JUNE 14: CHE'S 80TH BIRTHDAY
A brief personal look at Che Guevara
By Monsignor CARLOS MANUEL DE CÉSPEDES GARCÍA-MENOCAL
IT was Pope John Paul II's custom to travel accompanied by journalists who would report later on the trip. During the flight, at some point the Pope would go to the cabin where the journalists were and talk with them for a while. Usually, they asked him not just about that particular trip, but whatever else, human and divine, that interested them at the time. The anecdote that I am going to recount is about a trip to Africa — John Paul II made several to that continent — around the late 1980s or early 90s. By that time, there was speculation about a possible visit to Cuba by John Paul II. It materialized in January 1998. In a newspaper or magazine of the time, I read the following, which I am now trying to reconstruct from memory:
In the airplane cabin, they had already discussed the decolonization of African countries, developments that were still relatively recent. If that issue was brought up, it was almost impossible to avoid referring in some way to Cuba and to Che, one of the leading figures in that process. The question was a direct one: "What does Your Holiness think about Che?" According to the article I read at the time, the Pope reflected in silence for a few seconds then broke it by saying, with enlightening simplicity, "I don't know him intimately, but I know he was concerned about the poor. Therefore, he deserves my respect." I realize that John Paul II's opinion led me to a more just consideration of Che. When judging a person's deeds, we should not avoid motivations that he or she had in doing them, in taking a certain attitude toward life. Che is no exception. The excesses that he may have committed in the framework of that "concern" is one thing; what men or groups do for the unjust reasons of selfishness and unbridled ambition is another, of a very different nature.
Like most Cubans, my first solid references to Che came with the beginning of the guerrilla struggle in the Sierra Maestra, after the landing of the Granma; in other words, in early December 1956. I was enrolled in the Havana Seminary and the disciplinary nature of that institution — now diverse — made it hard for us to obtain information about the political situation or practically anything else that was happening in our country or the world. Fortunately, I kept in frequent contact not only with my family, but with my friends, including university classmates. Che turned out to be the most enigmatic of the leaders of that process. We knew the Cubans; we were getting to know Che.
All the references coincide in affirming his almost rash daring in face of danger, as well as his spirit of discipline. We learned that he was a doctor, and stories circulated about his trip around Latin America, his presence in the Guatemala of Arbenz, his meeting-up with Raúl and Fidel in Mexico, etc. Almost everyone also valued, since that time, the consistency between his convictions and his actions in life. People also said that he was a voracious reader of good literature, with a notable preference for books on philosophy, and for classic authors, not just the Spaniards, but the Greeks and Latin, which I liked very much. He was said to have a Marxist-oriented political culture, which for many Cubans of the time was an obstacle to regarding him positively. I admit that for me, that was not so much the case, because although I disagreed with his lack of a metaphysical philosophy and with his denial of the limits Marxism, I sympathized with the emphasis on socialism. Obviously, Marxism was not, and is not, my philosophical/political orientation, but then neither was, or is, anti-communism, more visceral than rational. While some people saw him distrustfully as a foreigner, since back then, some of my friends, and I personally, related his presence within the Cuban Revolution with that of many other foreigners who collaborated with our 19th century independence movements, above all with that of Máximo Gomez. The Dominican generalissimo, as we well know, is an integral part of Cuba's patriotic and internationalist pantheon.
As we headed toward the revolutionary victory, and the final stage in Villa Clara of the guerilla struggle, the anecdotes about Che naturally multiplied. And so did the questions that I had about him. Together with the positive data, I saw what seemed to be a radical, avenging attitude, hard and cold, in response to human weakness and error; an attitude that has never seemed positive to me when I discover it in those around me, or in people who I come across in my studies of history. The early months of the revolutionary government, with Che installed in Havana, seemed to confirm, in my eyes, the excesses of that avenging spirit, both in Che and in most of the Revolution's historical leaders. Che's speeches and writings in that period were along the same lines.
However, my admiration also increased in face of his existential and intellectual consistency, as well as his social sensitivity. Some of my friends, personal friends, became close collaborators of Che during that time. They were a precious source of information about the richness and nuances of his temperament. We could not limit him to his words. Not him or anybody. And with that difficult sort of contradiction in my approach to Che, we arrive at his final stage, with first-hand knowledge of it through his Bolivian campaign "diary."
Unfortunately, I never came into contact with him. For a good part of the time he spent in Cuba, I was living and studying in Rome (August 1959 to August 1963). Che disappeared from Cuba — Africa, Bolivia and death by murder — without me having been able to fill the vacuum of not having had the contact that is almost indispensable to really knowing and properly appreciating someone.
Then came the years of enthusiasm about Che, inside and outside of Cuba, even among people and groups which distanced themselves from the Cuban revolutionary process. Years of growth, almost mythological, of his image, the one in memory and the one in iconography, with the latter centered on Korda's photograph. Let us remember May 1968 in Paris, and everything that has happened since, in relation — direct or not — to that unrepeatable month. Years, too, with the appearance of essays and biographies. Impossible to have access to so many works. On more than one occasion, I asked for guidance on the matter from Manuel Piñeiro, with whom I had a very good friendship, never damaged by dubious disagreements. For my part, well, they have been the years of the development of Che's image.
Now Evocación. Mi vida al lado del Che (Evocation. My Life with Che), the one-of-a-kind book by Aleida March, Che's wife and sentimental companion during his years in Cuba, the definitive and defining ones. She is the only one who could watch over the presence of those traits from his private life and testify to them now, from the distance of more than 40 years on, in her simple prose, like that of someone in an informal conversation. Just as they must have been recounted to her children, who had no better bridge to Che than Aleida, their mother. Now we have had the good fortune to have access to that testimonial, to take a look at these realities that cannot be grasped except in this manner, that of the testimony of his wife and the mother of his children. A complementary manner that is a must for those of us who want to "know" Che completely. To know him through and through, to the very fibers of his heart; to know him at that level of human being where so many small, everyday realities are decided, like those of social and visible importance, a level where errors and virtues, positive aspects and not so positive ones emerge, are decided and begin to be discerned.
All roads now merge for me in the comment by John Paul II quoted at the beginning of this reflection. Almost everything about Che should be contemplated in the light of his consistent and radical actions in defense of the poor; of his passion for what we used to call "social justice." So consistent and radical was his passion, so razor-sharp, that it led him to make the offering of his own life. And when an upright man goes to those extremes, the disagreements with him acquire another tone, because such a man deserves not only respect, but deep admiration.
Havana, May 27, 2008 (Taken from the website Che80)
Showing posts with label Che. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Che. Show all posts
Saturday, June 14, 2008
CHE IN 1959 BY GABRIEL MOLINA
Havana. June 13, 2008
CHE IN 1959
BY GABRIEL MOLINA
• THE Cuban Revolution has always been forced to defend itself from the hostility of the U.S. government, as far back as the days of the Sierra Maestra.
As early as March of '59, just three months after the triumph of the armed struggle, then-Vice President Richard Nixon left a meeting he had held with Fidel in Washington and convinced President Eisenhower that action had to be taken to overthrow him.
That same year, the United States persuaded the British government to cancel a sale of Hunter fighter planes to Cuba. In the opinion of the U.S. authorities, those aircraft would have posed a problem for the invasion it was preparing, and which was carried out in April 1961 in the Bay of Pigs. With the same goal, the French ship La Coubre was blown up in February 1960 as munitions were being unloaded on Havana's docks. Dozens of Cubans and French citizens were killed in that terrorist act, attributed in Cuba to the CIA. Simultaneously, Washington prevented a consortium of Western European banks from approving a loan to Cuba of $100 million.
Sometimes the revolutionary government adopted the tactic of retaliating to economic blows. On June 6, when the Standard Oil, Texaco and Royal Dutch Shell oil companies refused, under U.S. government orders, to refine oil that Cuba had bought from the Soviet Union, the Cuban government did not hesitate to take over the refineries less than one month later. The sparring continued with the boycott that the Eisenhower administration promoted among oil exporters and shipping companies.
Cuba responded by nationalizing its refineries on August 6.
Che Guevara participated in all of those events and the corresponding decisions, not just as a combatant and politician, but as an economist, or better said, a strategist of the economy together with Fidel, a function for which he is not so well known.
Beginning with Che's first official civilian responsibility as director of industries for the Institute of Agrarian Reform, and also as president of the National Bank as of November of '60, and minister of industries as of 1962, it was his duty to act principally in the economy, to implement the line of diversification that the Revolution had charted both in production and international trade. An exceptional witness to the trajectory of Commander Guevara is Hector Rodríguez Llompart, who met Che in the La Cabaña fortress — where Commander Guevara was the military chief — in early 1959. Llompart was the municipal commissioner of Regla, and visited him together with Captain Miguel Angel Duque de Estrada, who was in charge of the Revolutionary Courts. Here are some of his valuable memories and assessments.
How do you remember those first days of the aggression?
--Aggressions of all types by the U.S. government against Cuba began very early on.
The armed aggression against the island's production centers, terrorist attacks and armed threats were answered by the Revolution by the improved organization of its military and security apparatuses, acquiring weapons, and creating the National Revolutionary Militias, Committees for Defense of the Revolution, etc.
The support and determination of our people to fight for victory under the slogan of 'Homeland or Death' made the political trenches impregnable.
The plans for economic aggression were more surreptitious, but just as dangerous
How did Che participate in the fight against those plans?
—The almost total dependence on the U.S. market and our economic ties of 50-plus years with the former colonial power made the situation of our open economy even more complicated.
It was essential to find other markets for the sale of our products, as well as for imported goods.
In late 1959, a Soviet exposition was set to take place in Mexico, and the Soviet delegation was being led by then-Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan.
At that time, I was an official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it was precisely Commander Guevara who told me that I should go to Mexico to officially invite Mikoyan to bring the Soviet exposition to Havana, and for him to personally lead, if possible, the Soviet mission.
As one personal anecdote, I remember how the newspapers announced Che's visit; the day I arrived in Mexico, there were many reporters and photographers at the airport. The newspaper El Universal reported the news that day under the headline: "They were expecting a bearded one, and a smooth-cheeked one arrived."
After a number of setbacks related to an ecclesiastical congress that was taking place in Cuba at the time, the visit was proposed, and finally happened in February 1960.
The Cuban delegation led by Commander Guevara and the Soviet one held a number of talks about the need to place our sugar sales in the USSR [market], in the face of the imminent suspension of purchases by the United States.
A trade agreement and another on credit were finally signed on February 13, 1960 by the Commander-in-Chief [Fidel Castro] and Anastas Mikoyan.
At that time, the USSR promised to buy 5 million tons of Cuban unrefined sugar over five years, and granted us a credit of $100 million, to be repaid over 12 years with 2.5% interest.
At the UN Conference on Trade and Development on March 25, 1964, speaking in the name of our government, Commander Guevara summed up that first period as follows: "Subsequently, this aggression was characterized by measures aimed at paralyzing the Cuban economy. The idea was to deprive Cuba, in mid-1960, of the fuel it needed for the operation of its industries, transportation and electric power plants. Under pressure from the State Department, independent U.S. oil companies refused to sell oil to Cuba or to make their tanker ships available for its transport. Shortly afterward, an attempt was made to deprive the island of the necessary hard currency for foreign trade. On July 6, 1960, then-President Eisenhower cut Cuba's sugar quota to the United States to 700,000 tons, totally eliminating that quota on March 31, 1961, a few days after the announced Alliance for Progress and days before the Bay of Pigs invasion. There was an attempt to shut down Cuba's industry, by depriving it of raw materials and spare parts for its machines and, to that end, on October 19, 1960, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a resolution prohibiting the shipment of numerous products to our island. That ban on trade with Cuba became greater, until on February 3, 1962, then-President Kennedy declared a complete embargo on U.S. trade with Cuba."
Having failed in all of its aggression, the United States moved to implement an economic blockade against our country, aimed at preventing other countries from trading with us. First of all, on January 24, 1962, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it was prohibiting entry into the United States of any product made, wholly or in part, with Cuban products, even if they were manufactured in another country. In another step signifying the establishment of a virtual economic blockade, on February 6, 1963, the White House issued a press release announcing that merchandise bought with U.S. government money would not be loaded on to ships with foreign flags that had engaged in trade with Cuba after January 1st of that year. That was how the blacklist began, which is now applied to more than 150 ships from countries who did not bow down to the illegal U.S. blockade. And in another step, to hinder trade with Cuba, on July 8, 1963, the U.S. Treasury Department froze all Cuban assets in U.S. territory and prohibited all transfers of money to and from Cuba, as well as any other transaction in dollars via third countries.
What were the objectives of that tour?
—The decision to deprive us of fuel, suspend purchases of Cuban sugar and other economic aggression had already materialized by October 1960, when, as deputy secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I received a telephone call from Jaime Barrios, who worked with Che, informing me that in the coming days I should join a delegation that would be led by Che and would visit all of the socialist countries. At that time, Che was already talking to us quite a lot about the need to build relations with those countries.
Later, I would learn more details about our mission; the primary objective of diversifying our trade by placing most of our sugar production in those markets and replacing the majority of our imports with products from those places.
Once in the USSR, an emergency meeting took place in Moscow that included almost all of the foreign ministers of the socialist countries. In the meeting, Commander Guevara explained the serious situation facing the Cuban Revolution given the imperialist aggression, and as the main theme, the need to place four million tons of sugar in those markets, at a price of four cents per pound. This price was higher than the rate on the New York Stock Exchange at the time.
He also said it was necessary for Cuba to buy its essential products from those countries.
