No Subject

Che Guevara: a Revolutionary Life
By Jon Lee Anderson
Grove Press, 1997, 814 pages

In both its monumental size and the depth of its research, Jon Lee 
Anderson's biography of Che Guevara appears definitive. Elegantly 
written and psychologically perceptive, it would reward anybody with 
even a superficial interest in Guevara. Unfortunately what it lacks 
is an informed Marxist point of view that in the final analysis 
leaves the subject something of a mystery, especially the 
circumstances of his tragic death. This review will cover both the 
assets and the weaknesses of the book as well as point in the 
direction of much-needed Marxist research into the career of Che 
Guevara.

Guevara's Argentine parents can best be described as déclassé gentry, 
who developed a threadbare aristocratic life-style tinged with 
bohemianism that strongly influenced Che's personal development. One 
is reminded of the stubborn desire to maintain appearances found in 
the fallen southern aristocrats in Tennessee Williams's plays, 
especially Che's mother Celia, whose romanticism and independent 
spirit was his greatest influence.

Of Irish lineage, Ernesto Guevara Lynch tried one business venture or 
another before settling into construction. Using his wife's money, he 
made his first quixotic stab at success in 1927 with a 'yerba mate' 
plantation along the Río Paraná. Yerba mate is a plant whose 
stimulating properties yield a beverage that is as much of a staple 
in Argentine society as tea is in England. Che favored this drink 
throughout his life, even after he had taken up residence in 
revolutionary Cuba. 

This plantation was no paradise either for the workers or the Guevara 
family. Yerba plantations and logging camps often depended on debt 
peonage. They typically drew upon itinerant Guaraní Indians called 
'mensu' who were given binding contracts and cash advances against 
future work, the same fate that often awaited indigenous peoples or 
Mestizos north to Mexico. While agrarian capitalism in Great Britain 
might have been characterized by wage labor, in Latin America unfree 
labor was the norm. Armed plantation guards called 'capangas' kept 
watch over peons to make sure none would escape. If one finally did, 
the local cops would return them to captivity. Anderson notes that 
Guevara Lynch was not the typical plantation boss: "Horrified at the 
stories he heard, he paid his workers in cash."

Born in 1928, the infant Che was the target of ravenous insects that 
infested the Caraguataí region. Every night, while he slept in his 
crib, his father or the Paraguayan foreman would use the burning tip 
of a cigarette to dislodge "the day's harvest of chiggers burrowed 
into the infant's flesh."

In both the carefully observed detail about the social conditions on 
Argentina's plantations and the personal lives of the Guevara Lynch 
family, one sees Anderson at his best. It helps us not only 
understand the harsh realities of Latin American society, but the way 
in which they impinged on a family that was both typical and 
atypical.

Eventually the plantation failed and the family returned to Buenos 
Aires, where Che's mother Celia put her unique stamp on the 
household:

"Celia, meanwhile, continued to run her house like a salon. The 
dinner table was her throne. Here she sat for endless hours playing 
solitaire, which-like the cigarettes she habitually smoked-she had 
become addicted to, but she was always ready to receive some young 
person for conversation or to dispense advice.

"As for the practicalities of everyday life, Celia was above the 
fray. She was clueless about what went on inside the kitchen and, on 
her cook's days off, threw together meals with whatever happened to 
be in the refrigerator, with no notion of measurements or recipes. 
With true aplomb, she was unperturbed when she found nothing there.

"Visitors invariably noted the absence of furniture, adornments, or 
paintings in the house, but were struck by the plethora of books, 
shelved and stacked everywhere. There were other peculiarities: The 
kitchen stove had a perennial short-circuit, and the walls were 
'live,' giving off electrical shocks to incautious newcomers who 
leaned against them."

With a mother like this (the kind any of us would be blessed to call 
our own), it is no wonder that Che cared little for the 
pretentiousness of Argentine high society. On one level this 
expressed itself as a disdain for personal hygiene or fashionable 
clothing. (He was proud of the nickname "El Chancho" he had acquired 
as a youth, which means "the pig." After becoming a guerrilla, he 
found that his neglectful attitude suited primitive conditions well. 
Yet, he never wanted to force his own personal values on others. In 
his capacity as economic planner in Cuba, he was dismayed at the 
inability of the Russians to supply personal hygiene goods in ample 
number. For the fastidious Cubans, deodorant, shampoo and soap were 
nearly as important as food, just as is the case today.)

