Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928-1967), an Argentinian-born communist revolutionary and guerrilla leader, was Fidel Castro’s right-hand man during the Cuban Revolution. He wrote the book on guerrilla warfare. He went on to fight in failed revolutions in D.R. Congo and in Bolivia, where he met his end after the CIA helped the Bolivian army to find him.
He is a hero not just in Cuba but to everyone who loves freedom, says Nelson Mandela. In the US he is part of the intellectual tradition of radical thought among Blacks and Chicanos – and, among Whites, a cool T-shirt.
Guevara came from a well-to-do family in Argentina. He was part Irish, part Spanish. Growing up he read Marx and Neruda and listened to the stories of those who had fought in the Spanish Civil War.
During and after his studies to become a doctor, he travelled across Latin America on his motorcycle. The poverty shocked him. But it got worse: in 1954 in Guatemala he saw, with his own eyes, the CIA overthrowing the government, bombs dropping from planes and everything. He did what he could to help defend the capital but it was hopeless.
Like Fanon, Guevara was a doctor who saw that what patients suffered from most were the effects of Western imperialism. Poverty and disease were merely the symptoms. The countries of Latin America were run for the benefit of the US by the few at the top who did its bidding, leaving the masses poor. The US, as he saw, used its military might to keep it that way.
In Mexico he met Fidel Castro, who asked him to join his revolution to overthrow Batista, the US’s puppet dictator of Cuba.
In 1956 Castro landed in Cuba with just 80 men – the same week Bing Crosby arrived to play golf. Batista defeated Castro, killing all but 20 of his men. As they fled to the mountains, Guevara had to choose between a box of medicine and a box of bullets. He chose the box of bullets.
By 1958 their numbers had grown to 200. They came down from the mountains and cut Cuba in half. Guevara himself took Santa Clara, the third biggest city. By New Year’s Day 1959 Batista had fallen.
Guevara had hundreds of political prisoners killed without trial. He became the head of the national bank and later the minister of industry.
In December 1964 he spoke before the UN and briefly met Malcolm X. Then he travelled across Africa, reading Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” (1961).
To free the human race of its enemy, the United States of North America, Cuba was not enough. Nor was Vietnam. There needed to be several Vietnams at the same time. The more countries that freed themselves from the tree of Western imperialism, the weaker the tree would become. So he went to fight in D.R. Congo and Bolivia. The Tricontinental – Asia, Africa and Latin America – needed to work together to throw off the chains of Europe and North America and create a new world, one built for everyone, not just for rich Westerners.
See also:
- Welcome to Hispanic Heritage Month 2014
- Frantz Fanon
- Malcolm X
- Nelson Mandela
- American Empire
- Notes towards a Chicano history of the US
- Books banned from Tucson classrooms – one of his books was among them
- Of dusky maidens – Jack Kerouac travelled across the US at about the same time as Guevara’s journey, but took a very different view of the poverty he saw.
How accurate was the “Motorcycle Diaries”?
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Great post,.
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… and los cubanos lived happily ever after. And no one from Cuba tried to escape and get to the U.S. in boats. Instead, people fled the U.S. in massive numbers to escape to lovely communist Cuba. Oh wait…
but, and it doesn’t matter how many people he slaughtered, Guevara was a “hero” because he came from a rich mostly white family and believed in communism, which is the predecessor to modern “equalism”. So he must be good, and I’m sure Obama would echo Mandela’s praises of him. Don’t worry, now the CIA is fighting to establish “equalism” all around the world, from the Ukraine to the Middle East! Viva la revolucion!
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The family and I saw a documentary on Che Guevara and it was very interesting. Guevara was an elite strategist.
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Anything this man has accomplished or achieved lost me @ the communism part (maybe he was confused and didn’t know how much that destroyed Asia for years) or the fact that he was the right hand man of a Dictator like Fidel Castro. Castro was a Western Imperial Elitist and many from Cuba detest non-white Latinos and like Brazil there is a heavy Caste system based on race.
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boitempoeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/11-11-11_luiz-bernardo-pericc3a1s_gonzalo-malcolm-e-fidel.jpg
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Hey Abagond, have you considered continuing the Latin American theme and writing an article on Evo Morales? He’s a pretty significant figure in contemporary Latin American political history.
