Portrait of Che Guevara - "
Guerrillero Heroico" - Alberto Korda (1960)
Today I remember the birth of Argentine revolutionary socialist,Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna,
familiarly known by the Argentinian slang word “Che, who was born in Rosario República Argentina on 14th June 1928 to politically aware upper-middle-class parents. Although some sources suggest he was actually born on May 14, 1928.
Guevara's father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, came from a family that had been in Argentina for 12 generations and was a prestigious one. His ancestor, Patrick Lynch, was born in Ireland in 1715, later traveled to Argentina via Spain, and by the end of the 18th century, he had become the viceroy of the La Plata-Parana River region.
His mother, Celia de la Serna y Llosa, also came from a family that had been in Argentina for 7 generations, likewise an aristocratic family; her ancestor, José de la Serna, was the last Spanish viceroy of Peru. Guevara's parents married in 1927.
His father said “in my son’s veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels”. Ernesto was diagnosed asthmatic at the age of two. Whereas his condition was chronic in Buenos Aires, when they moved to Alta Gracia, a dry highland province, it stabilised. His parents monitored his health, the humidity, his clothing and diet in an attempt to reduce the severity of the symptoms. Even as a child, it is said that he “showed an unusually strong self discipline by adhering to his asthma diets”.
Often his parents made him stay at home, for fear of an attack. He became a precocious reader, as this was one of the only things he could do when asthma struck. The family home contained more than 3,000 books and Guevara read very widely in world literature, politics and poetry. He would make handwritten notebooks of notes and quotations from his favourite authors. Later, he was a prolific writer and diarist himself.
An intellectual and an idealist, able to speak coherently about Aristotle, Kant, Marx, Gide or Faulkner, he also loved poetry, and was equally at home with Keats as with Sara De Ibáñez, his favorite writer. It is said that he knew Kipling's "If" by heart.
At school, he displayed a fiercely competitive personality, perhaps as compensation for his sickliness. Despite his illness, Guevara was an excellent sportsman – rugby, athletics, cycling, shooting were all activities into which he poured all of his energies.
Guevara acquired his famous nickname "Che." as "Che" is a Spanish interjection widely used in Argentina and some regions of South America, commonly employed to greet people or express surprise, similar to expressions like "hey" or "wow" in Chinese.
In 1948, he began to study medicine at Buenos Aires University. In his vacations, he made his famous trips by motorcycle through Argentina, Chile and Peru(as portrayed in his journals and dramatized in the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries). On these journeys, he encountered the poor and dispossessed – lepers, workers, peasants – with whom he identified and whose cause he subsequently passionately espoused.
Graduating from medical school in 1953, he journeyed through Bolivia and Peru to Guatemala, where he witnessed the social revolution under President Jacobo Arbenz. After Arbenz’s overthrow in a U.S.-orchestrated coup in 1954, which steeled Guevara’s anti-imperialism. His work as a doctor further exposed him to the poor, whose sufferings Guevara attributed to oppressive South American governments backed by US capitalist interests.
Guevara journeyed to Mexico and established contact with two brothers who shared his ideas; Fidel and Raul Castro. alongside other Cuban exiles.. Convinced that Castro was the visionary revolutionary he had long sought, he joined Castro’s 26 July Movement and soon became one of its leaders.
The group embarked for Cuba in December 1956, aboard a badly overloaded yacht called "Granma".Only 12, including Fidel his brother and Guevara, escaped a government ambush when they landed in eastern Cuba.
Taking refuge in the rugged Sierra Maestra mountains, they built a guerrilla force of several thousand fighters who, along with urban rebel groups, defeated Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista,in just over two years.
Commandante Guevara was second only to Castro in the revolutionary movement, and played a major role in the Cuban revolution earning a reputation as a skilled and sometimes ruthless commander. In the guerilla campaign in the mountains, the two contradictory sides of Guevara’s personality were demonstrated: his love and care for his fighters, whom he helped to educate and entertain, but also his ruthlessness, for example in shooting informers, deserters and spies.
As a military leader, he was intelligent and brave, with a tendency towards foolhardiness, according to his leader Castro. It is said that Guevara played an important role in converting Castro to communism, often quoting Marx, Engels, Mao Tse-tung and others.
