Rev Left Radio - Che Guevara: Revolutionary Hero (Life, Legacy, and Theory)

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

This is the audio from a full video put out by Paul Connolly over at the YouTube channel "Marxist Paul" on the life, legacy, and theory of Che Guevara. Watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3yVJghCn9Q&ab_channel=MarxistPaul Check out Paul's channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarxistPaul Learn more about POLICOMM: politicsincommand.info Follow Politics in Demand on twitter: https://twitter.com/policomm    

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I'm actually going to play the audio from a full audio and video clip off of YouTube from the channel Marxist Paul put together by the one and only friend of the show and previous guest on the show, Paul Connolly. So Paul Connolly operates out of Ireland. He's a wonderful really principled Marxist and he does really good educational videos. on Marxist topics in general, on his channel Marxist Paul. And he recently put out a video on Che Guevara, who, as anybody that's listened to Revelaf for any amount of time,

knows is a huge figure for me, a role model for really all of us. And I found the video very helpful in going deeper into some aspects of Che's life that we haven't even been able to cover so far on the show. So I thought it was a really wonderful opportunity. I reached out to him. I said I would love to promote this great new video on Che Guevara on Rev Lef's podcast feed because of course Paul operates mostly on YouTube and I thought it'd be a wonderful opportunity to get this stuff out to a whole new platform to more people get more people

importantly to go like and subscribe to Paul's channel Marxist Paul on YouTube and enjoy that content share that content it's really it's really wonderful Paul is definitely somebody who is a friend of the show is a friend of mine who does really wonderful really principled consistently great work on the political education front and I'm really happy to share some of his work with you today. Paul also wanted to give special thanks to Jay from Politics in Command who did a fantastic job putting together the visual aspects of the Che video. So you're going to hear the audio right now, but in the show notes I'll link to the full video so you can go check out that part of it as well. Politics in Command or Policom with 2Ms is an educational resource

promoting revolutionary anti-revisionist politics. They're launching a brand new new Polycom podcast on the 1st of October 22, so a week or two after this comes out, which you'll find on their website, politicsincommand. info, and also linked on their Twitter account at Polycom. I'll link to both in the show notes. To anyone who appreciates the kind of revolutionary Marxist politics of Che Guevara outlined in this episode, you're going to feel right at home with the new Polycom podcast. So huge shout out to Paul, huge shout out to Jay. And without further ado, here is the audio. that video on The Life, Legacy, and Theory of Che Guevara.

Dr. Ernesto Guevara Lynch, better known as Che Guevara, is one of the most iconic and well-recognized revolutionary figures in the world. But too often he's seen as just this alone, an icon on a badge or a work of graffiti art on a street corner. It can easily be forgotten that he was a living, breathing, thinking human being like each one of us. And more than just a rebellious aesthetic, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once described Che as not only an intellectual, but also the most complete human being of our age. The aim of today's video is to take a look at the fiery life that Che led to discuss his enduring legacy and cultural impact around the world to this day, as well as to provide a deeper

insight into the specifics of Chez's revolutionary politics from a modern Marxist perspective. In 1928, Ernesto Guevara, or Ernesto Guevara Lynch, was born to his father of the same name and his mother, Celia de la Cerno Iloza, in Rosario, Argentina. His family was of mixed Basque Irish descent, providing the basis for his father to later state that, in my son's veins, flowed the blood of Irish rebels. The Irish side of his family hailed from the lynches of County Galway, who left Ireland in the mid-18th century. Despite being born with asthma, Che was and would remain for the rest of his life,

athletically active and fit, playing rugby for the club universitario de Buenos Aires, whose initials prophetically spelled out the word Cuba. While his family was relatively well off in Argentinian society, the young Ernesto's father exposed him to left-wing and Spanish Republican politics from an early age. With the large range of books available in his family home and his strong interest in reading and philosophy, She studied the works of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and Vladimir Lennon. A well-read student, Che excelled in school and went on to study medicine at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1948. Third-level education was a privilege in Argentina at the time, so he was quite fortunate to be given the opportunity to pursue his studies,

eventually receiving an MD in 1953 and finally earning the formal title of Doctor. During his studies, Che took a year off university to embark on a grand motorcycle journey in 1951 with a close friend of his, Alberto Granado, to volunteer at a Peruvian leprosy village. Famously documented in Chez's best-selling memoirs, The Motorcycle Diaries, the 8,000-kilometer road trip took Chey north along the spine of South America through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama. He also took a flight to Miami, Florida. This journey had a profound, life-changing impact on Che, as he witnessed the suffering of various