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Im south African and I have nothing but love for che quevara. yes I support the idea of Marxism. Thomas sankara was inspired by him and he wanted france to stop controlling Burkina faso and he was shot. The Europeans want to keep Africans in chains. also fidel castro and angola helped to stop apartheid. he was friends with nelson mandela. check out my video on the people of benin.http://youtu.be/HDzLkgammxI?list=UURlHlltRjWFtkuwOhcy2UVw
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check out this video on Thomas sankara http://youtu.be/DfzoToJEnu8 against debt
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Michelle,you appear to be a white South African who decided it would be cool to make a national geographic style montage of photos of different African groups set to distinctly non-African bossa nova (and advertise it on a post about Che Guevara). Almost as if you were taking pictures of wildlife. You must be proud of yourself. A noble person proud to help end apartheid, even though it will result in the slaughter of your own people and a decline in the standard of living of the average person in SA. A great do gooder who believes in Marxism, even though its implentation has resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide, along with general impoverishment of adherent nations and peoples and all the maladies that come with that. To me you are disgusting.
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Che was a revolutionary all the way. Those people downing his approach to revolution never have been revolutionary themselves. Its nonsense to down a man who gave his life for freedom. As it is said Che was part white, a doctor and he didn’t have to care but he did. Its nasty some of the comments about Che coming from silly Blacks who never fought anything or anybody for freedom.
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@ Michelle
The Sankara video is brilliant. I’ve never heard of the man until now. Before the video ended I silently wagered that this man was assassinated. I was going to check wiki to confirm, but I read your other comment first and realized then that my silent wager was right. (my intuition provides me no pleasure with my correct guess here though)
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Kiwi said:
“I guess we can thank whites for inventing communism, just like how white racism and colonialism similarly devastated nonwhite majority countries like South Africa”
More precisely, YKW invented communism, but to point that out is not permitted. They also invested “equalism”, and “equalism” is the best thing ever, even though equalist countries never seem able to come anywhere close to obtaining actual equalism in their populations (like communism, it sounds good, though, rite, and the rich can get richer while saying they really truly duly believe in equalism and they are ever so sorry for their privilege, but of course Johnny needs to go to school in a nice neighborhood).
Re: colonialism, so if whites never had any interaction with what is now South Africa would South Africans really be better off? The area was sparsely populated before whites showed up (the decisive Battle of Blood River was won by less than 500 Boers). If being part of warring tribes is so cool, there’s nothing stopping Africans from renouncing the white man’s “civilization” and going back to that. However, generally speaking, given the choice, no one does that.
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Given the choice between the U.S. being ruled by our current parties or the technocrats in Beijing, I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat.
If you look at what I wrote above, it doesn’t mention IQ. I mentioned civilization. Europeans have created and sustained it. So have East Asians. I didn’t say it justified colonialism. I asked seriously if Africans in present day South Africa would have been better off if they (and their ancestors) had had no contact with Europeans. I don’t think the answer is clearly “yes”.
IQ is important, but it isn’t everything. Whites seem to have self-destructive tendencies. Call it pathological altruism. Anyway, I know you don’t want to have a serious discussion of these issues. You want to “win” arguments.
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@biff
Oh, so that’s what they’re calling “the White Man’s Burden” these days. And the fact that no one seems to appreciate this hefty burden graciously shouldered on behalf of the rest of the world seriously vexes whites so.
As far as colonization of South Africa goes, it never occurs to the conquering party that leaving the original African inhabitants alone instead of fighting them, taking their land and pillaging the living daylights out of it while subjecting them to rigidly enforced second-class status in their own home was a viable option. Of course, that’d mean the spoils offered by the African continent would go untapped and well, we very well can’t let that happen, can we?
Of course you would, as the devil you know is the one you benefit most from. Ask someone who’s not of your tribe the same question and you’ll see some rather surprising answers.
IMHO, six in one hand and a half-dozen in the other. Not a dime’s worth of difference, ethnicity notwithstanding.
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@ Kiwi
You might see biff’s world view as contradictory, but it’s actually common conservative thought. They think of past Western civilization as superior, but that it is now decadent and doomed to fail. I know of many authors who wrote stuff like that in the late 19th century and my guess is one would find more when going further back.
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biff didn’t say Jews weren’t white. He said “more precisely”. That’s like someone saying “bird” and someone else saying “more precisely, a sparrow.”
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Guevara was an idealist, but a flawed, limited and blinkered one. As we have seen, he displayed overtly racist traits during at least some of his life.
He turned out to be ruthless and authoritarian. That seems to be a theme that recurs often with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. The means they employ (the Vanguard Party approach) invites corruption by power and is, from the outset, elitist, paternalistic and hierarchical.