You should remember that at the time, Cuba did not yet have a Ministry of Foreign Trade, and we had very little information, and even less experience, in that area. All we had were solid political arguments and a letter signed by our prime minister, Commander Fidel Castro, which had the abovementioned request, and its bearer was Commander Guevara.
What were the agreements reached?
—As a result of those negotiations, the USSR promised to buy 2.7 million tons of sugar; China, one million tons; and the other socialist countries, 300,000 tons.
In addition, Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia bought symbolic quantities as an expression of support and solidarity with the socialist countries.
In Moscow, a multilateral agreement on payments was also signed.
With the goal of reaching trade agreements that included lists of the products to be bought and sold, payment agreements and credit agreements, the delegation led by Che also visited Czechoslovakia, China, Korea and the Federal Republic of Germany.
During his stay in China, and to save time, Che decided that he would visit the Democratic Republic of Korea, and had me lead a small group to Vietnam and Mongolia, countries with which we also established diplomatic relations at the time.
At the end of his stay in Berlin, Che had to return to Cuba, informing us that he would make a short stop in Budapest and that the delegation I was leading from then on should travel to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania.
Was there already talk of the need to change Cuba's trade structure?
—After arriving in Cuba, Commander Guevara appeared on television on January 6, 1961, to report on the signing of the agreements with the socialist countries:
"It was an extremely difficult task, a difficult task, because we have had to change the structure of our trade in just a few months. From the end of 1959, exactly one year ago, Cuba has passed from being a country with a totally colonial structure, with domestic and foreign trade systems completely dominated by the large import companies dependent on monopoly capital, to being — in 10 months, as of October, when the cycle definitively ends — a country where the state holds a complete monopoly over foreign trade, and also a large part of domestic trade."
He also referred to additional difficulties that we were facing, given that in those countries, the decimal metric system was used, while we continued to use the colonial practice of weighing in pounds and measuring in yards, with different systems for measuring pressure or a simple pipe fitting.
Electrical equipment in Cuba uses 60 cycles, while in the socialist countries, it was 50 cycles per second.
In short, we were facing all types of difficulties, but with the determination to overcome them and triumph over them in face of the dilemma created for us by the imperialist aggression.
Interesting anecdotes emerged out of these initial experiences.
For example, in China, when evaluating the list of products to be traded, there was a difference of $3 million favoring the Chinese side.
Before signing the final protocol, the Chinese prime minister at the time, Chou En-lai, told Che that China should not appear to be receiving more in products than what it was exporting to Cuba.
So it was decided to have a line of $3 million in arts and crafts exports, given that at the time, we could not find any other products that met our needs.
It was out of that protocol contingent of Chinese arts and crafts that lots of stories circulated in Havana about the large volume of Chinese walking sticks and umbrellas being sold in our stores.
Actually, the Chinese sent us valuable craftwork that I am sure exceeded the value previously mentioned.
I always believed that neither they nor we really valued those wonderful things.
On the contrary, certain foreigners who were living in Cuba temporarily did take advantage of the situation, enriching themselves through the illegal sale of those art treasures.
Another source of anecdotes and jokes was the snow removers. I think that these actually had a basis in truth, in machines that were the same or similar and were purchased to be tried out in our mining industry.
I will never forget the look of amazement on the face of the Soviet translator who, in reading the list of things we needed, did not know what to say when a typing error led him to read the need for thousands of "monkey lips" (bembas de mono) instead of "hand pumps" (bombas de mano).
We joked amongst ourselves about the decision by Commander Guevara to buy all the canned meat we could, and also all the machine tools that we could.
A few months later, we would realize how correct those decisions were, when, mobilized to occupy trenches or as a volunteer in cutting sugar cane, I thought the Russian meat tasted glorious, after having made so many faces when we first tried the samples they had given us.
We had the same internal satisfaction of knowing that the problem created by the blockade of a shortage of spare parts could be solved through the machine tools we had bought, which a comrade on the delegation had commented on by going so far as to say that on the next King's Day, we would have to do propaganda among the country's parents so they would give each child the present of a machine tool.
Personally, I have unforgettable memories of those days together with a man as peerless as Che.
I had the opportunity to meet prominent individuals like Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai, Nikita Krushchev, Walter Ulbricht, Pham Van Dong and other outstanding leaders of the socialist camp.
But it is with special affection and admiration that I remember one agreeable and helpful young woman who helped us as a German translator in the FRG, Tamara Bunke Bider, who years later would go down in history as Tania the guerrilla fighter.
On February 23, 1961, the Ministry of Foreign Trade was created, with Alberto Mora appointed as its minister.
What problems were created by those changes in foreign trade, and what role in did Commander Guevara play in resolving them?
— Some time after returning from the trip to the socialist countries, I was appointed deputy minister of foreign trade.
During those early years of organizing and readapting our foreign trade, and despite having multiple responsibilities, Commander Guevara played an exceptional role in attending to and developing it.
During those years, Che referred publicly to foreign trade activity, sometimes to refute those who, like the [newspaper] Diario de la Marina, maliciously criticized the first agreements with the Soviet Union. He did that during a talk he gave at the University of Havana on March 2, 1960, and days later, on March 20, 1960, as part of the inaugural lecture of the TV program "The People's University."
He also referred to the main difficulties we were facing at the time in taking on these tasks, such as during the speech he gave at a planning seminar in Algeria on July 13, 1963, where he said:
"Our foreign trade had changed completely in location. From 75% with the United States, it went to 75-80% with the socialist countries. A beneficial change for us in every respect, political and social, but in the economic respect, it required a large amount of organization.
Hundreds of specialized importers used to make their requests to the United States by telephone, and the next day they would arrive by ferry, direct from Miami to Havana. There were no warehouses or foresight of any kind.
That whole apparatus, without those technicians, enemies of the government, had to be established in what was first the Foreign Trade Bank of Cuba and later the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and centralize all of these purchases there with inexperienced people, to do them now, not one day away by telephone, but two months away, in long talks. And at the same time, raw materials that had a different name. And even more: if you all go today to a factory in this country and want to know what kind of steel is used for a given spare part, you will find that it has a number in a catalog, the SKF-27, for example. The SKF-27 in that company's sales catalog corresponds to a particular component; how could that be requested in the socialist countries? We had to do analyses of steel, sometimes machine fabricate one or two particular parts. Almost impossible. We had to import the machines here in Cuba, with a shortage of highly-qualified technicians."
Those were Cuba's everyday problems — and still are.
Was he pleased with the course of those trade relations?
— Che foresaw and warned of the difficulties and obstacles that, in our own experience of trade relations with certain socialist countries, led to the latter following capitalist patterns in the conduct of their relations with underdeveloped countries.
So, in a speech he gave in Algiers on February 24, 1965, at the second Afro-Asian Economic Solidarity Seminar, he said:
"Socialism cannot exist unless there is a change in people's consciousness, creating a new, fraternal attitude toward humanity, both individually, within the society in which socialism is being or has been built, and in relation to the world, with respect to all of the nations that suffer imperialist oppression." •
1. Jaime Barrios, a Chilean, was killed on September 11, 1973 at La Moneda Palace.
CHE IN 1959
• From 1959, the heroic guerrilla became one of the central leaders of the revolutionary process as a result of his proven determination, versatility and abilities and because of the dynamic of the tremendous events resulting from the aggression against Cuba • Héctor Rodríguez Lompart recalls Fidel Castro's strategy for combating the blockade that is now more than 45 years old, and the role played by Che, who would have been 80 years old on June 14
BY GABRIEL MOLINA
• THE Cuban Revolution has always been forced to defend itself from the hostility of the U.S. government, as far back as the days of the Sierra Maestra.
As early as March of '59, just three months after the triumph of the armed struggle, then-Vice President Richard Nixon left a meeting he had held with Fidel in Washington and convinced President Eisenhower that action had to be taken to overthrow him.
That same year, the United States persuaded the British government to cancel a sale of Hunter fighter planes to Cuba. In the opinion of the U.S. authorities, those aircraft would have posed a problem for the invasion it was preparing, and which was carried out in April 1961 in the Bay of Pigs. With the same goal, the French ship La Coubre was blown up in February 1960 as munitions were being unloaded on Havana's docks. Dozens of Cubans and French citizens were killed in that terrorist act, attributed in Cuba to the CIA. Simultaneously, Washington prevented a consortium of Western European banks from approving a loan to Cuba of $100 million.
Sometimes the revolutionary government adopted the tactic of retaliating to economic blows. On June 6, when the Standard Oil, Texaco and Royal Dutch Shell oil companies refused, under U.S. government orders, to refine oil that Cuba had bought from the Soviet Union, the Cuban government did not hesitate to take over the refineries less than one month later. The sparring continued with the boycott that the Eisenhower administration promoted among oil exporters and shipping companies.
Cuba responded by nationalizing its refineries on August 6.
Che Guevara participated in all of those events and the corresponding decisions, not just as a combatant and politician, but as an economist, or better said, a strategist of the economy together with Fidel, a function for which he is not so well known.
Beginning with Che's first official civilian responsibility as director of industries for the Institute of Agrarian Reform, and also as president of the National Bank as of November of '60, and minister of industries as of 1962, it was his duty to act principally in the economy, to implement the line of diversification that the Revolution had charted both in production and international trade. An exceptional witness to the trajectory of Commander Guevara is Hector Rodríguez Llompart, who met Che in the La Cabaña fortress — where Commander Guevara was the military chief — in early 1959. Llompart was the municipal commissioner of Regla, and visited him together with Captain Miguel Angel Duque de Estrada, who was in charge of the Revolutionary Courts. Here are some of his valuable memories and assessments.
How do you remember those first days of the aggression?
--Aggressions of all types by the U.S. government against Cuba began very early on.
The armed aggression against the island's production centers, terrorist attacks and armed threats were answered by the Revolution by the improved organization of its military and security apparatuses, acquiring weapons, and creating the National Revolutionary Militias, Committees for Defense of the Revolution, etc.
The support and determination of our people to fight for victory under the slogan of 'Homeland or Death' made the political trenches impregnable.
The plans for economic aggression were more surreptitious, but just as dangerous
How did Che participate in the fight against those plans?
—The almost total dependence on the U.S. market and our economic ties of 50-plus years with the former colonial power made the situation of our open economy even more complicated.
It was essential to find other markets for the sale of our products, as well as for imported goods.
In late 1959, a Soviet exposition was set to take place in Mexico, and the Soviet delegation was being led by then-Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan.
At that time, I was an official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it was precisely Commander Guevara who told me that I should go to Mexico to officially invite Mikoyan to bring the Soviet exposition to Havana, and for him to personally lead, if possible, the Soviet mission.
As one personal anecdote, I remember how the newspapers announced Che's visit; the day I arrived in Mexico, there were many reporters and photographers at the airport. The newspaper El Universal reported the news that day under the headline: "They were expecting a bearded one, and a smooth-cheeked one arrived."
After a number of setbacks related to an ecclesiastical congress that was taking place in Cuba at the time, the visit was proposed, and finally happened in February 1960.
The Cuban delegation led by Commander Guevara and the Soviet one held a number of talks about the need to place our sugar sales in the USSR [market], in the face of the imminent suspension of purchases by the United States.
A trade agreement and another on credit were finally signed on February 13, 1960 by the Commander-in-Chief [Fidel Castro] and Anastas Mikoyan.
At that time, the USSR promised to buy 5 million tons of Cuban unrefined sugar over five years, and granted us a credit of $100 million, to be repaid over 12 years with 2.5% interest.
At the UN Conference on Trade and Development on March 25, 1964, speaking in the name of our government, Commander Guevara summed up that first period as follows: "Subsequently, this aggression was characterized by measures aimed at paralyzing the Cuban economy. The idea was to deprive Cuba, in mid-1960, of the fuel it needed for the operation of its industries, transportation and electric power plants. Under pressure from the State Department, independent U.S. oil companies refused to sell oil to Cuba or to make their tanker ships available for its transport. Shortly afterward, an attempt was made to deprive the island of the necessary hard currency for foreign trade. On July 6, 1960, then-President Eisenhower cut Cuba's sugar quota to the United States to 700,000 tons, totally eliminating that quota on March 31, 1961, a few days after the announced Alliance for Progress and days before the Bay of Pigs invasion. There was an attempt to shut down Cuba's industry, by depriving it of raw materials and spare parts for its machines and, to that end, on October 19, 1960, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a resolution prohibiting the shipment of numerous products to our island. That ban on trade with Cuba became greater, until on February 3, 1962, then-President Kennedy declared a complete embargo on U.S. trade with Cuba."
Having failed in all of its aggression, the United States moved to implement an economic blockade against our country, aimed at preventing other countries from trading with us. First of all, on January 24, 1962, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it was prohibiting entry into the United States of any product made, wholly or in part, with Cuban products, even if they were manufactured in another country. In another step signifying the establishment of a virtual economic blockade, on February 6, 1963, the White House issued a press release announcing that merchandise bought with U.S. government money would not be loaded on to ships with foreign flags that had engaged in trade with Cuba after January 1st of that year. That was how the blacklist began, which is now applied to more than 150 ships from countries who did not bow down to the illegal U.S. blockade. And in another step, to hinder trade with Cuba, on July 8, 1963, the U.S. Treasury Department froze all Cuban assets in U.S. territory and prohibited all transfers of money to and from Cuba, as well as any other transaction in dollars via third countries.
What were the objectives of that tour?
