Twenty-seven years ago this month, Ernesto "Che" Guevara died, murdered by rangers in the village of Higuera, Bolivia. Jorge Jorquera argues that more than any other symbol of the 1960s, El Che should be remembered.
To the Argentineans, che can express, depending on intonation and context, the entire spectrum of human passions — surprise, exhilaration, sorrow, tenderness, approval or protest. After the Cuban Revolution, when Che was asked whether he liked what had first been his nickname, then his combat pseudonym, he replied: " For me 'Che' signifies all that is important and valuable in my life. It couldn't be otherwise. After all, my first name and surname represent something small, private, insignificant."
According to his father, there was something in his nature that drew Che "to distant wanderings, dangerous adventures and new ideas". But the passion that earned Che his name was most of all a passion for human liberation.
Born June 14, 1928, he found in his family an atmosphere of radical liberal ideas. Both his mother and father had been active in the anti-fascist and anti-Peronist movements. His mother, Celia de la Serna, had also participated in the feminist movement and fought for women's suffrage.
His parents were book lovers, with a library full of the classics, books on history, philosophy, psychology and art. Che had his favourites, in childhood Jules Verne, Dumas, Victor Hugo and later Cervantes, Tolstoy and Gorky. Poetry he loved. He knew well the works of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Garcia Lorca, and Neruda.
His early years filled Che with both a grand respect for humanity and anger at those who would destroy it. His rebelliousness was touched also by the heavy defeats already inflicted on the left in Latin America, through the 1930s and the experiences of "popular fronts" such as that in Chile.
In 1943, his close friend Alberto Granados suggested that a street demonstration be organised to demand the release of arrested students. Che responded: "What do you mean, go into the streets, just so they can beat you over the heads with clubs! No thanks, I'll hit the street only when they give me a bufoso [pistol]."
In the struggle
Perhaps nothing was more formative in Che's youth than the trip he and Alberto took between December 1951 and August 1952. This trip through leper colonies and the Americas brought them into direct contact with the vast poverty and human deprivation of the continent. The trip confirmed Che's moral conviction — he wanted to contribute to la lucha. But how he would contribute he could not be sure.
First he hit the books and finished his studies, graduating in March 1953 as a surgeon and specialist in dermatology. Soon after, having avoided Argentinean military service, Che set foot again. This time, like many other progressive activists in Latin America, he was attracted to Bolivia.
In 1952, yet another revolution had taken place in Bolivia. Che met with a range of representatives from the National Revolutionary Movement government, and even worked for a spell in the Office of Information and Culture and the Agrarian Reform Department.
He was quickly disillusioned by the corruption and political retreats of the Bolivian government. Neither were the links to the working people strong enough to turn this tide. The trade union movement was managed by slippery political figures, and there was no coherent and organised revolutionary leadership.
Revolutionary strategy
Che eventually made his way from Bolivia to Guatemala. Already begun, here his general theoretical self-education in Marxism and Leninism would be strongly affirmed and developed. Most of all the experience of the US-backed coup against Jacobo Arbenz's reformist government strengthened Che's views of the need to prepare for armed struggle and organise a leadership.
Already a Marxist when he arrived, according to his Peruvian comrade and later companion Hilda Gadea, in Guatemala Che was pointed firmly in the direction of a revolutionary strategy, counterposed to the Stalinist "parliamentary road to socialism". Che witnessed the limitations of relying on a "progressive" sector of the national bourgeoisie to carry out a revolutionary process of national liberation. He concluded that violent confrontation with the ruling class and state would be unavoidable.
From this followed Che's views on guerilla warfare. These views would be enriched by the Cuban revolutionary process and the lessons of mass struggle, but would later also lead to the foquismo that detached so many revolutionaries from the revolutionary potential of workers and peasants in Latin America.
In the struggle in the Sierra Maestra and the key cities of Santiago and Havana, Che and the Cuban revolutionaries learned in practice the centrality of mass action. In his December 1958 article "What we have learned and what we have taught", Che wrote:
"... we have also learned that the strategy of mass struggle follows established laws that cannot be bent or evaded. The lesson is clearly learned. To the work among th peasant masses — whom we have united, regardless of affiliation, in the struggle for land — we add today the raising of workers' demands that unite the proletarian masses under a single banner of struggle, the United National Workers Front, and a single immediate tactical goal: the revolutionary general strike."
The triumph and development of the Cuban revolution deepened Che's appreciation of the central role of the working class. In particular, the reorganisation of production in a new non-capitalist economy highlighted the role of the working class in the overall process of social revolution.
Che's saw the struggle in terms of his Leninist understanding: "The Cuban revolution has polarised the forces. Faced with the dilemma of choosing between the people or imperialism, the weak national bourgeoisies choose imperialism and betray their country. In this part of the world the possibility is almost totally gone for there to be a peaceful road to socialism."
However, the prism of an international movement dominated by Stalinism, and Latin American experiences marked by this and the earlier guerilla movements against Spanish colonialism, led to his tendency to generalise guerilla struggle into a strategy.
Socialist construction
Che's contribution to the revolutionary movement, the dedication of his life to human emancipation, was an example for a generation of activists. And while his writings on revolutionary strategy are open to different interpretations and marked by a certain militarism, he did provide an incisive and sometimes original contribution to a Marxist understanding of socialist construction.
What stands out are his polemics against bureaucratism, his contribution to debates on socialist planning and economic development, and his notes on ideology and the revolutionary party in the transition to socialism.
Che emphasised the need to recall at every stage the unavoidable if complex link between economic existence and social consciousness: "With respect to material interest, what we want to achieve with the budgetary system is for the lever not to become something that compels the individual — either individually or collectively — to struggle desperately with others in order to assure certain conditions of production and distribution that would put him in a privileged situation".
Che added that maintaining the ideological strength of the revolution was critical. The revolutionary party would be the "ideological motor force of the revolution".
Socialist construction, according to Che, could not be separated from internationalism. The task of a revolutionary "comes to an end only with death, unless the construction of socialism is accomplished on a world scale. If his [her] revolutionary zeal is blunted when the most urgent tasks have been accomplished on a local scale and [s]he forgets about proletarian internationalism, the revolution [s]he leads will cease to be a driving force and sink into a comfortable drowsiness that imperialism will utilise to gain ground. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity."
Che's internationalism, his anti-bureaucratism, his entire revolutionary fervour was fuelled by a sharp Marxist understanding of revolution, its possibility and necessity. The revolutionary moral conviction of his Marxism is the strongest memory of him and what, in an age of individualism, deserves to be rescued most for the new generation of radical activists. A commitment to humanity is something to be proud of.
Two years before he was murdered, Che encapsulated this moral conviction in a letter to his children:"Remember that the revolution is what is important ... 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."