Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson
The book makes one think about the role of personalities in history: Cuba became communist just because of the Argentine Che Guevara. He planted the idea of communism in the mind of Fidel Castro. Fidel wasn’t a communist in the beginning. Fidel was an ambitious, Che an idealist. Fidel wanted power, Che wanted a better world. Fidel had bourgeois leanings: he liked comfort, good food and beautiful women. Che pushed correctness and self-denial close to asceticism. And still, Che, le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche[11] of communism, had a far bigger negative impact. Without Che, Fidel would have been just an ordinary Latin American dictator.
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Don’t think that this book only shows Che Guevara’s qualities, although some people consider it a hagiography. On the other hand, I’ve seen Marxist sites that consider Jon Lee Anderson as a detractor who tainted Che Guevara’s memory. Because Anderson tries to be objective: he also writes about the shootings ordered by Che Guevara and about his disastrous impact for the Cuban economy, as a Minister of Industry (He was more communist than Moscow, he didn’t accept even the mild financial autonomy of the companies and financial rewards for workers allowed in other communist countries, he thought that the economy could work only on moral motivations.) and about the toughness of this symbol of rebellion with his subordinates (for serious faults, he punished his fighters with days without any food, and his subordinates at the Ministry, with months in the labor camp Guanahacabibes). Although the author lived for years in Cuba, when researching the book, the book is far from being pro-Cuban propaganda. I won’t be surprised to find that it’s banned in Cuba – actually, I would be surprised if it isn’t.
Of course, Anderson isn’t totally objective. An article about Che Guevara’s victims accused the book of having more pages about Che’s first love than about the trials and executions of those accused of involvement in dictator Batista’s repressions, organized by Che Guevara in the prison-fortress La Cabaña in the first moths after the victory. I noticed that in the La Cabaña part, Anderson only quotes sources on Che’s side, subordinates involved themselves in the revolutionary tribunals. There were 55 executions in 5 or 6 months. To put things into perspective, the author says that, about the same time, Raul Castro (Fidel’s brother and later successor) executed 70 soldiers in just 1 day. There were also executions during the fights in the mountains: informers, deserters, robbers, rapists – here the source is Che himself, who wrote everything in his diary, including how he shot a traitor with his own hand, where the bullet entered and where it exited the skull (using anatomical terminology – he was a doctor). To think that he chose the path that led to all that from compassion, moved by the suffering of the poor…
To his own conscience and to his old friends shocked by his metamorphosis in a “killing machine” (like Alberto, the guy with the motorcycle), he justified his actions on utilitarian grounds, speaking about the future. If you don’t kill them, they kill you. Yes, they also have wives and children, but you have the chance to save thousands of future children from poverty and hunger. As time has shown, unfortunately it was the other way around: instead of saving, he condemned thousands of future children to poverty, hunger, rationed food: the food ratios were introduced in 1962, when he was minister (7 months before that, at an international conference, he boasted that Cuba will become self-sufficient for food and will have 10% economic growth per year). I grew up in a communist country in the 80’s, a country that had food ratios. Trying to imagine what would have been to live like that all my life helps me to understand, easier than most, the actual negative impact Che Guevara had on Cuba.
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Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born in a good, upper class, blue tribe Argentine family that claimed to have aristocratic origins. The family lost its wealth in time, but not its social status. His parents, especially his mother, were cultured people, nonconformist for their time and place, irreligious, left-leaning, supporting the left during Spanish civil war, democrats, opposing Peron’s dictatorship. They had a messy but welcoming house, full of books everywhere, on every piece of furniture.
Che’s mother was an unusual woman, the first in their city to wear pants and to drive a car. From this woman, Che inherited, apparently, both his courage and his non-conformism, but also the asthma that tortured him all his life. She encouraged him to spend his bed-ridden times reading – she taught him to read and write and later she taught him French – but also to spend his healthier intervals doing sport, trips, without care, like he was healthy. Between them there was always a special relationship, kept alive even from far away, by letters, but cut brutally when Che left secretly in his Congo expedition, and she believed, like many others, that Fidel made him disappear, as it frequently happened in communist countries between No. 1 and No. 2. She died soon after, in despair.
Che’s first contact with Marxism was as a teen, just from intellectual curiosity. He was a voracious reader. He read everything, from adventure to poetry to philosophy. Yes, he was once one of us, did you know? Not exactly a nerd – too successful with women for that and also playing sports, in the rugby team. But he also played chess and read chess books, read philosophy and wrote his notes in his philosophy notebooks, and later will abandon a budding research career to join the revolution. He did research and published 2 papers about allergy, first as a medical student (with his professor as first author), then as a young doctor, in Mexico. He also loved (and sometimes wrote) poetry.
Besides intellectual curiosity, there was rebellion. As a little boy, he threw firecrackers through the window of some neighbors who had a dinner party. After he grew up and couldn’t do that anymore, because he was himself present at such upper class dinners, with his family, he noticed that some well chosen ideas and quotes from his readings had almost the same effect. To discuss religion, for example, he used Marx, but also Nietzsche.
He was just trolling actually. His first contact with Marxism didn’t convince him. In high school and later in medical school, he wasn’t considered a communist, neither by himself nor by the others. He wasn’t actually much interested in politics. He was interested in books, travels and women. In the last domain, like in his lectures, he showed the same voracious appetite and taste for diversity: white women, black women, Indian women, teen girls, older experienced women… He didn’t yet have a political worldview, but he had an instinctive, spontaneous rejection of everything upper class, of the unwritten codes of the world he grew up in. He defied this world through his ideas and his looks (he pushed his neglect of looks close to neglect of hygiene), waiting for the moment when he could break with it completely, leaving, going far away, to discover another world, another kind of people.
