Of course, both of these events—the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and Guevara’s murder—immediately followed periods in which Guevara formed part of armed insurrections fighting against regular armies, and hence it is no surprise that Guevara tends to be thought of primarily and above all as a guerrilla soldier.5 This association of Guevara with guerrilla warfare and armed resistance to injustice more generally is, to be sure, perfectly justified, as is the attention paid to his accomplishments in this regard, whether as a soldier or as a theorist. For these reasons it also seems appropriate, in proposing a general “classification” of Guevara, to use the label “Latin American revolutionary,” as does one well-known encyclopedia.6 At the same time, this label, “revolutionary,” which denotes “one engaged in a revolution” or “an advocate or adherent of revolutionary doctrines,”7 may prove inadequate and misleading in Guevara’s case, even if we construe the term in such a way as to encompass Guevara’s accomplishments as, say, president of the National Bank of Cuba, Minister of Industries, or Cuba’s sometime-roving envoy—just three of the roles that he assumed as a participant in the Cuban Revolution. The problem is that the term “revolutionary” may well obscure the fact that Guevara was actually, as Margaret Randall puts it, an “unusual combination of theoretician and warrior.”8 That is, Guevara was also an original, creative political thinker whose abundant writings, speeches, lectures, and talks attest to an innovative interpretation and development of various concepts, principles, and commitments central to Marxist political theory. Indeed, Guevara—who was well versed in both the Marxist classics (Marx, Engels, and Lenin) and contemporary Marxist theory (including Althusser, Mao, and Paul Baran)—produced a body of work that should be of interest to anyone concerned with fundamental questions in radical social theory, for his books, essays, speeches, and so on address questions that have shaped some of the most important debates in this theoretical tradition. For example: Is it possible for revolutionaries to take power without recourse to armed struggle? How should work be organized in a liberated society? How should we conceive of—and undertake—the transition from capitalism to socialism in an underdeveloped country? What role should moral incentives and motivations play in this transition? What are its preconditions? What mechanisms or practices promote equality and social solidarity? How should revolutionaries deal with resistance to their initiatives and with the opposition from imperialism? What are the appropriate methods of management and administration in a socialist economy? What role should the peasantry play in the struggle for national liberation? Do we need to transform human beings in order to realize communism, and, if so, how?
Yet, despite the fact that Guevara’s works address such questions, along with many others of central importance to radical social theory, his contributions to this body of thought have not received the attention that they deserve, with the result that Guevara has not been given his due as an analyst and theorist, at least outside of Spanish-speaking countries. There would seem to be two basic reasons for this neglect of Guevara’s contributions to radical social thought. First of all, the extraordinary interest and drama of Guevara’s exploits as a “man of action,” from his youthful travels throughout Latin America to his final attempt at kindling an insurrectionary struggle in Bolivia, tend to overshadow, or deflect attention from, the rest of his accomplishments. Second, much of what Guevara wrote and said has yet to be translated into English. This is the case with many of the texts included in Escritos y discursos, the standard, nine-volume edition of Guevara’s works; and it is true to an even greater extent in the case of El Che en la Revolución cubana, whose seven volumes run to well over 3,500 pages and comprise the single most comprehensive—yet still highly incomplete—collection of Guevara’s articles, lectures, speeches, addresses, interviews, talks, meeting transcripts, reports, and letters. Nor are there, at present, English-language versions of the recently published Apuntes filosóficos (Philosophical notes) and Apuntes críticos a la economía política (Critical notes on political economy), which include countless fragments and notes on various works in Marxist theory, ranging from an influential Soviet manual of political economy to writings by Engels, Lenin, and other notable Marxist authors. (By contrast, Guevara’s writings dealing with his youthful trips across Latin America and guerrilla campaigns in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia, as well as his treatise on guerrilla warfare, are all readily available in English translations.) With so much of Guevara’s prodigious output unavailable in English, and still largely unknown even to those who read Spanish,9 it is not surprising that so many people are quite unaware of the full extent of Guevara’s engagement with the central problems in radical social theory or the key figures and writings from the Marxist tradition.