Guevara’s empathy with the oppressed, and his strong motivation to act, were so fervent that he apparently failed to recognise the elements of oppressiveness and tyranny within himself. Marxist-Leninist top-down communism, where a ruling (or, euphemistically “guiding”) party exercises authority is doomed to the kind of totalitarian future that played out in Cuba, The USSR, China and N Korea. In Marx’s vision The State, in the form of The Party, was supposed to be a transitional socialist step on the way to a true communism that would not require centralised, authoritarian government. But, as the Anarchist Communists pointed out, no state has ever faded away due to redundancy. Indeed, states invariably strive to strengthen their grip on the populations they govern.
The kind of Communism that was prominent in the 20th Century brought out the worst of what was in Guevara. Guevara learned that a strong party would be needed to guide the ignorant proles. As always, imposed authority soon became oppression.
I don’t know if Guevara’s empathy with the poor and oppressed was stronger than his egotistical urge to power. Perhaps if the revolution on offer had been a grass-roots Anarchist-Communist one, rather than Marxist-Leninist, he may have developed differently and truly acted for the inclusive common good. On the other hand, the absence of positions of authority to which he could aspire might have been unattractive to him.
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To Abagond:
He went on to fight in failed revolutions in D.R. Congo and in Bolivia, where he was killed by the CIA.
What’s your source that says he was killed by the CIA..? Multiple articles indicate he was executed by a member of the Bolivian army on the orders of the President of Bolivia. The US apparently wanted him alive to be brought to Panama for interrogation.
““CIA tells us that the latest information is that Guevara was taken alive. After a short interrogation to establish his identity, General Ovando—Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces—ordered him shot. I regard this as stupid, but it is understandable from Bolivian standpoint, given the problems which the sparing of French communist and Castro courier Regis Debray has caused them.”
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To Kiwi:
As a native of Argentina, an extremely white country, he seems to have taken on the job of “saving” black Congolese and brown Bolivians. I’m sure Cuba remained a white-dominated country even after Fidel Castro overthrew the US-backed regime.
Bautistia, the ruler of Cuba before Castro was biracial – The Castros and Guevara are fully of European descent in a country that has been classified as roughly 50% mixed race or black. Also FWIW I wouldn’t call Argentina “extremely” white although the upper class Argentinians (As with Che Guevara’s family) are almost exclusively white. Also the CIA Factbook claims Argentina is 99% white but genetic studies indicate that the average Argentinian is roughly 20% indigenous and black, albeit there are many people who are of fully European descent and quite a few people who have markedly higher levels of indigenous ancestry.
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@ Uncle Milton
Thank you. I stand corrected. The CIA helped the Bolivian army to find him. In particular, US Rangers led the 1800 Bolivian soldiers and were aided by informants and NSA radar. The Bolivian minister of interior, Antonio Arguedas, was himself a CIA agent. The order to kill him came from La Paz.
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Abagond
Thank you. I stand corrected. The CIA helped the Bolivian army to find him. In particular, US Rangers led the 1800 Bolivian soldiers and were aided by informants and NSA radar. The Bolivian minister of interior, Antonio Arguedas, was himself a CIA agent.
I know US troops were training Bolivian soldiers but I do not think they were with the Bolivians when Guevara was captured. (Too high profile..)
However this fellow Félix Rodríguez was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Rodr%C3%ADguez_(soldier)
http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKroderiguez.htm
I have one degree of separation from Felix Rodriguez. He took (Stole) Che Guevara’s Rolex watch as a souvenir and wore it for many years afterward and was wearing it the day he interrogated a friend of mine who had been arrested at a protest in San Francisco against the first Gulf war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Rodr%C3%ADguez_(soldier)#Bolivia
“In 1967, the CIA recruited Rodríguez to train and head a team to hunt down Marxist guerilla Che Guevara, who was attempting to overthrow the government in Bolivia. After Guevara was wounded and captured by Bolivian special forces trained and supported by the CIA, Rodríguez interrogated him.
Rodríguez stated that he wanted to keep Guevara alive for further interrogation, but was thwarted by the order of the Bolivian president that Guevara be summarily executed. Rodríguez, whose cover was that of a Bolivian army major, repeated those orders, later stating that it was a Bolivian decision, and Guevara was killed. Rodríguez has in his possession Guevara’s Rolex wristwatch.”
