba in 1959 there were expedited trials and executions of vile murderous criminal thugs of the US puppet Batista regime, at least for those who didn't escape. But the US made sure they got off their man Batista off the island with hundreds of billions in cash before Castro got to him. I certainly don't agree with many of the tactics Che resorted to during the periods of intense stress and difficult expediencies immediately following the victory of the revolution. But war is hell and certainly if it would have been possible for revolutions to occur, it's certainly preferable. Like the monarchs and aristocrats in the French Revolution, they were guilty merely by the historical record and who they were. Psychopathic tyrannical regimes simply do not relinquish their power and entitlements willingly or out of remorse, moral shame or guilt - they never have. Entrenched power rarely concedes anything - and never without a fight. Autocratic political power has in almost every case solicited the support of organized religion to maintain their control over the masses. That was the case in the French and Bolshevik Revolutions and perhaps even the American Revolution and all the other revolutions from below as against conservative tyrannies from monarchies, theocracies and other forms of elitist dictatorship. Now it's the dictatorship of corporations we're dealing with. Nothing much changes, does it? The Conservative Corporate Welfare State now rules us! Welcome to neo- fascism, techno-feudalism, rule by an oligarchic elite of billionaires and debt peonage for the masses of wage slaves. The right wing always alludes to the tyrannies caused by communist regimes (that were not really communist regimes at all) like Stalin's Russia. Capitalism produced more than 100 million skeletons prematurely in democratic capitalist India between the years 1947 and 1979 according to Nobel economist Amartya Sen's figures. And that's just one capitalist or capitalist controlled country. Every eight years, democratic capitalist India continues producing as many skeletons prematurely as what China did in all its years of shame under Mao Tse Tung. It has been estimated that the British Empire robbed India of over $40 trillion, much of which went into the coffers of the hideous British monarchy. While on the subject of Mao, the US and British backed Chiang Kai-shek managed to murder 10 million before Maoists chased him and his gangsters to Formosa and Burma. Maoists had to doff their red bandanas in the presence of Kai-shek's mercenaries lest they be executed on the spot. They'd have murdered millions more given the opportunity. Instead they fled with the wealth of the Bank of China and imperial jewels. Those who collapsed under the weight of the booty were forced to carry were typically shot to death or beheaded then and there. Chiang Kai-shek went on to create WACL and helped to finance other right wing mercenaries around the world, like the Contras in Nicaragua. Every year anywhere from 4 to 13 million children alone die agonizing deaths around the capitalist controlled third world. This has been happening every year since at least the potato famine and "Black 1847" in Ireland when millions starved to death while pork and corn were exported from 13 Irish Sea ports to "the market". The English used the experience of their ruthless pillage and exploitation of Ireland as a template for their emerging colonial empire. Every year the absurd market diktats of capitalism are directly responsible for a holocaust and every year millions of human beings are sacrificed on the altar of false free market gods. It's sickening but after all most forms of capitalism have been colossal failures and the perverted form we have today has been an unmitigated calamity. Capitalism ought to have been dead in the water following the 1929 global market t crash and 30 year long depression. It's a monstrous ideology and is heading for collapse – after all, given the laws of entropy nothing lasts forever. Once levels of corruption that we now witness have set in, the end will be near. Of that I have little doubt although given my age I may not be around to witness the species extinction, environmental devastation and ecosystem collapse, all of which are exacerbated by homo sap overpopulation by at least a factor of three. By the way, isn't it ironic how the right wing business class vilifies and demonizes Che Guevara while at the same time exploiting his martyrdom status among the masses by making billions in profits by marketing his name, picture, famous quotes and logos. But who with any honesty has ever suggested that capitalism has any moral standards or integrity? No one! If everyone held to the minimalist moral adage of the Golden Rule, capitalism would not last a day. But if a profit can be made out of something, anything goes as it does with the idiotic scam of lotteries And what’s next as traditional sources of profit are in a steady decline?. Some conservatives and liberals try to stretch our minds to credulity by inventing courses at universities called "Business Ethics". Is there a more egregious oxymoron than that? Yes, the US government made sure they got their colonial yes man Batista and his riches stolen from the people of Cuba off the island before the