MILLIONS of people have heard of 'Che' Guevara, Fidel's second in command in the Cuban revolution, and most would recognise his famous stylised poster portrait. But what did he stand for? What were his achievements? Nothing better sums up Guevara than his death in October 1967, fighting in Bolivia. He went there at the height of the Vietnam war to open a 'second front' against US imperialism. Fifteen years after his death PAUL LAWSON and ALAN FREEMAN pay tribute to him.
Ernesto Che Guevara was born in Argentina. He decided to become a doctor, and to pursue his studies travelled the length and breadth of Latin America. By accident, he arrived in Guatemala in 1954, a very significant year for that country. The mild reformist government of Jacob Arbenz had just been elected.
At that time the country was dominated by the US United Fruit Company. John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary was determined that no government hostile to that company could survive. He had good reason. His brother Allen Dulles was president of the United Fruit Company.
The result was an invasion of counter-revolutionary exiles, organised by the Central Intelligence Agency. This completely changed Che's thinking. He said: 'The United Fruit Company, the State Department and Dulles — they were in fact one and the same — and they unleashed the dogs of war'.
What Guevara had discovered in Guatemala was in fact imperialism. He decided to devote himself to the revolution: 'to become a revolutionary physician one first of all has to make a revolution'.
Two years later he was one of the group which landed on Cuba with Fidel Castro, from the boat Granma to establish a guerrilla army. In the Sierra Maestra, Guevara and Fidel's brother Raul became effectively the deputy leaders of the revolution.
Leading his own guerrilla column, he was the strategist of the battle of Santa Clara, the fall of which precipitated the flight of the dictator Batista from Cuba.
In addition to acting as commander of the guerrilla column, he acted as chief doctor — and dentist! He comments: 'my lack of experience and lack of anesthetic forced me to resort to 'psychological anaethesia', which in plain language means insulting the patients whenever they complained about the pain.
In the Sierra Maestra Guevara had already become a Marxist as well as a revolutionary of action. But the revolutionary movement as a whole was not Marxist: its aims were vague, and mainly democratic and nationalist in formulation. When the guerrilla rebels swept into Havana on New Year's Day 1959, the direction of the revolution was by no means certain.
Che argued that the revolution should be based on the poor. To carry through the revolution the July 26 movement should sweep away the old state apparatus and get rid of the rule of the bourgeoisie. It meant a break with imperialism.
The revolution proved that Guevara was right. In order to carry through the revolutionary aims of improving the lot of the poor, Castro's government broke up the large land-holdings and distributed them; closed the casinos and brothels; cut electricity and phone tarifs in half; halved rents and made it illegal to own more than one house.
It was convincing proof of what revolution could do. But the guerrillas had installed a cabinet which included liberals, including the prime minister Urrutia.
Fidel resigned, and mass demonstrations forced his reinstatement and the resignation of the bourgeois prime minister Urrutia.
Technicians, professionals and small business people fled. The USA embargoed Cuban sugar: Castro nationalised all US assets. Then, on 17 April 1961, two US navy ships sailed into the Bay of Pigs with a mercenary task force of five American ships, two battleships and three freighters loaded with tanks, artillery and 1500 troops.
But this time there was no capitalist army to welcome them. The guerrillas armed the people — who drove out the invaders. Che had been proved right, and Fidel declared that Cuba was now to be a socialist republic.
Che's originality now came to the fore. The new republic was under siege. Blockaded by the USA, it turned to the Soviet Union to sell sugar and buy oil. But this brought another danger: that the political line of the Russian bureaucracy would suffocate and isolate the revolution.
Che fought the Kremlin's influence. A furious polemic was joined around the devlopment of the Cuban economy. On one side stood supporters of the 'economic reforms' in Russia, like Foreign Trade Minister Alberto Mora and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, now Deputy President. They called for 'material incentives' to increase production.
Guevara — and the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, who joined the debate at the Cuban's invitation — said this would create a new bureaucratic layer. Che argued for 'moral' incentives — pride in the collective achievements of the revolution. No incentive should be introduced which divided worker from worker or permitted individual enrichment.
Cuba's backwardness, it was said, made this a 'utopian' project. Che countered that the world level of productive forces was the most decisive factor. Cuba should end its isolation by extending it revolution. Its gains should be guarded at home by building a new leadership, formed in direct contact with the masses in the struggle for production.
From this came Che's famous call for 'One, Two, Many Vietnams' which led Cuba to launch a world wide armed struggle movement in 1966. From it, too, grew his concept of a 'new man' emerging from the struggle against underdevelopment.
Not all Che's ideas bore fruit. He did not live to see the Nicaraguans transform the Cuban experience into an insurrection model of revolution; his own heroic attempt to repeat the Cuban experience in Bolivia failed when the people ignored his small band, leading to his capture and death.
He did not see the twin upsurges of 1968 in France and Czechoslovakia. He concentrated on the third world, and had no strategy to link up with the working class struggle in the urban centres of the world.
Nor did he grasp the vital importance of an organised clash of ideas in a transitional society — which marked the early years of the Russian Revolution.
