Che Guevara



Although he would become known under the nickname “Che”, Che was born under the name Ernesto Guevara. He was born in June of the year 1928 in the country of Argentina, more specifically the area of Rosario (McCormick 340). Che was the son of an engineer in the construction field. His interest in radical politics likely began with his family’s discussions and admiration for the anti-fascist groups who fought in the Spanish Civil War, to the point of welcoming former Spanish fighters to live with his family. Additionally, Che grew up hearing that he was in part a descendant of the Irish, and inherited an admiration for the often volatile politics of the region (McCormick 341).

Che’s upbringing was also one of geographical and intellectual variety. As a result of his father’s work and often entrepreneurial endeavors, Che would never live in one region for very long. The reason for his place of birth was not one which his parents lived for long for his birth, rather it was due to his father’s entrepreneurial attempt at the economic revitalization of an agricultural business specializing in the yerba mate botanical species. These migratory adventures would impart two things on the young Che: a propensity towards travel and a chance to engage with a large variety of Argentinian households, as his family often resorted to cohabitation with others who had housing (Spicer-Escalante 394). Beyond Che’s diverse spatial habitations, his childhood was also marked by a wide array of literary exposures. His bibliophilic tendencies were expressed in the consumption of Kafka, Camus, H.G Wells, Nietzsche, Russell, Jules Verne and others. He also had a fascination for the intellectual endeavors of historical and archaeological studies, as well as poetic literary pieces (McCormick 341).

During his adolescence, Che continued his propensity towards traveling (Spicer-Escalante 394). Initially he was forced to engage in a form of travel by taking a bus to his high school and he also practiced a good deal of hitchhiking (Spicer-Escalante 394). Eventually as he entered into his twenties in the early 1950s, he engaged in an eventually famous motorcycle excursion. For more than seven months, he along with a friend, traveled across numerous countries with in the subcontinent, and would later pen down the journey in the book The Motorcycle Diaries, which was later made into a film (McCormick 341). In the years after this trip, Che would gain a medical education, and following this would start another multi-country journey throughout south America. He lived in Guatemala for a few months, where he developed a greater political consciousness while witnessing the 1954 US CIA initiated Coupe de ta. He would leave Guatemala to flee political persecution under the new government. He would find safety in Mexico and for the first time meet a young Fidel Castro. (McCormick 341)

What happens next is the beginning of his role in the movement to remove the Cuban dictator Batista. Conspiring with the young Castro, they would plot and then spend over a year assembling a group of likeminded comrades (which numbered under one hundred), to boat to the island nation. The trip would fester illness with many of the members on the boat, for what would become a week long journey. By the time they arrived close to the island they would be forced to leave all their prepared materials on the boat as it got stuck close to but not actually on shore. To top this off, once on land they were unable to navigate the unfamiliar terrain for more than a day. The first event which this group of revolutionaries were involved in to be considered an event of war, was when Bastia’s forces were notified of the group being present on the island and decided to ambush them. The group was caught off guard by Batista’s forces who then executed all of the revolutionaries who they captured or those who naively surrendered. Those lucky enough to survive would find relative safety in the remote, wooded mountains of the island, despite losing all fighting equipment. (McCormick 342).

Their fate would change when their forces were able to recuperate and eventually began gaining ground in rural areas. Combined with the other anti-Batista groups already active in the region, Batista’s forces increasing found the resistance to be a powerful force. (McCormick 343). Che and Fidel’s small military successes eventually culminated with their victory in the Battle of Santa Clara. Batista’s regime finally fell almost immediately after this battle when Batista decided to withdraw from his government and take up residence in the United States. In the end, Che would preside over their proclaimed victory in the island’s capital, pushing other resistance groups to the side (McCormick 343). Despite the role other “urban” groups played in the revolution, Che and Castro would soon become in the minds of many the primary stars in Cuba’s revolutionary drama (Childs 594).

Initially Che was not assigned a role in the revolutionary state, but was eventually assigned to oversee the departments in charge of Industrialization and Agrarian Reform. In Che’s early Cuba, he nationalized various economic sectors, thus abandoning capitalism, and much to the US and it’s imperialistic businesses distain, embraced socialist economics. Instead of being a horrid transition, it would actually become a helpful boost to Cuba’s economy. The size, variety, and stability of Cuba’s economy has been attributed to Che’s work. Despite his antagonism toward the US and it’s imperialist policies, he was blinded by his ideology when it came to effective aspects of the previous economy. He would borrow elements of many business administrative designs in the form of what would be called the BFS. Che was fine with appropriating effective outputs of the previous capitalist system, which would put his views increasingly in contrast with the USSR’s more ideologically derived antipathy with many things associated with certain capitalist economic outputs, even things like accounting technologies. (“Guevara and the Great Debate” 16).

