The Political Theory of Che Guevara

by Llorente, Renzo Tramer

  53. “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” found in ibid., 73; see also “Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution,” found in ibid., 297.

  54. “En la Universidad de Montevideo,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:339–40.

  55. “Presentación del número especial de la revista Tricontinental dedicada a Ernesto Che Guevara, el 27 de septiembre de 1997,” in Piñeiro Losada, Barbarroja, 106; William Gálvez Rodríguez, El guerrillero heroico: Che en Bolivia (Arrigorriaga, Sp.: Status Ediciones, S.L., 2003), 332; Oliver Besancenot and Michael Löwy, Che Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy, trans. James Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 64; and Néstor Kohan, “Por la revolución mundial” (http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=124579). Guevara apparently wrote this essay in the fall of 1966.

  56. “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams (Message to the Tricontinental),” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 358; see also Guevara’s remarks in Eduardo Galeano, “El Che Guevara: Cuba como vitrina o catapulta,” in Nosotros decimos no: Crónicas (1963/1988) (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, S.A., 1989), 60. For Guevara’s reasons for holding that peaceful methods of struggle are likely to prove ineffective in Latin America, see “Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 295–98.

  57. Löwy, Marxism, 67. Elsewhere in the same text Löwy attributes to Guevara a “deep and unshakable conviction that only the road of armed struggle can lead to the emancipation of the oppressed peoples of Latin America (and of the whole world)” (79).

  58. “Discurso a las milicias en Pinar del Río,” found in Guevara, Escritos y discursos, 5:77; Deena Stryker, Cuba 1964: When the Revolution Was Young (Lexington, KY: Big Picture Publishers, 2013), 171.

  59. “Discurso a las milicias en Pinar del Río,” found in Guevara, Escritos y discursos, 5:77.

  60. “The Philosophy of Plunder Must Cease,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 312; “Inauguración de la planta de sulfometales ‘Patricio Lumumba,’” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:490.

  61. “Discurso a las milicias en Pinar del Río,” found in Guevara, Escritos y discursos, 5:74; “Inauguración combinado industrial de Santiago de Cuba,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 5:295; and “Inauguración de la planta de sulfometales ‘Patricio Lumumba,’” found in ibid., 3:489.

  62. “Faced with the dilemma of choosing between the people or imperialism, the weak national bourgeoisies choose imperialism and definitively betray their country. In this part of the world the possibility is almost totally gone for there to be a peaceful transition to socialism” (“A Party of the Working Class,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 170).

  63. “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” found in ibid., 82; see also Guevara, Congo, 235.

  64. “Inauguración de la INPUD,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 5:205. In his 1962 essay “Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution,” Guevara actually goes so far as to say that “we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of atomic war victims” (found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 304). This essay was first published after Guevara’s death, in 1968. It is worth bearing this in mind, along with the fact that, as Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés point out, “according to the Cuban government this article was written during the missile crisis of October 1962” (unnumbered editorial footnote in Guevara, Che: Selected Works, 77).

  65. “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 142; “Mobilizing the Masses for the Invasion,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Speaks, 34. See also “Inauguración de la planta de sulfometales ‘Patricio Lumumba,’” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:490.

  66. “Asamblea de trabajadores portuarios,” found in ibid., 4:8; “Inauguración combinado industrial de Santiago de Cuba,” found in ibid., 5:295; “At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 349.

  67. This slogan is part of the title of the English translation that I cite (“Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams [Message to the Tricontinental]”), but in the original Spanish version of the essay it appears below the title, in the space where one would normally place an epigraph.

  68. “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams (Message to the Tricontinental),” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 358.

  69. See, for example, “Inauguración fábrica de bujías,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 5:155 and 156; “Mobilizing the Masses for the Invasion,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Speaks, 33; “Inauguración de la escuela de capacitación técnica para obreros,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 4:87; and Russell, “Americans,” 2.