In any event, the upshot of this neglect of Guevara’s thought is that English-language scholarship has barely registered his valuable contributions to radical social thought in general and Marxist theory in particular. For example, Guevara does not merit an entry in either the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought or, even more inexplicably, the authoritative Dictionary of Marxist Thought.10 These omissions are plainly unjustifiable, considering that Guevara’s ideas exercised a profound influence on the Cuban Revolution and the political history of Latin America after 1959 (and considering the other topics and figures included in these works). The small number of volumes in English that do aim to analyze Guevara’s political thought—as opposed to the innumerable books that address other themes connected with Guevara, ranging from straightforward biographies to meditations on his cultural significance—tend to be of a very introductory nature11 or else prove rather superficial because of a desire to cover aspects of Guevara’s life and/or historical context along with his thought.12 In short, none of the existing works provides an analysis and assessment of Guevara’s overall contribution to radical social thought in general and Marxist theory in particular.
The main aim of the present book is to remedy this neglect of Guevara’s achievements in this regard through a careful study of his political thought. Accordingly, it seeks to provide reliable accounts of the theses, concepts, and commitments that lend Guevara’s theoretical and political orientation its distinctive, original character. But this study also aims to situate Guevara’s ideas within the context of the Marxist theoretical tradition, for Guevara regarded himself as a Marxist,13 includes many references to Marx and Marxist ideas in his writings, speeches, lectures, and so forth, and plainly viewed his contributions to political and economic debates in the early 1960s as contributions to the development of Marxism. In addition, the present study also furnishes critical assessments of Guevara’s key ideas and argues that several of them are defensible today and remain relevant to contemporary debates in socialist theory (and not merely debates within Marxism). In other words, I reject the view that Guevara’s thought is of merely historical interest. To the contrary, I believe that John Gerassi was correct in claiming, in the introduction to his 1968 anthology of Guevara’s speeches and writings, that “In the history books he [Guevara] will, in due course, be recorded as one of the great contributors to Marxist-Leninism [sic]”14 and that some of Guevara’s contributions to this tradition constitute a valuable resource for the regeneration of left-wing social theory and the political project that has come to be known as twenty-first-century socialism, even if one eschews “Marxism-Leninism.”
The following chapters examine what are, in my view, the most important components of Guevara’s political thought. Chapters 1 and 2 consider two of Guevara’s most distinctive contributions to radical social theory, namely his conception of the “new man”—which I shall be calling the “new person”15 or “new human being”—and his views on the need to transform our attitude toward, and experience of, work. As we shall see, Guevara’s interest in the creation of a new human being and his concern with the transformation of work occupy a preeminent place in his political thought and vision of social renewal and are, moreover, closely connected with
one another. However, each of these two topics merits a chapter-length treatment, given their importance in Guevara’s thought and given the fact that Guevara’s proposals and vision are often misunderstood, when not deliberately distorted and caricatured. Chapter 3 examines Guevara’s views on internationalism and imperialism. Chapters 4 and 5 then consider various aspects of Guevara’s ideas on socialism, communism, and revolution, including his views on economic management and organization in the transition to socialism. In the final chapter, 6, I discuss a few dimensions of Guevara’s legacy as a political thinker in general and as a Marxist theorist in particular.
