BY JORGE JORQUERA
What would people think of Ernesto "Che" Guevara if he were around today? This leader of the 1959 Cuban revolution was anything but a moderate. He believed with extreme passion in the beautiful possibilities of humankind. Many considered him impatient and fanatical, but he simply saw no reason to "moderate" his desire to make the world a better place.
Che arrived at his political convictions by confronting the realities of ordinary people. During his travels through Latin America in the early 1950s, while still an Argentinian medical student, he saw first hand what is usually kept at arms length. In a 1960 speech "On revolutionary medicine", he spoke of this time: "I came into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued punishment cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child is an unimportant accident". Helping those people became his life's work.
He realised though that this could not be done from a distance. Che chose to throw his lot in with the actual struggles people were waging for their liberation. In 1954, Che found himself in Guatemala, where he became politically active and witnessed the CIA-backed invasion that toppled the Arbenz government, which had initiated social reforms potentially threatening of US interests.
He fled to Mexico and soon made contact with more leaders of the Cuban revolutionary movement, including Fidel Castro. "Then I realised a fundamental thing... the isolated effort, the individual effort, the purity of ideals, the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals goes for naught if that effort is made alone, solitary".
In 1956, convinced to join the struggle of the Cuban people against US imperialist domination and the dictatorship led by Fulgencio Batista, Che left with 81 others on a boat called Granma. They were confident that they could add a new spark to the struggle of the Cuban peasants and workers. On arrival they were met by the Cuban army — only 15 people survived.
The survivors helped strengthen the movement among the peasant poor and their links with the urban opposition. Every successful armed operation had the same aim, to strengthen their leadership unit and inspire further confidence to struggle in the growing opposition. The July 26 Movement, as the grouping was known (following an unsuccessful 1953 attack on that date on the Cuban Moncada barracks), united the peasantry in the struggle for land and raised, as Che explained in a 1959 article, "workers' demands that unite the proletarian masses under a single banner of struggle".
According to Che, "the principal actors of this revolution had no coherent viewpoint" to start with. Among the July 26 Movement there were various conceptions about how the revolution could be won and what it would look like. The unity it achieved was the result of resolute action, inspired and in "close relationship with the people".
The principle of a revolution for and by the people guided their every action. In the process, said Che, "the experience of revolutionary practice gave those leaders the opportunity to form a more complete ideological conception". The July 26 Movement became a socialist movement.
As the struggle of the Cuban peasants and workers intensified, the old system began to crumble. On August 31, 1958, Che led a guerrilla force from the Sierra Maestra towards Las Villas province in central Cuba. There they joined forces with the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate, another organisation leading urban struggle against the dictatorship.
By December, a number of towns in the province had been liberated. The Batista dictatorship was losing its grip, relying increasingly on only its military options. In order to hold Cuba's capital, Havana, reinforcement troops were called from Santa Clara, the capital of Las Villas province.
On December 28, Che's July 26 Movement column begun the battle for Santa Clara. They cut off all military support to the Batista regime now besieged in Havana. On January 1, 1959 Batista fled Cuba, and a new military junta was established. The July 26 movement called on workers and peasants to continue the struggle. On January 2, a general strike of workers paralysed the country and the columns led by Che and Camilo Cienfuegos, another leader of the July 26 Movement, entered Havana.
By May, 1959, the revolutionary government had passed laws reducing electricity rates, cutting rents by 30-50%, outlawing racial discrimination, and introducing agrarian reform that fixed legal holdings at a maximum of 1000 acres and re-distributed land among all the peasantry.
By October, the National Revolutionary Militias had been formed, incorporating thousands of workers and peasants into a people's army and smashing the old apparatus of state repression and social control. In November 1959, Che was appointed the president of the National Bank of Cuba.
Resources were nationalised, taking them from the corporations and putting them into the hands of the population as a whole. Che played an important role in establishing a national budgetary system that increased social decision-making over how things were produced and distributed.
Che and Cuba's revolutionary leaders were very sensitive to the dangers of bureaucratisation that resulted from centralising the country's resources in the state, especially while Cuba's economy remained poor and dependent on the capitalist West. According to Che, "any appearance of formality might separate us from the masses and from the individual, which might make us lose sight of the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation".
Che emphasised that only a population empowered to run things themselves could minimise this danger. This is why he argued that "society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school".
Internationalism
Che knew that the struggle for liberation was an international one. Cuba could achieve only so much — it could be a beacon of hope, but without other revolutions Cuba would be left out to dry.
In April 1965, Che left Cuba to once again throw in his lot with others in struggle. In 1967, in a message to theOrganisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Che urged people at "every small point on the map of the world [to] fulfill our duty and place at the disposal of the struggle whatever little we are able to give".
Che died in battle in Bolivia on October 9, 1967. Since then, his example of steadfast resistance to oppression, and the lessons he drew out of struggle, have inspired activists struggling for freedom and democracy across the world.
Now, after two decades of neoliberalism has ripped through the world, we desperately need more "Ches" desperately. What Che represents is the hope that emerges when people take their beliefs seriously and seize every chance they get to make a difference.
He lived until his final breath with the same attitude he asked of his children in his farewell letter to them: "Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary."
[The quotes in this article have been drawn from Che's many speeches and articles. Many are contained in the Che Guevera Reader, published in Australia by Ocean Press.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, December 10, 2003.
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