  70. “Asamblea de trabajadores portuarios,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 4:8.

  71. “Inauguración combinado industrial de Santiago de Cuba,” found in ibid., 5:295 and 296; “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams (Message to the Tricontinental),” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 360; “Interview with Josie Fanon,” found in Guevara, Che: Selected Works, 401.

  72. Found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 225.

  73. One might recall in this connection Max Weber’s observation from a century ago: in politics, Weber remarked, “it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true” (Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [New York: Oxford University Press, 1946], 123; emphasis in the original; see also 121).

  74. “Conferencia en Dar-Es-Salam,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 5: 355; “Conferencia en el salón de actos del Ministerio de Industrias,” found in ibid., 5:388.

  75. Ibid., 388. One commentator who rightly underscores this consideration is Manuel Monereo, in Con su propia cabeza, 36.

  76. Löwy, Marxism, 100.

  77. According to Harry Villegas Tamayo, “Pombo,” who had been one of Guevara’s bodyguards and fought with him in both the Congo and Bolivia, Guevara criticized Debray’s rendering of the foco theory (contained in Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?) at length in Bolivia. The notebooks in which Villegas recorded Guevara’s comments were kept by the Bolivian Army (Néstor Kohan, De ingenieros al Che: Ensayos sobre el marxismo argentino y latinoamericano [Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2000], 273, n. 63).

  78. “The Essence of Guerrilla Struggle,” in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 64.

  79. “Conferencia Televisada,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:43.

  80. Guevara, Congo, 235.

  81. “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 80.

  82. Ibid., 78–79. Guevara presents similar arguments, citing the first two of these considerations, in “Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution,” found in ibid., 302.

  83. “Communiqué No. 5 to the Bolivian Miners,” in Guevara, Bolivian Diary, 276.

  84. Bertrand Russell, “Peace through Resistance to U.S. Imperialism,” in Readings in U.S. Imperialism, ed. K. T. Fann and Donald C. Hodges (Boston: Porter Sargent Publisher, 1971), xvi.

  85. For an impassioned denunciation of the barbarism of imperialism, see, in addition to the “Message to the Tricontinental,” “Inauguración combinado industrial de Santiago de Cuba,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 5:293.

  86. Taibo, Ernesto, 619.

  87. “The Essence of Guerrilla Struggle,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 65. In a similar vein, Guevara writes in Guerrilla Warfare that the “guerilla fighter” only “initiates the fight” “once peaceful means are exhausted” (Ernesto Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, trans. J. P. Morray [New York: Vintage Books, 1961], 32).

  88. “The Essence of Guerrilla St
ruggle,” in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 65.

  89. K. S. Karol, “Why Quadros Fell,” New Statesman, September 1, 1961, 265.

  90. “The Essence of Guerrilla Struggle,” in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 67; Guevara, Congo, 216; “The Cuban Revolution’s Influence in Latin America,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 283.

  91. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Qué es un ‘guerrillero,’” in Obras 1957–1967 (Havana: Casa de Las Américas, 1970), 1:156.

  92. Monereo, Con su propia cabeza, 49–50, 114. One place in which Guevara refers to the increasing popularity of socialist ideas is his account of his intervention in the Congo: “We are strongly assisted by the present conditions of humanity, the development of socialist ideas” (Guevara, Congo, 237).

  93. “Reunión bimestral, enero 20 de 1962,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 6:149.

  94. Monereo, Con su propia cabeza, 49–50; Daniel Bensaïd’s “Che: A Thinker of Acts,” afterword to Besancenot and Löwy, Che Guevara, 116; John Gerassi’s introduction to Guevara, Venceremos!, 45, 50.

  95. “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 138–39.

  96. “A los compañeros argentinos,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 4:220; “At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 340.

  97. “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” found in ibid., 74.

  98. Ibid., 70.

  99. Armando Hart Dávalos’s “El Che: Una cultura de liberación,” found in Almeida et al., Che siempre, 14. Hart wrote this essay in the late 1990s.

