The Political Theory of Che Guevara
Page 22
“Be like Che”
During his speech at the mass public tribute to Guevara held in Havana nine days after Guevara’s execution, Fidel Castro said, “If we wish to express what we want the men of future generations to be, we must say, ‘Let them be like Che!’”103 Castro’s exhortation introduced the phrase that would subsequently become one of the most emblematic slogans of the Cuban Revolution: “Be like Che.” At first glance, this slogan may strike us as quite unreasonable, and we might well conclude, as Margaret Randall has observed, that adopting this slogan “raised the bar to unattainable heights.”104 After all, not many people could possibly maintain Guevara’s grueling work schedule. Not many could assume so many occupational and political roles with the same facility: Guevara was variously a physician, photographer, soldier, military official, banker, journalist, industrial analyst, government minister, diplomat, military strategist, management theorist, economic planner, and revolutionary theoretician . . . among other things. Not many people could achieve Guevara’s self-discipline or commitment to self-improvement. (For example, after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Guevara spent about five years studying mathematics,105 in addition to his wide reading and intensive study in all of the areas in which he assumed official responsibilities—the National Bank, the Ministry of Industries, etc.)
At the same time, there are plainly some ways in which we can and should strive to “be like Che.” We can, for instance, adopt the substantive commitments that I mentioned in the previous section and have sought to explain and defend in the present study. To the extent that we do so and succeed in making our actions consistent with our beliefs, we shall not only have demonstrated that it is indeed possible to “be like Che,” but will also have contributed, however modestly, to making the world a better place.
Notes
Timeline
1. The book appears to have been first published in April 1960, but it is difficult to obtain exact information on the date of publication.
2. The book seems to have appeared in May or June 1964.
3. It is unclear when Guevara left Tanzania, but it was probably in February, or early March, 1966. Accordingly, one cannot say with certainty when he reached Prague, either.
Introduction
Wherever possible, I have used existing English-language translations of Guevara’s works. In a couple of cases I have used two different English-language translations of the same text, either for comparative purposes or because of the need for maximum accuracy in the English rendering of Guevara’s words. When the published English translation provides an abridged or otherwise incomplete version of Guevara’s original text, I often cite from both the translation and the original, and both sources have been included in the bibliography.
In the case of works that have not been previously translated into English, references are to Guevara’s Spanish-language text, and any translation provided, whether in the body of the text or in an endnote, is my own. In citing pieces included in El Che en la Revolución cubana and Escritos y discursos, I use the titles that appear on the initial page of each selection, for the titles that appear in the tables of contents for these volumes are often inordinately long, as they also contain information bearing on such things as a text’s date of publication and, in the case of El Che en la Revolución cubana, the location in which a talk took place or a speech was delivered. In any case, since I include the volume number for all of the works from these collections, page numbers make it very easy to locate all of Guevara’s Spanish-language texts to which I refer.
Finally, references are given in accordance with the standard conventions for capitalization in the language in which the title is cited.
1. Guevara’s full name was Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, but in Spanish-speaking countries only the first surname is used in most contexts. According to Jon Lee Anderson, it was Ñico López, one of the Cuban exiles whom Guevara met in Guatemala in the early 1950s, who first gave him the nickname “El Che Argentino” (Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life [London: Bantam Books, 1997], 129), and this would eventually become simply “Che.” The origin of this nickname was Guevara’s habitual usage, typical of Argentines, of the expression che, which can be roughly translated as “listen,” “hey,” “man,” or “mate,” depending on the context.
2. Ambrosio Fornet, “La década prodigiosa: Un testimonio personal,” in Narrar la nación: Ensayos en blanco y negro (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2011), 353; see also “Political Sovereignty and Economic Independence,” found in Ernesto Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, ed. David Deutschmann (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003), 101.
3. Rafael Hernández et al., “1968: Una mirada retrospectiva,” in Último jueves: Los debates de Temas (Havana: Ediciones ICAIC and Revista Temas, 2010), 4:109; see also Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez’s “La gran lección del Che,” found in Juan Almeida et al., Che siempre (Donostia [San Sebastián], Sp.: Tercera Prensa-Hirugarren Prentsa, S.L., 1997), 123.
4. Fernando Martínez Heredia, “El Che Guevara: Los sesenta y los noventa,” in El corrimiento hacia el rojo (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2001), 244; see also Martínez Heredia’s interview by Néstor Kohan, “Cuba y el pensamiento crítico,” found in Fernando Martínez Heredia, A viva voz (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2010), 23.