nations in Latin America caused by American imperialism. One particularly raw and evocative episode of his book illustrates an encounter with persecuted Chilean communists near the Chukicamata copper mine in Chile as follows. Lying beneath the meager shade of two lampposts on the arid road leading to the mines, we spent a good part of the day yelling things at each other now and again from one post to another, until on the horizon appeared the asthmatic outline of the little truck which took us halfway to a town called Bacadano. There we made friends with a married couple, Chilean workers who were communists. By the light of the single candle illuminating us, drinking matthew and eating a piece of bread

and cheese, the man's shrunken figure carried a mysterious, tragic air. In his simple, expressive of language, he recounted his three months in prison and told us about his starving wife who stood by him with exemplary loyalty, his children left in the care of a kindly neighbour, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work, and his companeros mysteriously disappeared and said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea. The couple, numb with cold, huddling against each other in the desert night, were a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the world. At the time, the communist Party of Chile was banned by the so-called Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy. Guevara would later comment on the anger he felt at the sites he witnessed during his journey

and how it shaped him as a revolutionary, sparking in specific his readiness to become a guerrilla fighter for the people. Now unable to sit still, Che would continue to travel throughout Latin America, although no longer on a motorbike from 1953 to 1956. During his journey, the increasingly radicalized, now self-proclaimed Marxist Leninists, Che wrote in a letter. Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit Company, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated. After getting caught up in and attempting to join the fight against the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala,

Chee moved to Mexico in exile along with the group of Cuban exiles he'd met along the way. This included the future leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, who fled Cuba after the 26th of July attack on the Moncado Barracks in 1953, the attack becoming the origin of the name of the group's guerrilla army, the 26th of July movement, or M267 for short. In Mexico, Chee teamed up with Castro's small band of Cubans and began training to wage a guerrilla war in a renewed attempt by the Cubans to overthrow the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Trained under Spanish Civil War veteran General Alberto Beo, Che was described as the best guerrilla of them all. During this time, Che married his first wife, a Peruvian communist by the name of Hilda Gede, although they would

later get divorced in 1959. Chee, intending to be the group's field doctor, departed in 1956 with just 81 other men in a small cabin cruiser named the Grandma, which was designed to only hold 12 people. After being ambushed, this force was cut down further to a mere 22 people who would be forced to flee into the Sierra Moistra Mountains, and they began developing and expanding a people's guerrilla war against the Batista regime, taking root among the peasants of rural Cuba and establishing urban guerrilla networks in the cities. Che rose up through the ranks of the guerrilla army during this time, noted by Castro for his fearlessness, and was given command as El Commandante over his own guerrilla column.

Che would later write a work of military theory on his tactics used during the Cuban Revolution in the 1961 book Guerrilla Warfare. In it, he also expressed many of his views on the conduct of a revolutionary and the discipline that people's fighters should adhere to. One of the great educational techniques is example, he wrote. Therefore, the chiefs must constantly offer the example of a pure and devoted life. Promotion of the soldier should be based on valor, capacity and a spirit of sacrifice. Whoever does not have these qualities in a high degree ought not to have responsible assignments. By February 1958, the ranks of the anti-imperialist guerrilla army of the 26th of July movement had grown to 400. But this was dwarfed.

in size by Batista's US-funded forces, which were supplied with planes, bombs, military advisers and napalm by the US military. However, a regime's advanced weaponry alone can't stifle a revolution. As summed up by the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong who led his own guerrilla war before Che Guevara, weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one. It is man and not materials that counts. Che Guevara waged a lightning campaign within his guerrilla column alongside his future wife, the guerrilla Alida March. Eventually, the Cuban revolution would grow out of hand for Batista and the USA, culminating in the decisive M267 victory at the Battle of Santa Clara over a force of thousands, personally led and commanded by Che Guevara,

whose outnumbered and under-equipped forces, managed to defy all odds leading to the flight of Batista and the eventual collapse of his regime. Che went on to on to assume important positions within the new progressive government, from managing the trials of war criminals from the old regime at La Cabana Prison, where he married Alita March, to pioneering the 1959 Agrarian Reform Law. Che Guevara also spearheaded the hugely successful 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign, which rapidly increased the country's literacy rate from 47% to 96%, one of the highest rates in the world at the time, in just eight months. Che was sent on diplomatic missions to many countries such as Greece,