As you probably know, even though the CIA may recruit someone, they don’t always do the bidding of the US.. Antonio Arguedas Che Guevara’s diaries to Cuba (and later defected to Cuba…)
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/712384/Antonio-Arguedas-Mendieta And let’s not even talk about the Middle East.. (Saddam Hussein was at one time on the CIA’s payroll…)
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@biff im not white. im black, my mom is Xhosa and my dad is congolese
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Michelle:
When you go to the link you provided above you see the name “Michelle Grobbelaar”
When you google “Michelle Grobbelaar” you get this: http://www.africaarray.psu.edu/academics/biographies/biography_grobbelaar.asp
Lily white do gooder type. If that’s not you, my bad, but you must get confused with her a lot, since she dominates the google search results and is also from SA.
Kiwi, you throw around “stupid” and “retard” pretty freely there. Just empty insults. I know you can do better than that.
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Kiwi:
You don’t see that these kinds of intellect related insults mean nothing to me or BM/DJ/CC/DDG. That’s the point. It’s like me calling you shorty (after you’ve identified as a tall guy–and I have no reason not to believe you). You would probably just completely laugh and shrug it off. You know a little about my pedigree and that I attended better schools than yours and likely have a much higher IQ than you. You’re not able to one up me in this area. Judging by his comments, BM/DJ/CC/DDG is also a very smart guy. He writes far more coherently than you do.
By the way, you said this “He thinks Jews aren’t really white, which is why he says they control America at the expense of real whites like him: WASPs” You’re just making stuff up. I’m not saying YKW aren’t truly “white”. Of course the ones of European descent are. My best friend is half YKW and he’s married to a WASP. I’m sure they will have wonderful babies and I wish them the best. Second generation European Americans: British, German, Italian, Greek, etc. tend to blend in with the greater American white population by intermarriage. Many, if not most YKW still don’t do this, so they self-segregate, and they tend to take care of their own. So that’s one thing. The other thing is that they tend to be disproportionately “equalist” in ideology (in practice, almost no one is), despite the fact that this dogma (a successor to communism) is destroying civilization globally. However, I recognize there are many traditional defenders of civilization among the YKW, especialy in their homeland (they don’t put up with illegal immigrants, for instance). So it’s a complex subject, and I don’t appreciate you putting words in my mouth. Though I know that won’t stop you from doing so.
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Kiwi
I also think it is fair to view biff as a stalker
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Kiwi:
At least you will never admit defeat. You keep making ridiculous arguments, and you are in a place where probably the majority of the readership doesn’t have the ability to see how stupid they sound.
So you think STEM majors from podunk state schools are all smarter than ivy leaguers who didn’t want to be comp. sci nerds, even though they had higher math SATs than you.
I normally don’t even reply to Sharina. She couldn’t even scroll up to see which of us made the first comment on this post and who was stalking whom.
Anyway, because of your revelelations on Open Thread, where you’ve inadvertently identified yourself as a male at the very bottom of the sociosexual hierarachy (equivalent to a female being ugly and fat), you’ve apparently gotten several girls here concerned for your safety/mental health. If they see me pointing out your inability to interact with girls or your inability to make coherent arguments, it seems they are gonna try to call Child Protective Services.
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Kiwi
I was not going to go sout far as call biff stupid but I officially can. When I called him a stalker I was referring to his extensive research of Michelle. Did Michelle follow and stalk him at some point? Oh but the dumb azz didn’t bother to scroll up and view the context into why that was said.
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So* not sout
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@Kiwi
Are you suggesting that “Big Momma/Da Jokah/Church’s Chicken/duckduckgoofs” may very well have the same person behind those accounts? I wouldn’t be surprised.
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WAY OFF TOPIC: the intelligence, education or sex lives of commenters.
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@ Kiwi
Che Guevara was arguably a White Saviour, but I would not count him as one. He was from Argentina, which was at the wrong end of Western imperialism, as was the rest of Latin America along with most of Asia and Africa. If Hollywood makes a more or less true film about his life that White Americans love, then that would probably prove me wrong.
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@ Jefe
I do not know how true the “Motorcycle Diaries” are. I have not read it, but I heard it was good.
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@ Buddhuu
Can you be specific?
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For a start some things he said:
Excuse abrupt response. Literally just about to run out of the office for home.
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There was also something he was supposed to have said about not being bothered about helping “blacks” because they hadn’t contributed to the revolution in Cuba. I can’t remember it verbatim and I can’t find it online.
But the evidence for racism is countered by comments from some of his Congolese comrades who said that Guevara treated everyone equally.