5. “The Che of popular culture is much more a man of action than ideas” (Margaret Randall, Che on My Mind [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013], 36).
6. Collier’s Encyclopedia, 1992 ed., s.v. “Guevara, Che.”
7. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition.
8. Randall, Che, 47. Fidel Castro describes Guevara in very similar terms in “In Tribute to Che,” in Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, by Ernesto Che Guevara, trans. Victoria Ortiz (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969), 22; see also Alan Bullock, “Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto (Che),” in Twentieth-Century Culture: A Biographical Companion, ed. Alan Bullock and R. B. Woodings (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1983), 293.
9. Samuel Farber’s recent The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) is a case in point: the book contains no references, for example, to El Che en la Revolución cubana.
10. David Miller, ed., Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991); Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd ed. (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1991). Equally surprising, David McLellan barely mentions Guevara in a chapter on Marxism in Latin America in his authoritative Marxism after Marx, 4th ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). It is worth noting, on the other hand, that in his anthology The Marxists (C. Wright Mills, ed. [New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1962]), C. Wright Mills did include some brief selections from Guevara (from, among other works, “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” found in Ernesto Che Guevara, Che: Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara, ed. Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés [Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1969]).
11. See, for example, Michael Löwy, The Marxism of Che Guevara: Philosophy, Economics, Revolutionary Warfare, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD, and Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007).
12. See, for example, Mike González, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution (London and Sydney: Bookmarks, 2004); or see Farber, Politics.
13. It is significant that Guevara makes a point of referring to his Marxism in his “farewell” letter to his parents (Ernesto Che Guevara to [His] Parents (1965), in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 384).
14. From John Gerassi’s introduction to Ernesto Che Guevara, Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara, ed. John Gerassi (London: Panther Books Ltd., 1969), 51.
15. In 1997, Fernando Martínez Heredia actually proposed that we pay tribute to Guevara by changing the expression new man to new person (from his interview with Jesús Arencibia Lorenzo, “Expresión viva de la he
rejía cubana,” found in Martínez Heredia, A viva voz, 291).
16. For the earlier development of Guevara’s political thought, and particularly in relation to its historical context, see María del Carmen Ariet García, El pensamiento político de Ernesto Che Guevara (Mexico City: Ocean Sur, 2010), 15–62.
17. Luiz Bernardo Pericás maintains that Guevara’s thought underwent a rapid change between the start of the Cuban Revolution and Guevara’s guerrilla campaign in Bolivia (Che Guevara y el debate económico en Cuba, trans. Rodolfo Alpízar Castillo [Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2011], 219). Yet Pericás goes on to explain that what changed was the nature of Guevara’s Marxism, which was superficial and derivative in January 1959 but had become far more nuanced, dynamic, and “heterodox” by the end of 1966 (ibid.). If this is all that is meant by “changes” in Guevara’s political thought, then I do not disagree with Pericás.
18. Vicente R. Martínez Llebrez and Luis. A. Sabadí Castillo, Concepción de la calidad en el pensamiento del Che (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2006), 61.
19. From Guevara’s “Speech to Medical Students and Health Workers,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 113; 114.
20. I discuss the criticisms mentioned here in chapters 3 and 5.
21. The only exception would seem to be an article that Guevara published just one week before Castro’s momentous announcement—“Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 130. Yet even in this text the identification of the Cuban Revolution with socialism remains somewhat ambiguous.
22. From Guevara’s “Working Class and the Industrialization of Cuba,” found in Guevara, Che: Selected Works, 237ff., 241, 239. Guevara does use the word “capitalist” on page 238 of this essay, but this is the one exception.
23. “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 74–75; 77.
24. “El papel de la ayuda exterior en el desarrollo de Cuba,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:81, 96, 99.
25. “Speech to the Latin American Youth Congress,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 232, 234; and see “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” ibid., 122, 123. The sheer vagueness of the latter essay makes it misleading to say, as does Paco Ignacio Taibo II, that it is Guevara’s “first public declaration” of his Marxism (Ernesto Guevara, también conocido come el Che, 4th ed. [Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1997], 394).
26. To be sure, three months before the declaration, during a January 1961 television appearance, Guevara had stated that “on arriving in the Soviet Union, one senses that it is the place where socialism was born and senses that socialism is a just system” (“Conferencia Televisada,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:51). But such a statement hardly amounts to a self-identification with socialism, let alone Marxism.
27. “Memoria Anual 1961–1962,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 6:675. This text is in fact undated but was apparently written in 1962. See also Ernesto Che Guevara, “Conferencia ofrecida por el Comandante Guevara a los estudiantes de la carrera de Economía de la Universidad de Oriente,” Utopías, Nuestra Bandera 184, no. 1 (2000): 172.