As Mandel had pointed out, socialist planning requires that the people confront major political and economic decisions in the shape of alternative options — rather than a government proposal to be accepted or rejected. Cuban planning remains plagued by unnecessary blockages which the leadership acknowledge, but have so far not overcome.
The departure of Guevara from Cuba in 1966 to establish a revolutionary guerrilla movement in Bolivia led to many false and stupid rumours in the world socialist movement. Many people believed that Guevara, as the most radical leader of the Cuban revolution, had argued with Fidel and that Fidel had had him murdered.
Of course, since his mission was secret it was impossible for the Cubans to reply and to state just where he was, except to say that he was on 'an important mission in another country'. Only when he was killed was it possible for the Cubans to make a full reply.
From his guerrilla outpost in Bolivia Che sent a long message to the Tricontinental solidarity organisation in Havana — entitled 'Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams!' In it he argued that the way to help the beleaguered Vietnamese, at the height of their struggle with the United States, was to open up revolutionary struggles elsewhere.
This was anathema to the Soviet bureaucracy, who bitterly opposed the extension of revolution. Their line was 'peace in Vietnam' — a compromise with the Americans and certainly not more revolutionary wars.
While the Soviet bureaucrats said 'make peace', and doled out their aid to Vietnam through an eye-dropper, Che said 'the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution'. Everywhere Che's message aided the revolutionaries in their demand for solidarity with the Vietnam revolution. To carry through the aim of creating 'Two, Three, many Vietnams' the Cubans attempted, in a mechanical and voluntaristic way, to start a revolution in Bolivia. But an isolated group of revolutionaries were incapable of starting a real revolution. In particular, the Bolivian Communist Party played a treacherous role, refusing to give any aid to the project.
On 8 October 1967, Che's guerrilla group was encircled. Guevara himself was wounded and taken prisoner. He was taken to the village of Higueras by the security forces, and on the order of the head of the military dictatorship Barrientos, murdered. He died as he lived: in combat for the world revolution.
Che understood that only socialist revolution could start to solve the problems of the oppressed people of the third world: as he put it, the revolution in this epoch 'will either be a socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution'. And he understood and died fighting for the essence of permanent revolution in our time: only by extending the revolution can its victories be consolidated.
Boxes
'Political sovereignty and economic independence are united. If a country doesn't have its own economy, if it is penetrated by foreign capital, it cannot be free from control by the country it is dependent on, nor can it exercise its will if it conflicts with the interests of the country economically dominating it.
National sovereignty means first, a country's right not to have any one interfere in its affairs, the right of people to have the kind of government and way of life they find best suited; this depends on their own choice and it is only these people who can decide if a government is to change or not But all these concepts of political sovereignty, of national sovereignty are fictitious if there is no economic independence.'
Cuban television program "People's University" in March, 1963.
'We clearly understand — and we state with complete frankness — that the only correct solution to the problems of mankind at present is the total elimination of exploitation of the dependent countries by the developed capitalist countries, with all the consequences implicit in this action …
In contrast to the rapid growth of the countries of the socialist camp and the development, although at a much slower rate, of the majority of capitalist countries, there is the undeniable fact that a large number of so-called underdeveloped countries are at a complete standstill and at times even show rates of economic growth below those of population growth.
These facts are not accidental. They are in strict accordance with the nature of the developed capitalist system in the process of full expansion which subjects the dependent countries to the most abusive and least disguised forms of exploitation.
Ever since the end of the last century, this expansionist and aggressive trend has been made evident in countless aggressions against different countries on the most backward continents, but today it is most evident in the fact that the developed powers control the production and trade of raw materials of the dependent countries. In general, this is shown in the dependence of a given country on one commodity, which, in turn, is sold to a given market in amounts determined by the needs of that market.
The World is hungry, but does not have money to buy food, and paradoxically, in the underdeveloped world, in the world of hunger, possible expansion of food production is discouraged to be able to maintain the price level, that is, to be able to eat. This is the relentless law of the philosophy of plunder, which must end as a standard of relations between peoples.'
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Geneva, March 25, 1964.
'The struggle against imperialism to remove the impediments of colonialism or neocolonialism, being waged politically or through armed struggle, or through a combination of both, cannot be separated from the struggle against backwardness and poverty. Both are phases of the same process that leads to the creation of a new, rich, and just society. It is absolutely necessary to first seize political power and liquidate the oppressor classes; but later we must deal with the second stage of the struggle, which is even more difficult, if possible, than the first.
Ever since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept most of mankind submerged in poverty, distributing profits among the strongest countries. The living standards of those countries are based on the poverty of our countries; thus, to increase the living standards of the underdeveloped countries we must therefore struggle against imperialism. And every time one country falls from the imperialist tree we have not only won a partial victory against our chief enemy, but we have also contributed to weakening it effectively and to taking one step closer to final victory.
We believe that the present road is full of danger, danger that is not invented or predicted for the future by any superior mind, but danger that is the palpable result of the reality around us. The struggle against colonialism has reached its final stages, but in our era the colonial status is only a result of imperialist domination. As long as imperialism exists, it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries; today, this domination is called neocolonialism.'
Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity, Algiers, February 24, 1965.