Reaching maturity during the presidency of Juan Peron, Che began to 
explore Marxist and socialist literature ranging from Joseph Stalin 
to Alfredo Palacios, the founder of the Argentine Socialist Party. 
However, it was the example of Perón himself that Che found most 
inspiring. While Peron has been labeled a 'caudillo' or even a 
fascist by some segments of the Marxist movement, he had much more in 
common with Fidel Castro than Mussolini with whom superficial 
comparisons have been made. Resenting Perón's successful links with 
industrial unions, the CP lashed out at Perón for stepping on its 
turf. When Che ran into a CP youth leader at the University of Buenos 
Aires, where he was studying medicine, he came across as "brusque and 
difficult." Anderson characterized the 22-year-old Che's overall 
attitude toward the CP as "very critical of its sectarianism and 
skeptical about its role in Argentine politics." No matter what he 
thought of the writings of Stalin or the example of a powerful 
workers state in the Soviet Union, Che was looking for an 
alternative.

Despite his wide reading in leftwing literature, it would probably be 
more accurate to describe the young Che Guevara as a cultural rebel 
more than anything else. Although deeply opposed to class injustice, 
he had not really developed a systematic understanding of the 
capitalist system, nor how to overthrow it.

It was around this time that he began to travel extensively on the 
continent. His "Motorcycle Diaries," which record only part of these 
peregrinations, come across as a mixture of Jack Kerouac and John 
Reed. You can see a longing to be connected with the less fortunate 
'other' that evokes Kerouac's strolls through African-American 
neighborhoods in "On the Road." What you do not find in Kerouac is a 
desire, such as that expressed in the following impression of Chilean 
miners, to abolish the conditions that make someone the 'other':

"By the light of the single candle which illuminated us ... the 
contracted features of the worker gave off a mysterious and tragic 
air. . . . The couple, frozen stiff in the desert night, hugging one 
another, were a live representation of the proletariat of any part of 
the world. They didn't even have a miserable blanket to cover 
themselves, so we gave them one of ours, and with the other, Alberto 
and I covered ourselves as best we could. It was one of the times 
when I felt the most cold, but it was also the time when I felt a 
little more in fraternity with this, for me, strange human species."

Eventually his travels led him to Guatemala in 1954, where a 
combination of stormy political events and encounters with key 
individuals would complete his political education and steel his 
determination to become a revolutionary. He arrived during the 
presidency of Jacobo Arbenz, a reformer who had earned the enmity of 
the CIA, the United Fruit Company, and the local comprador 
bourgeoisie. After taking up arms in an unsuccessful bid to defend 
Arbenz's presidency, Che fled with many others to Mexico City, where 
he would eventually meet Fidel Castro. 

Although he did not write up an extensive balance sheet of the 
abortive Guatemalan social democratic experiment, he did take note of 
one failing in a letter to his friend Tita Infante. Falsehoods were 
being circulated all over Latin America about the bloodthirsty 
character of the Arbenz government, from whose grips the CIA and the 
army purportedly had delivered the Guatemalan people. To the 
contrary, for Che "there were no murders or anything like it. There 
*should* have been a few firing squads early on, which is different; 
if those shootings had taken place the government would have retained 
the possibility of fighting back." He would also write his mother 
that he was "completely convinced that [political] half-way measures 
can mean nothing but other than the antechamber to treason." Surely 
this lesson would be applied to Cuba, where Che became administrator 
of the revolutionary tribunals.

In Guatemala City Che became acquainted with Hilda Gadea, a heavy-set 
Peruvian woman with plain features whom he would eventually wed. 
Although Che was blessed with an Adonis-like beauty, he did not 
necessarily seek physical attractiveness in the opposite sex. What 
drew him to Hilda was her sophisticated Marxist outlook and strong 
personality, both of which made her a compañera and not just a 
romantic interest.

Hilda was an exiled leader of the youth wing of Peru's APRA party 
working in Arbenz's government. The APRA's leftwing nationalism bore 
similarities to Peron's "Justicialist" movement. His only 
disagreement with her revolved around the character of the APRA party 
which he regarded as middle-class and reformist. However, she was 
also strongly influenced by the Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui, 
the founder of Peru's non-Stalinist Communist Party. Unfortunately, 
Anderson has few comments on their conversations about Mariátegui 
except that they took place. For scholars of Mariátegui and Latin 
American Marxism, the encounter between Hilda and Che serve as a key 
link with the Cuban revolution, which viewed the Peruvian communist 
as one of their own.