Fidel/Che revolutionaries reached Havana. Before the US stole indigenous land and the top half of Mexico in the 1840s, they pilfered Cuba after the Spanish American War (a typical war of imperialism started by the US by lies or fabricating an incident as they did in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere) the Cubans simply had one oppressor (Spain) replaced by another. But in the Philippines the locals revolted (with nothing more than machetes against US machine guns) after they realized the Americans had no intention of granting them independence and freedom. The US military slaughtered some 300,000 Philippine insurgents who rebelled. Philippine people actually deluded themselves into believing that the US would liberate them from hundreds of years of Spanish brutality, but no, of course not. One colonialist master replaced by another. The Philippines had resources the US coveted. In fact our Uncle Jim worked for Placer Dome there for years and the Philippines is are still trying to get compensation for the massive environmental degradation by Placer (which was eventually gobbled up by Barrick Gold I believe) during the neo-colonial post World War II period. It's the same ugly story throughout Latin America, the Middle East and South East Asia. The rivers and ecosystem of Ecuador for example, have been turned into a garbage dump by Texaco (now Chevron) and there is a $35 billion class action suit filed by the indigenous people, thousands of whom were murdered by corporate mercenaries. Their pools of oil sludge pollute the rivers and jungles of Ecuador, once one of the most pristine and beautiful place on earth. Now it's happening in Northern Alberta near Jasper National Park, called the Tar Sands. What an arm pit and garbage dump this area has become. Indigenous Cree are being cheated out of their land and livelihoods and treaties violated. The lakes are polluted and the fish they catch are inedible, peppered with cancerous lesions. It’s a national disgrace. As has been generally the policy in Latin America with the USA, the CIA jackals got rid of the progressive left wing leader in Ecuador and replaced him with a puppet fascist tyrant in order to pillage their resources, enriching the elites of Ecuador and US big oil, while impoverishing everyone else. Now there is a new government and the leader has refused to pay the massive debt incurred by corrupt tyrants and US economic hit men. That's what your coveted globalized capitalism has become. On Che In addition to all the books written personally by Che, I've read three well-researched scholarly biographies on his life, the most important and detailed of which is John Lee Andersons 1000 page Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. Jorge Castenada's penetrating biography of Che called Companero is also a very balanced account. I've included Jon Lee Anderson’s biography in the email attachments. Do yourself a favour Bob and read it. There's nothing in that 1000 pages that even remotely resembles what you have said about Che. I also highly recommend Volker Skierka's excellent biography on Fidel Castro. You ought to also watch the documentary of Che on the History Channel (a very conservative program), two other documentaries on Che as well as the two movies that have been made on his life in the past few years: (1) Steven Soderberg's Che (in 2 parts) and (2) The Motorcycle Diaries. None of your claims about Che Guevara appear in any of them. None, zilch, zero, nada. By the way I have a Che Tee-shirt and several posters on the walls of my basement library. I guess that makes me an uninformed idiot. Would you rather me have a Ronald Reagan, Maggie (“There is no alternative”) Thatcher, Lyin’ Brian “On the Take” Mulroney and George W Bush poster, two village idiots and psychopaths who ought to be charged with crimes against humanity? Or perhaps photos of war criminals Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. I prefer to not have creepy moronic reptilian murderers on my home walls, especially mass slaughter in the name of greed and corporate power. Both Castro and Guevara were educated professional men. Castro held a law degree and I've read much of what Dr. Che Guevara (yes, he was a physician) has written and he's a highly intelligent thoughtful man. By the way, he suffered from severe asthma throughout his life and he was certainly no paragon of moral perfection (how can you be, fighting a revolution?); he was a tough disciplinarian with the revolutionary army and equally hard on himself. He was suspicious of many in his midst and rightly so because there were frequent infiltrations of US agents into the revolutionary army (as there was in the CPUSA during the two major Red Scare and aftermaths). Living as guerrillas in the Sierra Maestro Mountains, he did have to resort to summary executions of detected traitors and infiltrators. Remember these men and women were hiding out in the Sierra Maestro mountains barely surviving without the luxury of due process and courts of law. They somehow survived years living in the mountains, recruiting many peasants who were illiterate and starving thanks to the US colonial tyranny. They started out with just a small force of a couple of dozen men and women. Yes, some women fought beside men as