In the period before the economic restrictions by the United States government were initiated, Cuba’s economy was quickly advancing including in technological production as a result of Che’s more flexible ideological leanings. This would change the first year of the 1960s when the United States economic restrictions would require the island to develop closer ties with the Soviets who were eager to share their lesser quality materials and methods to the newly Marxist-Leninist nation. Che would not make their alliance a completely pleasant one, as the two countries had quite different interpretations of Marxist ideology. The soviet’s system was increasingly, and somewhat contradictory, embracing capitalist methodologies in order to boost their economy for what was thought would be a communist period. Unfortunately for their hopes, it would eventually lead back to capitalism later on. Che would eventually come to the opinion that what was called “market socialism” took only the worst of both systems and was not an ideological turn he was willing to support. For Che, his trust laid more on the writings and ideas of the original Marxists, than those of later revolutionary theorists such as Lenin. His writings became increasing hostile to the Soviet’s system and led to what historians have term the Great Debate (“Guevara and the Great Debate” 14-18).

Another concept that Che would become known for was a concept called the “New Man”. This was an attempt by Che to reconcile individualism and collectivism (Martinez-Saenz 20). Che deplored the commonly held notion that socialist ideology required individual interested to be subservient to a statist organization (Martinez-Saenz 16). His views on the New Man are multifaceted. He emphasized ideas of social responsibility, particularly among the labor force and young people, but he desired this to be an individual outcome of their own thought, and not obtained by coercive measures (Martinez-Saenz 22-23). Additionally, he promoted the idea of individual pride in involvement with the new government (Martinez-Saenz 23). Despite this seeming slightly contradictory, he did not believe there should be a complete submission of the individual for any cause. Rather he advocated people to maintain a level of individualism including the development of specific aspects of the individual different from others in the community. But at the same time, one should not forget their community membership and its associated responsibilities (Martinez-Saenz 24).

Che’s own views were evolving and changing in the mid and late 1960s. He was becoming more interested in international affairs and was focusing more and more on the international political movements against imperialism and in particular the United States government (McCormick 348). Che’s focus on internationalist issues irritated Fidel, who was left to deal with Cuba, which was increasingly suffering economic ills (McCormick 349). His focus on international anti-imperialist struggle included a particular interest in African politics, to the point he would go to the Congo for a short period of time (McCormick 348-349). After the Congo, Che would choose to assist a communist struggle in the South American country of Bolivia (McCormick 349).

Che’s experience in Bolivia would be a low point and eventually the final note in his life. Che initially tried to ally his effort in Bolivia with the existing communist party in the regions, which went under the name of the Bolivian Communist Party (also know as the PCB) (McCormick 350). But this did not go as planned and eventually Che would end up alienating the party and he would not end up gaining their support (McCormick 350). After quite a bit of planning, Che and his group entered the country of Bolivia. Initially they had thought they were going to use the native population to assist with their revolutionary effort, but the native population lacked the interested in Che’s plot, or for what they could understand of it. Che did not realize this population spoke a specific indigenous language which he and his colleagues were unprepared to communicate in (McCormick 350). In the following months, Che’s forces had been uncovered by the Bolivian government, and in turn the government began slowly picking off individual soldiers hiding in the mountains, leaving Che’s troops to slowly decrease in number. Eventually his troops would be forced to consume impromptu culinary creations of rodents (McCormick 351). Additionally Che’s pulmonary health began to erode (McCormick 351). If this wasn’t enough, Che also had to combat an increasing tactful Bolivian government military response (McCormick 352). As time went by, Che’s forces continued to decrease until he found himself fleeing Bolivia (McCormick 353). The Bolivian government, well supported with assistance from the United States, found Che’s extremely dwindling group hiding and killed Che (McCormick 353).

Both Che’s economic thought and his dramatic life have created a significant legacy. In Cuba, his economic views have been both abandoned and adopted at various different points in post-revolutionary Cuban history, to the extent that Yaffe has called it a “Guevarist pendulum” (“Guevara’s Enduring” 61). In the Cuban historical epoch of the Special Period after the collapse of the USSR, Fidel would use the intellectual legacy of his fallen comrade to attempt to revitalize the country (Augustin 46). Beyond the country of Cuba, Che’s legacy can also be seen, although in a very different form. In some countries such as the United States, photographical depictions of him have been highly commodified into garments, or as decorative facades on pottery used for holding liquids (Larson and Lizardo 426). This initial commodification began at the same time of the Cuban revolution and was extremely popular among leftist subcultures, as well as by some less dedicated to communist ideology (Larson and Lizardo 428). His popularity also grew in the late 1990s when new information about the where-abouts of his corpse was revealed to the public (Larson and Lizardo 428). Also in the 1990s the Neo-Zapatistas movement in certain areas of Mexico utilized the aura of Che in pictorial form (Larson and Lizardo 429).