By 1959, the dictator Batista had fled and the Castro regime took over. In the following months, Guevara commanded the La Cabana prison, and was responsible for exacting revolutionary justice against the war criminals and others from the old regime.
Commandate Guevara told the tribunals “Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary. We must act through conviction. We’re dealing with a bunch of criminals and assassins.”
Several hundred prisoners were shot as Guevara watched from on top of a wall, lying on his back, cigar in mouth, to encourage the firing squads.
Che Guevara proved to be less effective as an economic leader than a military one. He became president of the Cuban national bank, with his signature “Che” on the bank notes signalling his distaste for money. However, he had more success with the Cuban Literacy Campaign, which taught more than 700,000 people to read and write. In Cuba’s government, he also enacted land reform to distribute land from bourgeois land owners to Cuban peasants.
At the heart of Cuban Internationalism, Guevara intertwined revolution and medicine, based on his ideas of racial equality. In his 1960 speech to health workers and medical students, Guevara asserts the need for a mobilization of doctors as part of the fight against capitalism. Based on his speech, his travels demonstrated his understanding of the consequences that colonization has had on Black and indigenous people in the Global South.
Guevara and the Cuban government also took great lengths to push for medical missions in Africa. This stemmed from both the African diaspora in Cuba and shortcomings in revolutionizing Latin America. Although not in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Algeria Guevara assisted in providing adequate pay and supplies to Cuban doctors. Guevara’s perceptions of Latin America, though limited by his shortsighted ideals of gender, still shows how his beliefs are influenced by both race and class.
The Palestinian people and their struggle were also close to Che's heart. IMonths after the victory of the Cuban Revolution, Che landed in Gaza wearing his dark military fatigues on 18 June 1959 after travelling about 450km from Cairo. He received a hero's welcome from the Egyptian de facto governor of Gaza, General-Lieutenant Ahmad Salim, as well as from Palestinian officials and heads of municipalities and many ordinary people.
One of Che's goals for the visit was to support Arab and Palestinian national liberation and revolutionary movements against western imperialism and colonisation, recognising US imperialism's complicity with the Zionist state, and observing the Palestinian displacement and dire conditions, Guevara remarked to Cuban Commander Omar Fernández Cañizares, “Look, this is the work of the Gringos ”
With Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, at the mansion of the Governor General, Lieutenant General Ahmad Salim. Gaza, 1959.
During his short visit, he toured several Palestinian refugee camps including Al-Buraij camp, where he was welcomed with chants from the Cuban revolution.Witnessing first hand the devastation and dispossession of the Nakba, a Palestinian refugee in Rafah approached Che Guevara and asked that the Cubans tell the Americas the truth of what they witnessed there. Guevara hugged the refugee and replied Cuba would denounce their oppression “before all of humanity.”
Zulfiqar Swirjo, an official affiliated to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine stated during a previous interview that his father was there during that historic visit that aimed to share Guevara's beliefs and revolutionary ideas with Gaza's fighters They had wanted to put together a strategic plan for a popular struggle to fight the Israeli forces using guerrilla warfare tactics.
His visit transformed Palestinian resistance into part of a broader global anti-imperialist movement.
Cuba went on to welcome the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, making official contact with it in 1965. Since then the Revolutionary Government of Cuba have remained the staunchest supporters of Palestine, and despite the emense difficulties imposed by the illegal US blokade provide all round material support to the Palestinian people.
In 1962, he was one of the main architects of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he was seemingly unconcerned at the risk of “millions of atomic war victims”. Early in his rule, at the height of the Cold War, Castro allied Cuba to the Soviet Union, which protected the Caribbean island and was its principal benefactor for three decades.
The alliance brought in $4 billion worth of aid annually, including everything from oil to guns, but also provoked the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the United States discovered Soviet missiles on the island. Convinced that the United States was about to invade Cuba, Castro urged the Soviets to launch a nuclear attack.Thankfully cooler heads prevailed. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy agreed the Soviets would withdraw the missiles in return for a U.S. promise never to invade Cuba.
The United States also secretly agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, an isolated Cuba fell into a deep economic crisis that lasted for years and was known as the "special period". F
ood, transport and basics such as soap were scarce and energy shortages led to frequent and long blackouts. Castro undertook a series of tentative economic reforms to get through the crisis, including opening up to foreign tourism.The economy improved when Venezuela's socialist leader Hugo Chavez, who looked up to Castro as a hero, came to the rescue with cheap oil.