India, Egypt, Morocco and Japan. Because Chee had such firm beliefs and principles, he often came into contradiction with many of the reactionary or imperialist leaders he met with. For example, in Japan, where he refused to honour the soldiers of the fascist Japanese empire, citing their slaughter of millions of Chinese people. At the same time, he also became quite famous among many nations as a skilled and prominent statesman, going on to deliver important speeches at the United Nations. In 1961, responding to the nationalisation of US companies by the Cuban anti-imperialist revolution and in response to the increasingly pro-Soviet line of the Fidel Castro government, under the highly anti-communist and interventionist Kennedy administration of the USA,

the CIA organized an attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. To the humiliation of Kennedy, the invasion was crushed by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, trained by Che Guevara. This led to Castro proclaiming himself a communist later that year, after previously having denied it. While few would deny that Castro was a great revolutionary and a national hero, some would speculate whether his sudden ideological development had emerged out of genuine ideological conviction or out of a more pragmatic need to seek closer relations with the Soviets under Nikita Khrushchev in light of the mounting embargoes being placed on Cuba, spearheaded by the US. Jay Guevara and the Cuban government successfully managed to lead Cuba through the Cuban Missile

Crisis the following year, after the US blockaded Soviet missiles for a proposed Soviet missile base on Cuba. Just one of many examples of the extreme imperialist aggression Cuba has had to deal with throughout the years. Che Guevara, now Minister of Industries, faced a number of growing ideological issues between himself and the rest of the government as relations between Cuba and the USSR strengthened. On a diplomatic trip to Algeria, he harshly condemned the Soviets, Castro's close allies, for having departed from its previously revolutionary socialist path and instead embracing the path of revisionism under Khrushchev, which led the tensions mounting between himself and his comrades in Cuba upon his return. While Castro sought to emulate

Khrushchev's Soviet model, Chey condemned it and correctly predicted how it would lead to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. In response to the revisionist Soviet argument that markets would have to be maintained indefinitely for communism to be achieved, Givara wrote that. We understand that the capitalist categories are retained for a time and that the length of this period cannot be predetermined. But the characteristics of the period of transition are those of a society that is throwing off its old bonds in order to move quickly into the new stage. The tendency should be, in our opinion, to eliminate as fast as possible the old categories, including the market, money, and therefore material interest, or better

to eliminate the conditions for their existence. The tensions over Soviet revisionism continued to grow with the Sino-Soviet split, when the then-revolutionary People's Republic of China, led by Mao Zetong, who Che later visited personally, broke with the revisionist leadership of the USSR. While the Cuban government remained close to their Soviet allies, Chey aligned with Mao and the anti-revisionist revolutionary path. Chey notably commented that, Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists. Eventually, Che took the decision to leave Cuba, also leaving his wife and children behind. A letter left by Che to Fidel Castro read out in public expressed his continuing loyalty to the Cuban Revolution despite their ideological differences. He wrote that,

Wherever I am, I will feel the responsibility of being a Cuban revolutionary, and I shall behave as such. In leaving his posts in the Cuban government, Che sought to continue his revolutionary guerrilla struggle against US-backed Comprador regimes around the world. His whereabouts became mysterious and unknown, as he secretly travelled to the Congo to assist the Simba Rebellion, an armed indigenous resistance movement against the Mobutu dictatorship. However, Che found little success, lamenting the corruption of the rebel leaders and eventually leaving due to failing health.

Chee journaled his experiences in his Congo diaries, which he called the story of a failure. After a brief secret return to Cuba in 1966, Che who was being hunted by the CIA, traveled undercover to Bolivia in his final ill-fated guerrilla campaign. He had been warned by exiled former Argentinian president Juan Perra. that his plan to establish a guerrilla army in Bolivia and overthrow the Bariento's dictatorship there was suicide. Entering La Paz in the disguise of a middle-aged investor named Adolfo Mena Gonzalez, Che assembled a small band of Cubans, Bolivians and Peruvians who called themselves Ehercito De Liberation Nacional de Bolivia. The guerrillas waged a short-lived campaign of sabotage and

ambushes, but they found themselves isolated and unable to rally any kind of deep support base among Bolivian peasants. Unlike in Cuba, Che Guevara was unable to root his guerrilla campaign firmly within the people, and eventually the campaign fell apart at the seams. The CIA had been hunting Che down ever since his departure from Cuba, and CIA operatives were advising the Bolivian army in their hunt to capture and kill Che. They eventually succeeded in capturing Che under the command of Cuban CIA operadoff Felix Rodriguez. Undaunted, Che remained fearless until death, and spoke of the immortality of revolution in his final moments to the Bolivian soldiers who'd been guarding him. Before being put to death

by a hesitating sergeant on the 9th of October in 1967, Chey's last words were to his executioner. Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man. Months before his death, Chee had written his own epitaph, stating that, Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism. and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind, the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear, and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons,