Castro had arrived in Mexico City after being pardoned by Batista for 
his armed assault on the Moncada barracks in 1953. Upon being freed, 
he immediately began plans to launch another armed assault on the 
degenerate dictator and American puppet. Che had already made contact 
with Raul Castro, a left-leaning member of the Cuban Communist Party,
in Mexico City. The two hit it off instantly. After Fidel's arrival 
in Mexico City, Che and Hilda put on a dinner party in his honor, 
whose guests included Laura Albizu Campos, the wife of the Puerto 
Rican revolutionary. When asked by Hilda why he was in Mexico if his 
struggle was in Cuba, Fidel replied: "Very good question. I'll 
explain." Characteristically, the answer lasted four hours.

Elaborate preparations were now underway to organize an armed 
invasion force to join the July 26th movement in Cuba that was 
already conducting sabotage and propaganda interventions through its 
largely urban student and middle-class base. In 1956 some of the 
future guerrillas, including Che, were arrested in Mexico City after 
word of their preparations had leaked out. Following a week or so of 
interrogations, Che told the cops that he "openly admitted his 
Communism and declared his belief in the need for armed revolutionary 
struggle, not only in Cuba but throughout Latin America."

When Fidel found out about Che's statement, he became furious. With 
Castro's public utterances to the effect that he was nothing but a 
patriotic reformer in the best Western nationalist and democratic 
traditions, Che's red rhetoric made him appear deceitful. In fact, 
Fidel's future goals were very likely not that different from Che's, 
but he saw the importance to not create premature divisions between 
himself and those sections of the Cuban bourgeoisie who were willing 
to fight against Batista. Always the master of thrust-and-parry, 
Castro ridiculed the idea of being smeared as an agent of communism. 
After all, he observed, Batista himself had been involved in an 
alliance with the Partido Socialista Popular, the CP of Cuba.

Eventually Che was freed from the Mexican jail and the guerrillas 
sailed to Cuba on a rickety yacht called "Granma" at the end of 1956. 
After reaching land on Cuba's southeastern coast on December 2nd, the 
fighters ran into one reversal after another, leaving their 
revolutionary prospects as shaky as the boat they arrived on.

Three days after landing, they found themselves in the middle of a 
sugar field en route to the Sierra Maestra mountains in Oriente 
province. There they ran into a Cuban army detachment at 4:30 in the 
afternoon, which, in addition to out-numbering and having superior 
weaponry to the rebels, had the element of surprise. Shot in the 
neck, Che was lucky to escape with his life. Of the 82 men who 
arrived on the Granma, only 22 would ultimately regroup in the 
sierra, including Fidel and Che.

At their newly established camp, Fidel lashed out at Che for losing 
his rifle in the heat of battle and stripped him of his pistol. Che 
bore no resentment at being dressed down and worked all the more 
assiduously in the future to show his battle-worthiness. When he 
became a commander of his own guerrilla column, he imposed the same 
kind of iron discipline as Fidel--making sure that he would set a 
personal example himself. Considering his life long struggle with 
asthma, Che's determination to march many miles in hot humid weather 
that aggravated this condition was an inspiration to the men who 
fought alongside him, most of whom were Afro-Cubans from the most 
oppressed ranks of the peasantry, the so-called 'guajiros.' 

Anderson's narratives of Che in combat are not only gripping, they 
suggest that this is the Che Guevara who is most important to him. In 
an encounter in the Mar Verde valley, we see Che as battle-hardened 
veteran.

>>"I could at that moment sense the tension prior to combat," he 
wrote later. "I saw the first soldier appear. He looked around 
suspiciously and advanced slowly. ... I hid my head, waiting for the 
battle to begin. There was the crack of gunfire and then shooting 
became generalized." The forest filled with the roar of combat as the 
two sides blasted away at each other at close quarters. The army 
hastily fired mortars, but they landed well beyond the rebels, and 
then Che was hit. "Suddenly I felt a disagreeable sensation, similar 
to a burn or the tingling of numbness. I had been shot in the left 
foot, which had not been protected by the tree trunk."