—The decision to deprive us of fuel, suspend purchases of Cuban sugar and other economic aggression had already materialized by October 1960, when, as deputy secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I received a telephone call from Jaime Barrios, who worked with Che, informing me that in the coming days I should join a delegation that would be led by Che and would visit all of the socialist countries. At that time, Che was already talking to us quite a lot about the need to build relations with those countries.
Later, I would learn more details about our mission; the primary objective of diversifying our trade by placing most of our sugar production in those markets and replacing the majority of our imports with products from those places.
Once in the USSR, an emergency meeting took place in Moscow that included almost all of the foreign ministers of the socialist countries. In the meeting, Commander Guevara explained the serious situation facing the Cuban Revolution given the imperialist aggression, and as the main theme, the need to place four million tons of sugar in those markets, at a price of four cents per pound. This price was higher than the rate on the New York Stock Exchange at the time.
He also said it was necessary for Cuba to buy its essential products from those countries.
You should remember that at the time, Cuba did not yet have a Ministry of Foreign Trade, and we had very little information, and even less experience, in that area. All we had were solid political arguments and a letter signed by our prime minister, Commander Fidel Castro, which had the abovementioned request, and its bearer was Commander Guevara.
What were the agreements reached?
—As a result of those negotiations, the USSR promised to buy 2.7 million tons of sugar; China, one million tons; and the other socialist countries, 300,000 tons.
In addition, Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia bought symbolic quantities as an expression of support and solidarity with the socialist countries.
In Moscow, a multilateral agreement on payments was also signed.
With the goal of reaching trade agreements that included lists of the products to be bought and sold, payment agreements and credit agreements, the delegation led by Che also visited Czechoslovakia, China, Korea and the Federal Republic of Germany.
During his stay in China, and to save time, Che decided that he would visit the Democratic Republic of Korea, and had me lead a small group to Vietnam and Mongolia, countries with which we also established diplomatic relations at the time.
At the end of his stay in Berlin, Che had to return to Cuba, informing us that he would make a short stop in Budapest and that the delegation I was leading from then on should travel to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania.
Was there already talk of the need to change Cuba's trade structure?
—After arriving in Cuba, Commander Guevara appeared on television on January 6, 1961, to report on the signing of the agreements with the socialist countries:
"It was an extremely difficult task, a difficult task, because we have had to change the structure of our trade in just a few months. From the end of 1959, exactly one year ago, Cuba has passed from being a country with a totally colonial structure, with domestic and foreign trade systems completely dominated by the large import companies dependent on monopoly capital, to being — in 10 months, as of October, when the cycle definitively ends — a country where the state holds a complete monopoly over foreign trade, and also a large part of domestic trade."
He also referred to additional difficulties that we were facing, given that in those countries, the decimal metric system was used, while we continued to use the colonial practice of weighing in pounds and measuring in yards, with different systems for measuring pressure or a simple pipe fitting.
Electrical equipment in Cuba uses 60 cycles, while in the socialist countries, it was 50 cycles per second.
In short, we were facing all types of difficulties, but with the determination to overcome them and triumph over them in face of the dilemma created for us by the imperialist aggression.
Interesting anecdotes emerged out of these initial experiences.
For example, in China, when evaluating the list of products to be traded, there was a difference of $3 million favoring the Chinese side.
Before signing the final protocol, the Chinese prime minister at the time, Chou En-lai, told Che that China should not appear to be receiving more in products than what it was exporting to Cuba.
So it was decided to have a line of $3 million in arts and crafts exports, given that at the time, we could not find any other products that met our needs.
It was out of that protocol contingent of Chinese arts and crafts that lots of stories circulated in Havana about the large volume of Chinese walking sticks and umbrellas being sold in our stores.
Actually, the Chinese sent us valuable craftwork that I am sure exceeded the value previously mentioned.
I always believed that neither they nor we really valued those wonderful things.
On the contrary, certain foreigners who were living in Cuba temporarily did take advantage of the situation, enriching themselves through the illegal sale of those art treasures.
Another source of anecdotes and jokes was the snow removers. I think that these actually had a basis in truth, in machines that were the same or similar and were purchased to be tried out in our mining industry.
I will never forget the look of amazement on the face of the Soviet translator who, in reading the list of things we needed, did not know what to say when a typing error led him to read the need for thousands of "monkey lips" (bembas de mono) instead of "hand pumps" (bombas de mano).
We joked amongst ourselves about the decision by Commander Guevara to buy all the canned meat we could, and also all the machine tools that we could.
A few months later, we would realize how correct those decisions were, when, mobilized to occupy trenches or as a volunteer in cutting sugar cane, I thought the Russian meat tasted glorious, after having made so many faces when we first tried the samples they had given us.
We had the same internal satisfaction of knowing that the problem created by the blockade of a shortage of spare parts could be solved through the machine tools we had bought, which a comrade on the delegation had commented on by going so far as to say that on the next King's Day, we would have to do propaganda among the country's parents so they would give each child the present of a machine tool.
Personally, I have unforgettable memories of those days together with a man as peerless as Che.
I had the opportunity to meet prominent individuals like Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai, Nikita Krushchev, Walter Ulbricht, Pham Van Dong and other outstanding leaders of the socialist camp.
But it is with special affection and admiration that I remember one agreeable and helpful young woman who helped us as a German translator in the FRG, Tamara Bunke Bider, who years later would go down in history as Tania the guerrilla fighter.
On February 23, 1961, the Ministry of Foreign Trade was created, with Alberto Mora appointed as its minister.
What problems were created by those changes in foreign trade, and what role in did Commander Guevara play in resolving them?
— Some time after returning from the trip to the socialist countries, I was appointed deputy minister of foreign trade.
During those early years of organizing and readapting our foreign trade, and despite having multiple responsibilities, Commander Guevara played an exceptional role in attending to and developing it.
During those years, Che referred publicly to foreign trade activity, sometimes to refute those who, like the [newspaper] Diario de la Marina, maliciously criticized the first agreements with the Soviet Union. He did that during a talk he gave at the University of Havana on March 2, 1960, and days later, on March 20, 1960, as part of the inaugural lecture of the TV program "The People's University."
He also referred to the main difficulties we were facing at the time in taking on these tasks, such as during the speech he gave at a planning seminar in Algeria on July 13, 1963, where he said:
"Our foreign trade had changed completely in location. From 75% with the United States, it went to 75-80% with the socialist countries. A beneficial change for us in every respect, political and social, but in the economic respect, it required a large amount of organization.
Hundreds of specialized importers used to make their requests to the United States by telephone, and the next day they would arrive by ferry, direct from Miami to Havana. There were no warehouses or foresight of any kind.
That whole apparatus, without those technicians, enemies of the government, had to be established in what was first the Foreign Trade Bank of Cuba and later the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and centralize all of these purchases there with inexperienced people, to do them now, not one day away by telephone, but two months away, in long talks. And at the same time, raw materials that had a different name. And even more: if you all go today to a factory in this country and want to know what kind of steel is used for a given spare part, you will find that it has a number in a catalog, the SKF-27, for example. The SKF-27 in that company's sales catalog corresponds to a particular component; how could that be requested in the socialist countries? We had to do analyses of steel, sometimes machine fabricate one or two particular parts. Almost impossible. We had to import the machines here in Cuba, with a shortage of highly-qualified technicians."
Those were Cuba's everyday problems — and still are.
Was he pleased with the course of those trade relations?
— Che foresaw and warned of the difficulties and obstacles that, in our own experience of trade relations with certain socialist countries, led to the latter following capitalist patterns in the conduct of their relations with underdeveloped countries.
So, in a speech he gave in Algiers on February 24, 1965, at the second Afro-Asian Economic Solidarity Seminar, he said:
"Socialism cannot exist unless there is a change in people's consciousness, creating a new, fraternal attitude toward humanity, both individually, within the society in which socialism is being or has been built, and in relation to the world, with respect to all of the nations that suffer imperialist oppression." •
1. Jaime Barrios, a Chilean, was killed on September 11, 1973 at La Moneda Palace.
A MEETING WITH CHE GUEVARA by K Gajendra Singh
Che Guevara ;"an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom"
–Nelson Mandela.
Che Guevara is "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age"
—Jean-Paul Sartre.
"The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels, the Spanish conquistadores and the Argentinean patriots. Evidently Che inherited some of the features of our restless ancestors. There was something in his nature which drew him to distant wanderings, dangerous adventures and new ideas. "
— Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Che's Father
1965 was a very eventful year in Algeria. Jammu and Kashmir leader Sheikh Abdullah , who had been released from prison in India ,under the pretext of seeing Algerian Revolutionary leader and President Ben Bella turned up in Algiers and met with Chinese Prime Minister Chou en Lai , also visiting Algeria .Soon after, President Ben Bella himself, residing at the Peoples Palace , just across my flat on Rue Franklin Roosevelt ,was overthrown in a peaceful coup d'etat by Houari Boumeddienne ,the military chief of the Algerian Liberation Army . Twice, preparatory meetings for the Second Afro Asian Summit failed to agree on an agenda or the date or even the venue.
But it is the 80th anniversary of Che Guevara's birth on 14 June and the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution which Che helped plan and execute with Fidel Castro , which brought back memories of the visit to Algeria of that legendry revolutionary icon of 1960s and beyond.
Having won its independence from France three years earlier after a bloody 8 year long guerilla war , in which a million Algerians out of eleven million population were sacrificed ,Algeria was then at the forefront of struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Its capital Algiers was a thriving hub for freedom movements and revolutionary groups from all over Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Every week there were seminars, meetings and summits for Arab, Afro-Asian and Third World solidarity and struggle. It was for one such seminar in February 1965 that Che Guevara himself , then Minister of Industry in the Cuban government turned up He was indisputably the dazzling star of the show. After the meeting people queued up to shake his hand and so did I , then posted as a young diplomat at Algiers . I said hello and perhaps added how are you. It was like getting an autograph of a celebrity.
With only a few years into the diplomatic service after an engineering degree from Banaras I was still reading up on history and international relations and was not fully cognizant of the Che Guevara phenomenon and his revolutionary past . But the man had a charismatic presence in green olive fatigues and black beret at a rakish angle. The very best of the Hollywood and Bollywood stars all rolled into one ; say our Ajit, Raj Kumar, Dharmendra ,Errol Flynn et al. Later when I recounted my meeting and shaking hands with Che, many students ,leftists and ladies would shake my hand to partake some of that revolutionary 'barkat' which might still be lingering in my fingers.
Later I learnt more about Che ( so nicknamed because of his constant use of Che - dear) , his full name being Ernesto Guevara de la Serna .Born in 1928 in a well educated middle class Argentine family , he was the eldest of five siblings . He played excellent chess as a child and was an aggressive rugby player. During adolescence and later he remained passionate about poetry, especially that of Neruda, Keats , Machado, Lorea, Mistral ,Vallejo and Whitman ,He could also recite Kipling and Hernandez from memory. A home library of more than 3,000 books, allowed him to be an enthusiastic and eclectic reader of philosophers and poets , even writings of Jawahar Lal Nehru (with whom Che had lunch during the visit to New Delhi ), apart from Marxist and existentialist writers.
He had a brilliant medical academic career and was an exceptional athlete in spite of asthma. But his motorcycle trips across Latin America , where he encountered American imperialism at first hand changed his vision of the world. A bloody revolution was necessary to throw out capitalism and imperialism.
"After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty , hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people." --- Che Guevara in 1960.
After finishing his medical studies , he reached Guatemala in December 1953, where President Jacob Arbenz Guzman heading a democratically elected government, through land reforms and other measures, was attempting to improve the condition of the peasants. Che wanted to settle down in Guatemala ,but for the overthrow of the Arbenz government by Washington which confirmed Guevara's view that USA as an imperialist power would oppose and attempt to destroy any regime that sought to redress the socio-economic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing countries. This strengthened his conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such a condition.
Che then shifted to Mexico city in September 1954, and renewed his friendship with the Cuban exiles he had known in Guatemala. In June 1955, he met with Raul Castro and later his older brother, Fidel Castro . the revolutionary leader who was planning to overthrow the dictatorship of US backed Fulgencio Batista in what became hallowed as the Cuban Revolution. Guevara recognized at once that Castro was the cause for which he had been searching for. He joined Castro and was promoted as Commander in Castro's 26 July Movement, playing a pivotal role in the successful guerrilla campaign to overthrow the Batista . After Castro's army rolled victoriously into Havana the revolutionary government in February, 1969 proclaimed Guevara "a Cuban citizen by birth" in recognition of his role in the triumph.
After the revolution Che served in many prominent governmental positions, including as president of the national bank, minister of industry, and "supreme prosecutor" over the revolutionary tribunals and executions of suspected war criminals from the previous regime. He also went traversing around the globe to meet with an array of world leaders to explain and promote the Cuban socialism .Che was a prolific writer and diarist. One of his most prominent published works includes a manual on the theory and practice of guerilla warfare.
Time Magazine, which described Che Guevara as one of the hundred most influential persons of the 20th century wrote that ; "Che convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience. When grenades were needed, Che set up a factory to make them. When bread was wanted, Che set up ovens to bake it. When new recruits needed to learn tactics and discipline, Che taught them. When a school was needed to teach peasants to read and write, Che organized it."
The Cuban revolution , still survives in spite of American endevours to undermine it and many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro himself .Cuba remains a beacon and has inspired revolutionaries and leftist regimes around the world specially in Latin America. More so after the collapse of the Soviet Union and ongoing transformation of China into a bourgeoisie state. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is a most striking example. Many other independent leaders are being elected in Latin America , who are following the pro-people policies of Chavez and trying to extricate their countries from the grip of US and other multinationals .