  Chapter 4

  1. Sinclair, Viva Che!, 114.

  2. Francisco Fernández Buey’s preface to Monereo, Con su propia cabeza, 11.

  3. The position that I criticize here has recently been defended by Samuel Farber, who maintains that Guevara’s “theory of guerrilla warfare and the conditions to conduct this kind of struggle” is his “most significant contribution to revolutionary thought and practice” (Politics, 36).

  4. “A New Culture of work,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 145.

  5. For example, see Guevara’s “On the Concept of Value,” found in Silverman, Man and Socialism in Cuba, 237; “En la Universidad de Montevideo,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:339–40; “On the Alliance for Progress,” found in Guevara, Venceremos!, 268; Guevara’s “The Meaning of Socialist Planning,” found in Silverman, Man and Socialism in Cuba, 100–101; and “El papel de los estudiantes de tecnología y el desarrollo industrial del país,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 4:191.

  6. “At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 342 (hombre—“man”—is translated here as “human being”).

  7. “Entrega de premios de la emulación socialista,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 5:252; “Graduación en la escuela de administradores ‘Patricio Lumumba,’” found in ibid., 4:320; “Reunión bimestral, septiembre 28 de 1962,” in ibid., 6:317.

  8. See, for example, Carta a Robert Starkie, 12 de junio de 1961, found in ibid., 1:408; “Inauguración fábrica de bujías,” found in ibid., 5:154; and Ernesto Che Guevara to José Medero Mestre, February 26, 1964, found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 377.

  9. “On Economic Planning in Cuba,” found in Guevara, Venceremos!, 222 (“consciousness” is translated as “conscience”); “X preguntas sobre las enseñanzas de un libro famoso,” found in Guevara, Apuntes críticos, 142.

  10. “Reunión bimestral, febrero 22 de 1964,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 6:436; “Selección de Actas de reuniones efectuadas en el Ministerio de Industrias: 2 de octubre de 1964,” found in Guevara, Apuntes críticos, 370.

  11. “Reunión bimestral, febrero 22 de 1964,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 6:453. Guevara’s remarks are reminiscent of a passage from the young Lukács: “The ultimate objective of communism is the construction of a society in which freedom of morality will take the place of legal compulsion in the regulation of all behaviour” (see “The Role of Morality in Communist Production,” found in Lukács, Tactics and Ethics, 48).

  12. “On Production Costs and the Budgetary System,” found in Silverman, Man and Socialism in Cuba, 121; see also “Selección de Actas de reuniones efectuadas en el Ministerio de Industrias: 2 de octubre de 1964,” found in Guevara, Apuntes críticos, 337.

  13. “On the Budgetary Finance System,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 211; “Selección de Actas de reuniones efectuadas en el Ministerio de Industrias: 2 de octubre de 1964,” found in Guevara, Apuntes críticos, 363; “Sobre las normas de trabajo y la escala salarial,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 4:600; “Asamblea de trabajadores portuarios,” found in ibid., 4:16.

  14. See, for example, “Graduación en la escuela de administradores ‘Patricio Lumumba,’” found in ibid., 4:320; “Inauguración de la fábrica de galletas ‘Albert Kuntz,’” found in ibid., 4:4; “Entrega de premios de la emulación socialista,” found in ibid., 5:251; “On Production Costs and the Budgetary System,” found in Silverman, Man and Socialism in Cuba, 121; and “The Cuban Economy: Its Past and Its Present Importance,” found in Guevara, Che: Selected Works, 145.

  15. I borrow this distinction from Cohen, Self-Ownership, introduction and chapter 5.

  16. “Discurso en la inauguración de la planta beneficiadora de caolín, Isla de Pinos,” found in Guevara, Escritos y discursos, 8:84.