and other men be ready to entone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory. Che's life is an inspiration which resonates with millions of aspiring revolutionaries and oppressed people around the world. Alberto Granado, Chase's close friend who joined him on his famous motorcycle journey, wrote of his legacy after Che's death, he was a man who fought and died for what he thought was fair, so for young people, he's a man who needs to be followed. And as time goes by and countries are governed by increasingly corrupt people, Che's persona

gets bigger and greater and he becomes a man to imitate. The iconic photograph taken of Che in 1960, Guerrillero Heroico, caught the imagination and attention of the world with Che's unwavering and determined expression. The photograph was described by the Maryland Institute of Art as the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century. Che Guevara's face features on the banners of anti-fascist football fans on street art, on posters and on the covers of albums. However, the actual story of Che that lives behind the iconic image

is often glossed over or not fully known by those who use it. The legacy of Che and what he stood for is claimed by a large variety of groups throughout politics and popular culture as a broad token of rebellion, but for many, the finer details beyond this are vague and fuzzy. Perhaps more distasteful is the mass commercialisation of his face by capitalist enterprises, wherein Che's image can be found everywhere on just about any piece of merchandise imaginable, offering consumerist placation to the world's oppressed

masses in place of Che's revolutionary politics of liberation. The symbol of Chee takes on a much more meaningful and sincere quality when it's connected directly to his personal revolutionary struggle and beliefs, such as the Ernesto Che Guevara Lynch mural in the Derry Bogside, or the numerous pieces of street art depicting Che in the favelas of Buenos Aires. After his death, his image and name have been invoked by revolutionary groups and movements across the world, including the indigenous Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, and dozens upon dozens of other guerrilla movements across Latin America. There are a large number of statues and monuments to Chee in various countries around the world, including Cuba, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico,

the USA, India, El Salvador, and Spain. Notably absent from this list, however, is Ireland. There was a proposal passed by Galway City Council to erect the statue of Che Guevara in 2012. However, the plans fell through, likely due to political pressure by high-profile American politicians and academics, such as Ileana Rose Lettinen of the US House of Representative Foreign Affairs Committee, or Professor Carlos Era of Yale University, who told the City Council that if they were to build a statue for Che Guevara, then they should also build one for Oliver Cromwell, a man known in Ireland as the Butcher due to his genocidal colonial war which wiped out more than 40% of the country's native population in the mid-1600s. A number of members of the Irish political and business elite

also strongly opposed Che's statue being built, so it's unsurprising that Galway City Council caved in to the pressure. In spite of ruling class opposition, Chee's importance here in Ireland remains immense. He visited the country in 1962 and 1965 and has since become a symbol of Irish republicanism due to his ancestry in Galway, his support for Irish national liberation, and his prominence as a symbol of revolution against imperialism in oppressed nations. Across the ocean in Argentina, in the television contest El Gen Argentino aired in 2007, Argentinian voters from the public decided on whom they considered to be the greatest people, from their country. This was a spin-off from the BBC's 100 Greatest Britons. In this show,

out of a sample of 350,000 public votes, Che Guevara placed as one of the top 10 finalists with a ranking of fifth place, demonstrating that Chee still holds a special place in the hearts and minds of many people in the country of his birth and around the world. Che Guevara's conception of revolutionary theory, as mentioned earlier, came from a principled anti-reveillance visionist, Marxist-Leninist standpoint. However, Gavara's own unique ideas surrounding the practice of revolution and guerrilla war certainly played a large role in his understanding of military tactics. Chee believed, similarly to Mao and China, that a socialist revolution in the modern world could only be successfully won through armed struggle, and Che saw the

guerrilla war as fundamental to this principle. Che emphasized the bond between guerrilla war and class struggle in his essay, Guerrilla War, a Method in 1963, writing, Is the Guerrilla Method the unique formula to conquer political power in all America? Or anyway, will it be the predominant formula? Or simply, will it be one more formula among others used to fight? During these controversies, it's used to criticise those who want to adopt guerrilla war, saying that they forget the class struggles as if they were opposed. We refuse the concept inherent to this position.

The guerrilla war is a people's war. It is a class struggle. If one intends to realize this kind of war, without the support of the people, one will see the prelude of an inevitable disaster. The guerrilla is the people's combative vanguard, situated in a certain territory, armed, disposed to realize many warlike actions that drift to the unique strategic possible aim, the capture of power. It is supported by the peasant masses and workers of the region and aval territory.

