IT HAS BEEN 53 years – well over half a century – after his death, but Ernesto Guevara de la Serna still lives. No incorruptible saint – in fact the so called “Butcher of La Cabana” for signing the death warrants of hundreds of “war criminals,” read: military officers of the ousted Batista regime as well as informants, and counter revolutionaries – Guevara has gained cult status around the world.
Notwithstanding too, the late – and still continuing – discoveries of
his proven failures and alleged atrocities.
It was on the occasion of his 44th death anniversary in Oct. 2011 that I
essayed to touch the Che mystique, thus:
“COMANDANTE STAR on a black beret capping a frowning, pensive handsome
face; left eyebrow slightly raised; black, long hair waving in the breeze.”
Beyond the image of Che Guevara pop cultured in millions of T-shirts,
posters and decals around the globe, what do the young and not-so-young know
about the man already long dead – executed on October 9, 1967 – even before
they were born?
Essentially, nothing.
So, what fascinates them to wear that icon, in virtual veneration of the
man they don’t even know?
Irreligious blind faith?
The aura of enchantment around that image of Che known in the whole of
Latin America as El guerrillero heroico is – to Paco Ignacio Tabio Jr.,
author of the definitive Guevara: tambien conocido como el Che (Guevara:
also known as Che) – wrought by “the manifestation of a transparency and
supernatural honesty.”
There, arguably, lies the Guevara mystique.
The photograph was taken by Albert Korda for the Cuban newspaper Revolucion
at the public funeral of the 81 fatalities in the explosion of La Coubre,
a French ship laden with Belgian arms at the Havana harbour on March 4, 1960.
Unpublished, the photo remained in the newspaper morgue. In 1968, the Italian
publisher Giacomo Feltinelli, researching on the life of Che, found the photo
in Korda’s house, took it back to Italy and made a poster from it. The rest, as
clichéd, is history. The irony not lost in the capitalist success rising out of
a communist “artifact.”
The Che brief may well read: Argentine by birth, doctor of medicine by
education; adventurer and motorcycle enthusiast, poet, photographer, writer; by
revolution defined and deified.
The essence of Che may well be in his word: “The only passion that
guides me is for the truth…I look at everything from this point of view.”
By his truth he lived. By his truth he was executed. Life and death make
a universality that finds relevance to and resonance in the world to this day.
An unshakeable belief in the people that makes the core value of the
true revolutionary: “There is no effort made towards the people that is not
repaid with the people’s trust.”
Vanity
A damnation of the vacuous vanity of self-ordained champions of the
masses: “The people’s heroes cannot be separated from the people, cannot be
elevated onto a pedestal, into something alien to the lives of that people.”
The masses eke an existence out of hovels, even as they look up to their
heroes luxuriating in their high-walled mansions. So un-Che, so unheroic, so
undemocratic, so prevalent. And so very Filipino.
Che holds the purity of the democratic ideal before its corruption by
the politics of patronage: “How easy it is to govern when one follows a system
of consulting the will of the people and one holds as the only norm all the
actions which contribute to the well-being of the people.”
Compare with the Filipino norm of governance: Off with the people, buy
the people, fool the people. Thus, the first call of the revolution: “People –
forward with the Revolution! Workers – to the struggle! Peasants – organize!”
Romanticism – damned by Mao as a bourgeois diversion to be expunged from
the Chinese Revolution, and for that matter, from all revolutions – finds a
refining, humanist aspect in Che’s own: “If it were said of us that we’re
almost romantics, that we are incorrigible idealists, that we think the
impossible: then, a thousand and one times, we have to answer that yes, we
are.”
The Latino attributes of intense passion, sentimentalism, and
romanticism do not diminish any, but in fact even enhance, nay, inflame
revolutionary zeal. Che makes the perfect argument: “At the risk of seeming
ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling
of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this
quality.”
(In college, barely versed in Che’s life and works, I wrote an essay on
Che titled The Romantic Revolutionary. Modesty be damned, I got a flat 1 on
that. More importantly, bragging rights for having already grasped Che’s
essence even then. Though my enchantment with Che started in high school, in –
of all places – the Mater Boni Consilii Seminary.)
Humanism
Che takes the humanist facet of the revolution further: “Revolutions,
accelerated radical social changes, are made of circumstances; not always,
almost never, or perhaps never can science predict their mature form in all its
detail. They are made of passions, of man’s fight for social vindication, and
never perfect.”
Yet another taboo in the revolutionary movement – adventurism – was
taken to the positive plane by Che: “Many will call me an adventurer, and I am,
but of a different type: of those who put their lives on the line to
demonstrate their truths.”
So, Che demonstrated his truth with his death, something the romantic
adventurer in him put thus: “Wherever death may surprise us, it is most
welcome. Our funeral dirge will be the staccato sound of machineguns and the
cries of battle and victory.”
Some object lessons there for the RAM, the Magdalo, the YOU and
what-have-you in the Philippine military wanting a coup. Moreso, for the
current cadres of the longest-running insurgency in all of Asia.
Che’s thesis on revolutionary praxis makes one of the most succinct on
the subject: “And it must be said quite sincerely that in a true revolution, to
which everything is given, from which no material returns are expected, the
task of revolutionary vanguard is both magnificent and anxious…In these
conditions, a great dose of humanity is needed, a sense of justice and truth,
if we are not to fall in the trap of extreme dogmatism, of cold scholasticism,
of isolation from the masses. Every day we have to fight so that love for
humanity can be transformed into concrete deeds, into acts that set an example,
that mobilize.”
There lie lessons in revolutions Che had fought, had seen, and in those
he did not see: the Stalinist dogmatism that pervaded the Soviet Union and its
satellites, the excesses of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,
Mao’s cult of personality, the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. And, in the
current of events, Xi Jinping taking China to the imperialist road to
perdition.
Failure
Before his fatal failure in Bolivia, Che bombed out in the Congo in the
1965 attempt to start the conflagration of the African continent that, to him,
represented “one of, if not the most, important battlefields against every form
of exploitation that exists in the world.”
“We cannot liberate by ourselves a country that does not wish to fight,”
Che conceded defeat six months after. A pointed lesson that it is as hard to
start as to stop revolution from without. Lessons for Che himself in Bolivia,
for the USA in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Lessons still
unheeded today in Iraq, in Chechnya, and again, in Afghanistan. Hasta la
victoria siempre – ever onward to victory – usually captions the Che icon.
It was the exhortation that closed Che’s letter to Fidel Castro before he left
for the Congo. It has become the rallying cry for revolutionaries around the
world.
But Che had a more stirring call for revolutionary solidarity: “If you
can tremble with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world,
we are comrades.”
Hasta siempre, Comandante Che Guevara!
