Che Guevara
At two years old Che Guevara developed asthma from which he suffered all his life, and his
family moved to the drier climate of Alta Gracia (Cordoba) where his health did not improve.
Primary education at home, mostly by his mother, Celia de la Serna. He became a voracious
reader of Marx, Engels and Freud which were all available in his father's library, it is probable
that he had read some of their works before he went to secondary school (1941), the Colegio
Nacional Dean Funes, Cordoba, where he excelled only in literature and sports. At home he was
impressed by the Spanish Civil War refugees and by the long series of squalid political crises in
Argentina which culminated in the 'Left Fascist' dictatorship of Juan Peron, to whom the Guevara
de la Sernas were opposed. These events and influences gave the young Guevara a contempt for
the pantomime of parliamentary democracy, and a hatred of military politicians and the army, the
capitalist oligarchy, and above all the U.S. dollar and imperialism. Although his parents, notably
his mother, were anti-Peronist activists, he took no part in revolutionary student movements and
showed little interest in politics at Buenos Aires University (1947) where he studied medicine,
first with a view to understanding his own disease, later becoming more interested in leprosy. In
1949 he made the first of his long journeys, exploring northern Argentina on a bicycle, and for
the first time coming into contact with the very poor and the remnants of the Indian tribes. In
1951, after taking his penultimate exams, he made a much longer journey, accompanied by a
friend, and earning his living by casual labor as he went: he visited southern Argentina, Chile,
where he met Salvador Allende, Peru, where he worked for some weeks in the San Pablo
leprosarium, Colombia at the time of La Violencia, and where he was arrested but soon released,
Venezuela, and Miami. He returned home for his finals sure of only one thing, that he did not
want to become a middle-class general practitioner. He qualified, specializing in dermatology,
and went to La Paz, Bolivia, during the National Revolution which he condemned as opportunist.
From there he went to Guatemala, earning his living by writing travel-cum-archaeological
articles about Inca and Maya ruins. He reached Guatemala during the socialist Arbenz
presidency; although he was by now a Marxist, well read in Lenin, he refused to join the
Communist Party, though this meant losing the chance of government medical appointment, and
he was penniless and in rags. He lived with Hilda Gadea, a Marxist of Indian stock who
forwarded his political education, looked after him, and introduced him to Nico Lopez, one of
Fidel Castro's lieutenants. In Guatemala he saw the CIA at work as the principal agents of
counterrevolution and was confirmed in his view that Revolution could be made only be armed
insurrection. When Arbenz fell, Guevara went to Mexico City (September 1954) where he
worked in the General Hospital. Hilda Gadea and Nico Lopez joined him, and he met and was
charmed by Raul and Fidel Castro, then political emigres, and realized that in Fidel he had found
the leader he was seeking.He joined other Castro followers at the farm where the Cuban
revolutionaries were being given a tough commando course of professional training in guerrilla
warfare by the Spanish Republican Army captain, Alberto Bayo, author of Ciento cincueto
preguntas a un guerrilleo, Havana 1959. Bayo drew not only on his own experience but on the
guerrilla teachings of Mao Tse-tung, and 'Che', as he was now called (it means chum or buddy
and is Italian origin), became his star pupil and was made a leader of the class. The war games at
the farm attracted police attention, all the Cubans and Che were arrested, but released a month
later (June 1956). When they invaded Cuba, Che went with them, first as doctor, soon as a
Commandante of the revolutionary army of barbutos. He was the most aggressive, clever and
successful of the guerrilla officers, and the most earnest in giving his men a Leninist education.
At the triumph of the Revolution Guevara became second only to Fidel Castro in the new
government of Cuba, and the man chiefly responsible for moving Castro towards communism,
but a communism which was independent of the orthodox, Moscow-style communism of some of
their colleagues. Che organized and directed the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria to
administer the new agrarian laws expropriating the large land holders; ran its Department of
Industries; and was appointed President of the National Bank of Cuba.In 1959 he married Aledia
March and together they visited Egypt, India, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Yugoslavia. Back
in Cuba, as Minister for Industry he signed (February 1960) a trade pact with the USSR which
freed the Cuban sugar industry from dependence on the teeth of the US market; in it is the
foreshadowing of his failure in the Congo and Bolivia, in an axiom which proved to be hopelessly
misleading: ' It is not always necessary to wait until the conditions for revolution exist, the
instructional focus can create them.' And, with Mao Tse-tung, he believed that the countryside
must bring the revolution to the town in predominately peasant countries. Also at this time, he
glorified his own kind of communist philosophy. ( published later in the Socialism and Man in
Cuba, March 12 March 1965). It can be summed up in him ' Man really attains the state of
complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a
commodity.' He was moving away from "Moscow", towards Mao, and beyond into what is
essentially the old idealistic, Anarchism. His formal breach with the Soviet Communist Party
came when, addressing the Organization for Afro-Asian Solidarity at Algiers (February 1965) he
charged the USSR with being a 'tacit accomplice of imperialism' by not trading exclusively with
the Communist bloc and by not giving underdeveloped socialist countries aid without any
thought of return. He also attacked the Soviet government for its policy of coexistence; and for
revisionism. He initiated the Tricontiental Conference to realize a program of revolutionary,
insurrectionary, guerrilla cooperation in Africa, Asia and South America. On the other hand,
after a halfhearted attempt to come to some kind of terms with the USA, he was also attacking the
North Americas, at the UN as Cuba's representative there, for their greedy and merciless
imperialist activity in Latin America.Che's intransigence towards both capitalist and communist
establishments forced Castro to drop him (1965), not offically, but in practice. For some months
even his whereabouts were a secret and his death was widely rumoured: he was in various
African countries, notably the Congo, surveying the possiblities of turning the Kinshasa rebellion
into a Communist revolution by Cuban-style guerrilla tactics. He returned to Cuba to train
volunteers for that project, and took a force of 120 Cubans to the Congo. His men fought well,
but the Kinshasa rebels did not, they were useless against the Belgian mercenaries and by autumn
1965 Che had to advise Castro to withdraw Cuban aid.Che's final revolutionary adventure was in
Bolivia: he grossly misjudged the reveloutionary potential of that country with disastrous
consequences. The attempt ended in his being captured by a Bolivian army unit and shot a day
later.Because of his wild, romantic appearance, his dashing style, his intransigence in refusing to
kowtow to any kind of establishment however communist, his contempt for mere reformism, and
his dedication to violent, flamboyant action, Che became a legend and an idol for the
reveloutionary- and even the merely discontented- youth of the later 1960s and early 70's a focus
for the kind of desperate revolutionary action which seemed to millions of young people the only
hope of destroying the world of bourgeois industrial capitalism.
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