>>Che heard some men moving through the brush in his direction and 
realized he was now defenseless. He had emptied his rifle clip and 
hadn't had time to reload; his pistol had fallen on the ground and 
now lay beneath him, but he couldn't lift himself up to get it for 
fear of showing himself to the enemy. Desperately he rolled over and 
managed to grab the pistol just as he saw one of his own men, 
Cantinflas, coming toward him. Cantinflas had come to tell him his 
own gun was jammed and that he was retreating. Che snatched the gun, 
adjusted the clip, and sent the youth off with an insult. In a 
display of courage, Cantinflas left the tree cover to fire upon the 
enemy only to be hit himself by a bullet that entered his left arm 
and exited through his shoulder blade.

>>Both Che and Cantinflas were now wounded, with no idea as to where 
their comrades were. To escape the line of fire, they began crawling 
until they found help. Fleeing, they set off for a peasant 
collaborator's house a couple of kilometers away. Cantinflas was in a 
hammock-stretcher, but Che, his adrenaline still pumping, did the 
first part of the trip on his own two feet before the pain from his 
wound overcame him and he had to be lifted onto a horse.<<

On January 1, 1959, the guerrilla armies made their triumphal entry 
into Havana. From this point onwards, Anderson's biography begins to 
meander. Since the Guevara who interests and inspires him most is the 
Guevara of motorcycle journeys or courageous combat, his stint as 
economic planner and his failed missions in the Congo and Bolivia are 
treated anti-climactically. However, these are the exact issues that 
challenge us as Marxists. How can socialism be built in an 
underdeveloped island that depends on export agriculture? How can the 
revolution be extended beyond the shores of the island to relieve 
pressure, as well as defeating injustice in other countries? These 
are obviously the questions that the Marxist movement has been 
grappling with since 1917 and before, and which Anderson lacks the 
motivation and expertise to address. 

Before Che made the decision to leave Cuba and launch guerrilla 
warfare to relieve pressure both on Cuba and Vietnam, he was working 
two jobs. One was with the Institutio Nacional de Reforma Agraria 
(INRA) and the other was as president of Cuba's National Bank. INRA 
was also where Fidel was working. From this agency, the assault on 
Cuban agrarian capitalism was mounted. As head of the Cuban army, 
Fidel could supply the military firepower to put teeth into what 
would amount to the most radical land reform in this hemisphere's 
history.

Che's working hours became legendary. Foreign dignitaries would be 
told of being granted an interview with Che at 3:00, only to 
subsequently learn that this was 3AM. Mostly Anderson dwells on these 
superhuman efforts and Che's constant clashes with friends and 
comrades who apparently lacked this kind of dedication. All in all, 
he comes across in Anderson's account as an insufferable martinet 
whose native Argentine haughtiness clashed with the more laid-back 
style of the Cubans.

The Cuban decision to advance toward socialism is treated, as one 
might suspect, by Anderson in standard jaded journalist mode. 
Moreover, this turn is treated as if the issue was style rather than 
the ability of a nation to go its own way without interference from a 
hostile imperialist power that had sucked its wealth for most of the 
century. He writes:

>>Along with most other American influences-such as Santa Claus, who 
had been banned-the learning of English was now discouraged; Russian 
was now the second language to learn in the "new" Cuba. Che began 
taking twice-weekly Russian-language classes from Yuri Pevtsov, a 
philologist sent from Lermonstov University to be his interpreter and 
personal tutor. They had no Russian-Spanish manual to work from, so 
the two made do with a Russian-French primer.

Inevitably, in spite of the early popular ridicule about the "bolos," 
a certain Soviet "style" began to seep inexorably into Cuban life in 
way* that were initially superficial. The government spearheaded the 
emblematic transformation. There was already the new central planning 
board, JUCEPLAN, an imitation of the USSR's GOSPLAN. Streets, 
theaters, and factories were rebaptized with the names of homegrown 
and foreign revolutionary heroes and martyrs such as Camilo 
Cienfuegos and Patrice Lumumba. The old Chaplin Cinema on First 
Avenue would become the Carlos Marx, and before long, there would be 
day-care centers named Heroes de Vietnam and Rosa Luxemburg.<<