Che had come to Algeria after visiting many important Afro-Asian nations like China, India, Yugoslavia, Egypt .This visit turned out to be his last public appearance on the international stage. In a speech at the economic seminar on the importance of Afro-Asian solidarity ,he specified the moral duty of the socialist countries and accused them of tacit complicity with the exploiting Western countries. He proceeded to outline a number of measures which he said the communist-bloc countries must implement in order to accomplish the defeat of imperialism.
Che appeared closer to Mao's Chinese ideology. It was an implicit criticism of the Soviet Union , Cuba's main support and bulwark against implacable US hostility , which continues to this day . Ideological differences with Castro on USSR 's policies brought some coolness in relations between Castro and Guevara. After Algiers , Che did return to Cuba but left soon after and dropped out of public life and then vanished altogether.
There were many media reports of his appearance with USA's CIA very much on his trail and keenly interested in his activities .It appears that he first helped Patrice Lumumba's cause in Congo , but did not achieve much success. In late 1966 he went over to Bolivia to set up guerrilla training groups to help dissidents to the regime. US was keeping a watch on his movements but Che was unaware that Washington had sent CIA and other operatives , including one Felix Rodriguez into Bolivia to aid the government forces which had been trained, advised, and supplied by US Army Special Forces trained in jungle warfare .
In October, 1967, Che's group was attacked by the Bolivian army. Guevara, who was wounded in the attack, was captured , but he died defiantly. A panicky Bolivian regime , afraid of reaction around the world if he were tried and US demands ,got him executed . Moments before his execution Che was asked if he was thinking of his own immortality. "No," he replied, "I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution." A jittery and shaking Bolivian soldier chosen to kill him , had trouble pulling the trigger. Che asked him to steady himself and take a clean aim. He was only 40 years old . Few revolutionaries like Mao and Fidel live to grow old. And Mao's China is far from a revolutionary state now. More of a statues quo regime with wannabe imperialistic ambitions.
In July ,1997 , Che Guevara's remains though not exhumed were definitely identified by two experts who were "100 percent sure" ,were discovered in Vallegrande in Bolivia . A 19 July ceremony in Havana, attended by Fidel Castro and other Cuban officials, marked the return of Che's remains to Cuba and in an 17 October ,1997 ceremony attended by Castro and thousands of Cubans, Che Guevara's were reburied in Santa Clara, Cuba
Che's unflinching will, self sacrifice and idealism have given him a saint like halo and reverence among his followers around the world. His theories and treatises on guerilla warfare still remain a beacon for the young and the revolutionary as they were for the 1968 students uprising in Paris and elsewhere , for example , among the leftist Marxist students of Turkey in early 1970s, who also studied the Naxabari movement and lapped up theories of Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal from Indian Bengal. But there was also Geetanjali and Geeta along with Marxist literature found with leftist students in Ankara. Soon after 9/11, many Muslim radicals in the Arab world wrongly tried to compare Osama ben Laden with Che.
Che's memories now live on in photos, music, theater pieces, movies, poems, novels, sculptures and scholarly texts. To coincide with his 80th birthday celebrations , a collection of vintage Che Guevara prints are on display in Austria, including the iconic 1960 Alberto Korda portrait of him in a beret. Exhibitions of his photographs including of his visit to India in 1960s is being held in New Delhi .A new statue has been unveiled in his native Argentina. The larger-than-life "Monument to Che" statue weighs three tons and towers 13 feet high, topped off with the revolutionary's famed starred beret. Guevara had left the city in 1953 as a young doctor embarking on a trip throughout Latin America, a journey depicted in the 2004 movie "Motorcycle Diaries."
But the universal consumer society today exploits even Che's fame and name to sell designer clothes, beer, films and books.
The "Brand Equity" writers in USA who claimed " End of History " aka triumphalism of US capitalism have said much and written numerous volumes about the failure of socialism in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe but little about the failure of capitalism for two thirds of humanity, the four billion people that live below the poverty line. Nikolai Ceausescu remains the most important leader in Romania's history according to a recent poll. Russian leader Vladimir Putin , whom US President George Bush once asked to implement democracy as in Iraq ( some sick joke) consistently gets over 70% in popularity poll , while Bush's popularity is at an all time low of any US president ,touching a low 30%.
The result of globalization ,policies of IMF and WTO with consequent increased income inequalities in USA and elsewhere and sliding of the capitalist system towards failure, will only add further misery to poverty ridden masses around the world . The crash of expectations built on rabid and unabashed consumerism and financial speculations based on fiat currency created liquidity leading to high oil prices and scarce and expensive food is already leading to strikes over energy price increase and riots over food shortages around the world..
The era immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall would be remembered for the political , social and economic decline in human evolution and condition ;in regard to basic rights, equality, fraternity and well being. USA and UK are becoming police states with constant surveillance and spying on its own citizens and abridgment of civil liberties .Corporate media and government controlled BBC churn out spins , half truths and blatant lies. And how to describe US spending on defence (against whom) which is as much as the rest of the world put together. Not to protect USA but to maintain unbridled hegemony as shown in its naked and illegal aggression on Iraq for its oil , followed by rampant and continued looting and destruction of that country .Over a million Iraqis have been killed , millions of children rendered orphans and 4 million Iraqis made refugees in a population of 25 million .US leaders had the obscenity to describe the March 2003 invasion as 'Operation Iraqi freedom" as part of a so called plan to 'spread democracy' in the Middle East . Now, daily ,Iran is being threatened with bombing ,even with nuclear weapons by Israel and USA. Where will this unbridled greed , capitalism and globalization would lead to?
But there is some hope. The fierce Iraqi resistance against US military machine now bogged down in a quagmire. Unmasking of aura of invincibility of Israel by Lebanese Hezbollah fighters. Defiance by Iran against US and 3 European powers. The fast changing scene in Latin America favouring pro-people governments and decline of US hegemony. Overthrow of the monarchy in Nepal and Maoist movements in many Indian states ruled by corrupt political elites.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies. Copy right with the author.
E-mail: Gajendrak@hotmail.com
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Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Che Guevara and The Economy of the New Human Being
With Raul Castro's recent call for structural changes in the Cuban economy, Che Guevara's earlier ideas on the economic incentives allows us to rethink Socialism of the 21st Century
By: Amaury E. del Valle
Most of the work of Che Guevara is still a mystery to study. His life is closely linked to intellectual work that, as he confessed in a letter in February 1964, can sometimes seem a little «obscure,» precisely because it was written mainly when «my watch read past midnight.»
However, to read it slowly is to find a great many reflections, some of them marked by the historical moment in which he lived, while others that are still incredibly valid. Many of his thoughts were ahead of the times that we have experienced over the last several years, such as the collapse of what he called the «Soviet model of socialism.»
In his writings and discussions, Che was most concerned with the economy, national and international policy, and liberation struggles.
Needed Pillars
Che’s economic thought is not an undecipherable riddle or a theoretical Minotaur impossible to defeat. Even in its unfinished nature it can be summarized, as he did in his essay El socialismo y el hombre (officially titled «Socialism and Man» in the 1960s). In a prophetic phrase that still remains as a challenge, he said «To build communism, we have to build a new (person) at the same time that we build the material base.»
One of the pillars of Che’s economic concepts was precisely the creation of a structure in which the most important element would be not only the satisfaction of the basic needs of people, but also their education, in order to make them aware of themselves as being the real owners and main beneficiaries of the means of production.
One of the essential moments in his thought was the controversy about the direction of the newly born socialist economy in Cuba, between 1963 and 1964. The argument emerged from issues that were merely national, and eventually became a debate over the appropriateness of the economic model implemented in the socialist countries at that time.
Regarding the matter, Che himself warned against «blind apologetics;» he criticized those who wanted to import experiences that were alien to Cuban reality, saying that «The law which supposedly governs the transition from socialism to communism is a mechanistic and conservative concept, an attempt to put Soviet reality in step with the theory, to put aside all analysis and ignore the harsh problems that would arise if a truly revolutionary course were taken.»
In his work «Neither Imitation Nor Copy: Che Guevara and the Pursuit of a New Socialism,» researcher Michael Löwy says that, contrary to the tendencies of copying the Soviet model that was in fashion in his time, the guerrilla commander believed that building socialism was «an heroic attempt to create something new, the pursuit —interrupted and unfinished— of a different paradigm for socialism, which in a many aspects was radically opposed to the ‘really existing’ bureaucratic caricature.»
Other Che specialists think similarly to this, especially regarding the debate on Cuban economy between 1963 and 1964, when they acknowledge that at the time there were evident tensions and contradictions between the ideals of the Cuban Revolution and those of the leadership in the Soviet Union. The internationalist ideals of the socialist national liberation of the Cuban Revolution were opposed to the Soviet system and its ideology, which despite being mechanistic and subordinated to «building of socialism in one country,» was the strongest force operating and speaking on behalf of Marxism.»
It was not in vain that Che himself highlighted the «great boldness» of questioning not only the model of socialism implemented at the time, but also the role of the USSR itself in the international arena, which he thought many times behaved like an imperialistic superpower.
In a speech he made in Algeria in February, 1965, he said openly, alluding to the USSR, that «there won’t be socialism if there is not a change in conscience among peoples that leads to a attitude of solidarity; this must change both at the individual level and in the society in which socialism has been or is being built, and worldwide, because of all the peoples who are subjected to imperialist oppression.
Cuban economist Osvaldo Martinez referenced Che’s own words, when he said that it was «heresy» and «audacity» to refer to a plan to write a true Marxist political economy, one which was non-apologetic, but more like a «scream from the bottom of underdevelopment.»
There is not doubt that the objective of Che —and of Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries— was to establish a framework of thought characteristic of the Cuban Revolution, which was far from what was then understood as «Marxism-Leninism.»
What had been feed to Cuba and the rest of the world under that name were no more than professed «truths» that were held up as being eternal, when in fact they responded more to the concrete realities of the USSR —even distorting Marxist theory— than to truly creative and “ecumenical" thought about socialism, as Che called it in his reflections.
To Build the 21st Century
Aspects that most concerned Che in his reflections were the search for economic efficiency, the application of science and technology as the means of increasing production levels, and especially the use of the moral incentives as a complement and even a necessary support for people’s attitudes toward work.
In «Socialism and Man in Cuba» (http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/documents/chesocandman.htm), he referred directly to this idea when he affirmed that “The pipe dream that socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism (the commodity as the economic cell, profitability, individual material interest as a lever, etc.) can lead into a blind alley. And you wind up there after having travelled a long distance with many crossroads, and it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn. Meanwhile, the economic foundation that has been laid has done its work of undermining the development of consciousness. To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new (person).»
Equally, in a letter sent to Fidel before his departure to the Congo, he maintained that «communism is a phenomenon of conscience; you don't arrive there through a leap into the void, a change in the productive quality, or the simple clash between the productive forces and the productive relations. Communism is a phenomenon of conscience; it is necessary to develop that consciousness in people, where individual and collective education for communism is a constituent part of them. We cannot measure in terms of per capita income the possibility of entering the communist stage... »
However, Che did not have his back turned to reality; nor was he an incurable idealist, as some have wanted to paint him – trying to mystify his figure so as to minimize his thought.
A profound observer, constantly studying and an untiring traveller, he quickly concluded that socialism would be going down the wrong road if it attempted to compete with the overproduction of capitalism, precisely the basis upon which that entire system of exploitation is built.
«The communist model of production presupposes a considerable abundance of material goods, but not necessarily a strict comparison with capitalism,» he held, when asserting that instead of disproportionate production, «planning and economic efficiency» would be imposed. These were pillars of his theory in the field of economics.
«We have a great gap in our system: how to integrate the person into their work in such a way that is not necessary to use what we call material disincentives, how to make each worker feel the vital necessity to support their revolution and, at the same time, make work a pleasure... », wrote Che in that same letter to Fidel.
He himself questioned the situation about which he assured it was necessary to «thoroughly study.» He proposed in a meeting of at the Ministry of Industries «to fight with all our force so that moral incentives replace the material incentives to the degree possible and within the shortest time possible. This means we are establishing a relative process; we are not excluding material incentives, we are simply saying that we should fight for moral incentives to become, in the least possible time, the decisive factor in the performance of workers.»
However, he didn't assume a utopian position and reject the necessity of recognizing material rewards to those who work better than others. He maintained that «workers must be rewarded, but not with money based on the percentage they have exceeded the norm, but by their capacity to acquire a greater capacity. Let’s take the example of someone going to school ... and graduating with a higher qualification. Returning to the workplace with the new qualification would automatically translate into a wage increase – that is to say, a material incentive... »
A promoter of voluntary work, which characterized him as a true revolutionary, the economic thought of Che went into such specific details, given his position as the minister of Industry, that he ended up theoretically and practically involving himself in the determination of how wages would be determined in the socialist society in the making.
«How much is invested for the work of a soldier and how much for a teacher? How much for a minister and how much for a worker? Lenin, in«State and Revolution,» had an idea (Marxist) that rejected the comparison of officials' salaries and those of laborers, but I am not convinced that his reversal is correct,» questioned Che when criticizing the “Fundamentals of Political Economy” of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, then taken almost like a «Bible» for socialist construction.
He himself responded, analyzing the reality he saw in the Soviet Union and Cuba, that «the real essence of all of today difficulties is the false conception of the communist person, based on a long-term economic practice that tends to and will continue to tend to make people just a number in the production process through the lever of their material interest.» He also noted that «trying to raise productivity by individual rewards is falling even lower than capitalists.»