revolutionaries. It's a remarkable story how they were able to pull it off. Read the Che Guevara speeches to the UN from the early sixties which can be read online. Brilliant stuff! What motivated him to become a revolutionary was witnessing the abysmal lives, unsafe working conditions and brutal exploitation (basically slaves) of miners in Peru and Chile by US mining companies; I think one was owned by Anaconda. I reiterate: read the book and then watch the documentary called The Motorcycle Diaries. He was shocked, coming from a middle class background in Argentina and was repulsed by the gap between the glitzy transplanted European culture in which he lived and the starving misery on typically American owned mines and their exploited workers, especially indigenous peoples. He could see that this was caused almost entirely by America's habit of smashing locals and assassinating leftist leaders (often existing or burgeoning socialist governments) and replacing them with fascist-style dictators prepared to grovel and slobber over US corporations so they could plunder the resources of the target country. This is all chronicled in the aforementioned movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, a truly amazing and inspirational movie by the way. It's also recorded and corroborated by John Perkins three books and writers like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Parenti and many other intellectuals. If I had found anything in my reading and research on Che that corroborated what you have said about him, I would surely not have anything to admire, beyond his intellect and drive for social justice. Che was eventually murdered by CIA backed jackals in the jungles of Bolivia where he was trying to liberate the natives from longstanding US imperialism and exploitation, the same sort of countless stories detailed in John Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Perkins confirms from first-hand experience what people like Noam Chomsky have been saying for decades about US imperialism. So, if you are looking for mass murderers, butchers and psychopathic killers, look no further than very recent history: Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the beltway mafia - or any other US president for the past 240 years would suffice. And you can now add the limousine liberal Obama (President Drone) to that long list of murderous US presidents. The mean-spirited and hateful economic embargoes against Cuba continue, but if US had just left Cuba alone, it's anyone's guess how things may have played out. There were dozens of assassination attempts on Castro by US hired jackals, goons and mercenaries who tried to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Even Canada would be a banana republic if it had been embargoed by the US alone, but there are many other countries that participated in the Cuban economic sanctions. After all the US now rules the world and what they say goes – but that may not last much longer since like all empires that preceded it, the United States is an evil empire in a steep moral decent and heading into the abyss. Even today, as an extremely poor country, Cuba provides free education and health care, something the US refuses to provide for its own people. There are more important things after all - spending trillions on the military, imperialistic wars and tax concessions to those who already have massive wealth - the big corporations and the Über-Rich. There are countless myths about the Cuban revolution. First, neither Che nor Castro was in their younger days, doctrinaire Marxists, although Che became more attracted to it as time passed. Castro was a socialist but there's a lot to learn and much disagreement about Che and what his real political sentiments regarding the variations of socialism that exist. Contrary to the conceptions of many in the U.S. today, the revolution in Cuba was made independent of, and at times in opposition to, the Cuban Communist Party. Sadly, the cruel economic US economic sanctions imposed on Cuba threw the country into the lap of the Soviet Union for support, the opposite of what was desired. I think JFK knew this after the many disastrous decisions he made. It was only several years after the revolution succeeded in taking state power that an uneasy working relationship was established leading to a merger of the revolutionary forces and the Party - a merger that provided no end of problems for Che, and for the Cuban revolution itself. For Che, Marx’s maxim: "From each according to their ability to each according to their needs," was not simply a long-range slogan but an urgent practical necessity to be implemented at once. The harrowing constraints of developing a small country into a social democracy, particularly in the context of continued attacks by U.S. imperialism including a naval blockade, an invasion, numerous assassination attempts, a threatened nuclear war during the infamous Cuban missile crisis and the ongoing economic and ideological harassment, on the other hand, militated against Che’s vision and boxed-in the revolutionary society into choosing from equally unpalatable alternatives. It was amid such contradictory pressures that Che tried to set a different moral and ideological standard for Cuba and for humanity