In keeping with the need to depict the Cuban revolution in power as 
some kind of grotesque Soviet outpost, Anderson tries to find ways to 
depict government statements as shrill and even hysterical. Time and 
time again, the reader is not sure whether Anderson is resorting to 
"scare quotes" to score political points or rather referring to the 
actual words of Cuban officials. For example, on page 535 Anderson is 
setting up the first meeting of Tomas Borge with Che, who is 
described needlessly as "squat and full-lipped." He writes, "Another 
country whose 'liberation' was a goal close to Che's heart was 
Nicaragua." Is Anderson quoting some statement of Che or Borge's or 
is trying to score points against the Central American revolution of 
the 1980s? After all, it is not unreasonable to think in terms of the 
liberation of Nicaragua when Somoza's National Guard had been 
torturing college students and driving campesinos off their land. No 
need for scare quotes when you are dealing with really scary 
dictators.

The final one hundred pages of Anderson's biography are taken up with 
Che's ill-fated interventions in the Congolese revolution and 
Bolivia. As one might expect, the attempt to assist Laurent Kabila 
turns out to be something of a fiasco, as the Congolese rebels are 
depicted as drunkards, whore-mongers and--worst of all--believers in 
'dawa,' which is a superstitious notion that the enemy's bullet can 
not harm them. The subtext of Anderson's chapter on the Congo is that 
such peoples were not suitable material for revolutionary 
transformation as long as they maintained such backward notions. A 
more interesting question probably never would have occurred to 
Anderson, namely how it is that a country could be colonized by an 
'civilized' (my own scare quote) for over a hundred years and retain 
such unscientific beliefs. It would appear that resolute struggle 
against capitalism and colonialism is the best prescription for 
relief from superstition of any sort.

All in all, Anderson betrays some rather racist attitudes toward the 
Congolese people whose courageous leader Patrice Lumumba is 
characterized as "erratic-seeming" and whose rebel troops rule over 
'liberated' territory rather than liberated territory. While one can 
have all sorts of questions about the behavior of Kabila's followers, 
there seems little doubt given the brutality of Mobutu and his 
mercenary allies that--yes--this territory was liberated. One 
supposes that true liberation in Anderson's terms would have to wait 
until the people have received the proper tutelage under serene and 
wise imperialist guidance.

Anderson's account of Che's tragic fall in Bolivia goes over material 
that is quite familiar at this point, including the treacherous 
character of the Bolivian CP and Che's heroic but doomed effort to 
overcome illness and isolation in order to make some kind of 
breakthrough.

For a useful assessment of Che's failure in Bolivia, it would require 
a totally different orientation than Anderson is equipped with. To 
put it as succinctly as possible, the defeat in Bolivia is not the 
result of poor tactics by the guerrillas, or a more sophisticated 
counter-insurgency policy.

The answer, or at least the beginnings of an answer, can be found in 
Anderson's book itself. Namely, the guerrilla movement in Cuba was an 
outgrowth of civic movements that combined legal, electoral and 
extra-legal assaults on the dictatorship. By the time Fidel Castro 
had arrived on the beach of Oriente province in 1956, he was already 
well known as the student leader and the candidate of the Orthodoxo 
party who had challenged Batista. The revolutionary movement he 
founded existed all over Cuba whether or not members were engaged in 
combat or not. As a rule of thumb, guerrilla movements cannot succeed 
unless this kind of mass movement has had a prior existence.

The other flaw in Che's strategy was the belief that a Latin American 
revolution could be launched without regard to the specific dynamics 
of a nation-state. In fact, Bolivia was intended to be a launching 
pad for an assault on Argentina itself, Che's homeland. 
Unfortunately, Che and his fighters were extremely isolated from any 
ongoing national struggle in Bolivia itself and were forced to rely 
on a CP who preferred conventional trade union and parliamentary work 
to armed struggle, no matter the lip service they gave to this 
project.

In light of recent anti-globalization protests, with their 
trans-national ruling class target, it is useful to remind ourselves 
of the need for a political program based on the living class 
struggle of a given nation-state. After all, when all is said and 
done, revolutions grow out of the most deeply felt grievances of 
oppressed peoples whose consciousness is formed by experiences at the 
plant gate or the plantation. In other words, the experiences that 
shaped both Che Guevara's life and the people whose cause he made his 
own.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 08/03/2001

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