Educating the new person with a new approach to production was the principal thesis championed by Che, although it was not always well understood, or applied, neither in Cuba nor in the Soviet Union.
Foretelling the Soviet Collapse
Perhaps the importance of Che’s economic thought, in the light of current events and the challenges faced by Cuba, have not been weighed enough.
This is partly because many of his writings were not published until recently, and also because of the mystification of Che as a guerrilla commander and a man of action has often overshadowed his side as a philosopher and a Marxist economist – self-taught but well trained.
While in Prague, after leaving the Congo, Che wrote to Orlando Borrego, one of his closest collaborators. The said that he was thinking on «initiating a work on the manual of Political Economy from the Academy,» referring to the material from the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
These notes, which were unpublished only recently, as well as others he wrote down in the Bolivian jungle on philosophy, are some of the most illustrious of Che’s visions on socialism, and especially on the Soviet Union.
His worry came as a result of his visit to that country, a year and half earlier, in which he perceived some «dangerously capitalists arguments» in his exchanges with Soviet leaders and academics.
Fueled by the controversy about the Cuban economy in the construction of socialism —of which Che was a main actor in its first years— the idea of the thirst for profits and productive competition with capitalism being the driving force of development worried him greatly.
Argentinean academic Néstor Kohan said, «Guevara believed that in the transition to socialism the survival of the law of value had to be surpassed by socialist planning or... there would be a return to capitalism.»
Likewise, he criticised the siren songs of the praised Soviet manual of Political Economy that spoke of the «general crisis of capitalism,» a phrase about which he said «people must be careful...» «Crumbling» has a clear meaning in language; a fully grown man cannot undergo any more physiological changes, but he’s doesn’t agonize. The capitalist system has reached its total maturity under imperialism, yet it has not taken full advantage of its possibilities at the current moment and has great vitality. It is more precise to say «fully developed» or to say that it has reached the limits of its possibilities for development.
At the same time, Che was not convinced that the Soviets were knocking at the doors of communism, as they asserted; nor did he believe that setting economic goals to compete with capitalism was the ideal way of reaching that objective. As he said,«no one can set ‘bread and butter’ goals for reaching communism.»
This double characteristic of criticising capitalism while rejecting «sanctified» models was the largest contribution of his economic work, unfinished and based on notes, it was an effort «aimed at inviting people to think, to take Marxism with the seriousness this giant doctrine deserved.»
That is the reason why Che could formulate that warning thirty years prior that «The Soviet Union is returning to capitalism.» At the same time he set the foundations for the path to the socialism for its construction in the 21st century, which was intended to break with any narrow simplification of political economy. As he said in a 1965 interview with the Algerian newspaper The Avant-Garde, «this new society is the result of conscience.»
By: Amaury E. del Valle
Most of the work of Che Guevara is still a mystery to study. His life is closely linked to intellectual work that, as he confessed in a letter in February 1964, can sometimes seem a little «obscure,» precisely because it was written mainly when «my watch read past midnight.»
However, to read it slowly is to find a great many reflections, some of them marked by the historical moment in which he lived, while others that are still incredibly valid. Many of his thoughts were ahead of the times that we have experienced over the last several years, such as the collapse of what he called the «Soviet model of socialism.»
In his writings and discussions, Che was most concerned with the economy, national and international policy, and liberation struggles.
Needed Pillars
Che’s economic thought is not an undecipherable riddle or a theoretical Minotaur impossible to defeat. Even in its unfinished nature it can be summarized, as he did in his essay El socialismo y el hombre (officially titled «Socialism and Man» in the 1960s). In a prophetic phrase that still remains as a challenge, he said «To build communism, we have to build a new (person) at the same time that we build the material base.»
One of the pillars of Che’s economic concepts was precisely the creation of a structure in which the most important element would be not only the satisfaction of the basic needs of people, but also their education, in order to make them aware of themselves as being the real owners and main beneficiaries of the means of production.
One of the essential moments in his thought was the controversy about the direction of the newly born socialist economy in Cuba, between 1963 and 1964. The argument emerged from issues that were merely national, and eventually became a debate over the appropriateness of the economic model implemented in the socialist countries at that time.
Regarding the matter, Che himself warned against «blind apologetics;» he criticized those who wanted to import experiences that were alien to Cuban reality, saying that «The law which supposedly governs the transition from socialism to communism is a mechanistic and conservative concept, an attempt to put Soviet reality in step with the theory, to put aside all analysis and ignore the harsh problems that would arise if a truly revolutionary course were taken.»
In his work «Neither Imitation Nor Copy: Che Guevara and the Pursuit of a New Socialism,» researcher Michael Löwy says that, contrary to the tendencies of copying the Soviet model that was in fashion in his time, the guerrilla commander believed that building socialism was «an heroic attempt to create something new, the pursuit —interrupted and unfinished— of a different paradigm for socialism, which in a many aspects was radically opposed to the ‘really existing’ bureaucratic caricature.»
Other Che specialists think similarly to this, especially regarding the debate on Cuban economy between 1963 and 1964, when they acknowledge that at the time there were evident tensions and contradictions between the ideals of the Cuban Revolution and those of the leadership in the Soviet Union. The internationalist ideals of the socialist national liberation of the Cuban Revolution were opposed to the Soviet system and its ideology, which despite being mechanistic and subordinated to «building of socialism in one country,» was the strongest force operating and speaking on behalf of Marxism.»
It was not in vain that Che himself highlighted the «great boldness» of questioning not only the model of socialism implemented at the time, but also the role of the USSR itself in the international arena, which he thought many times behaved like an imperialistic superpower.
In a speech he made in Algeria in February, 1965, he said openly, alluding to the USSR, that «there won’t be socialism if there is not a change in conscience among peoples that leads to a attitude of solidarity; this must change both at the individual level and in the society in which socialism has been or is being built, and worldwide, because of all the peoples who are subjected to imperialist oppression.
Cuban economist Osvaldo Martinez referenced Che’s own words, when he said that it was «heresy» and «audacity» to refer to a plan to write a true Marxist political economy, one which was non-apologetic, but more like a «scream from the bottom of underdevelopment.»
There is not doubt that the objective of Che —and of Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries— was to establish a framework of thought characteristic of the Cuban Revolution, which was far from what was then understood as «Marxism-Leninism.»
What had been feed to Cuba and the rest of the world under that name were no more than professed «truths» that were held up as being eternal, when in fact they responded more to the concrete realities of the USSR —even distorting Marxist theory— than to truly creative and “ecumenical" thought about socialism, as Che called it in his reflections.
To Build the 21st Century
Aspects that most concerned Che in his reflections were the search for economic efficiency, the application of science and technology as the means of increasing production levels, and especially the use of the moral incentives as a complement and even a necessary support for people’s attitudes toward work.
In «Socialism and Man in Cuba» (http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/documents/chesocandman.htm), he referred directly to this idea when he affirmed that “The pipe dream that socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism (the commodity as the economic cell, profitability, individual material interest as a lever, etc.) can lead into a blind alley. And you wind up there after having travelled a long distance with many crossroads, and it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn. Meanwhile, the economic foundation that has been laid has done its work of undermining the development of consciousness. To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new (person).»
Equally, in a letter sent to Fidel before his departure to the Congo, he maintained that «communism is a phenomenon of conscience; you don't arrive there through a leap into the void, a change in the productive quality, or the simple clash between the productive forces and the productive relations. Communism is a phenomenon of conscience; it is necessary to develop that consciousness in people, where individual and collective education for communism is a constituent part of them. We cannot measure in terms of per capita income the possibility of entering the communist stage... »
However, Che did not have his back turned to reality; nor was he an incurable idealist, as some have wanted to paint him – trying to mystify his figure so as to minimize his thought.
A profound observer, constantly studying and an untiring traveller, he quickly concluded that socialism would be going down the wrong road if it attempted to compete with the overproduction of capitalism, precisely the basis upon which that entire system of exploitation is built.
«The communist model of production presupposes a considerable abundance of material goods, but not necessarily a strict comparison with capitalism,» he held, when asserting that instead of disproportionate production, «planning and economic efficiency» would be imposed. These were pillars of his theory in the field of economics.
«We have a great gap in our system: how to integrate the person into their work in such a way that is not necessary to use what we call material disincentives, how to make each worker feel the vital necessity to support their revolution and, at the same time, make work a pleasure... », wrote Che in that same letter to Fidel.
He himself questioned the situation about which he assured it was necessary to «thoroughly study.» He proposed in a meeting of at the Ministry of Industries «to fight with all our force so that moral incentives replace the material incentives to the degree possible and within the shortest time possible. This means we are establishing a relative process; we are not excluding material incentives, we are simply saying that we should fight for moral incentives to become, in the least possible time, the decisive factor in the performance of workers.»
However, he didn't assume a utopian position and reject the necessity of recognizing material rewards to those who work better than others. He maintained that «workers must be rewarded, but not with money based on the percentage they have exceeded the norm, but by their capacity to acquire a greater capacity. Let’s take the example of someone going to school ... and graduating with a higher qualification. Returning to the workplace with the new qualification would automatically translate into a wage increase – that is to say, a material incentive... »
A promoter of voluntary work, which characterized him as a true revolutionary, the economic thought of Che went into such specific details, given his position as the minister of Industry, that he ended up theoretically and practically involving himself in the determination of how wages would be determined in the socialist society in the making.
«How much is invested for the work of a soldier and how much for a teacher? How much for a minister and how much for a worker? Lenin, in«State and Revolution,» had an idea (Marxist) that rejected the comparison of officials' salaries and those of laborers, but I am not convinced that his reversal is correct,» questioned Che when criticizing the “Fundamentals of Political Economy” of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, then taken almost like a «Bible» for socialist construction.
He himself responded, analyzing the reality he saw in the Soviet Union and Cuba, that «the real essence of all of today difficulties is the false conception of the communist person, based on a long-term economic practice that tends to and will continue to tend to make people just a number in the production process through the lever of their material interest.» He also noted that «trying to raise productivity by individual rewards is falling even lower than capitalists.»
Educating the new person with a new approach to production was the principal thesis championed by Che, although it was not always well understood, or applied, neither in Cuba nor in the Soviet Union.
Foretelling the Soviet Collapse
Perhaps the importance of Che’s economic thought, in the light of current events and the challenges faced by Cuba, have not been weighed enough.
This is partly because many of his writings were not published until recently, and also because of the mystification of Che as a guerrilla commander and a man of action has often overshadowed his side as a philosopher and a Marxist economist – self-taught but well trained.
While in Prague, after leaving the Congo, Che wrote to Orlando Borrego, one of his closest collaborators. The said that he was thinking on «initiating a work on the manual of Political Economy from the Academy,» referring to the material from the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
These notes, which were unpublished only recently, as well as others he wrote down in the Bolivian jungle on philosophy, are some of the most illustrious of Che’s visions on socialism, and especially on the Soviet Union.
His worry came as a result of his visit to that country, a year and half earlier, in which he perceived some «dangerously capitalists arguments» in his exchanges with Soviet leaders and academics.
Fueled by the controversy about the Cuban economy in the construction of socialism —of which Che was a main actor in its first years— the idea of the thirst for profits and productive competition with capitalism being the driving force of development worried him greatly.
Argentinean academic Néstor Kohan said, «Guevara believed that in the transition to socialism the survival of the law of value had to be surpassed by socialist planning or... there would be a return to capitalism.»
Likewise, he criticised the siren songs of the praised Soviet manual of Political Economy that spoke of the «general crisis of capitalism,» a phrase about which he said «people must be careful...» «Crumbling» has a clear meaning in language; a fully grown man cannot undergo any more physiological changes, but he’s doesn’t agonize. The capitalist system has reached its total maturity under imperialism, yet it has not taken full advantage of its possibilities at the current moment and has great vitality. It is more precise to say «fully developed» or to say that it has reached the limits of its possibilities for development.
At the same time, Che was not convinced that the Soviets were knocking at the doors of communism, as they asserted; nor did he believe that setting economic goals to compete with capitalism was the ideal way of reaching that objective. As he said,«no one can set ‘bread and butter’ goals for reaching communism.»
This double characteristic of criticising capitalism while rejecting «sanctified» models was the largest contribution of his economic work, unfinished and based on notes, it was an effort «aimed at inviting people to think, to take Marxism with the seriousness this giant doctrine deserved.»
That is the reason why Che could formulate that warning thirty years prior that «The Soviet Union is returning to capitalism.» At the same time he set the foundations for the path to the socialism for its construction in the 21st century, which was intended to break with any narrow simplification of political economy. As he said in a 1965 interview with the Algerian newspaper The Avant-Garde, «this new society is the result of conscience.»
Che lives By Pepe Escobar
It was forty years ago on October 8 when he was executed by a Bolivian Army subjected to CIA orders - sprinkled with Bolivian Rangers trained by US instructors imported from Laos. Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna might have been an austere, serious nemesis of the Western capitalist order. Or he might have been just a solitary idealist, a celestial wanderer. At 39, captured, wounded, exhausted, shackled, suffering with asthma, like a lion in a cage - the dingy room at a little adobe school in the tiny pueblo of La Higuera - he rose from a rickety chair to stand tall and face death.
His trembling executioner, soldier Mario Teran, later recalled his last words: "Be serene," said Che, "and be on target. You are about to kill a man." Teran saw "a big Che, enormous. His eyes were gleaming …When he stared at me, I felt dizzy ..." At one in the afternoon, his hands shaking, Teran would unleash two bursts of machine-gun fire into Che's chest (to make it look like he was shot in combat), just to plunge into an endless nightmare himself.