in general. We need a “New Man” as he called it. As Minister of Finance, he managed to distribute the millions of dollars obtained from the USSR to artists, and to desperately poor farmers who in the U.S. would have been considered at least as American capitalists would say, "poor risks." Free education and universal health care were primary policies that were implemented almost immediately in Cuba. Ironically, despite being a very poor country, Cuba today has far better rates of literacy, higher birth rates and longevity than the United States. Perhaps the United States and much of the rest of the world has a few things to learn from Cuba. In 1959, the guerrillas, headed by Fidel Castro, swept into Havana having defeated the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Although the U.S. government armed and funded Batista, the CIA had its agents in Fidel’s guerrilla army as well. One lieutenant in the guerrilla army, Frank Fiorini, was actually one of several operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency there. Fiorini would surface a few years later as a planner of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, two years after that as one of three "hobos" arrested in Dallas a few moments after President Kennedy was assassinated and immediately released (one of the other "hobos" was none other than CIA-operative E. Howard Hunt), and again as one of the culprits involved with the dozens of CIA assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. Fiorini became quite famous again in 1973 as one of the burglars at the Democratic Party Headquarters at a hotel known as the Watergate, under the name Frank Sturgis. Indeed, it was precisely when the Watergate hearings were on the verge of raising serious questions about the Bay of Pigs and U.S. covert operations in Cuba that, suddenly, the existence of secret White House tapes was "unexpectedly" revealed. From that moment on, all we heard was what did “Tricky Dick” Nixon know and when did he know it, and the potentially explosive investigation on the verge of revealing the secret history of illegal CIA interventions in Cuba, the murder of John F. Kennedy and attempted assassinations of Fidel were effectively sidetracked. And yet it was under the constant threat of warfare by the U.S. - overt as well as the ongoing covert operations - that the Cuban revolution, especially under the instigation of Che, took some of its boldest steps in introducing "socialism of a new type." Contrast that with the erstwhile "communist" states, as they sacrificed whatever visionary socialist features they had in order to lure capitalist investment, so that they could compete on the world market. As head of the Cuban national bank, Che going against the tide, as always - made Cuba’s new banknotes famous by signing them simply "Che." The first question Che asked of his subordinates when he took over the bank was "Where has Cuba deposited its gold reserves and dollars?" When he was told, "In Fort Knox," he immediately began converting Cuba’s gold reserves into non-U.S. currencies which were exported to Canadian or Swiss banks. Che’s concern was not so much with developing "solvent" banking institutions in Cuba, but with two things: fighting U.S. imperialism, in this instance by removing the revolution’s gold from the clutches of the United States government which could all too easily invent an excuse to confiscate it, as it later did with other Cuban holdings. Che was prescient in understanding that this would happen and, of equal importance, finding ways to foster and fund the creation of a new socialist citizen without relying upon capitalist mechanisms of greed and acquisitiveness, which he understood would end up undermining the best of efforts. Che best put forth his outlook, which came to be that of the new left internationally as well, in a speech, On Revolutionary Medicine: "Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger, and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming a famous scientist or making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people." "How does one actually carry out a work of social welfare? How does one unite individual endeavour with the needs of society?" "For this task of organization, as for all revolutionary tasks, fundamentally it is the individual who is needed. The revolution does not, as some claim, standardize the collective will and the collective initiative. On the contrary, it liberates one’s individual talent. What the revolution does is orient that talent. And our task now is to orient the creative abilities of all medical professionals toward the tasks of social medicine." "The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. … Far more important than a good remuneration is the pride of serving one’s neighbour. Much more definitive and much more lasting than all the gold that one can accumulate is the gratitude of a people. "We must begin to erase our old draconian concepts. We should not go to the people and say, `Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you our science, to show you your errors, your lack of culture, your ignorance of elementary things.’ We should go instead with an inquiring mind and a humble spirit to learn at that great source of wisdom that is the people." "Later we will realize many times how mistaken we were in concepts that were so familiar they became part of us and were an automatic part of our thinking. Often we need to change our concepts, not only the general concepts, the social or philosophical ones, but also sometimes our medical concepts." "We shall see that diseases need not always be treated as they are in big-city hospitals. We shall see that the doctor has to be a farmer also and plant new foods and sow, by example, the desire to consume new foods, to diversify the nutritional structure which is so limited, so poor." "If we plan to redistribute the wealth of those who have too much in order to give it to those who have nothing; if we intend to make creative work a daily, dynamic source of all our happiness, then we have goals towards which to work." Che’s love for the people took him first to the Congo and then to Bolivia, where he organized a band of guerrillas to serve, he hoped, as a catalyst in inspiring revolution there. Che once again had to battle Official Marxism: He struggled with the head of the Bolivian Communist Party for leadership of the guerrillas. The question: "Who should set policy for the guerrillas, Che and the guerrillas themselves or the head of the Bolivian Communist Party?" The guerrillas voted for Che perhaps the only election Che was ever involved in. NOT anybody was allowed to vote, not those who happened to live in the area, for example, but only people who were actively engaged in the struggle. Once Che won that election against the Communist Party attaché - an election that was not only about the individuals but a plebiscite on completely different revolutionary strategies - the Communist Party abandoned the guerrilla movement. Would we view Che’s decision today as the correct one if the Bolivian Communist Party had not been so heavy-handed, irresponsible and doctrinaire? (On the other hand, can there be a vanguard party that does not act in such a manner?) The question still haunts us: To whom is the guerrilla responsible? Who sets the framework? Such questions are not any easier to resolve. In Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam, for example, contrary to Che’s guerrilla army, the National Liberation Front’s military took their policy from the party’s political bureau, not the other way around. This was not the case with Che in Bolivia. The relationship of organization to mass-movement is a problem that has always plagued radical movements when they get to a certain stage. To whom is the affinity group, for example, responsible? Or, for that matter, the artist? The radio network? On the one hand, decentralization via anarchist philosophy is attractive, allowing for the greatest small-group autonomy, individual freedom and creativity. It may be one’s individual radio show or perhaps one’s need for a paying job to support the family. On the other hand, the larger movement must not only be able to coordinate the activities of many local groups but frame the actions of smaller groups who purport to be part of the same movement within a larger collective strategy, thus in some sense limiting their autonomy. In Bolivia, failure by the guerrillas to be part of a many-pronged social movement led to their demise. Indeed, Che in his last days was rueful and frustrated at the lack of working class uprising in the mines, which he had hoped to incite. (The Communist Party was powerful among mine workers in Bolivia.) An uprising would have enabled the guerrillas to have had much greater impact. Eventually, the miners did overcome the CP reticence and did go on strike, but it was too little, too late. The guerrillas were depleted, Che wished for just 100 more guerrilla troops; that rather small number (he believed) would have made the difference. These are serious and complicated questions that apply to our social movements today. Resolving such matters is not helped by demagoguery or grand-standing. It COULD BE helped by a transformation at the station itself, into one that consciously tries to develop a revolutionary culture and sees itself as such, and not simply a "job". It’s tricky stuff; not easily reconciled. The world or at least OUR world depends upon whether we are able to resolve (or at least live with) the contradictions implied therein. In Bolivia during the summer of 1967, the guerrillas were picked off one by one. Without additional revolutionary forces Che and the others were forced to deal with the reality that, at least in Bolivia at that moment, their strategy for catalyzing a mass-based revolutionary uprising has failed. With the U.S. government under the presidency of the Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, sending military "advisers" and arms to the Bolivian junta, it became only a matter of time, a few months, before the struggle was defeated and the guerrillas wiped out. A true picture of Che is not that of the flamboyant posters, nor the hagiography of both Hollywood and Stalinism, but of a man dedicated to the poor internationally, trying with a small band of guerrillas to spark a revolutionary uprising of peasants and workers to create a better life for themselves, and meeting frustration after frustration, with only some small successes apart from the tremendous