OCTOBER 9:

HISTORY:

TODAY IN HISTORY:

Forty years ago today, in 1967, to the great convenience of his so-called friends as well as his enemies, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was killed by Bolivian armed forces supplied and trained by the American CIA and US Special Forces. Born in 1928 in Rosario, Argentina of a middle class family of Irish and Basque descent and aristocratic pretensions. Despite a lifelong affliction with asthma he excelled in sports as a child. In 1948 he entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. He travelled about Latin America on a motorcycle expedition during at least a year of these "studies" but still managed to graduate in 1953. He promptly took off for more travels across the length of Latin America and ended up in Guatemala in December of that year. At the time this country was headed by the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a leftist reformist who was attempting land reforms with the object of ending the US dominated latifundia system. While in Guatemala he was introduced to the Peruvian economist Hilda Gadea Acosta who was working there. He began a love affair with her, a very convenient arrangement because she had many connections in the Arbenz government. He also established contact with the Cuban exiles gathered around Fidel Castro and helped them in their main fund raising activity, the peddling of religious artifacts related to the Black Christ of Espuipulas. Unable to obtain a post as a medical intern unless he joined the Communist Party his finances were precarious. Despite his vast sympathy for communism he balked at the idea of party discipline. He supported himself mainly by pawning his lover's jewelry. Guevara was present in Guatemala during the CIA sponsored coup that overthrew Arbenz in 1954, took refuse in the Argentinian Embassy , and later left the country for Mexico under a safe conduct pass.

While in Mexico Guevara became reacquainted with his Cuban friends, and when their leader Fidel Castro arrived, after being amnestied from prison in July, 1955, Guevara fell under his spell. He joined the "July 26th Movement" that planned to overthrow then Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Having not yet endured enough punishment Hilda Gadea also went to Mexico from Guatemala and resumed her love affair with Guevara. They were married on August 18th, 1955. She gave birth to a daughter, Hilda Beatriz, on February 15th, 1956.

On November 25th, 1956 the Granma set out from Tuxpan, Mexico carrying a band of Castro's followers who hoped to overthrow Batista. Their landing was a disaster, and only 15 to 20 of the group survived to retreat to the Sierra Maestra mountains in eastern Cuba. Once there Guevara rose in the ranks, acquiring a reputation for courage, military knowledge and ruthlessness. As the Batista dictatorship crumbled because of opposition from much of Cuban society (even Batista's generals had begun to negotiate a separate peace with Castro) Guevara led a march westward towards Havana, encountering little significant opposition.

Batista fled to the Dominican Republic on January 1st, 1959. For his military services the new Cuban government proclaimed Guevara a "Cuban by birth" on Feb., 7th, and he initiated divorce proceeding against Hilda Gadea shortly thereafter. On June 2nd he married the Cuban born Aleida March with whom he had been living since late 1958. He began a short career as a government bureaucrat during which he acquired a reputation for both brutality and incompetence. His first job was a five month stint as the commander of the La Cabana Fortress prison. During these months somewhere between 156 and 550 people were executed at that prison under his orders.

For the next few years Guevara was rotated through a number of bureaucratic posts as he failed to achieve his level of incompetence. From the National Institute of Agrarian Reform to President of the National Bank of Cuba and later as a stint as Minister of Industry Guevara flitted, or was moved by popular demand, from one to the other. He at least "authorized" the Stalinization of the Cuban economy in these positions even if his dedication to the "work" was minimal, occupied as he was with chess tournaments, book writing and plotting various almost comic opera attempts to repeat the Cuban success in other Latin American countries. To say the least he didn't disapprove of the authoritarian nature of the socialism being built in Cuba then, even though any "planning" or, especially, administrative role that he may have had has been exaggerated by both his friends and enemies. As his books will testify he had little interest in the practicalities of "building socialism", and great interest in abstract dreams of ideological glory.

In December 1964 Guevara was sent to New York as head of the Cuban delegation to the UN. From this point he indeed found his level of incompetence. He spent the next few months meeting with various US political figures and doing a world tour, the "highlight" of which was his visit to North Korea where he stated that the regime there was a model towards which Cuba should aspire. In Algiers, however, he shot himself in the foot by criticizing the Soviet Bloc for being insufficiently militant, seeming to lead towards the Chinese version of Stalinism. He returned to Cuba on March 14th, 1965 and dropped out of sight two weeks later.

Back in Cuba Guevara's incompetence had been thoroughly demonstrated previously. He was thus unacceptable for any government post in which he could do further damage. Similarly he had annoyed Castro's Soviet backers sufficiently that another high profile international posting was also out of the question. Through the rest of 1965 Guevara's whereabouts were unknown to the world, even though he fate had been settled in an all-night meeting the very day that he arrived back in Cuba. By April 24th Guevara and the first of what were later to be about 100 members of a Cuban expeditionary force had arrived in the Congo to fight on behalf of the pro-Marxist Simba movement. The expedition was a fiasco. The communications of the Cubans were constantly monitored by the US National Security Agency which transmitted the information to the Congolese army. By late December 1965 Guevara had left the Congo, blaming the failure on his Congolese allies rather than the utterly fantastic nature of the plan itself.