Then there was the striking smiling corpse, eyes wide open, brought as a war trophy by the Bolivian soldiers to the hospital laundry in colonial-era Vallegrande. Some compared it to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson; it was rather the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in Renaissance master Mantegna's 1490 AD masterpiece. The laundry today is a holy chapel - its walls covered by thousands of pilgrim's inscriptions. The school at La Higuera is a museum where peasants sell pieces of earth impregnated with the blood of Che.
As much as Spartacus throughout history became the icon of all global wars fought by slaves against their masters, Che in only four decades is the undisputed global icon of all wars fought by rebellious peoples who believe in hope against injustice and who believe another, less cruel world is possible.
He's not only "Che-sus" - more popular than Jesus in a way John Lennon himself wouldn't dream of. He is revered by Bengalis in Kolkatta, Palestinians in Gaza, Egyptian lawyers, Uzbek dissidents, Afghan exiles, Kiwi backpackers, Russian soccer players, Syrian computer wizards, the Pumas (the Argentine rugby team), Cuban chess masters, Brazilian motorcycle gangs, Iraqi sharpshooters. In His name, everything is permitted. Last week Che's daughters were invited by an Iranian university just for them to learn he was being hailed as an anti-communist religious leader. In Bolivia - where in 1967 he hoped to be spearheading guerrilla columns towards Peru and Argentina - he's no less than Saint Che, or San Ernesto de La Higuera, and his story, via crucis, is transmitted by sacred oral tradition from peasant to peasant.
A recently declassified secret note of Paraguayan intelligence tells how Che, disguised as "Oscar Ferreira", was crossing from Brazil to Paraguay in 1966. This proves how all US-supported dictatorships in the southern cone were in close synch at the time, all bowing to the dictates of US counterinsurgency. The problem is that at that very moment Che was fighting in the Congo.
Top of the pops
Che, single red-starred beret pulled casually over gorgeous long black hair, eyes flaming with purpose and staring into infinity, is the most iconic, recycled and ripped off image of the 20th - and so far, 21st - centuries. Alberto "Korda" Diaz, Fidel's official photographer, has described Che in the legendary March 4, 1960 shot he defines as "Guerrillero Heroico" (Heroic Fighter), as "encabronado y dolente" (angry and sad).
But way beyond this angry and sad "die young, stay pretty" rock aesthetic, transcending all ideology, transcending all the perverse embraces of hyper-capitalism, Che came to personify the very essence of rebellion and resistance, anti-imperialist struggle with a romantic aura. From soccer god Maradona, with a tattooed Che on his shoulder, to Osama bin Laden, who could not resist posing for the Islamic masses as Sheikh Guevara. Serious students of Che's life came to view him not only as a symbol of all things revolutionary, but of an almost Zen-like compassion and sacrifice for a worthy cause. He became much more of a cultural than a political hero. That explains his killer seduction of global youth's collective unconscious.
As a representation of dreams and aspirations, he could not but belong to a pantheon of Virgins and saints. As the ultimate crossover saint, pop sainthood had to translate into pop art. Thus the prized Che-signed Cuban banknotes at Buenos Aires flea markets, the Che cigarettes in Peru, the Che bikinis in Brazil, the Che clocks in Kerala, Che on Thai trucks, Che wallets and lighters in China, and on the T-shirts worn by radical Hong Kong legislator Leung "Long Hair" Kwok-hung, Che alongside Sheikh Nasrallah in Lebanon, Che alongside Imam Hussein all over the Middle East.
On the road with Che
Doctor, serial reader, serial smoker, a lover of chess, rugby and motorcycles, amateur economist, one-time Minister of Industries and Minister of Finance in revolutionary Cuba, Fidel Castro's favorite commander, the greatest Latin American since Bolivar, Che was above all a humanist. It's all there in his many writings - stressing the crucial importance of every cultural process linked to economic transformation, an analysis which orthodox Marxism never addressed.
In a post-modern South American echo of Ken Kesey's Magic Bus, which in the early 1960s was driving "further", introducing the US to acid tests, a yellow La Preferida (The Prefered) bus set out from Buenos Aires on a 36-hour journey towards Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and then the holy sites of Vallegrande and La Higuera, carrying everything from young Argentine militants to Uruguayan union leaders, not to mention the coca leaf-chewing Bolivian drivers, everyone listening to Bolivian rock group Atayo. How's that for South American integration?
They are all now mingling with rock musicians, Nobel Prize winners, Cubans who fought with Che in the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, hordes of students, peasants, European tourists, 1960s dreamers and assorted armchair revolutionaries at the apex of five-day World Che Festival, drenched with music, movies, performance art, ritual pilgrimages and even a soccer Che cup.
They are all at the heart of the government-sanctioned, 280km-long Che Guevara trail in south-central Bolivia - the South American answer to the Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam. One wonders how Che - who plied these then dusty routes in the 1950s - would contemplate South American integration via revolutionary tourism, complete with bed and breakfast and trekking guides.
The Cuban ambassador to Bolivia, Rafael Dausa Cespedes, swears "this land is blessed by the blood of Che". And by his lessons as well, one might add. There are 2,180 doctors and 119 teachers from Cuba currently working in Bolivia - by request of President Evo Morales. The ambassador stresses Cuba does not want oil or mineral concessions from Bolivia - unlike other world powers. Even Argentines are crossing the border to have their eye operations performed by skilled Cuban doctors - for whom poetic justice is sweet to the ears: before becoming a revolutionary wanderer, Che was a doctor himself.
Former soldier Mario Teran, the man who killed Che, lives in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, anonymous and dirt poor. He used to be blind because he was unable to finance a cataract operation. Cuban doctors have operated on 600,000 people in 28 countries, free of charge. Including 110,000 Bolivians and Teran. The full story of how he was cured by doctors sent by Fidel Castro was revealed to a Bolivian newspaper over a year ago by Teran's son.
From Patagonia to Rio Bravo
Che's daughter, Aleida Guevara, sees Latin America today as being at a "special moment" in history, recalling how her father emphasized the necessity of social movements to gather force, and everyone to realize "we are a big Latin-American family", a "big motherland from the Rio Bravo to Patagonia".
On December 9, 1964 Che pronounced in a prophetic speech at the United Nations in New York about the liberation of Latin America. It was his last public appearance before setting off for the Congo. Recently, an Aymara (member of an Indian people living in the mountainous regions around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and Perualso) did New York. It was Bolivian President Evo Morales, during the UN General Assembly. He played soccer, he talked to union workers about Abraham Lincoln, dazzled Jon Stewart and the audience of The Daily Show with his sincerity, integrity and very gentle charisma.
Just as ghastly racist Bolivian white elites call him "indio de mierda" (shitty Indian), the Bush administration denies visas to mestizo (mixed Spanish/Indian) members of Evo's cabinet. Che would immediately see what Evo provokes in white Bolivians, exiled white Cubans, prejudiced Americans, or Peruvian first-class writer and mediocre politician Mario Vargas Llosa: fear.
Evo is doing now what Che wanted to do 40 years ago - and it goes way beyond a Marxist revolution. No wonder a portrait of Che hangs in Evo's presidential office in La Paz. Evo is a truly indigenous son of the land. His massive support base is not only Bolivian, but reaches across Latin America. He is forcing the white elites still with a conquistador mentality to confront their pitiful record in terms of exploiting, humiliating and plundering the riches of South America's indigenous populations. And the white, exploitative elites are of course terrified of facing a slow but inevitable redistribution of wealth.
Evo even set up a kind of decolonization government body to help people deal with the effects of Western hyper-capitalism. If there is any "ism" in this revolution, it is humanism. And the inspiration had to come from Che.
Che would immediately smile, smoking a pipe, at how Evo and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela are demonized to kingdom come for nationalizing oil and gas and using the extra cash for much-needed investment in health and education and to accelerate the dreaded redistribution of wealth. Who profits? Instead of Corporate America or Corporate Europe, it's the "indios de mierda" derided by racists - the poor indigenous and mestizos in Venezuela and Bolivia.
And Ecuador is right on track as well. Che lives in Ecuador - where the party of US-trained economist and President Rafael Correa recently grabbed the majority seats of the Constituent Assembly that will write a new constitution stressing national sovereignty and national assets in Ecuadorian, not foreign corporate hands. Just as Bolivia had been reduced by former US-puppet, comprador governments to the status of poorest country in South America, Ecuador also lags; although it's the fifth largest oil exporter in Latin America, its illiteracy rate is 65% and its external debt towards the IMF is proportionally one of the highest.
Correa will not strike any FTA with Washington, will not be attached to the US-designed Plan Colombia, and will definitely renegotiate the national debt. What Che wanted 40 years ago is what most South American countries are striving for now: improved, increasing regional integration, not US-imposed FTAs. Seven South American countries are now joining the new Bank of the South, with its HQ in Caracas. Bye bye IMF and its poverty-inducing "structural adjustments".
So what Che symbolizes now, mostly in Latin America but also in the troubled Middle East, is the pure essence of all 1960s dreams of radical change. And it's even more irresistible when sprinkled with a sense of style. The man was a lover of poetry. A new book launched in Argentina, El Cuaderno Verde del Che (Che's Green Book) is an anthology of 69 poems by, among others, Pablo Neruda, Nicolas Guillen and Cesar Vallejo, copied by Che in the Bolivian jungle. The book was found by three Bolivian officers and a CIA agent in Che's backpack, a few hours before he was killed.
When you have brains, balls, good looks, true compassion and style your only way is up - towards a worldwide moral and political high ground. For all the young at heart in the world, Che lives - forever, and so does the example he set. The fight for social justice is an eternal flame. Hasta la victoria, siempre.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
His trembling executioner, soldier Mario Teran, later recalled his last words: "Be serene," said Che, "and be on target. You are about to kill a man." Teran saw "a big Che, enormous. His eyes were gleaming …When he stared at me, I felt dizzy ..." At one in the afternoon, his hands shaking, Teran would unleash two bursts of machine-gun fire into Che's chest (to make it look like he was shot in combat), just to plunge into an endless nightmare himself.
Then there was the striking smiling corpse, eyes wide open, brought as a war trophy by the Bolivian soldiers to the hospital laundry in colonial-era Vallegrande. Some compared it to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson; it was rather the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in Renaissance master Mantegna's 1490 AD masterpiece. The laundry today is a holy chapel - its walls covered by thousands of pilgrim's inscriptions. The school at La Higuera is a museum where peasants sell pieces of earth impregnated with the blood of Che.
As much as Spartacus throughout history became the icon of all global wars fought by slaves against their masters, Che in only four decades is the undisputed global icon of all wars fought by rebellious peoples who believe in hope against injustice and who believe another, less cruel world is possible.
He's not only "Che-sus" - more popular than Jesus in a way John Lennon himself wouldn't dream of. He is revered by Bengalis in Kolkatta, Palestinians in Gaza, Egyptian lawyers, Uzbek dissidents, Afghan exiles, Kiwi backpackers, Russian soccer players, Syrian computer wizards, the Pumas (the Argentine rugby team), Cuban chess masters, Brazilian motorcycle gangs, Iraqi sharpshooters. In His name, everything is permitted. Last week Che's daughters were invited by an Iranian university just for them to learn he was being hailed as an anti-communist religious leader. In Bolivia - where in 1967 he hoped to be spearheading guerrilla columns towards Peru and Argentina - he's no less than Saint Che, or San Ernesto de La Higuera, and his story, via crucis, is transmitted by sacred oral tradition from peasant to peasant.
A recently declassified secret note of Paraguayan intelligence tells how Che, disguised as "Oscar Ferreira", was crossing from Brazil to Paraguay in 1966. This proves how all US-supported dictatorships in the southern cone were in close synch at the time, all bowing to the dictates of US counterinsurgency. The problem is that at that very moment Che was fighting in the Congo.
Top of the pops
Che, single red-starred beret pulled casually over gorgeous long black hair, eyes flaming with purpose and staring into infinity, is the most iconic, recycled and ripped off image of the 20th - and so far, 21st - centuries. Alberto "Korda" Diaz, Fidel's official photographer, has described Che in the legendary March 4, 1960 shot he defines as "Guerrillero Heroico" (Heroic Fighter), as "encabronado y dolente" (angry and sad).
But way beyond this angry and sad "die young, stay pretty" rock aesthetic, transcending all ideology, transcending all the perverse embraces of hyper-capitalism, Che came to personify the very essence of rebellion and resistance, anti-imperialist struggle with a romantic aura. From soccer god Maradona, with a tattooed Che on his shoulder, to Osama bin Laden, who could not resist posing for the Islamic masses as Sheikh Guevara. Serious students of Che's life came to view him not only as a symbol of all things revolutionary, but of an almost Zen-like compassion and sacrifice for a worthy cause. He became much more of a cultural than a political hero. That explains his killer seduction of global youth's collective unconscious.
As a representation of dreams and aspirations, he could not but belong to a pantheon of Virgins and saints. As the ultimate crossover saint, pop sainthood had to translate into pop art. Thus the prized Che-signed Cuban banknotes at Buenos Aires flea markets, the Che cigarettes in Peru, the Che bikinis in Brazil, the Che clocks in Kerala, Che on Thai trucks, Che wallets and lighters in China, and on the T-shirts worn by radical Hong Kong legislator Leung "Long Hair" Kwok-hung, Che alongside Sheikh Nasrallah in Lebanon, Che alongside Imam Hussein all over the Middle East.