victory of the Cuban revolution itself. In America, they portray heroes as all-knowing exceptions to the rule, thereby reinforcing dependence upon the myth of the heroic individual and maintaining the impotence of the multitude. In our culture, we are taught that change takes place not through mass-action but through a single moralistic or righteous figure (think of how Dr. Martin Luther King or Malcolm X is portrayed today) who is able to make the system respond positively to the importance of his or her argument. We should hold no such illusions. The Bolivian peasants who are still alive and living in the areas in which Che and his guerrilla band were operating were clearly touched by the brush of history. In the film "Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary," the filmmakers found that many of them were still alive, and interviewed them. They movingly recounted that one world-historic experience of their lives, their encounter with Che. Some remembered his kindness towards them. One peasant woman was an apolitical young teenager in 1967 and had risked her life to bring Che food and look after him in his last hours. Now around 50 years old, she remembers Che’s kindness towards her, and how this profoundly affected her life. Although no one in the film says it in so many words, clearly Che was something of a Christ figure to them, even to those who betrayed him or fired on him. It’s quite a comment on our present condition that human touches that were once quite ordinary seem, in today’s world, exceptional. As Che put it, in one of the most famous quotes which I have on my basement wall: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." But back in the autumn of 1967, Che was thrown increasingly into doubt. He began to question his strategy of the "foco" for Bolivia, which in Cuba had worked so effectively. The guerrillas were faced with the failure of the peasants to join the revolt, contrary to the guerrillas’ expectations. This had a huge demoralizing effect on the guerrilla army, as well as upon Che’s state of mind. Che was captured, tortured and murdered in Bolivia under the direction of the CIA and it's jackals on October 9, 1967. Several decades have passed. Still Che is remembered, not as some ancient and barely remembered patriarch, but as a special person who typified the spirit, hope and optimism of the counter-culture times. He inspired so many ordinary people to commit themselves to their vision of a different world, even in the face of bureaucratic intransigence and the enormous power of US imperialism, against all odds. That such a vision seems extraordinary and out of place today, that acting out of one’s love for humanity is almost inconceivable in the US and throughout most of the so-called Western “democracies” today only makes yesterday’s commonplace behaviour seem beyond comprehension. And yet, people act in such ways all the time! We just don’t see it, or report it. It’s what makes us human in an era of zombie world robots. It’s what enabled the new Bolivian revolution to actually win state power, much to the chagrin of the US government. That, too, is part of Che’s legacy. And, hopefully, it's what inspires us to continue "risking ridicule," regardless of where it comes from, to make our radical efforts today successful. For many of us, it’s not only the end result that matters; it’s the way we live, living a meaningful life. But to explain it all would take many more pages. If you really want to find out it's there for anyone who wants the truth - in the many volumes of books that have been written on the Cuban Revolution. I have many of them in my library. Changing one's mind in the face of counter-evidence even many times throughout one's life is a sign of rationality, despite popular views on the preference to sticking to your guns mentality, regardless. Although I doubt any of this or anything you might perchance read what I have suggested, you will not change your mind. I've learned to accept that. Random Thoughts on Che’s Murder by the CIA: Che's death in Bolivia at the hands of the U.S.-trained-and-led Bolivian Rangers was a case of outright murder. He had been wounded and surrounded by a force of 180, armed with automatic rifles. He was alive. From Quebrado Del Yuro, where he had been overwhelmed, he was carried five miles on a stretcher to the town of La Higuera. There the Bolivian army junta was asked what to do with him. Assured of American support, they ordered him shot. Although Bolivia has no official death penalty, Che was executed within two hours of arrival in La Higuera. Seven bullet holes were clearly visible, including one through the heart, administered after he became a prisoner. His fingers were then cut off to identify his fingerprints, obligingly sent to the Bolivian military by the Argentinean junta. His body, strapped to a helicopter, was then flown to Valle Grande and taken to a Catholic hospital where the body was put on public exhibition. So afraid was the Bolivian military of even the dead Guevara that, though it is against all custom in Catholic Bolivia, his body was nevertheless cremated. Even that didn't end the macabre ritual. As if that would stop Che from becoming a beacon for all Latin Americans struggling for freedom from their own