So, it seems that Che might have had periods where he viewed black people through the critical eyes of white paternalism. That said, I always had the feeling that he was more anti-racist than racist, but I’ve only read a couple of books about him and those will, of course, have reflected the authors’ opinions.
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To buddhu and Abagond: re controversial writing by Che Guevara
Buddhu said:
For a start some things he said
Abagond said:
Can you be specific?
The controversial passage comes from The Motorcycle Diaries (page 246 of my ebook) , written when Che was 24 years old – the setting is Caracas:
“The homes in the suburbs are spaced much further apart. Caracas extends along the length of a narrow valley, enclosing and restraining it on its edges, so that on a short walk you’ll be climbing the surrounding hills, and there, with the progressive city laid out before your feet, you’ll begin to see a new aspect of its multifaceted makeup. The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely: the black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”
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I read Uncle Milton’s post and where Guevara mentions that blacks lack of affinity for bathing, i read Guevara was called “The Pig” because he lacked an affinity for bathing.
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Top Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Che Guevara from Listverse.com. He was called “Chancho” (pig) for list lack of bathing.
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The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink
Buddhuu, it would be better to have more context around that quote but I’m inclined to think that comment of Guevara’s is not racist. It’s just his observation about most blacks in (i guess) Cuba, it might have been a well supported observation, given the day to day realities.* His comment sounds like a comment you could hear a person of colour make. For example, “Whites x…….x” Would it be racist? Not necessarily. Poc have irritations with white people, the irritations can’t always be phrased like a Hallmark card saying, nor should they be, necessarily.
On a personal note, my own Caribbean originated family warned me that American Blacks have particular (meaning are famous for) negative qualities and provided me warnings and examples when I made my first visit to America. Was my family being racist? No, they were commenting on a particular cultural grouping of Blacks and making a generalization (they understand their observation can’t be true in every case) that they thought was true in a good many cases.
Just because something a comment/observation is unpleasant and is said about a racial (sometimes the speaker really means a cultural grouping, and uses colour from convenience or confused awkwardness) grouping does not mean it is “racist”. (At least not in the, “these people are genetically like this” meaning.)
There is a difference in speaking on a taboo and speaking hatefully. The world is not this binary place only populated by the innocent good on the one side and dedicated evil on the other. It is not evil to speak to a taboo.
——————————————————————————
* if blacks were indeed engaging in frivolities and drink but had a history of being marginalized in Cuban society (or whatever society Guevara was talking about) then, from such a vantage point, one might talk of racism in the comment. But that gets into a bit of nuance and semantics.
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oh dear,
egg on face, this way comes? 😀
Milton has posted the context. Time to read it…
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Well, the racist comment seems to be the bathing remark.
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Context, context.
We should remember that there were public shows of solidarity from Castro (and Guevara) toward Malcolm X. Picking on a comment here and a comment there does not always inform of the whole of a story.
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@ Uncle Milton:
Many thanks for that. I’ve been a bit pressed for time so my hurried posts have been largely from (vague) memory. I’m grateful to you for being more thorough.
@ Legion:
No egg. I think your analysis is perfectly reasonable.
@ all:
There are far more examples of Guevara saying unambiguously, vigorously anti-racist things. He was particularly scathing about the USA. But it’s pointless to ignore the isolated remarks: they do bear examination so we draw as well-informed conclusions as we are able.
I’ve found the other passage to which I alluded in my comment yesterday. It reads thus:
The page Google threw up with it is http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/apr/17/marco-rubio/did-che-guevara-write-extensively-about-superiorit/.
There doesn’t seem to be much context there for the quote and I really don’t recall the context from when I originally encountered it.
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Some examples of Guevara’s anti-racist utterances are quoted near the bottom of this interesting article.
http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/02/05/debunking-the-che-guevara-was-racist-lie/
Notably:
and
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Yeah, I’m pretty sure that if these sentiments had come from Mitch Mcconnell, there would be no delay in characterizing them and he as a racist.
Time to take Che off the pedestal just for the sake of consistency, methinks 🙂
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During brazilian military dictatorship of the 70s it was forbidden even to say his name. Em he became an ícon for freedom loving brazilians.
Now we know he was a fucking nazi. He executed gays for the crime of being gay, and blacks for the crime of being black
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1959 quote when his Führer conquered Cuba:
“We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.”
(He didn’t keep his word: blacks were murdered)
The source is a leftist site: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_1199252
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Fidel and Che created concentration vamos for gay men:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fidel-castros-horrific-record-on-gay-rights
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