Che Guevara

Title: Che Guevara – A Revolutionary Life

Author: Jon Lee Anderson

Publisher: Grove Press, 1997 (First)

ISBN: 9780802135582

Pages: 814

The end of cold war in the 1990s and the earth-shattering crash of communism in the Soviet Union threw leftist movements around the world into a tizzy. All their theory and its practical implementation was no more and they faced the unenviable and daunting task of facing the future without the support of an overarching and viable ideology. This problem was solved to some extent by resurrecting the legacy of a revolutionary hero who was killed in battle a quarter of a century ago. Che Guevara fit the bill perfectly. He was young when he died for his ideology, uncorrupted by any long tenure in power and upholding the principles of equality and freedom from exploitation. This provided a timeless appeal to the masses. Che’s portrait is now ubiquitous in leftist circles, but few know of the man behind that visage. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (1928 – 1967) was born in Argentina and grew to be the face of communism and revolution across the globe. With painstaking research spanning many years and continents, Jon Lee Anderson tells the story of Che Guevara in this great book. Anderson is an American biographer, author and staff writer for ‘The New Yorker’. He has reported from many war zones in the world and currently resides in England.

Che Guevara was born in an aristocratic family in Argentina who later fell on bad times. His birth was marked by a fortuitous coincidence as in the same hour of Che’s birth, a striking dockworker in the town had died of gunshot wounds. Anderson provides an in-depth coverage of the revolutionary’s childhood. He was very much attached to his mother Celia, who shared many of his bold features and chronic asthma. Che was reckless and brimming with energy. Once he crossed a yawning chasm deftly balancing himself on a length of narrow beam laid across it. However, his teenage was not marked by any heroic deeds. He exhibited a paradoxical behavior of expressing radical-sounding declamations while displaying a complete apathy about political activism. Guevara’s home was a place where his mother brought all kinds of people and was ever ready to share the meals with them. As a result, Che turned out to be searching, nonconformist and with a yearning for adventure. After his medical school education, he explored the South American countryside on a motorcycle along with a friend. They visited many countries and it was Dr. Hugo Pesce, a leprologist in Lima who effected a change in Che’s attitude to life and society by drawing him closer to Marxism. For Che, politics was a mechanism for social change, and it was social change, not power itself, that he craved, unlike Castro. While staying in Mexico, he established liaison with Cuban rebels fighting the Batista regime under Fidel Castro. A mutual respect grew between the men and soon Che joined the guerilla force that embarked on a fight against the regime. Part 1 of the book neatly covers this episode in Che’s life.

Post-war Latin America was a fertile breeding ground of revolution with its deadly combination of large landowners, unpopular and bullying authorities, domination by the clergy, absence of effective laws and economic predominance of foreign corporate monopolies. To add to the potent mix, all of Latin America, except Brazil was culturally unified by the bond of Spanish – the lingua franca. Revolutionaries worked on a continental scale and the Cuban revolutionary struggle was helped and abetted by people of other nationalities. Anderson makes it abundantly clear that Fidel Castro and most of his revolutionary companions were not communists even long after the revolution was successfully hoisted on the shoulders of the Cuban people. During military action, Castro maintained a respectable distance from the Cuban Communist party and the open dalliance Che and his brother Raul made with the communists often turned his position awkward for all concerned. Che believed war as the ideal circumstance in which to achieve a socialist victory, or socialism was the natural order of mankind and guerilla war the chrysalis from which it would come about. The U.S. was also not too hostile to Castro’s revolutionary struggle. When the Batista regime used tanks and B-26 bombers it had acquired from the U.S. as part of its hemispheric defence program against the revolutionaries, they opposed it and temporarily froze further military assistance. After the revolution’s ouster of Batista and when Castro assumed the reins of power, the U.S. recognized the new government in Havana even before the USSR did so.

