The face of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna maintains an undeniable glamor in history. 54 years after his death, "Che" remains the "Christ" of the rebellion, but also the dominant background against which the ruling class and the proletariat clashed. Che was the personification of the rupture, the conflict, the radical expression, the difficult but also non-negotiable penetration into the foreign, hostile environment. Devoted to uncertain and distant struggles, he passed into the realm of mythology, having managed to combine Marxist rhetoric and humanism in a unique way, embracing revolution with enthusiasm and scorning doctrinal restrictions.
In the image of the real revolution of consciousness, Che Guevara symbolizes the power of will and responsibility, the radical seed of the infinite in the field of freedom. His left-wing "prophecy" served as the driving force behind a particular conception of rebellion, one that is not fortified around state-run, bureaucratic socialism. An idealist and deeply internationalist, Che organized and oriented the issue of the revolution towards a political identity, which called for the realization of utopia through action, completely opposed to the careful application of the vague theory of Soviet Stalinism.
It was Guevara's action, the one that contributed to reviving the until then marginalized questioning of the spontaneous, universally subordinated to the demand of "organization", and indeed at a moment when the infamous "model" was entering a period of crisis. Che was the beginning of May 1968:he had perished some time before under tragic circumstances and thus was able to embody in the lines of the extreme Left, a combination of revolutionary radicalism, Marxist rhetoric and humanism, representing a style less dogmatic and more enthusiastic than than those of Trotsky or Mao. His point was clear:the revolution, which is not the application of a "theory", is proven in practice.
A point of view based on three steel pillars, which were the basis and starting point for his personal realization and mobilization. The love of social justice, the loathing of "Yankees" Americans and the fascination exerted on him by the Marxist discourse, created the explosive mixture that led the teenager from Rosario to renounce apathy and obey the instincts of rupture. The books further helped sow the seed of conflict within him. Jack London, Pablo Neruda, Lorca, Dumas, Verne, set sail on his inner journey, before he even began his wanderings in Latin America.
Freud up close, but also Marx. An anti-Peronist, like his parents, a declared democrat, but with the seed of conflict planted in him from an early age:"I will not take to the streets unless they give me a gun", he clearly declared to his classmates, in Córdoba, who wanted to demonstrate . His destiny seemed to follow that of the hero of his favorite book, Don Quixote. He was thirsty for adventure, he wanted to wander. At the age of 23, on a motorcycle, he got to know "Great America", in his first political encounter with the social reality of the Latin continent and committed himself to the difficult destination that awaited him.
He met the despised Indians, talked with the tortured miners and impoverished farmers, was outraged by the exploitation of foreigners who stole the lives of his "compatriots". A year later, in 1952, now a sworn doctor, he left again. "An American soldier is leaving," he had told his mother, saying goodbye to her at the train station. The young bourgeois intellectual no longer thirsted for adventure, at least not in the carefree, detached sense of personal responsibility. Marxist books were now his main reading, but the interpretations were entirely his own.
Armed struggle was his own ideal. "Outside revolution there is no life," he strongly argued throughout his life. Leaving behind Sartre's existentialism, along with the confusion caused by the "absolute freedom" of the French philosopher, Che preferred to move forward keeping the eternal struggle for the formation of the human condition through personal action, an extension of the political commitment to to himself and the values that led fatally to co-responsibility and the satisfaction of social demands without discounts or concessions. In front of him, around him, everywhere, things were clear. Divided into the good and the bad.
In December 1953, Guevara arrived in revolutionary Guatemala. Jakob Arbens, a young left-wing colonel, was trying to free his country from the colonial bonds of the USA. One of his moves was to nationalize 84,000 hectares of the United Fruit Company, which angered Washington. The CIA very quickly organized a coup and Carlos Castillo's troops entered the country in June 1954, overthrowing the government. The "open wound left in his side by Guatemala", as he wrote in his diary, was the first great lesson for Che and the absolute confirmation of the necessity of developing armed movements.
He eventually ended up in Mexico, where he came into contact with Cuban exiles. He met Raul Castro, also an ardent Marxist-Leninist, and his brother, Fidel, a young lawyer, who in July 1953 had attempted a failed raid with 133 other guerrillas on Camp Moncada, in Santiago, Cuba. The endless hours of discussions with Fidel about the next landing, marked the starting point of the rebellion. The 81 "crazy" and determined people who boarded the "Granma" - a wreck yacht - on the night of November 25, 1956, to arrive a week later on the coast of Las Colorados in southeastern Cuba, shared the same visions as the enthusiastic doctor from Argentina.
The jungle turned out to be harsh and inhospitable, but the "barbudos", the bearded rebels, were helped by the farmers, the workers, the trade unions, all those oppressed by the Batista dictatorship, and two years later they entered Havana victorious. Che liberated Santa Clara and was hailed as a hero. With the title of comandante now, he had achieved his original goal:to convince that with a guerilla war, an initial small core of warriors, could win the support of the poor and impoverished. In the summer of 1959 Guevara contacted Nasser, Nehru and Tito - the leaders who two years later would create the non-aligned movement - claiming the place of free Cuba on the political map.
His own logic of "permanent revolution" was adopted by Fidel and the Cuban revolution was declared anti-imperialist and socialist. Great changes were made on the island:agrarian reform, health services, reading and writing classes to combat illiteracy, all these and more were implemented under Che's supervision, who printed a hundred thousand copies of "Don Quixote" at the national printing press. and distributed them for free to the Cubans. The new era had begun in a climate of euphoria and Guevara, assuming the Ministry of Industry, announced the "birth" of a new man, whose sole motivation would be morality.