Aid from communist-run China also helped, but an economic downturn in Venezuela since Chavez's death in 2013 have raised fears it will scale back its support for Cuba.Plagued by chronic economic problems, Cuba's population of 11 million has endured years of hardship, although not the deep poverty, violent crime and government neglect of many other developing countries.
While Britain and America were supplying arms to help Africa's apartheid regimes, Cuba was busy sending its men to fight them. Under Castro, Cuba had the best literacy rate in the world because it spent five times as much on education than war - the opposite of what America does. In fact, Cuba achieves the same health care system outcomes as the United States at only 5% the cost.
Lest we forget, Cuba was the biggest single provider of healthcare workers to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, more than all richer nations. Cuba has sent more doctors throughout the world to minister to the poor than even the World Health Organization despite Cuba's small size and meager resources.
From Cubas support fighting Apartheid in South Africa, to training doctors from Latin America and its international medical brigades caring for the victims of earthquakes from Pakistan to Haiti, Cuba's model has shown that another world is possible.
Speaking at the United Nations in 1964, Guevara denounced apartheid, imperialism and the poverty of the Latin American masses. However, he rejected the pro-Soviet tendency in global and Cuban politics, and his thinking had moved towards a Maoist approach.
Perhaps partly for that reason, he decided to leave Cuba First, Che Guevara travelled to Congo, unsuccessfully trying to promote resistance to Mobutu. He blamed incompetence and in-fighting for the failure. After that, he offered his services to FRELIMO in Mozambique, but they were declined.
In 1966, following his disappointments in Africa, Guevara disguised himself, and went to promote revolution in Bolivia. As a guerrilla commander, he scored impressive victories in ambush after ambush in Bolivia. Though he is credited with developing foco theory, Guevara never attempted to advance a new theory of guerrilla warfare.
He wanted to defeat American imperialism by launching guerrilla campaigns simultaneously in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but his tricontinental strategy resulted in failures first in the Congo and then in Bolivia. And perhaps because he favoured conflict to compromise, he was unable to develop good relations with local leaders. He was a fighter, not a theorist.
In addition, he was now up against the CIA and US Special Forces, his men lacked training and equipment, and his radio communications had failed. In the jungle, he became increasingly ill with asthma, having to make guerilla raids just to obtain medicine.
His life ended tragically in Bolivia in 1967 when he was captured in Vallegrande, Bolivia during the Battle of Quebrada del Yuro. On October 9, 1969 he was executed on orders of the Bolivian President. A half-drunken sergeant shot him nine times, so that the authorities could say that Guevara had been killed trying to escape. CIA men were in close attendance. When Mario Terán, the soldier who would execute him, entered the room, Guevara reportedly said “I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man.” His hands were cut off as proof of death. Guevara’s body was strapped to the skids of a helicopter and flown to Vallegrande, a small town 65 kilometres away, before being moved to an open-air laundry in the grounds of a hospital. It was here that the international press was summoned and the famous Christ-like photograph of his lifeless bearded corpse taken by Bolivian photojournalist Freddy Alborta.
Alborta's post mortem photo of Guevara, 1967
It is probable that Che would have been compared to Christ being taken down from the cross in any case. He was in his 30s when he died, he had long hair and a beard, and he gave his life for the cause of the working class and the peasants in a deeply Catholic country. And probably his image would only grown in its inspiration – that change would arrive in Bolivia and that the poor could eventually live in dignity. But the photograph that emerged seems to me to be a powerful visual and artistic reminder of Che’s redemptive powers.
Fearing that it might become a place of pilgrimage, the authorities decided not to bury the revolutionaries in the local cemetery. Instead, they were concealed in a mass grave in the corner of an airfield.
A mural dedicated to Che Guevara in Vallegrande, where his body was taken and displayed to the international press. This is now part of the Che Route, sponsored by the Bolivian government and foreign solidarity groups.
In his last letter to his children, Guevara wrote “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”
The legacy of Che Guevara is constantly evolving in the collective imagination. As a symbol of counterculture worldwide, Guevara is one of the most recognizable and influential revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. An icon of global popular culture, as well as a hero of Third World communist revolutionary movements and a symbol of the Western Leftist Movement. He remains a monumental figure in Latin American history, influencing a half-century of political ideals and movements.
