for young people in the 2lst century. Being as photogenic as Johnny Depp is always a help. But it's the facts of his life and his humanistic approach to socialism that guarantee his place in the history of future revolutions.
Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna, as he was known to his parents, was born in Argentina in 1928. He went to Buenos Aires University to study medicine where he showed no interest in politics. In 1949 he went motorcycling in northern Argentina and a couple of years later he travelled to Chile, Colombia and Peru. Having come from a comfortably-off family these trips were his first real experience of the poverty of the farmers and Indians whom he met.
His travels took him to Guatemala which had a left-leaning government led by Jacobo Arbenz. Guevara was present when the CIA organised a coup which overthrew Arbenz's government because it was giving land to the peasantry. By this time Guevara considered himself a Marxist and, according to some accounts, he tried to organise armed resistance to the coup.
With the defeat of the Arbenz government in 1954 Guevara went to Mexico City. That's where he met the two brothers Fidel and Raul Castro. They had fled Cuba and were trying to organise a small guerrilla army to return and overthrow a corrupt, proAmerican government. The Cubans were being given a professional military training by Alberto Bayo, a veteran of the Spanish civil war.
n November 1956 Guevara sailed to
Cuba with Castro's 80 strong "army"
on a boat called the Granma, but they didn't have much luck. They were noticed immediately and the group had to split up. Guevara was wounded in an ambush. Although he was the group's doctor, it was at this point that Guevara decided to abandon his medical supplies and save the ammunition the guerrillas needed.
In January the rebels successfully attacked the barracks at La Plata. By the spring of that year their military campaign had intensified and were building support among the peasant farmers. On New Year's day 1959 the dictator Batista fled to Miami and the revolutionaries found themselves in government.
Guevara found himself transformed from guerrilla leader to the Director of the National Bank and Minister for Industries. And this was when he showed himself to be at his most revolutionary. Most people who imperialism because he was a beacon across and beyond, and a symbol of the fight for national liberation make that sort of transformation quickly find it hard not to adapt to the circumstances, and probably relieved they no longer have to sleep in mountain forests hunted by a dictator's army
Guevara was made of different stuff. His slogan was: "The duty of a revolutionary is to make revolutions."
There's no doubt that Che was a revolutionary, but what sort of a revolutionary was he? Theoretically, Che considered himself a Marxist. He outlined his methods in a number of writings, one was called Guerilla Warfare: A Method.
"To be the vanguard of the party means to be at the forefront of the working class through the struggle for achieving power. It means to know how to guide this fight through shortcuts to victory:
Here, the operative word is shortcuts. In fact the Cuban revolution was a textbook example of small groups of committed individuals carrying out the revolution on behalf of the majority, using military tactics. Cuba was never a mass movement involving the working class and peasantry. Nevertheless, Che was murdered by agents of US imperialism because he was a beacon across Latin America and beyond, and a symbol of the fight for national liberation.
The was fascinated by great historiCeliaders, induding Marx and
Lenin, even beginning a biography of Marx. But he avoided the conclusion both these figures came to; that the key issue was not to be the singular historical revolutionary personality, but to build a were successful revolutions in other parts of the world. For him the victory of the Vietnamese against the Americans would be a victory for the Cuban revolution. He wanted to open up new revolutionary wars and was convinced that what had worked in Cuba could succeed in other countries.
In 1965 he took 100 veterans of the Cuban revolution to the Congo to try to ensure that US and European imperial interests did not retain control of this mineralrich region of Africa.
One of Che's kindred spirits was the murdered leader of the
Congo, Patrice Lumumba whom the US had planned to murder using a syringe, rubber gloves and a vial of untraceable poison. Before they could get to Lumumba the Belgian security services had him kidnapped and murdered. Che's brief episode failed; what worked in Cuba didn't work in Africa.
Still convinced that he could support the Vietnamese by opening up a revolutionary war in Latin America Guevara travelled to Bolivia in 1966. He had a guerrilla force of 29 Bolivians, 16 Cubans and 3 Peruvians but Partying against the cuts Brazilian students demand more money for education and an end to neo-liberal policies in a Rio de Janeiro protest against the Lula government. The demonstration marked the anniversary of the right wing military coup which in 1964 ousted President Goulart and brought decades of brutal repression. The USA congratulated the conspiring generals even before Goulart was deposed. The Geisel dictatorship supplied torturers for the Chilean junta in 1973. didn't have the support of the Communist Party or the strong Bolivian miners' union. The result was predictable. Guevara was taken prisoner and murdered in September 1967.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called Guevara "the most complete man of his time". He was a doctor, an economist, a banker, a revolutionary, a military theoretician and an innovative thinker. Guevara died trying to come to the aid of the Vietnamese revolution, half a planet away from Cuba This at a time when the Vietnamese revolution was creating a new revolutionary generation in Europe and America
Guevara was the shining revolutionary star. The opposite of the old men who rep resented Soviet Stalinism, he was the uncompromising revolutionary idealist who refused to make rotten deals with the old
Che Guevara once said: "It was precisely love for humanity which conceived
Marxism..tl desire to combat mise injustice and all the exploitations suffer by the working class which made Mar arise from the mind of Karl Marx."
I revolutionaries must share a sion for humanity and a belief we can change the world for better. Che's method was to gr together the most committed indivic to make change the world for the majo
Global mass movements against impe ism and capitalism are part of daily life ir 2Ist century, mass revolutionary partie not. Revolutionary crises are not a r even in the 2lst century as the last few y have shown in Argentina and other par
Few countries have ever had revolu ary governments. Mass movements mass parties have to converge for th
happen.