  17. “Technology and Society,” found in Guevara, Che: Selected Works, 299; “Delegados en el Congreso Obrero,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:514; Carta a Luis Corvea, 14 de marzo de 1964, found in ibid., 1:442.

  18. Farber, Politics, 77–78; see also 11 and 118.

  19. Ibid., 78. Hodges also seems to defend this view in Bureaucratization (161ff.).

  20. Marx, “Gotha,” 87.

  21. For example, “Sobre las normas de trabajo y la escala salarial,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 4:599; “Graduación de 400 alumnos de las escuelas populares,” found in ibid., 4:549; “Delegados en el Congreso Obrero,” found in ibid., 3:514; “Clausura de la Asamblea de Producción de la Gran Habana,” found in ibid., 3:455; “A los obreros más destacados durante el año 1962,” found in ibid., 4:341; and “Entrega de premios de la emulación socialista,” found in ibid., 5:70.

  22. Farber, Politics, 78.

  23. Ernesto Che Guevara to [His] Children (1965), in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 383.

  24. “The Sin of the Revolution,” in Guevara, Venceremos!, 191; Guevara, “La conferencia de prensa,” 349.

  25. Löwy, Marxism, xxviii.

  26. Marx, Civil War, 328.

  27. “The Cuban Revolution’s Influence in Latin America,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 284.

  28. “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?” found in ibid., 136; emphasis in the original.

  29. “A los compañeros argentinos,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 4:217.

  30. “Conferencia Televisada,” found in ibid., 3:43–44; see also “Inauguración de la INPUD,” found in ibid., 5:206; and see “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 141.

  31. “En la visita del Gral. Líster,” in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 3:207. In fact, Guevara “never tired of telling his Cuban comrades that in Guatemala Arbenz had fallen because he had not purged his armed forces of disloyal elements” (Anderson, Revolutionary, 389).

  32. There seem to have been slightly over fifty executions while Guevara was in charge of the military tribunals (Yaffe, Economics, 292–93, n. 5; and Felipa de las Mercedes Suárez Ramos, “Tribunales revolucionarios: Monumento a la justicia,�
�� Trabajadores, January 19, 2014, http://www.trabajadores.cu/20140119/tribunales-revolucionarios-monumento-la-justicia/). The far higher estimates for the number of executions in 1959 that one finds, for example, in Anderson’s biography of Guevara (Revolutionary, 419) and Lars Schoultz’s more recent That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution ([Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009], 87) presumably refer to Cuba as a whole.

  33. “En respaldo de la Declaración de La Habana,” in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 2:334; “Entrevista en el INRA,” in ibid., 2:116. According to Carlos Franqui, a national survey conducted at the time of the tribunals found that more than 90 percent of Cubans approved of the trials and executions (Taibo, Ernesto, 344).

  34. Guevara, “Cuba Will Continue,” 152. Elsewhere Guevara emphasizes that the executions in the immediate aftermath of the rebels’ triumph were “done openly before the public opinion of the continent and with a clear conscience” (“The OAS Conference at Punta del Este,” in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 252).

  35. “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” found in ibid., 76.

  36. See, for example, “On Economic Planning in Cuba,” found in Guevara, Venceremos!, 223.

  37. “Fidel’s Trip to New York,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Speaks, 21; “Acto en el Palacio de los Sindicatos de la URSS,” found in Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana, 2:419; “Interview with Laura Bergquist (#1),” found in Guevara, Che: Selected Works, 387. Guevara summarizes his general thesis concisely in a speech delivered in August 1961: “It is an agrarian, antifeudal, and anti-imperialist revolution that under the imperatives of its internal evolution and of the external aggressions became transformed into a socialist revolution and that declares itself as such before all the Americas: a socialist revolution” (“The OAS Conference at Punta del Este,” found in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 251).

  38. “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” in ibid., 76. The view that Guevara defends is vividly expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, who refers to “the basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy, and resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counterrevolution” (Russian Revolution, 287; see also 289).