More on Che Guevara

Robert Scheer took the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death a month or so ago to write on The Martyring of Che Guevara TruthDig.com 10/09/07. Scheer noted that Guevara's power as an icon seems to have had more influence than his actual practical attempts at revolutionary missionizing:

It also turned out that killing Che was a big mistake, as his message was spread more effectively by his execution than by his guerrilla activities, which were, after he left Cuba, quite pathetic. This is the case in Latin America, where political leaders he helped inspire are faring better than those coddled by the CIA. Daniel Ortega, whom the CIA worked so doggedly to overthrow, is the elected president of Nicaragua. Almost all of Latin America’s leaders are leftists, some more moderate than Che (as in Brazil), and others as fiery as the guerrilla (in Venezuela), but all determinedly independent of yanqui control. Fortunately, they differ from Che in preferring the ballot to the gun. But all recognize that poverty remains the region’s No. 1 problem and that the free-market model imposed by the United States hardly contains all the answers. Recall that the U.S. break with the Cuban revolution came before Castro’s turn toward the Soviets, and that it was over his nationalization of American-owned business assets in Cuba ranging from Mafia-run casinos to the electric power grid.

He describes Guevara's theory of revolution as follows:

... he was either an Argentine Trotskyite or an anarchist, but Che was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched, bureaucratized Cuban mold. Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging bureaucracy. He was, like Trotsky in his dispute with Stalin, skeptical that the kind of socialism that truly served the poor could survive in just one country; hence, he died attempting to internationalize the struggle.

A Troskyist? An anarchist? I'm not sure where Scheer got that notion, although chances are he's better informed on the subject than I. But unless we understand those terms to simply mean "some leftwinger who isn't a communist" or something like that, I'm not sure they apply to Guevara. I mean, if we're actually using the words to mean something, Trotskyist is something very different than anarchist. So that's kind of a broad range of option that Scheer gives.

Che Guevara's view of revolution in the "Third World" was thought to be very close to that expounded by ther French writer Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America. The writer Juan Bosch (1909-2001), who served as the elected president of the Dominican Republic in 1963, wrote about Debray's book when it first appeared, in "An Anti-Communist Manifesto" New York Review of Books 10/26/1967 (behind subscription); the article was a translation of a Spanish original.

Che Guevara an anti-Communist? Bosch assumed that the view expressed by Debray was also that of Fidel Castro and therefore operative policy of the Cuban leadership at the time. He wrote of Revolution in the Revolution?:

It consists of two elements. First, this book charges that all of the Communist parties in Latin America lack the courage to think about a seizure of power. At the same time, Revolution in the Revolution? is a weapon in Fidel Castro's struggle to bring about a union of communism and nationalism in Latin America.

Debray's main accusation against Communist parties in Latin America raises others which may be even more serious, because they are based on moral judgments rather than those of tactical capacity. In view of the inclination of Latin American youth to value moral considerations above all others, these charges could have serious consequences for present-day Communist parties in Latin America. The most important of these charges is that, because they need to maintain a political position which will allow them to deal with the middle classes and the oligarchies in their countries, the Communist parties are sabotaging guerrilla movements.

This is probably a reasonable description of Guevara's view, that the orthodox Communist parties were more an obstacle to meaningful social revolution than a support. Whether that was Castro's view, even when Bosch assumed in 1967, is another question. Certainly a few years later, Castro was supportive of Salvador Allende's peaceful road to socialism - though that can't be said to have been an unqualified success, either, thanks to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

Bosch argued that, in practice, the Guevara/Debray perspective was short-sighted, perhaps deceptive. Because even in the Cuban experience, while the Cuban Communist Party had a limited role in Castro's armed struggle, it played a critical role in building the revolutionary state afterwards:

There is, however, one question which Debray does not take into account. Fidel Castro was able to seize power without the help of the Cuban Communist Party, but could he have done all he did without its collaboration? Could Fidel Castro have gained total control of the life of the country so rapidly had he continued to rely on groups of people from different social classes, led by young middle- and lower-middle-class revolutionaries who were without any well-defined ideology or any party discipline—as was true of the 26th of July Movement? The answer would seem to be No. The existence of a Cuban Communist Party, with its rigidly disciplined cadres and followers, was without a doubt a factor of prime importance, not in the seizure of power, but in the transition from the type of revolution that Castro had preached to the type of revolution that he finally installed.

... Cuba needed newspaper and magazine editors, television and radio writers, schoolteachers, engineers, agronomists, doctors, civil servants at all levels, administrators and accountants in any number of industries, banks, and commercial establishments, labor leaders, and military men to bring it into the socialist sphere. Could all of this have been supplied by some 800 or 1000 guerrilla fighters? Undoubtedly not. On the other hand, the Cuban Communist Party had on its rolls thousands of men and women working at many different jobs all over the country. Those men and women were able to hold various positions in the government and in the life of the country, which allowed the guerrilla fighters from the Sierra Maestra to devote their time to organizing the army, the police, the militia, and to specialized functions in the military and police sectors. If we were to follow Cuba's example literally, we would conclude that although the Communist party is not necessary in the seizure of power, it becomes indispensable to continue the revolution once power has been seized.

Debray himself later re-evaluated his "Guevarist" theory of guerrilla warfare and revolution. He eventually joined the French Socialist Party and became an advisor on foreign affairs to Socialist President François Mitterrand.

For a present-day glimpse of Debray's views, see his article Socialism: A Life-Cycle New Left Review July-Aug 2007.

Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly for 11 - 17 October 2007 provides a reminder about Guevara's diplomatic activities in Comandante against convention:

Shortly before Ernesto Che Guevara's disappearance from public life in 1966, and on his way to Algeria, he stopped in Cairo, where he was warmly received by former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser. During his memorable visit to Egypt, Che attended a number of formal and informal meetings with Egyptian politicians and intellectuals. Popularly known as the "Enemy of Convention", he exchanged ideas with the leading artists and intelligentsia of the day such as Faten Hamama, Ahmed Bahaaeddin, Louis Awad and Ihsan Abdel-Quddous.

Tags: che guevara, juan bosch, régis debray, robert scheer