This book depicts the devastation that came about in Cuba after the revolution’s establishment of an autocratic system that spread its tentacles far and wide to tie the people down in all spheres of life. As a result of cozying up to the USSR and export of armed guerillas to other Latin American countries, the U.S. imposed crippling sanctions against Cuba which cut down the living standards of the people. During the early stages of Castro’s reign, the visiting Soviet technicians and advisors were dazzled at the glitzy gizmos and hearty outwardness visible in Havana’s streets. Slowly, as communism tightened its deathly stranglehold, all of it was gone and the Cubans came down to the level of the Soviets with interminable queues to obtain basic foodstuffs and strict censoring of media. Che instituted a Cleansing Commission to rid the country of the traitors to revolution. Hundreds were apprehended, subjected to summary trials lasting a few minutes and then executed by a firing squad. Fidel Castro ruled out elections for ever and named his brother Raul as his successor. His cronies chanted ‘Revolucion Si, Elecciones No’ (Revolution Yes, Elections No). All newspapers were either taken over by the state or closed down. Che envisaged vanguard role for the rebel army ignoring urban workers and traditional communist party organization. His forceful advocacy of rural guerilla warfare and agrarian revolution betrayed ‘deviant’ Maoist influence in Soviet eyes. Che Guevara turned out to be a liability to Castro in the end, who wanted to placate the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet divide in Communism that surfaced in the early 1960s.

Che’s stint in Cuba’s administration was not marked by any extraordinary talent or aptitude. He worked as the industries minister, but his authoritarian policies stood in the way of the country’s progress. He appeared to have become bored in Cuba as time went by and wanted fresh adventures somewhere else. His outspoken criticism against the Soviets made his position difficult for Castro. Though the author maintains that the duo never fell out with each other openly, Che’s decision to lead the guerilla movement in Congo after living six years in Cuba came as a relief to Castro. But Congo was not Cuba, where he received little support from the peasants and local fighters. Moreover, unlike Cuba in the Batista era, Congo didn’t have a leader of the caliber of Castro. After a few months of futile warfare, he moved to Bolivia which he planned to turn into a staging ground for the Argentine revolution. However, the problems Che faced in Congo followed him to Bolivia as well. But this time, the Bolivian army proved to be a tougher bet than the disorganized mercenary troops in Africa. Che was eventually cornered and he surrendered to his enemies. Anderson says that Che shouted to army soldiers when they trained their guns on him at the moment of capture, “Don’t shoot. I am Che Guevara. I am worth more to you alive than dead” (p.733). If true, this cowardice brings lasting ignominy on a guerilla leader who had sent hundreds of young fighters to the battlefield asking them not to come back alive defeated. Che was not averse to killing captured enemies or court-martialed comrades himself. Being a doctor by profession, he could perform the executions with clinical precision and with great skill as mentioned in his diary of one such episode, “The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for Eutimio so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a 0.32 pistol in the right side of the brain with exit orifice in the right temporal lobe. He gasped a little while and was dead” (p.237). What is sickening is Guevara’s casual indifference to human suffering because we see in the very next day’s noting in the diary about a very pretty girl who joined the guerillas as “She is a great admirer of the movement who seems to me to want to f*** more than anything else” (p.238). It is shocking that such a tough person meekly capitulated to his enemies and begged for his life!

The author brings out all the aspects of the great revolutionary’s life. The book is so huge that there is practically nothing left to write about Che Guevara on his life. The author is an American, but the book is written very objectively. All facets of Che’s life are examined, and there are indeed a few passages on his sexual life that may be a bit discomfiting to his fans. But Anderson does more than justice to his hero by clearly remarking that his sexual voracity lasted only till his marriage (he married twice) and he remained steadfastly faithful thereafter. Che Guevara was very strict in his private life and didn’t channel government funds for his or family’s private purposes. Once he asked his wife to take their ailing daughter to the hospital in a bus because his car was intended only for official travel. Che’s wife often had to borrow money secretly from his bodyguards as Che drew only a meager salary for his work as a minister which occupied him for almost twenty hours each day. Che Guevara was a revolutionary to the core who wanted absolute obedience and unstinted courage from his followers. He always referred to people, the workers as bits of machinery, as the worker ants in a vast revolutionary agro-industrial complex. He was addicted to violence as a means to bring about an egalitarian regime and spurned elections of any sort. He advocated hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, and transforming the revolutionaries into an effective, violent, seductive and cold killing machine (p.719). Even with all this darkness in his character, Anderson makes Che digestible to the reader who takes pity on him on his last moments.

The book is adorned with a great many photographs detailing the life of Che. The epithet ‘Che’ came about in Cuba according to the Argentine habit of using the word ‘Che’ – meaning ‘Hey You’ – as a form of salutation. The book includes a large appendix, comprehensive notes and a commendable index. The book is gargantuan with 814 pages and compounded by the small typeface. The author has made use of an immense collection of reference material, including a so far unpublished journal of Che’s second travel titled ‘Otra Vez’ (Once Again) which was edited and handed over by Aleida March, his widow in which she had deleted several sexually graphic passages in the interests of preserving the propriety of her late husband’s image.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star