Amidst what Richard Gott describes as the ‘selective nationalist nostalgia’ and embrace of ‘heritage culture’ that is there for all to see in Cuba, there is one figure who towers above all others.
To begin with, he isn’t even Cuban. But he was, according to most founder-members and guerrilla fighters of the Revolution and later, the only one who originally championed the cause of communism with Latin American characteristics (although he had not given it any nomenclature, he re-read Marx and distanced himself from the Soviet methods). One of his former comrades who had often found him arrogant—as Argentinians often are in his view—concedes, however, that Che was the only leftist revolutionary among the pack. This is the primary reason why, lately, newspaper after newspaper in the West makes it a point to stress that his ideals are losing ground in Cuba. From CIA memos to documentaries, there has invariably been a deliberate thrust on proving, not with great success, that the Guevara era is long over.
But if you look closely and consult serious academic literature, it is easy to find that Che Guevara isn’t losing ground at all. The outcome of his work, while in power, is still being felt, except that typical Cubanologists don’t have time for a subject they assume is marginal, which couldn’t be further from the truth. You realize it the moment you examine pathbreaking research work. First, Guevara is the most admired person in the country, perhaps much more than even Castro. Globally, decades after he became a poster boy of internationalism and guerrilla warfare and notwithstanding concerted efforts to demonize him as a sadist who mistreated his prisoners (often based more on hearsay than any information from primary sources), he continues to be revered much more than any other leader of the Cuban Revolution—even inside the country, not to talk of the rest of Latin America or the Global South.
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What makes him unique is his unsurpassable appeal as an iconic revolutionary who died fighting. Studies suggest that he exerted a galvanizing influence on Cuba although few people talk about it—instead, they have internalized it. The same cannot be said of other leaders of the Revolution with the probable exception of Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos. But then, Guevara alone has an international halo as a revolutionary and not the head of a regime. Like Cienfuegos who died at age twenty-seven when his plane vanished over the sea near the Straits of Florida, Guevara’s early and mysterious death, aged thirty-nine, has added to the mystique around him notwithstanding ideological setbacks to his ideals.
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When, in the mid-1980s, Cuba pulled back from the Soviet model of socialism, entering a period known as ‘Rectification’, there was a return to Che’s ideas, approach and symbolism. Dr Helen Yaffe [author of Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution] refers to two Cuban academics, Fernando Hernandez Heredia and Carlos Tablada, who provide the theoretical basis for this move—‘linking Che’s promotion of voluntary labour and consciousness to his Marxist analysis of capitalism and his critique of the Soviet system, which had relied on capitalist tools to build socialism,’ she notes.
All this is certainly a new disclosure for Marxists back home in India and Kerala, where I have never come across any book that goes beyond capturing the revolutionary zeal of the Argentine-born revolutionary whose commentaries on internationalism we all treated like gold dust.
Former Cuban President Fidel Castro speaks with Che Guevara in Havana in 1959. Guevara is the most admired person in Cuba, perhaps much more than Castro. | Photo Credit: NYT/The Hindu Archives
The Cuba of the 1960s was a nation in transition going through a tumultuous time—nationalism was underway, as was the shift in trade to the socialist bloc. At the same time, the US blockade led to its own set of issues, including the exodus of professionals, attacks from US-sponsored agencies, sabotage and the real risk of nuclear war. In such a period, Yaffe looks beyond Guevara’s revolutionary appeal alone, and studies his natural abilities as a nationbuilder. ‘Under Che’s leadership, Cuban industry stabilized, diversified and grew—testimony to his capacity for economic analysis, structural organization and the mobilization of resources, both human and material,’ she writes. Che’s approach, she says, was not only based on his study of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production, but also his engagement with socialist political economy debates and his understanding of the managerial and technological advances of capitalist corporations.
As Minister of Industries, Guevara set up nine research and development institutes in Cuba and had a large role to play in the mechanization of the sugar harvest and the sugar derivatives industry. He also laid the groundwork for nickel production, green medicine, oil exploration, the chemical industry and even computing and electronics. ‘He integrated psychology as a management tool, secretly organized the printing of new banknotes, devised a new salary scale, and promoted workers’ management, inventions and innovations. In six tumultuous years, Che made an indelible contribution to Cuban development,’ Yaffe writes.
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Ullekh N.P.’s Mad About Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution talks about Cuba’s remarkable transcontinental bond with Kerala.
Cubans have always understood the range of Guevara’s brilliance and gumption, and scholars around the world are now gradually opening new doors of perceptions for those (including me) who had wrongly concluded that we had demystified Che Guevara and his passion. Such relatively new academic studies not only shine a light on a rare breed of leader but also diminish systematic and coordinated attempts by a section of Cubanologists to trash him through unverified, sensationalist narratives.
In Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Grove Press, 1997), Guevara’s biographer Jon Lee Anderson quotes a journalist as saying, ‘If he entered a room, everything began revolving around him . . . He was blessed with a unique appeal . . . He had an incalculable enchantment that came completely naturally.’ Richard Gott recalls the moment in October 1963 when he first met him: ‘Guevara had a charismatic attraction in real life, long before he became a Mantegna icon in death and a hypnotic image on a pop art poster in the age of Andy Warhol. Like Helen of Troy, he had an allure that people would die for.’
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Gott was in Bolivia, in the village of Vallegrande, four years after he first met Guevara. It was at the airfield here that Guevara’s body was brought in a helicopter from La Higuera, the Bolivian village near where he was held by CIA and local operatives before being executed. Gott was one of two men (besides a Cuban-American CIA operative) who identified the body that lay with open eyes as Guevara’s—because they were the only ones who had met him before. That moment perhaps changed many people’s romantic ideas about an armed guerrilla revolution. It certainly did in Cuba where Fidel Castro soon began to throw his weight with greater vigour in favour of the Soviet Union and distance himself from genuine protests against the socialist empire from its constituents in Eastern Europe.
Regardless, Guevara has many more claims to fame and continued relevance than being a mere guerilla leader and a military theorist.
Ullekh N.P. is an author and journalist based in New Delhi and Kerala. Excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House India from Mad About Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution.
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