Guevara nursed his grudges for the next six months living underground in Dar-es-Salaam and Prague. Members of the Mozambique independence movement FRELIMO met with him in Dar-es-Salaam and rejected his offer of "aid" to their own war. By early 1967 Guevara had been parked in Bolivia in the remote Nancahuazu region where the local Communist Party had purchased a parcel of land for "training' of the about 50 recruits that Guevara hoped would start a new revolution in the Andes region. The local communists, however, were split about the wisdom of this sort of operation, especially given Guevara's history of pro-Chinese sympathies. Rumours persist that his death was due to betrayal to the authorities on the part of the communists and even the Cuban government who shipped him two radio transmitters that were non-functional. An East German intelligence operative working in La Paz, the Bolivian capital, under the pseudonym of "Tania" (Haydee Tamara Bunke Bider) reportedly led the Bolivian authorities to Guevara's trail.

The "betrayal" theory of Guevara's death is highly disputed, and the truth may never be known. At the time where communist "loyalties" were split between Moscow, Peking and Havana it was entirely possible for an individual to be a "quintuple agent" serving 5 different masters. In any case the failure of Guevara and his small band of followers in Bolivia hardly needed betrayal to come about. As mentioned before the local communists were, at best, ambivalent about the scheme and promised help that never arrived. His opponents were well trained and equipped, unlike Batista's forces in Cuba.The incompetence of the planners, Guevara amongst them, is highlighted by the fact that the expeditionary force learned Quechua rather than the local native language Tupi-Guarani. Furthermore Guevara's own personal habit of peremptory command lost him whatever local support he might have gained amongst Bolivian locals who, in any case, were not clamouring for armed revolution at that time.

The result was inevitable. On October 8th Guevara's small force was surrounded, and he was captured . In the afternoon of the next day, October 9th, he was executed. The body was looted, and some of his personal possessions are still on ghoulish display at CIA headquarters in the USA. His hands were cut off for fingerprint identification. The body was disposed of later by unknown means.

In the unthinking climate of the time Guevara became a cult hero to an odd assortment of new leftists, utterly unconcerned with either the brutality of his methods or the desirability of his goal of a Stalinist state. As an ultimate irony his image is nowadays spread across the world as a tradeable commodity emblazoned on anything from teeshirts to key chains. Guevara's capitalist enemies have had the last word. Meanwhile back in the jungles of Bolivia a religious cult has sprung up around the legend of one "St. Che" who, like any good Catholic saint, heals the sick but never had any criticism of the Church to which he belonged no matter how much his theology may have been unorthodox. See The Killing Machine: Che Guevara from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand and Just a Pretty Face ? for discussion of the "cult of Che", and how it is mass marketed today. This sort absurdity has inspired its own parody. In Mexico there is a popular teeshirt of Guevara with a clown nose, entitled "Chepillin" is reference to a popular children's clown on Mexican TV, "Cepillin". Back in Cuba Guevara is a sort of secular saint, one of the sort of holiness that good churchmen are always glad to see the end of so they can glorify it. Children are required to begin each school day with a chant saying they "will be like Che". The government has built a mausoleum in Santa Clara (minus the body of course) that attracts about 200,000 people per year, almost 2/3rds of whom are foreign tourists.

The "cult of Che" has attracted many over the years, especially declasse intellectuals, would-be commissars in Leninist sects and romantic student "revolutionaries" who "revolve" right out of this upon graduation. Even some anarchists bizarrely enough cling to elements of "Guevara Kitch", though to an anarchist of good sense a Che teeshirt should be about as popular as a Hitler teeshirt at a Bnai Brith function. For a good discussion of the whole Guevara mythology from a sensible anarchist perspective see http://libcom.org/history/guevara-ernesto-che-1928-1967 . Some of the attachment is because some of those who call themselves "anarchists" mistake the idea of "militance" for that of "anarchism" and are merely attracted to the violent aura surrounding men such as Guevara. Most of this attraction is, of course, mere 200 proof, triple distilled juvenile bravado mixed with the juice from the ignorance berry to produce that fine concoction known as the 'Fashion-A Cocktail'.

For a rational view of the life of Guevara and his cult see Larry Gambone's 'St. Che' available from Red Lion Press and also from AK Press. This pamphlet sells for $2, and is worth every penny. The "myth of Che" is, of course, only part of the larger leftist myth of the Cuban revolution as the sole creation of the Marxists gathered around Castro and of the supposed "progressive" nature of the regime that this "revolution" (can we say "revolution followed by coup d'etat") gave birth to. For an anarchist view of the revolutionary process in Cuba and the unknown (to the average leftist) role that anarchists played in it see the following texts available in Molly's Links section under 'Texts'.

Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement by Frank Fernandez

Cuba: The Anarchists and Liberty also by Frank Fernandez

Both these texts, the first a book and the second a pamphlet, are available from See Sharp Press in print form. See that site for ordering details.