oligarchy and U.S. imperialism, they then scattered his ashes to the wind. [1] In vain are all these frantic efforts to erase the memory of the revolutionary martyr. Pure delusion is the thought that, with his death, the revolt against the exploitative regime has ended. Bolivia has more than doubled its military budget during the Barrientos tyranny. [2] In view of the fact that Bolivia is at war with no one--that is, no outside enemy, large or small--it is clear that the 17% of the national budget spent on "defense" is spent on arms to fight its own masses. When the time is ripe, the cold-blooded murder of Che will be avenged by the Bolivian masses that will put an end to this oligarchic regime. The Bolivian masses had once before succeeded in ridding themselves of a military junta soon after the end of the Second World War. But they also found that it is insufficient to succeed "at home" unless they also overthrew U.S. imperialism's iron grip on the country's economy. It is this which Che's fight has highlighted. To prepare themselves for the uphill struggle on two fronts it becomes necessary to also have a clear head, that is to say, a revolutionary theory, fully integrated with the self-activity of the masses. It is for this reason that we must not blind ourselves to the double tragedy of Guevara's death. Bravely he lived and bravely he died, but he did not do in Bolivia what he had done in Cuba: dedicate him to the masses. Guevara's isolation from the mass movement arose from a certain concept of guerrilla warfare as a substitute for social revolution. The impatience with the masses who do not rise at the call of the guerrilla leaders, the disdain for the city, which Castro had called "a cemetery for revolutionaries and resources," the scorn for theory--all adding up to isolating Guevara from the Bolivian masses at the moment he decided the time was ripe. His tragic death makes it imperative that these facts become widespread because there is no other way to uproot oppression once and for all. Che himself admitted, in tracing the development of the Cuban revolution, that "The men who arrived in Havana after two years of arduous struggle in the mountains and plains...are not the same men, ideologically, that landed on the beaches of Las Coloradas....Their distrust of the campesino has been converted into affection and respect for his virtues; their total ignorance of life in the country has been converted into a knowledge of the need of our guajiros: their flirtations with statistics and with theory have been fixed by the cement which is practice." However, the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare as if that were the only road to revolution led Guevara to disdain other forms of class struggles--from a minor strike to a general strike, from political struggles to theoretical development, including the separation of true Marxism from Communist perversions. Because Guevara could not separate the one from the other, he became impatient and looked for shortcuts to revolution. Yet he himself did, at certain critical periods, understand that only when the working class and the peasants are united, "the first step toward definite liberation is taken." This is what the guerrilla fighter forgets when he becomes impatient and wishes to substitute himself for the masses. At those moments, Guevara argued against the statement of Lenin: "Without a revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement."[3] Instead he held that "even if theory is not known, the revolution can succeed if historic reality is interpreted correctly and if the forces involved in it are utilized correctly." [4] But it is not a question of "utilizing" the forces. A revolutionary who appreciated the elemental surge of the masses learns from them because he sees them as reason, not only as mass force and energy. The fatal flaw in the concept of guerrilla war, whether that is the concept of Guevara or Mao or Giap [5], is that it is taken to be the equivalent of social revolution. It is impossible, however, to create revolutions from above. They arise from the spontaneous, creative self-activity of the masses. The theoretician who learns this prepares himself for the revolution. To work out a new relationship of guerrilla fighting to social revolution, of theory to practice, of the class struggles of the factory workers and those of agricultural laborers remains the task. In this way alone can the death of Che Guevara become a movement toward so total a revolution that it will abolish decadent capitalism and create a totally new, humanist foundation for life and labor and thought--a new society. Notes: 1. Contrary to this report at the time, it was later learned that Che's body was buried in a secret grave. 2. Gen. Rene Ortuno Barrientos seized control of Bolivia in a military coup in 1964, and ruled the country through an oppressive dictatorship until his death in 1969. 3. This phrase is from Lenin's WHAT IS TO BE DONE (1903) 4. This statement is from Che's NOTES FOR THE STUDY OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION (1961). 5. Vo Nguyen Giap (b. 1912), Vietnamese military and political leader who led the guerrilla war against the French and later the U.S.
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