The "utopia" that he had envisioned during his first trip to Latin America, gave identity to the everyday reality of the island. He met Sartre (who visited Havana with Simone de Beauvoir) and when the existentialist philosopher asked him "what is the plan of the revolution", he replied "to extend the field of the possible", a phrase that concealed this wonderful wanderer, eternally insubordinate, in the service of exploring other, hard-to-find "places", rebel. A traveler of duty with constant destinations, whose goal would be social justice and the questioning to the death of every form of exploitation and oppression.
Clearly more tolerant than Castro, he took care to keep his distance from extremes. He disagreed with the political persecution and conscription of artists and intellectuals, saying historically "beauty has not quarreled with revolution". But he did not take a single step back in the security of Cuba, "setting" every enemy against the wall. The US had already started the war of destabilization, refusing to tolerate the "communist cancer" in its neighborhood, the USSR on the other hand, ignored the embargo, buying sugar and offering oil. This was followed by the failed invasion of the rebels - with the support of the CIA - in Playa Girón.
"What the imperialists cannot forgive us for is that we made a socialist revolution that we will defend with arms," Fidel made clear in April 1961, immediately after the American fiasco. Che then met with Nikita Khrushchev and strongly advocated the deployment of Soviet missiles on Cuban soil. However, the crisis that followed and the abandonment of the plan by Moscow, forced him to change his "routine" too, disappointed by the developments and the Kremlin. He continued to call on revolutionary forces around the world to copy the Cuban model and fight the "International of Crime", as he had called imperialism, in December '64 from the UN podium.
He sent the same message two months later, from the floor of the Afro-Asian Solidarity economic conference in Algiers:"We must change man, proletarian internationalism is the duty against the common enemy, imperialism." In March 1965, Guevara disappeared from the face of the earth. At the beginning of April, he arrived in Congo in disguise to start a new guerrilla campaign. But the attempt failed and seven months later, Guevara escaped with his Cuban comrades, finding secret refuge in the Cuban embassy in Tanzania. In the meantime, pressure was on in Cuba to let the world know what had become of Che.
So Castro decided to publicly read Guevara's farewell letter, written some time before and soon after Carlos Puebla composed his stirring song, "Hasta siempre, Comandante". In that letter, Guevara reaffirmed his "solidarity with the Cuban revolution," but added that he "was determined to leave to serve the revolution abroad." The passion within him continued to burn, and neither the government offices in Havana, nor his position in the Communist Party, were capable of keeping him behind a desk. The oath he had taken was sending him once more to the battlefield.
He himself felt drawn to the prospect of a new guerrilla and to the goal of freeing even more of the tortured people of South America, the "great motherland," as he called it. In November 1966, with a fake Uruguayan passport and the name Ramon Benitez, he secretly arrived in La Paz, where he joined a small group of rebels to create a new revolutionary "hotbed" there. "It is the time of the fire and we must see nothing but light," he told his people, using the phrase of José Martí. "We must not wait until all the right conditions are ripe. We must create them," he wrote in his Bolivia campaign diary.
But the countdown had begun. With no support from anyone except a few KKB youths, with the opposition forces not cooperating with them, with communication almost impossible since the Indians spoke only local dialects, with the Bolivian army in constant pursuit, tightening the cord ever more. with hunger and exhaustion crushing them, with the hafies rendering their guerilla warfare useless, Che and his comrades could not stand it. Even though their leader kept saying, "one, two, three, many Vietnams, that's our slogan," Rio Grande and La Higuera swallowed up the dream of revolution, leaving behind only the corpses of of a few fighters who fell into the Cochabamba ambush.
Guevara, wounded, was captured by the Bolivian Rangers at noon on October 8, 1967. The news reached Vagegrande's headquarters in a coded message to General Centeno:"Papa cansado." "Dad", Che's code name, is "tired", i.e. injured. On the morning of October 9, Cuban-born CIA agent Felix Rodriguez was ordered by Bolivian President Rene Barrientos to put Protocols 500 and 600 into effect. "500" was the Bolivian code for Che and "600" the code command to execute it. Rodriguez informed Centeno of the order, but added that he had received clear instructions from the US government to keep Guevara alive at any cost.
Centeno decided to follow his own orders and ordered the execution to take place. Rodriguez was the one who announced the decision to the prisoner. "It's better this way. I should never have been caught alive," Che replied, and gave Rodriguez a message for his wife and another for Fidel. 27-year-old Sergeant Mario Teran offered to execute the wounded rebel. Once inside, he shot the Commandant in the chest, arms and legs with an M2 Carbine. It was ten past one in the afternoon when Che dropped dead. Bolivia became his grave, but eternity made his name a symbol.
Nine days later, over a million Cubans flooded the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana to say goodbye to their Che. "His life is a glorious page of history. His murderers will be disappointed when they realize that the art to which he devoted his life and intelligence cannot die," were Fidel's words. And indeed, 54 years after his death, the truth of his sacrifice remains unchanged through time. Because as Ernesto Guevara himself said:"What does it matter if death finds us? What matters is that our cry will be heard and another hand will be found to take our weapon, and other people will rise up to take the song, to hear the new cry of war and victory"...
* Video:The legendary song written by Carlos Puebla in 1965, in response to Che's farewell letter to the Cubans, which was read publicly in Havana by Fidel Castro.