28. “On Economic Planning in Cuba,” found in Guevara, Venceremos!, 207, 222, 224; 208; 210.
29. One particularly noteworthy occasion in this regard was the speech Guevara delivered at the United Nations in December 1964 (“At the United Nations,” from Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 327; 334. See also Sam Russell, “The Americans Still Want to Come Here,” Daily Worker, December 4, 1962, 2; and see Guevara’s “En relación con la II zafra del pueblo,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 4:63; 64). Incidentally, Fidel Castro would publicly define himself as a “Marxist-Leninist” for the first time on December 1, 1961 (Sergio Guerra and Alejo Maldonado, Historia de la revolución cubana [Tafalla, Sp.: Txalaparta, 2009], 191).
30. Fernando Martínez Heredia, Las ideas y la batalla del Che (Havana: Ciencias Sociales and Ruth Casa Editorial, 2010), 221.
31. Part of this letter, “A modo de Prólogo: Algunas reflexiones sobre la transición socialista,” has been included as a foreword of sorts to Ernesto Che Guevara, Apuntes críticos a la economía política, ed. María del Carmen Ariet García (Melbourne: Ocean Sur, 2006).
32. Ernesto Che Guevara, Congo Diary: Episodes of the Revolutionary War in the Congo (North Melbourne, Au.: Ocean Press, 2011); Ernesto Che Guevara, The Bolivian Diary (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2006); Guevara, Apuntes críticos; Ernesto Che Guevara, Apuntes filosóficos, ed. María del Carmen Ariet García (Mexico City: Ocean Sur, 2012). The latter two volumes assemble notes from 1965 to 1967, along with some previously published material and selections from the texts that are the subject of Guevara’s notes.
33. Frederick Engels, “Karl Marx’s Funeral,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 24:468.
Chapter 1
1. In The End of the State, Andrew Levine writes that this transformation “is, of course, psychological” (London: Verso, 1987, 162). Given recent advances in biotechnology, it is surely less obvious today that what one has in mind is a psychological transformation.
2. See Joseph H. Carens, Equality, Moral Incentives, and the Market: An Essay in Utopian Politico-Economic Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 103–108, and especially the citation from Alfred Kuhn on 104–105.
3. Ibid., 104.
4. The thesis says that the human essence “is the ensemble of the social relations” (Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 5:4. For a passage in which Marx equates history with “a continuous transformation of human nature,” see Poverty of Philosophy, 192. For discussion of Marx’s view of human nature, see Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature (London: Verso, 1983), and Vernon Venable, Human Nature: The Marxian View (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1946).
5. One of the most familiar general statements of this idea appears in the Communist Manifesto: “Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations, and in his social life?” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx and Engels Collected Works [New York: International Publishers, 1976], 6:503).
6. The working class “will have to pass . . . through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men,” in the course of “work[ing] out their own emancipation” (Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Marx and Engels Collected Works [New York: International Publishers, 1986], 22:335). See also Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, where the authors write that “the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary” (in Marx and Engels Collected Works [New York: International Publishers, 1976], 5:53).
7. See, for example, Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One, in Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 29:264; and see Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, in Marx and Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 25:270.
8. For example, Georg Lukács writes, “When the forces of production are governed by society in general, this brings about a radical transformation of man and his relation to his labor and to his fellow men” (The Process of Democratization, trans. Susanne Bernhardt and Norman Levine [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991], 156).
9. See Russian Revolution, 306, and “The Socialization of Society,” 348, both in Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004). In the latter essay, Luxemburg argues that socialism actually requires “a complete inner rebirth of the proletarian” (ibid.).
10. See, for example, Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), especially chapters 1 and 2.
11. Manuel Sacristán helpfully draws attention to this aspect of Lukács’s later thought. See “Nota necrológica sobre Lukács,” 229, and “Sobre el ‘marxismo ortodoxo’ de György Lukács,” 248, both in Manuel Sacristán Luzón, Sobre Marx y marxismo: Panfletos y materiales, ed. Juan-Ramón Capella (Barcelona: Icaria Editorial, S.A., 1983).
12. Levine, End, 162.
13. As Levine puts it, “in the sense Rousseau anticipated and Kant made explicit, they [people] must become more moral: more inclined to assess alternative courses of action as pure personalities adopting the standpoint of generality, not empirically distinct selves bent on improving their own positions” (ibid.).
14. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 88.
15. C. B. Macpherson analyzes possessive individualism in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).