In Cuba, an economic blockade led the island to act in defiance of U.S. power, creating in its wake an internationalist foreign policy. Guevara played a key role in the ideology and action needed to carry out these policies.
The Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick created the graphic image of Che’s face in 1968. The poster bearing this image was shown at the Arts Laboratory in London. It quickly became the image used prominently in the student riots that swept across France in May 1968.
Since then, Che’s face has been commodified, merchandised and objectified, appearing on T-shirts, ice cream wrappers, posters and mural art. His life is told in films, such as The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), in documentaries, plays, and in songs.
Yet the rights to Che’s face are not owned by the Guevara family, but by the photographer and artist who created the image. The famous photograph of Guevara in a beret was taken by Alberto Korda (Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez) in 1960, titled Guerrillero Heroico (Heroic Guerrilla Warrior). British pop artist Sir Peter Blake regarded it as ‘one of the great icons of the 20th century.’
This photograph was the beginning of the commodification of the image of Che. Che’s image is an ever-present political and social emblem that has been morphed in popular culture. It operates as ‘both a fashionable de-politicized logo, as well as a potent anti-establishment symbol used by a wide spectrum of human rights movements and individuals affirming their own liberation.’
Che’s image has become a counter-cultural symbol that operates independent of who he was as a person, metamorphosed from his life as a revolutionary appropriated into a work of art. Hannah Charlton writes in The Sunday Times (2006) that ‘Possibly more than the Mona Lisa, more than images of Christ, more than comparable icons such as the Beatles or Monroe, Che’s image has continued to hold the imagination of generation after generation.’
Marc Lacey writes in The New York Times (2006) that ‘40 years after his death Che is as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon. Which raises the question of what exactly does the sheer proliferation of his image – the distant gaze, the scraggly beard and the beret adorned with a star – mean in a decidedly capitalist world?” Che’s image has been preserved in popular myth; a world devoid of its initial reality. The image’s commodification has lost its fear by the CIA, that of a revolution in Latin America. Today it makes money for corporations, which have no fear of nationalisation by Left-wing governments.
Vladimir Lenin explains in The State and Revolution (1917)
" During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.this process of conversion from a feared political image into bourgeois icon. “
Journalist Herbert L. Matthews writes about Guevara in his book, Revolution in Cuba
"His dedication to his revolutionary beliefs was deeply religious. Che had a missionary's faith in the innate goodness of man, in the ability of workers to dedicate themselves to ideals and to overcome selfishness and prejudices. It was the other side of the coin of his passionate indignation against injustice and exploitation of the humble. He saw the solution in an exalted form of Marxism that would bring freedom and brotherhood. Such men are born to be martyrs."
On his 98th birthday, I commemorate Comrade Che, who led the Glorious Cuban Revolution alongside Comrade Fidel, with an excerpt from the letter he sent to the Tricontinental—Three Continents Conference held in Havana in 1967:
"We must not forget that imperialism is a world system, the final stage of capitalism, and that it must be defeated on a world scale. The strategic end of this struggle will be the destruction of imperialism. Our share falls to us, the exploited and underdeveloped of this world: to eliminate the foundations of imperialism. We, the oppressed nations, are dragged into absolute dependence by providing them with capital, raw materials, technicians, and cheap labor, and by receiving from them new instruments of domination in the form of new capital, weapons, and all kinds of materials.
The fundamental element of this strategic objective will be the true liberation of all peoples. In many cases, this liberation will be achieved through armed struggle, and socialist revolution will be inevitable in Our America.
While aiming for the destruction of imperialism, it is absolutely necessary to pinpoint who is leading it. This is none other than the USA. A people that does not hate the enemy cannot defeat a brutal enemy. And under the banner of the war waged for the salvation of humanity, we must develop a true proletarian internationalism with international proletarian armies.
If, in the world, two, three, or more Vietnams were to emerge into the daylight with death claiming its toll on them, with their tremendous tragedies, their everyday heroism, and their ceaseless blows against imperialism, and with the growing hatred of the world's peoples shattering the forces of imperialism, we could look to the future with greater certainty! Every one of our actions is a call to war against imperialism and a battle anthem for the unity of the peoples against the greatest enemy of humanity, the USA. "
Che's short life reveals Cuba’s resilience in the struggle to provide the needs of the people through the Cuban Revolution, especially those whose ethnic identity and race are factors in their economic and political oppression.Time magazine selected him as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century.