Until then, he used his vacations to travel: through Argentina on bike, on the ocean, temporarily employed on a ship… In his last (prolonged) vacation, he made his famous motorbike trip. Then, he completed his medical studies and immediately left the country. First stop was Bolivia, who just had a revolution and was doing agrarian reform. At first, he liked this – it echoed his yet vague feelings of a need for social reform, feelings aroused in his former motorcycle trip by his first contact with poverty and suffering. That, until he saw a Ministry clerk spraying the Native American peasants, who came to receive land, with insecticide; disgusted by the attitude of the new revolutionary government toward common people, he leaved, going further…
Until he reached another country in the fever of revolution: Guatemala. Here he lived interesting times: he saw the contra-revolution orchestrated by the CIA, that replaced an elected president, Arbenz, with a dictator, Castillo Armas, to put an end to the agrarian reform and nationalizations that touched American interests. He already flirted with Marxism when reaching Guatemala, but after he saw the planes shooting civilians, after he offered to fight for the revolution but was sent to a hospital, as a doctor, after he saw the demise of the president under USA pressure and the repression that followed, the arrests (including his future wife, Hilda), he came from this experience completely radicalized, full of powerless revolt against the Americans and convinced that the solution for Latin America’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain. He left for Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro, who invited him to join his revolution (because he needed a doctor).
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The Cuba landing was a disaster. They were discovered immediately by the army and destroyed. From about 80 fighters who came with the ship, only about a dozen survived, dispersed in the mountains. Che himself was shot in the neck and felt he was dying, but survived. And still, there, in the mountains, the minuscule rebel group survived, grew more and more, fought and, after 2 years, finally won. How it was possible? With the help of the local peasants, who hid them, fed them and joined their fight, and also due to the urban people from the city movement, mostly students and young professionals, who, risking their lives, constantly send them weapons, money and food. The peasants wanted land, the urban young people wanted freedom – neither had any idea that they were fighting for the victory of communism!
Batista was a very corrupt dictator, who transformed Cuba in a brothel and had ties with the American Mafia. He was despised by almost everybody. Neither the soldiers nor the officers wanted to die for him, considering that the rebels usually freed the prisoners after taking their weapons and even treated the wounded enemy soldiers (even Che had to take care of them, as a doctor).
Although he was invited to join as a doctor for the rebels, Che preferred the role of the soldier. Just after arrival, he abandoned a first aid kit to take some ammunition instead. Soon Fidel noticed his unusual courage, so he made him “comandante”, giving him the command of a column. Soon he also made himself noticed by his toughness towards his troops. He was so courageous and wanting to do great deeds that Fidel had to give him written order to abstain from suicidal actions, to not risk his life without good reason. On the contrary, Che created in his column a “Suicide Squad” for the most dangerous missions, and his rebel soldiers competed among them to join it.
After the victory, Fidel made him manager of the National Bank - although his only tie with banks, before victory, was that he wanted to rob one for the revolution, but the other rebel leaders dissuaded him - and later Minister of Industry. But Che’s nature wasn’t made for office work, for working with numbers. Depressed, he convinced Fidel to send him secretly in Congo with a group of black Cuban soldiers, to help the rebels who fought there against neocolonialism.
The Congo rebels weren’t exactly enthusiastic that they received a “white savior”. According to Che, the situation there was a complete disaster. The rebel leaders fought among themselves and partied in the cities with the money from supporting socialist countries and didn’t visit the front for months. An officer, an educated man, speaking fluent French, claimed that the bullets can’t harm him due to a Congolese magic named dawa. The soldiers had good weapons from the socialist friendly countries but they didn’t know to use them correctly and discharged them involuntarily, harming each other. During a battle, the Congolese ran away, letting only the Cubans to fight in their stead. After the battle, they punished the witch doctor because he didn’t do their dawa well. Of course, they lost and Che and his Cubans had to retreat from Congo, vanquished.
But Che couldn’t come back vanquished. The fact that he had in Cuba 5 children, the smallest one newborn when he left, wasn’t enough to counterbalance his pride - sometimes the aristocrat was still visible in the communist. He needed a new battlefield to redeem himself. So, with a troop of the best veteran guerilla fighters, he went to Bolivia, hoping that, from there, he will spread the revolution in all South America, his dream being a united communist Latin America.
Why did the guerilla tactics that succeeded in Cuba lose in Bolivia? Maybe because in Bolivia they lacked the support of the peasants, who saw them as the foreign invaders they were. He only succeeded to recruit a few workers from the cities, communists disavowed by their own party leadership, but not a single peasant. The Native American peasants, who received land at their revolution, as I said, looked at these white armed bearded aliens with fear and hostility and avoided them as much as possible. On top of this, Che really had bad luck. They became totally isolated after their radio transmitter broke and Tania, their contact with the Cuban spy network, had to stay with them after a reckless mistake. Maybe she was attracted by the guerilla life or maybe she was attracted by Che, although the book doesn’t claim that they were lovers. (But Che had an extraordinary charisma, he fascinated not only women but even men sometimes, once he received a declaration of love from a Soviet official!) And after the Bolivian army discovered the hiding place where they kept their documents, food and medicine, Che couldn’t control his asthma anymore and the illness subdued him, transforming him in an invalid who could barely walk. What followed was a long agony…
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The book is well documented and rich in details, sometimes captivating like a good novel, other times boring due to that multitude of details that offered context but interrupted the story.
In conclusion, to paraphrase Steven Weinberg, for good people to do evil, that takes ideology. But, as someone quoted in the book said, I can’t help admiring him. In spite of everything.