“COMRADE CHÉ”

The joke contained in the title will probably escape those who are unaware of the tautology here. The word Ché means friend, pal, and such, as it was frequently used by Guevara in his personal Argentinean idiolect, from which comes his well-known appellation as El Ché.

The “Cuban series” (already mostly posted on October 19^th, 20^th, and 22^nd, 2011) of the Khrushchev subsection starts with this prelude devoted to the extraordinary man who had become an international legend after his death, whereas in life he was a major nuisance to his future worshipers.

My reason for placing this entry in the Lady section is not to reveal some secret history, but mainly to draw attention to certain commonly ignored facts about him, such as the fact that while posthumously hailed as a legend, he used to be a real thorn in Moscow’s side, and had the American CIA been more imaginative and nuanced, they should have taken deliberate measures to keep him alive, rather than directly contribute to his capture and execution in 1967, in Bolivia, assuring his historical immortality as a symbol of anti-American anti-Imperialist struggle of the third-world nations, most conspicuously throughout America’s backyard in Latin America. Not at all surprisingly, today’s unabashedly socialist and unmistakably nationalist nation of Bolivia makes a convincing case as to who, these days, has been winning the Ché Guevara war on the formerly uncontestable American-owned continent.

At this point, it makes sense to introduce an external information source, for the reader’s quick reference, This is what is commonly known about the poster child of world revolution Ché Guevara. (The paragraphs in teal font below are mostly digested from the Wikipedia.)---

Ernesto “Ché” Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Ché Guevara, El Ché, or simply Ché, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerilla leader, military theorist, an international statesman, and a major figure of the Cuban Revolution. Since his death, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol and global insignia within popular culture.

As a young medical student, he traveled throughout Latin America, and was transformed by the endemic poverty that he witnessed. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region’s ingrained economic inequalities were an intrinsic result of monopoly capitalism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being the world revolution. This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala’s social reforms under President Jacobo Guzman whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow would solidify Guevara’s radical ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raul and Fidel Castro, and, joined their 26^th of July Movement, invading Cuba aboard the Granma, with the intention of overthrowing the U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents. He was promoted to second in command and played a pivotal role in the successful two year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.

Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included reviews of appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, instituting agrarian reforms, as minister of industries, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuba’s socialism. Such positions allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces which repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis..

(Those familiar with my narrative of the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Missile Crisis, will be instantly aware that the last paragraph was too wide of the mark, to treat it with as much as the minimum of credulity.)

...Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful motorcycle journey across South America. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to incite revolutions, first-- unsuccessfully-- in Congo-Kinshasa, and later, in Bolivia, where he was captured by the CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.

Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination as the subject in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. The Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled Guerrillero Heroico, has been declared the most famous photograph in the world.

What is demonstrably missing from this biographical summary is the fact that much of Guevara’s activity in the early years was oriented (not quite too obviously, of course, as he was a bona fide firebrand and an independently-minded revolutionary) toward his recognition and appreciation by Moscow. The latter, he, naturally, but still naively, hoped, could provide him with the necessary support, without which his actual struggle would be doomed to fail. (He was right, as his last year in the Bolivian jungle was plagued by inadequate logistics and paucity of elementary resources and supplies.) But Moscow wasn’t too eager to embrace any Latin American revolutionary, firmly and logically believing in the concept of spheres of influence. Furthermore, it saw Guevara as a trouble-making loose cannon, who wanted to fight world imperialism by his own rules, and not by the rules coordinated and agreed upon with Moscow. Eventually, Guevara understood that the Soviets would not be an ally of his, but rather a hindrance to his revolutionary ambition, and he tried to court the Chinese, who, however, refused to take his bait, although also at odds with Moscow at the time. Eventually, he was made feel unwelcome even in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, where all the talk about him being number two in the revolutionary hierarchy was nonsense, as, in effect, he was removed from any position of power and influence. Thus, at the end he was practically forced to flee Cuba in 1965, and basically left on his own, which ultimately resulted in his demise.

After his death, everything, naturally, changed. A dead revolutionary is the ideal revolutionary, transcending from a flawed personality of a mortal to the perfection of a fallen martyr (death bestowing a sainthood of sorts upon the dead).

As a result of his martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a new man driven by moral, rather than material incentives, Ché Guevara evolved into a quintessential icon of the leftist movements. An array of notable individuals have viewed him as a hero; for example, Mandela referred to him as “an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom” while Sartre described him as “not only an intellectual, but also the most complete human being of our age.” Guevara remains a beloved national hero to many in Cuba, where his image adorns the $3 Cuban Peso, and school children begin each morning by pledging “We will be like Ché.” In his native homeland of Argentina, where high schools bear his name, numerous Ché museums dot the country, which in 2008 unveiled a twelve-foot bronze statue of him in his birth city of Rosario. Additionally, Guevara has been sanctified by some Bolivian campesinos as “Saint Ernesto,” to whom they pray for assistance.

…Sic venit gloria mundi!