On the road with Che
Doctor, serial reader, serial smoker, a lover of chess, rugby and motorcycles, amateur economist, one-time Minister of Industries and Minister of Finance in revolutionary Cuba, Fidel Castro's favorite commander, the greatest Latin American since Bolivar, Che was above all a humanist. It's all there in his many writings - stressing the crucial importance of every cultural process linked to economic transformation, an analysis which orthodox Marxism never addressed.
In a post-modern South American echo of Ken Kesey's Magic Bus, which in the early 1960s was driving "further", introducing the US to acid tests, a yellow La Preferida (The Prefered) bus set out from Buenos Aires on a 36-hour journey towards Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and then the holy sites of Vallegrande and La Higuera, carrying everything from young Argentine militants to Uruguayan union leaders, not to mention the coca leaf-chewing Bolivian drivers, everyone listening to Bolivian rock group Atayo. How's that for South American integration?
They are all now mingling with rock musicians, Nobel Prize winners, Cubans who fought with Che in the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, hordes of students, peasants, European tourists, 1960s dreamers and assorted armchair revolutionaries at the apex of five-day World Che Festival, drenched with music, movies, performance art, ritual pilgrimages and even a soccer Che cup.
They are all at the heart of the government-sanctioned, 280km-long Che Guevara trail in south-central Bolivia - the South American answer to the Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam. One wonders how Che - who plied these then dusty routes in the 1950s - would contemplate South American integration via revolutionary tourism, complete with bed and breakfast and trekking guides.
The Cuban ambassador to Bolivia, Rafael Dausa Cespedes, swears "this land is blessed by the blood of Che". And by his lessons as well, one might add. There are 2,180 doctors and 119 teachers from Cuba currently working in Bolivia - by request of President Evo Morales. The ambassador stresses Cuba does not want oil or mineral concessions from Bolivia - unlike other world powers. Even Argentines are crossing the border to have their eye operations performed by skilled Cuban doctors - for whom poetic justice is sweet to the ears: before becoming a revolutionary wanderer, Che was a doctor himself.
Former soldier Mario Teran, the man who killed Che, lives in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, anonymous and dirt poor. He used to be blind because he was unable to finance a cataract operation. Cuban doctors have operated on 600,000 people in 28 countries, free of charge. Including 110,000 Bolivians and Teran. The full story of how he was cured by doctors sent by Fidel Castro was revealed to a Bolivian newspaper over a year ago by Teran's son.
From Patagonia to Rio Bravo
Che's daughter, Aleida Guevara, sees Latin America today as being at a "special moment" in history, recalling how her father emphasized the necessity of social movements to gather force, and everyone to realize "we are a big Latin-American family", a "big motherland from the Rio Bravo to Patagonia".
On December 9, 1964 Che pronounced in a prophetic speech at the United Nations in New York about the liberation of Latin America. It was his last public appearance before setting off for the Congo. Recently, an Aymara (member of an Indian people living in the mountainous regions around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and Perualso) did New York. It was Bolivian President Evo Morales, during the UN General Assembly. He played soccer, he talked to union workers about Abraham Lincoln, dazzled Jon Stewart and the audience of The Daily Show with his sincerity, integrity and very gentle charisma.
Just as ghastly racist Bolivian white elites call him "indio de mierda" (shitty Indian), the Bush administration denies visas to mestizo (mixed Spanish/Indian) members of Evo's cabinet. Che would immediately see what Evo provokes in white Bolivians, exiled white Cubans, prejudiced Americans, or Peruvian first-class writer and mediocre politician Mario Vargas Llosa: fear.
Evo is doing now what Che wanted to do 40 years ago - and it goes way beyond a Marxist revolution. No wonder a portrait of Che hangs in Evo's presidential office in La Paz. Evo is a truly indigenous son of the land. His massive support base is not only Bolivian, but reaches across Latin America. He is forcing the white elites still with a conquistador mentality to confront their pitiful record in terms of exploiting, humiliating and plundering the riches of South America's indigenous populations. And the white, exploitative elites are of course terrified of facing a slow but inevitable redistribution of wealth.
Evo even set up a kind of decolonization government body to help people deal with the effects of Western hyper-capitalism. If there is any "ism" in this revolution, it is humanism. And the inspiration had to come from Che.
Che would immediately smile, smoking a pipe, at how Evo and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela are demonized to kingdom come for nationalizing oil and gas and using the extra cash for much-needed investment in health and education and to accelerate the dreaded redistribution of wealth. Who profits? Instead of Corporate America or Corporate Europe, it's the "indios de mierda" derided by racists - the poor indigenous and mestizos in Venezuela and Bolivia.
And Ecuador is right on track as well. Che lives in Ecuador - where the party of US-trained economist and President Rafael Correa recently grabbed the majority seats of the Constituent Assembly that will write a new constitution stressing national sovereignty and national assets in Ecuadorian, not foreign corporate hands. Just as Bolivia had been reduced by former US-puppet, comprador governments to the status of poorest country in South America, Ecuador also lags; although it's the fifth largest oil exporter in Latin America, its illiteracy rate is 65% and its external debt towards the IMF is proportionally one of the highest.
Correa will not strike any FTA with Washington, will not be attached to the US-designed Plan Colombia, and will definitely renegotiate the national debt. What Che wanted 40 years ago is what most South American countries are striving for now: improved, increasing regional integration, not US-imposed FTAs. Seven South American countries are now joining the new Bank of the South, with its HQ in Caracas. Bye bye IMF and its poverty-inducing "structural adjustments".
So what Che symbolizes now, mostly in Latin America but also in the troubled Middle East, is the pure essence of all 1960s dreams of radical change. And it's even more irresistible when sprinkled with a sense of style. The man was a lover of poetry. A new book launched in Argentina, El Cuaderno Verde del Che (Che's Green Book) is an anthology of 69 poems by, among others, Pablo Neruda, Nicolas Guillen and Cesar Vallejo, copied by Che in the Bolivian jungle. The book was found by three Bolivian officers and a CIA agent in Che's backpack, a few hours before he was killed.
When you have brains, balls, good looks, true compassion and style your only way is up - towards a worldwide moral and political high ground. For all the young at heart in the world, Che lives - forever, and so does the example he set. The fight for social justice is an eternal flame. Hasta la victoria, siempre.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Che lives
THE ROVING EYE
Che lives
By Pepe Escobar
It was forty years ago on October 8 when he was executed by a Bolivian Army subjected to CIA orders - sprinkled with Bolivian Rangers trained by US instructors imported from Laos. Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna might have been an austere, serious nemesis of the Western capitalist order. Or he might have been just a solitary idealist, a celestial wanderer. At 39, captured, wounded, exhausted, shackled, suffering with asthma, like a lion in a cage - the dingy room at a little adobe school in the tiny pueblo of La Higuera - he rose from a rickety chair to stand tall and face death.
His trembling executioner, soldier Mario Teran, later recalled his last words: "Be serene," said Che, "and be on target. You are about to kill a man." Teran saw "a big Che, enormous. His eyes were gleaming …When he stared at me, I felt dizzy ..." At one in the afternoon, his hands shaking, Teran would unleash two bursts of machine-gun fire into Che's chest (to make it look like he was shot in combat), just to plunge into an endless nightmare himself.
Then there was the striking smiling corpse, eyes wide open, brought as a war trophy by the Bolivian soldiers to the hospital laundry in colonial-era Vallegrande. Some compared it to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson; it was rather the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in Renaissance master Mantegna's 1490 AD masterpiece. The laundry today is a holy chapel - its walls covered by thousands of pilgrim's inscriptions. The school at La Higuera is a museum where peasants sell pieces of earth impregnated with the blood of Che.
As much as Spartacus throughout history became the icon of all global wars fought by slaves against their masters, Che in only four decades is the undisputed global icon of all wars fought by rebellious peoples who believe in hope against injustice and who believe another, less cruel world is possible.
He's not only "Che-sus" - more popular than Jesus in a way John Lennon himself wouldn't dream of. He is revered by Bengalis in Kolkatta, Palestinians in Gaza, Egyptian lawyers, Uzbek dissidents, Afghan exiles, Kiwi backpackers, Russian soccer players, Syrian computer wizards, the Pumas (the Argentine rugby team), Cuban chess masters, Brazilian motorcycle gangs, Iraqi sharpshooters. In His name, everything is permitted. Last week Che's daughters were invited by an Iranian university just for them to learn he was being hailed as an anti-communist religious leader. In Bolivia - where in 1967 he hoped to be spearheading guerrilla columns towards Peru and Argentina - he's no less than Saint Che, or San Ernesto de La Higuera, and his story, via crucis, is transmitted by sacred oral tradition from peasant to peasant.
A recently declassified secret note of Paraguayan intelligence tells how Che, disguised as "Oscar Ferreira", was crossing from Brazil to Paraguay in 1966. This proves how all US-supported dictatorships in the southern cone were in close synch at the time, all bowing to the dictates of US counterinsurgency. The problem is that at that very moment Che was fighting in the Congo.
Top of the pops
Che, single red-starred beret pulled casually over gorgeous long black hair, eyes flaming with purpose and staring into infinity, is the most iconic, recycled and ripped off image of the 20th - and so far, 21st - centuries. Alberto "Korda" Diaz, Fidel's official photographer, has described Che in the legendary March 4, 1960 shot he defines as "Guerrillero Heroico" (Heroic Fighter), as "encabronado y dolente" (angry and sad).
But way beyond this angry and sad "die young, stay pretty" rock aesthetic, transcending all ideology, transcending all the perverse embraces of hyper-capitalism, Che came to personify the very essence of rebellion and resistance, anti-imperialist struggle with a romantic aura. From soccer god Maradona, with a tattooed Che on his shoulder, to Osama bin Laden, who could not resist posing for the Islamic masses as Sheikh Guevara. Serious students of Che's life came to view him not only as a symbol of all things revolutionary, but of an almost Zen-like compassion and sacrifice for a worthy cause. He became much more of a cultural than a political hero. That explains his killer seduction of global youth's collective unconscious.
As a representation of dreams and aspirations, he could not but belong to a pantheon of Virgins and saints. As the ultimate crossover saint, pop sainthood had to translate into pop art. Thus the prized Che-signed Cuban banknotes at Buenos Aires flea markets, the Che cigarettes in Peru, the Che bikinis in Brazil, the Che clocks in Kerala, Che on Thai trucks, Che wallets and lighters in China, and on the T-shirts worn by radical Hong Kong legislator Leung "Long Hair" Kwok-hung, Che alongside Sheikh Nasrallah in Lebanon, Che alongside Imam Hussein all over the Middle East.
On the road with Che
Doctor, serial reader, serial smoker, a lover of chess, rugby and motorcycles, amateur economist, one-time Minister of Industries and Minister of Finance in revolutionary Cuba, Fidel Castro's favorite commander, the greatest Latin American since Bolivar, Che was above all a humanist. It's all there in his many writings - stressing the crucial importance of every cultural process linked to economic transformation, an analysis which orthodox Marxism never addressed.
In a post-modern South American echo of Ken Kesey's Magic Bus, which in the early 1960s was driving "further", introducing the US to acid tests, a yellow La Preferida (The Prefered) bus set out from Buenos Aires on a 36-hour journey towards Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and then the holy sites of Vallegrande and La Higuera, carrying everything from young Argentine militants to Uruguayan union leaders, not to mention the coca leaf-chewing Bolivian drivers, everyone listening to Bolivian rock group Atayo. How's that for South American integration?
They are all now mingling with rock musicians, Nobel Prize winners, Cubans who fought with Che in the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, hordes of students, peasants, European tourists, 1960s dreamers and assorted armchair revolutionaries at the apex of five-day World Che Festival, drenched with music, movies, performance art, ritual pilgrimages and even a soccer Che cup.
They are all at the heart of the government-sanctioned, 280km-long Che Guevara trail in south-central Bolivia - the South American answer to the Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam. One wonders how Che - who plied these then dusty routes in the 1950s - would contemplate South American integration via revolutionary tourism, complete with bed and breakfast and trekking guides.
The Cuban ambassador to Bolivia, Rafael Dausa Cespedes, swears "this land is blessed by the blood of Che". And by his lessons as well, one might add. There are 2,180 doctors and 119 teachers from Cuba currently working in Bolivia - by request of President Evo Morales. The ambassador stresses Cuba does not want oil or mineral concessions from Bolivia - unlike other world powers. Even Argentines are crossing the border to have their eye operations performed by skilled Cuban doctors - for whom poetic justice is sweet to the ears: before becoming a revolutionary wanderer, Che was a doctor himself.
Former soldier Mario Teran, the man who killed Che, lives in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, anonymous and dirt poor. He used to be blind because he was unable to finance a cataract operation. Cuban doctors have operated on 600,000 people in 28 countries, free of charge. Including 110,000 Bolivians and Teran. The full story of how he was cured by doctors sent by Fidel Castro was revealed to a Bolivian newspaper over a year ago by Teran's son.
From Patagonia to Rio Bravo
Che's daughter, Aleida Guevara, sees Latin America today as being at a "special moment" in history, recalling how her father emphasized the necessity of social movements to gather force, and everyone to realize "we are a big Latin-American family", a "big motherland from the Rio Bravo to Patagonia".
On December 9, 1964 Che pronounced in a prophetic speech at the United Nations in New York about the liberation of Latin America. It was his last public appearance before setting off for the Congo. Recently, an Aymara (member of an Indian people living in the mountainous regions around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and Perualso) did New York. It was Bolivian President Evo Morales, during the UN General Assembly. He played soccer, he talked to union workers about Abraham Lincoln, dazzled Jon Stewart and the audience of The Daily Show with his sincerity, integrity and very gentle charisma.
