Che Guevara

Latin American revolutionary leader, who rejected both capitalism and orthodox Soviet communism. Like T.E. Lawrence (1888 1935), better known as 'Lawrence of Arabia', Guevara lived an adventurous life. Guevara's tragic early death in Bolivia created a legend that still lives. He once said that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love", but he also wrote influential works of guerrilla warfare.

During the Cuban Revolution of 1956-1959, led by Fidel Castro, which Ernesto Che Guevara participated in and became a commander in the Rebel Army, the goals of the Revolution changed from one of deposing the Dictator Fulgencio Batista, to a broader based social and economic movement, which featured agrarian reform as one of its main tenants. A large part of the Guerilla forces led by Castro and Guevara, sometimes above 80 percent, were peasants, some dispossessed, all abused by feudal land arrangements of Cuba before the Revolution. Many of the campesinos worked day in and day out for just barely enough to support a family. Nearly all the peasants were diseased or malnourished. This fact led Castro and Guevara to understand the need for the Agrarian Reform program instituted soon after the Revolution was accomplished, while they were still fighting the Revolutionary War (Guevara, 102).

During Che's subsequent revolutionary campaigns, he wrote his Message to the Tricontinental (1967) in which he openly criticized the Soviet Union; claiming that the Northern hemisphere of the world, both the Soviet Union and the US, exploited the Southern hemisphere of the world. He strongly supported the Vietnamese Revolution, and urged his comrades in South America to create "many vietnams".

In 1965 Che left Cuba to set up guerrilla forces first in the Congo and then later in Bolivia, where he was ultimately captured and killed in October 1967. Accounts of his execution have varied over the years, but many contemprary accounts indicate some degree of collaboration between Bolivia's government troops and the United States CIA.

Guevara developed a theory of primacy of military struggle, in particular concept of guerilla foquismo. Many of Che's theories regarding guerilla tactics are articulated in his 1961 work "Guerilla Warfare."

The Cuban experience was one fraught with mistakes made because of inexperience. Che was never one to hide facts, and he was always self critical. But no matter what, one fact remains that no capitalistic critic of Che Guevara or the Cuban revolution will ever be able to erase. The people of Cuba enjoyed a better life after the revolution than before it. Illiteracy was wiped out. Unemployment was eliminated. Cuba became somewhat of an industrial power. It may have hurt making the transition, but the pain was necessary. In April 1961, the United States sponsored the failed invasion of Cuba, called in America, "The Bay of Pigs". The invasion was aborted because the Cuban people did not raise up to greet the exiled invaders with open arms, as the American government expected they would. The Cuban people instead, defended the Revolution, and formed militias which stopped the invasion on the beach where it had landed. The Cuban people were in full support and in full defense of the Revolution at the place called Giron Beach. Che summed up the Revolution, and the progress of the Revolution to that point in History when he explained why there was no popular support for the invasion that America had looked for with the following words: "You can't expect that a man who was given a thousand acres by his father and just shows up here to get his thousand acres back won't be killed by a countryman who used to have nothing, and now has a terrible urge to kill the guy because he [the inheritor] wants to take his [the defender] land away from him." (Taibo, 327)

Ref:
- www.marxists.org
- www.kirjasto.sci.fi
- www.moreorless.au.com