Practically all of the essays, speeches, books, and so on in which Guevara develops his political ideas—that is, all of the works that, taken together, reflect and register his political outlook—were written or presented between the beginning of 1959 and late 1967. (This span of time excludes the letters and diaries from Guevara’s trips throughout Latin America prior to joining Fidel Castro’s rebels, as well as those that he wrote during the Cuban Revolutionary War.) However, while amounting to less than a decade, these were years of frenetic activity and successive, dramatic transformations for both the revolution as a whole—it passed through several phases, confronted a variety of challenges, survived several crises (including the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the October 1962 missile crisis)—and for Guevara himself, who was variously, and among other things, president of the National Bank, a minister in the government, Cuba’s preeminent envoy, and a leader of guerrilla operations on two different continents. Given the pace and scope of these social and political changes and the dizzying array of questions that Guevara had to address in these different roles, one might reasonably assume that Guevara’s thought likewise underwent significant changes between January 1, 1959,16 the day of the rebel army’s triumph over the Batista dictatorship, and October 7, 1967, when Guevara jotted down his final diary entries before being captured and murdered by the Bolivian Army. As it turns out, however, Guevara’s thought is remarkably consistent over the course of this period: while there is plainly a great deal of development and evolution in his thinking on the questions that most concerned him, what we find above all is remarkable continuity and coherence in his outlook17 and the absence of any major inconsistencies, contradictions, or tensions. It is worth pointing out, in this connection, that Guevara was already developing two of his most characteristic ideas—the need to create a “new man” and the value of “voluntary labor”—in 1959 and 1960: the first experiment with the latter took place in November 1959,18 while in a lecture delivered in August of the following year Guevara was already defending the need to create a “new type of human” and declaring that it was starting to come into being in Cuba.19 This continuity of thought is due, in my view, to the fact that Guevara would never really modify, let alone abandon, the fundamental ethicopolitical commitments that he had acquired by the time the revolution triumphed and that all of his specific proposals, initiatives, policies, and so on flow from these basic commitments. Indeed, even one of the few unmistakable changes in Guevara’s outlook—his shift from a more or less acritical enthusiasm for Soviet-style socialism in the early years of the Revolution to an attitude combining solidarity with the Soviet Bloc countries with criticism of their economic doctrines and approach to supporting Third World liberation movements20—represents, in the last analysis, an adjustment of his views in light of the same ethicopolitical commitments, an adjustment prompted by more extensive knowledge of, and reflection on, the socialist nations’ economic and political policies.
Thus, in contrast to the striking discontinuities in Guevara’s life from 1959 to 1967—after several years of performing a variety of functions within the Cuban government (and Cuban society), Guevara would join an uprising in the Congo, subsequently spend a number of months in Czechoslovakia, briefly return to Cuba, and end his life leading a guerrilla insurgency in Bolivia—Guevara’s basic political outlook over the same period is characterized by continuity. Accordingly, I make no attempt to periodize Guevara’s thought. Nor do I distinguish between materials published during Guevara’s lifetime and those that only appeared posthumously, since here, too, we find no significant contradictions or discontinuities in Guevara’s thought.
But while there is little justification, in my opinion, for holding that the content of Guevara’s political thought underwent important modifications during this period, there was one notable change with respect to the transparency and explicitness with which he articulated his fundamental political beliefs, commitments, and objectives. On April 16, 1961, during the funeral service for victims of US–backed bombing raids over Cuba and on the eve of the Bay of Pigs Invasion (likewise backed by the United States), Fidel Castro publicly proclaimed, for the first time, that the Cuban revolutionaries were carrying out a “socialist” revolution. Until this time, the leaders of the Revolution had studiously avoided using the words “socialist” and “socialism,” even though many of the measures enacted by the revolutionary government, such as the nationalization of key industries and the passage of laws increasing state intervention in the economy, along with the expanding economic relations with the socialist countries, suggested that the revolution was indeed following a socialist course. Guevara was no exception in this regard: prior to Castro’s announcement, Guevara had eschewed such terms as “socialist,” “Marxist,” “socialism,” and “communism,”21 even when presenting ideas, defending policies, or invoking concepts that were either of Marxist provenance or typical of socialist thought. For example, in a June 18, 1960, speech whose main topics are the problems, role, and duties of the working class, Guevara uses the term free enterprise rather than “capitalism,” refers to “employers” (clase patronal) rather than “capitalist” or “ruling” class, and, most significantly, contrasts the “free-enterprise”-type of development not with a “socialist” type of development but with “revolutionary development.”22 Likewise, Guevara’s book Guerrilla Warfare, published in 1960, is devoid of references to the Marxist tradition, whereas a 1963 essay dealing with similar topics, “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” includes quotations from Engels and Lenin and refers to “Marxist-Leninist parties” in an unmistakably favorable manner.23 Indeed, in a lecture from March 1961 Guevara could still discuss at length, and with gratitude, the scope of the aid received from the socialist countries without expressing any explicit identification with those countries’ doctrinal orientation.24 (The belief that Guevara did not become a committed Marxist until around the time of Castro’s declaration is untenable, even though he himself stated on occasion that it was during, and as a result of, the revolutionary process that he, along with other leaders of the Cuban Revolution, came to embrace Marxism and communism. I discuss the relevant passages, as well as the reasons for doubting their reliability, in chapter 4.)