Without these premises, one cannot admit the guerrilla war. From this passage, it can be seen that Che understood the need to build up a powerful support base among oppressed classes of the people before waging any kind of guerrilla campaign. However, Chee ultimately didn't quite reach the same level of analysis as the Maoist theory of the mass line, and fell just shy of understanding the semi-fudal economic. economic system that existed in Latin America. Seemingly in contradiction to his own aforementioned warnings of the need for mass support bases, Che's own later attempts to assemble small bands of heroic guerrillas in order to spread

the revolution from the starting point of an armed struggle, unfortunately resulted in failure in all cases except Cuba. This was because the mass support base of the people had already begun development since 1953, and was then properly expanded and deepened by the 22 survivors of the Grandma's landing from 1956. According to Che's theory, the guerrillas would act as a vanguard in and of themselves, inspiring the people through their actions and further creating the conditions for revolution. Che saw the expansion of the guerrilla war as following a so-called beehive effect with each successive development of a guerrilla base. In Chey's concept of guerrilla,

war, once each guerrilla base was fully developed, a small band of guerrillas would leave this base and travel to another area to repeat the process. Che was correct in that the creation of guerrilla bases can become seeds for growth, new power and political development. However, this strategy ultimately is unsustainable if the support base doesn't already exist in each new area from some kind of previous revolutionary activism to keep the small guerrilla bands alive and to nurture them. Such conditions existed in Cuba, where there was already mass support before the guerrillas moved in, but these conditions didn't exist at the time in Bolivia. This strategy, popularly coined as Fokoismo, although not by Che himself, appears to carry with it this flaw. In spite of this,

it inspired dozens of armed movements in Latin America, all with various degrees of success and failure. The strategy of Foco appears to stem more from Che's later practice. than it does his own writings. As while Che's written conception of guerrilla war seems to place heavy emphasis on gaining a mass support base as a precondition for any kind of guerrilla war, Fogo has been popularly practiced as a method of more or less skipping this stage of building support

and instead beginning with a small band of armed guerrillas as Che had attempted in Bolivia. In contrast to mewist writings, what appears to be more absent in Che's writing is an attention to the importance of building a broad, United Front and mass organizations to wage political struggle. While in Cuba, these kinds of organizations had already been built by revolutionaries in the forms of trade unions and students' organizations, such organizations hadn't yet been developed

in Bolivia, nor were these foundations built in the many more Focco experiments across Latin America that would follow in the wake of Che's death. As a theory, Foucaulte envisions the guerrillas becoming inspirations to push a country's population in the direction of revolution, as had happened with the attack on the Moncato barracks in Cuba in 1953. While nowists understand the mass lion as something that must be built in preparation for guerrilla war, Focco appears to consider the guerrilla campaign and the building of the mass lion to be won in the same as a process.

Whether responsibility for this can be placed on Che himself is debatable. As mentioned before, these strategies appear to stem more from Che's later-life revolution attempts than from what he actually wrote. Just as Fouca groups in the future would repeat the mistakes of Bolivia, such as the People's Revolutionary Army in Argentina, many groups claiming to follow Mousaidong's theory of protracted People's War, such as the Aragua guerrillas of Brazil, would also fall into the same trap of not properly building the mass support base among the people before initiating their campaign.

Whichever theorists they drew inspiration from, these attempts to build a revolution from the small spark of a few guerrilla bands were certainly selfless and heroic, but ultimately adventurous in nature. Of course, this doesn't mean that guerrilla armies shouldn't or can't start small. The fighters of the Cuban Revolution or the Maoist fighters today in the Filipino Revolution

both began as only a couple of squadrons. However, what set them apart from adventurous movements was the climate of mass support in which these were born, the very climate that both great Marxists Che and Mao, warned sternly is absolutely necessary before revolutionaries embark on any kind of armed campaign to take political power. When Che Guevara's father claimed that his son's veins flowed with the blood of Irish rebels, he was absolutely correct in this description. There are very few people on an international scale who have been able to become the living

embodiment of revolution and liberation that Che has. In the 19th century, the famous famous painting by Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, was the defining image of revolution. For many, the first picture that came to mind whenever the word was mentioned. Perhaps in France and other countries, it still is. However, it's undeniable that today and in the latter part of the 20th century, the first image that comes to mind when the word revolution is heard is the beret-wearing, cigar-smoking image of Che Guevara. Despite the mistakes of Fogo, Che's theory and understanding of the need for guerrilla war

as a method for oppressed peoples to seize power was solid, and his military writings still hold value for revolutionaries today. A genius commander, a martyr and an icon. It's no wonder that Che Guevara commands respect in every corner of the world, not just among revolutionaries, but in the public eye as a whole.