Just as ghastly racist Bolivian white elites call him "indio de mierda" (shitty Indian), the Bush administration denies visas to mestizo (mixed Spanish/Indian) members of Evo's cabinet. Che would immediately see what Evo provokes in white Bolivians, exiled white Cubans, prejudiced Americans, or Peruvian first-class writer and mediocre politician Mario Vargas Llosa: fear.
Evo is doing now what Che wanted to do 40 years ago - and it goes way beyond a Marxist revolution. No wonder a portrait of Che hangs in Evo's presidential office in La Paz. Evo is a truly indigenous son of the land. His massive support base is not only Bolivian, but reaches across Latin America. He is forcing the white elites still with a conquistador mentality to confront their pitiful record in terms of exploiting, humiliating and plundering the riches of South America's indigenous populations. And the white, exploitative elites are of course terrified of facing a slow but inevitable redistribution of wealth.
Evo even set up a kind of decolonization government body to help people deal with the effects of Western hyper-capitalism. If there is any "ism" in this revolution, it is humanism. And the inspiration had to come from Che.
Che would immediately smile, smoking a pipe, at how Evo and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela are demonized to kingdom come for nationalizing oil and gas and using the extra cash for much-needed investment in health and education and to accelerate the dreaded redistribution of wealth. Who profits? Instead of Corporate America or Corporate Europe, it's the "indios de mierda" derided by racists - the poor indigenous and mestizos in Venezuela and Bolivia.
And Ecuador is right on track as well. Che lives in Ecuador - where the party of US-trained economist and President Rafael Correa recently grabbed the majority seats of the Constituent Assembly that will write a new constitution stressing national sovereignty and national assets in Ecuadorian, not foreign corporate hands. Just as Bolivia had been reduced by former US-puppet, comprador governments to the status of poorest country in South America, Ecuador also lags; although it's the fifth largest oil exporter in Latin America, its illiteracy rate is 65% and its external debt towards the IMF is proportionally one of the highest.
Correa will not strike any FTA with Washington, will not be attached to the US-designed Plan Colombia, and will definitely renegotiate the national debt. What Che wanted 40 years ago is what most South American countries are striving for now: improved, increasing regional integration, not US-imposed FTAs. Seven South American countries are now joining the new Bank of the South, with its HQ in Caracas. Bye bye IMF and its poverty-inducing "structural adjustments".
So what Che symbolizes now, mostly in Latin America but also in the troubled Middle East, is the pure essence of all 1960s dreams of radical change. And it's even more irresistible when sprinkled with a sense of style. The man was a lover of poetry. A new book launched in Argentina, El Cuaderno Verde del Che (Che's Green Book) is an anthology of 69 poems by, among others, Pablo Neruda, Nicolas Guillen and Cesar Vallejo, copied by Che in the Bolivian jungle. The book was found by three Bolivian officers and a CIA agent in Che's backpack, a few hours before he was killed.
When you have brains, balls, good looks, true compassion and style your only way is up - towards a worldwide moral and political high ground. For all the young at heart in the world, Che lives - forever, and so does the example he set. The fight for social justice is an eternal flame. Hasta la victoria, siempre.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Che lives
By Pepe Escobar
It was forty years ago on October 8 when he was executed by a Bolivian Army subjected to CIA orders - sprinkled with Bolivian Rangers trained by US instructors imported from Laos. Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna might have been an austere, serious nemesis of the Western capitalist order. Or he might have been just a solitary idealist, a celestial wanderer. At 39, captured, wounded, exhausted, shackled, suffering with asthma, like a lion in a cage - the dingy room at a little adobe school in the tiny pueblo of La Higuera - he rose from a rickety chair to stand tall and face death.
His trembling executioner, soldier Mario Teran, later recalled his last words: "Be serene," said Che, "and be on target. You are about to kill a man." Teran saw "a big Che, enormous. His eyes were gleaming …When he stared at me, I felt dizzy ..." At one in the afternoon, his hands shaking, Teran would unleash two bursts of machine-gun fire into Che's chest (to make it look like he was shot in combat), just to plunge into an endless nightmare himself.
Then there was the striking smiling corpse, eyes wide open, brought as a war trophy by the Bolivian soldiers to the hospital laundry in colonial-era Vallegrande. Some compared it to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson; it was rather the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in Renaissance master Mantegna's 1490 AD masterpiece. The laundry today is a holy chapel - its walls covered by thousands of pilgrim's inscriptions. The school at La Higuera is a museum where peasants sell pieces of earth impregnated with the blood of Che.
As much as Spartacus throughout history became the icon of all global wars fought by slaves against their masters, Che in only four decades is the undisputed global icon of all wars fought by rebellious peoples who believe in hope against injustice and who believe another, less cruel world is possible.
He's not only "Che-sus" - more popular than Jesus in a way John Lennon himself wouldn't dream of. He is revered by Bengalis in Kolkatta, Palestinians in Gaza, Egyptian lawyers, Uzbek dissidents, Afghan exiles, Kiwi backpackers, Russian soccer players, Syrian computer wizards, the Pumas (the Argentine rugby team), Cuban chess masters, Brazilian motorcycle gangs, Iraqi sharpshooters. In His name, everything is permitted. Last week Che's daughters were invited by an Iranian university just for them to learn he was being hailed as an anti-communist religious leader. In Bolivia - where in 1967 he hoped to be spearheading guerrilla columns towards Peru and Argentina - he's no less than Saint Che, or San Ernesto de La Higuera, and his story, via crucis, is transmitted by sacred oral tradition from peasant to peasant.
A recently declassified secret note of Paraguayan intelligence tells how Che, disguised as "Oscar Ferreira", was crossing from Brazil to Paraguay in 1966. This proves how all US-supported dictatorships in the southern cone were in close synch at the time, all bowing to the dictates of US counterinsurgency. The problem is that at that very moment Che was fighting in the Congo.
Top of the pops
Che, single red-starred beret pulled casually over gorgeous long black hair, eyes flaming with purpose and staring into infinity, is the most iconic, recycled and ripped off image of the 20th - and so far, 21st - centuries. Alberto "Korda" Diaz, Fidel's official photographer, has described Che in the legendary March 4, 1960 shot he defines as "Guerrillero Heroico" (Heroic Fighter), as "encabronado y dolente" (angry and sad).
But way beyond this angry and sad "die young, stay pretty" rock aesthetic, transcending all ideology, transcending all the perverse embraces of hyper-capitalism, Che came to personify the very essence of rebellion and resistance, anti-imperialist struggle with a romantic aura. From soccer god Maradona, with a tattooed Che on his shoulder, to Osama bin Laden, who could not resist posing for the Islamic masses as Sheikh Guevara. Serious students of Che's life came to view him not only as a symbol of all things revolutionary, but of an almost Zen-like compassion and sacrifice for a worthy cause. He became much more of a cultural than a political hero. That explains his killer seduction of global youth's collective unconscious.
As a representation of dreams and aspirations, he could not but belong to a pantheon of Virgins and saints. As the ultimate crossover saint, pop sainthood had to translate into pop art. Thus the prized Che-signed Cuban banknotes at Buenos Aires flea markets, the Che cigarettes in Peru, the Che bikinis in Brazil, the Che clocks in Kerala, Che on Thai trucks, Che wallets and lighters in China, and on the T-shirts worn by radical Hong Kong legislator Leung "Long Hair" Kwok-hung, Che alongside Sheikh Nasrallah in Lebanon, Che alongside Imam Hussein all over the Middle East.
On the road with Che
Doctor, serial reader, serial smoker, a lover of chess, rugby and motorcycles, amateur economist, one-time Minister of Industries and Minister of Finance in revolutionary Cuba, Fidel Castro's favorite commander, the greatest Latin American since Bolivar, Che was above all a humanist. It's all there in his many writings - stressing the crucial importance of every cultural process linked to economic transformation, an analysis which orthodox Marxism never addressed.
In a post-modern South American echo of Ken Kesey's Magic Bus, which in the early 1960s was driving "further", introducing the US to acid tests, a yellow La Preferida (The Prefered) bus set out from Buenos Aires on a 36-hour journey towards Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and then the holy sites of Vallegrande and La Higuera, carrying everything from young Argentine militants to Uruguayan union leaders, not to mention the coca leaf-chewing Bolivian drivers, everyone listening to Bolivian rock group Atayo. How's that for South American integration?
They are all now mingling with rock musicians, Nobel Prize winners, Cubans who fought with Che in the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, hordes of students, peasants, European tourists, 1960s dreamers and assorted armchair revolutionaries at the apex of five-day World Che Festival, drenched with music, movies, performance art, ritual pilgrimages and even a soccer Che cup.
They are all at the heart of the government-sanctioned, 280km-long Che Guevara trail in south-central Bolivia - the South American answer to the Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam. One wonders how Che - who plied these then dusty routes in the 1950s - would contemplate South American integration via revolutionary tourism, complete with bed and breakfast and trekking guides.
The Cuban ambassador to Bolivia, Rafael Dausa Cespedes, swears "this land is blessed by the blood of Che". And by his lessons as well, one might add. There are 2,180 doctors and 119 teachers from Cuba currently working in Bolivia - by request of President Evo Morales. The ambassador stresses Cuba does not want oil or mineral concessions from Bolivia - unlike other world powers. Even Argentines are crossing the border to have their eye operations performed by skilled Cuban doctors - for whom poetic justice is sweet to the ears: before becoming a revolutionary wanderer, Che was a doctor himself.
Former soldier Mario Teran, the man who killed Che, lives in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, anonymous and dirt poor. He used to be blind because he was unable to finance a cataract operation. Cuban doctors have operated on 600,000 people in 28 countries, free of charge. Including 110,000 Bolivians and Teran. The full story of how he was cured by doctors sent by Fidel Castro was revealed to a Bolivian newspaper over a year ago by Teran's son.
From Patagonia to Rio Bravo
Che's daughter, Aleida Guevara, sees Latin America today as being at a "special moment" in history, recalling how her father emphasized the necessity of social movements to gather force, and everyone to realize "we are a big Latin-American family", a "big motherland from the Rio Bravo to Patagonia".
On December 9, 1964 Che pronounced in a prophetic speech at the United Nations in New York about the liberation of Latin America. It was his last public appearance before setting off for the Congo. Recently, an Aymara (member of an Indian people living in the mountainous regions around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and Perualso) did New York. It was Bolivian President Evo Morales, during the UN General Assembly. He played soccer, he talked to union workers about Abraham Lincoln, dazzled Jon Stewart and the audience of The Daily Show with his sincerity, integrity and very gentle charisma.
Just as ghastly racist Bolivian white elites call him "indio de mierda" (shitty Indian), the Bush administration denies visas to mestizo (mixed Spanish/Indian) members of Evo's cabinet. Che would immediately see what Evo provokes in white Bolivians, exiled white Cubans, prejudiced Americans, or Peruvian first-class writer and mediocre politician Mario Vargas Llosa: fear.
Evo is doing now what Che wanted to do 40 years ago - and it goes way beyond a Marxist revolution. No wonder a portrait of Che hangs in Evo's presidential office in La Paz. Evo is a truly indigenous son of the land. His massive support base is not only Bolivian, but reaches across Latin America. He is forcing the white elites still with a conquistador mentality to confront their pitiful record in terms of exploiting, humiliating and plundering the riches of South America's indigenous populations. And the white, exploitative elites are of course terrified of facing a slow but inevitable redistribution of wealth.
Evo even set up a kind of decolonization government body to help people deal with the effects of Western hyper-capitalism. If there is any "ism" in this revolution, it is humanism. And the inspiration had to come from Che.
Che would immediately smile, smoking a pipe, at how Evo and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela are demonized to kingdom come for nationalizing oil and gas and using the extra cash for much-needed investment in health and education and to accelerate the dreaded redistribution of wealth. Who profits? Instead of Corporate America or Corporate Europe, it's the "indios de mierda" derided by racists - the poor indigenous and mestizos in Venezuela and Bolivia.
And Ecuador is right on track as well. Che lives in Ecuador - where the party of US-trained economist and President Rafael Correa recently grabbed the majority seats of the Constituent Assembly that will write a new constitution stressing national sovereignty and national assets in Ecuadorian, not foreign corporate hands. Just as Bolivia had been reduced by former US-puppet, comprador governments to the status of poorest country in South America, Ecuador also lags; although it's the fifth largest oil exporter in Latin America, its illiteracy rate is 65% and its external debt towards the IMF is proportionally one of the highest.
Correa will not strike any FTA with Washington, will not be attached to the US-designed Plan Colombia, and will definitely renegotiate the national debt. What Che wanted 40 years ago is what most South American countries are striving for now: improved, increasing regional integration, not US-imposed FTAs. Seven South American countries are now joining the new Bank of the South, with its HQ in Caracas. Bye bye IMF and its poverty-inducing "structural adjustments".
So what Che symbolizes now, mostly in Latin America but also in the troubled Middle East, is the pure essence of all 1960s dreams of radical change. And it's even more irresistible when sprinkled with a sense of style. The man was a lover of poetry. A new book launched in Argentina, El Cuaderno Verde del Che (Che's Green Book) is an anthology of 69 poems by, among others, Pablo Neruda, Nicolas Guillen and Cesar Vallejo, copied by Che in the Bolivian jungle. The book was found by three Bolivian officers and a CIA agent in Che's backpack, a few hours before he was killed.
When you have brains, balls, good looks, true compassion and style your only way is up - towards a worldwide moral and political high ground. For all the young at heart in the world, Che lives - forever, and so does the example he set. The fight for social justice is an eternal flame. Hasta la victoria, siempre.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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