In fact, prior to Castro’s declaration that the Cuban Revolution was a socialist revolution there seem to be only two occasions on which Guevara hints at his own political outlook, but on both occasions his language is highly ambiguous. The first occasion involves a July 1960 address to a Latin American Youth Congress, in which Guevara rather evasively grants that the revolution might be taking roads that Marx had pointed out and suggests, furthermore, that if the Cuban revolutionaries are practicing “that which is called Marxism,” it is in the form of the Maoist military theory that they learned when one of Mao’s pamphlets happened to fall into their hands during the final phase of the Revolutionary War. The second occasion is Guevara’s October 1960 article “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution.” This piece includes favorable, relatively lengthy references to Marx and Marxism, but the essay’s almost academic detachment leaves Guevara’s own relationship to the Marxist tradition rather unclear: “We recognize,” he wrote, “the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanity’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge,” and “the laws of Marxism are present in the events of the Cuban Revolution,” but they are
present “independently of whether its leaders profess or fully know those laws from a theoretical point of view.”25
Guevara would not abandon his discretion until after Fidel Castro’s public acknowledgment of the Cuban Revolution’s socialist orientation,26 even though Guevara claims in a 1962 report to the Council of Ministers that by the “second semester of 1960”—that is, several months before Castro’s announcement—Cuba was already entering the “period of transition from capitalism to socialism”27 (and so, one would think, it would have been reasonable and appropriate to begin using the “language” of socialism publicly). But once Castro made his announcement, Guevara’s terminology underwent an immediate and dramatic change: in his April 30, 1961, lecture (“On Economic Planning in Cuba”), delivered a mere two weeks after Castro’s announcement, Guevara refers to the revolution as “socialist” on several occasions and is less inhibited in his use of characteristically Marxist language and concepts, such as “petit bourgeoisie” and “the capitalist system.”28 Thereafter, Guevara would consistently invoke Marxist concepts and regularly use Marxist language, explicitly identify the measures he defends with policies aimed at establishing socialism and communism, and unhesitatingly proclaim his adherence to Marxism and Marxism-Leninism.29
This ideological candor in Guevara’s texts (including his speeches, lectures, and other works) after mid-April 1961 makes these documents far more illuminating and reliable than Guevara’s output in the period preceding Castro’s historic announcement. But the postannouncement period also roughly coincides with Guevara’s tenure as Minister of Industries, as his appointment to this position had occurred less than two months earlier, at end of February 1961, and would not end until his departure for the Congo at the end of March 1965. During these years as minister, Guevara was actively engaged in economic planning—besides heading the Ministry of Industries, Guevara was a member of the revolution’s organ for central planning (JUCEPLAN)—and this experience, which involved the attempt to undertake the transition to socialism in a country that was both underdeveloped and under siege (and so also involved constant improvisation, experimentation, and innovation), enriched, and is registered in, Guevara’s works from this period. Guevara also contributed to the general political orientation of the Cuban Revolution during these same years, especially with regard to its international outlook, and Guevara’s texts from this time also reflect this dimension of his activity in Cuba. This extraordinary period culminates in Guevara’s speech at the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity in Algiers on February 24, 1965, and his best-known text, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” which he wrote at approximately the same time and published in the March 12, 1965, issue of the Uruguayan weekly newspaper Marcha; the latter text was, as Fernando Martínez Heredia points out, the last piece of work that Guevara wrote for immediate publication.30 Guevara’s last recorded talk as minister likewise took place in March of that year. His last published interview, apparently also conducted in March, appeared in April, which is also the month in which he sent an illuminating letter to Fidel Castro summarizing his considered views on the transition to socialism in Cuba.31 By contrast, after April 1965 Guevara would prepare but one major essay for publication, the text usually referred to as the “Message to the Tricontinental”; Guevara’s only other writings from the final years of his life were, apart from letters, a lengthy report on his guerrilla campaign in the Congo, a series of brief communiqués in the name of his Bolivian guerrilla army, a document with instructions for his urban collaborators in Bolivia, the diary he kept while in Bolivia, and the highly suggestive yet fragmentary comments and notes on his readings in political economy and Marxist theory.32
The Political Theory of Che Guevara Page 2