In death, Che Guevara would become the iconic symbol of revolutionary martyrdom; giving up his own life with no fear, for the cause of fighting oppression and liberating others. His ideas and actions inspired many leftist movements across Latin America and beyond, particularly among youth and radical groups in the 1960s.
Che remains a polarizing figure; admired by some as a symbol of idealism and revolutionary dedication, a heroic defender of the oppressed and poor,while others criticize him as a violent adventurer, an executioner and the "Butcher Of la Cabaña" while Jean Paul-Sartre, Susan Sontag, Nelson Mandela and many others have regarded him as a hero and an inspiration, a man who was prepared to die for his beliefs.
What made Che unique was the unorthodox current of Marxism-Leninism he represented. Unlike those who believed revolution had to wait until all the perfect material conditions emerged, Che argued that revolutionaries had a duty to create those conditions through struggle itself. His theory of guerrilla warfare held that even a small group of committed revolutionaries could spark broader popular movements rather than waiting indefinitely for history to move on its own.
He believed that revolution was not just an external process, but an internal, almost spiritual, struggle to develop new values, ethics, and forms of consciousness: the creation of a “New Man.”
Che also rejected the idea that socialism could be built in one state and survive indefinitely in isolation, and his life reflected the belief that the struggle for socialism had to be global or risk total defeat.
Che understood the centrality of ethics in politics, the centrality of subjective factors in revolution, leading to the rapid transformation of Cuban society into a giant school of reclaiming Cuban culture and ethical values.
Hence, the literacy and “voluntary labour” campaigns, the advances in education and medicine, and the large scale involvement of people in movements for agrarian reform, housing reform, and so on. These movements and campaigns converted idealistic goals into on-the-ground realities that have continued to evolve, making possible what one could have never imagined even in one’s wildest dreams.
Rejecting the use of capitalist methods to fight capitalism, Che alongside Fidel Castro used the methods of socialist praxis to transform what began as a national liberation struggle into a socialist revolution that would transform institutions and social and human relations through an organised and conscious “praxis” that—despite errors recognised publicly by both of them and their successors—continues till today.
Che also repeatedly warned about the dangers of not seeing the deficiencies of “existing socialism” and of mechanically copying Soviet manuals and methods. He had spoken about this often, and this is also explicitly stated in his writings preserved in Cuba and available around the world. He observed that the “intransigent dogmatism of the Stalin era has been succeeded by an inconsistent pragmatism . . . returning to capitalism.”
He saw the actions and programmes of the Cuban Revolution as “clashing with what one reads in the (Soviet) textbooks” and contributed insightful socialist critiques of both capitalist and socialist societies and their theories.
History has never agreed on what to make of him. His story resists simplicity. What remains certain is that he lived—and died—according to absolute conviction. In the final hours before leaving for a war he would not survive, he was thinking about his children. Not about fame. Not about legacy. But about what values he hoped they would carry forward. “Study and read diligently,” he wrote. “Remember that an individual has no value alone.” Stand for something. Learn everything you can. Never be indifferent to suffering."
In July 1997, his remains were discovered; and sent back to Cuba, where they were reburied in a ceremony attended by President Fidel Castro and thousands of Cubans.In October, the Council of State of Cuba issued a notice designating the period from the 11th to the 17th of that month as a national period of mourning, and his remains were interred at the Che Guevara Square in Santa Clara.
Comrade Che dedicated his life to the struggle against the imperialist bandits who oppress and exploit the world's peoples, chief among them the greatest enemy of the human race, the USA.
Che, like Fidel, was profoundly committed to the cause of peace, but unfortunately had to take up arms to move the world closer to that ephemeral goal. To make a world without war possible, Che gave his life, even as Fidel did. We can learn much from their examples. The best tribute we can now make is to continue the struggle to end the immoral and unjust blockade of Cuba and for the return of the illegally occupied land at Guantanamo Bay.
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine. ” -Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
Salute . Comrade Che is immortal! Patria o muerte y venceremos!
Photo: an activist paints a mural honouring Che on the apartheid wall in the occupied West Bank.
