“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall./We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it./Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary./Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone, is worth nothing.” – Some of Che’s famous quotes.
For basketball excellence, everyone wants to be like Michael Jordan or Stephen Curry, both are prolific scorers. As a rebel, there isn’t more iconic a face than Che in his famous eye-piercing and serious look of a picture taken by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960. He exudes that romantic face of a defiant hero; a martyr for an ideal and visionary cause, perhaps in the same category as Jesus Christ. In fact his last picture taken to prove his death at the laundry house of the Villegrande hospital, he seemed to resemble Jesus Christ, except that his dead eyes were staring beyond the unknown, a mystery only death can reveal or not. But his life is anything but. Let’s explore it briefly.
There’s no better place, in my opinion, to start than to watch a film of his coming-of-age adventure entitled The Motorcycle Diaries starring the good-looking Gael García Bernal. In 1952, the 23-year old Che embarked on a journey, together with his best friend Alberto Granado, to see more of the neighboring countries of Argentina in a motorcycle. The trip took them through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and lastly to Miami before they went back home to Buenos Aires. Along the way, they observed the poverty and injustices of the indigenous peasants as well as the widening gap between the lifestyle of the “haves” and the “have-nots”. In Peru, they volunteered for three weeks to help out in a leper colony. The whole experience of the trip opened up in Che the uncompromising and relenting commitment to help the side of the people who have no voice, who are mistreated a lot because of their low economic and social conditions, who are powerless and uneducated, who suffer from the hands of abusive government and military, without regard of their nationalities. “There, in the final moments of people whose farthest horizon is always tomorrow,” he wrote in his travel journal, “one sees the tragedy that enfolds the lives of the proletariat throughout the whole world; in those dying eyes there is a submissive apology and also, frequently, a desperate plea for consolation that is lost in the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of misery surrounding us.” He became an international communist fighter for the oppressed.
But before becoming one, he aligned himself first with Fidel Castro and his rag-tag army of Cuban rebels against the Batista government. He met Castro in Mexico City sometime in 1955. Che described that encounter this way: “I met him on one of those cold nights of Mexico, and I remember that our first discussion covered international politics. Within a few hours that night—at dawn—I was already one of the expeditionaries.” To his wife Hilda Gadea, Che said, “If anything good has happened in Cuba since Martí, it is Fidel Castro. He will make the revolution. We agreed profoundly…Only a person like him would I be disposed to help in everything.”
Here’s Fidel’s recollection of Che: “An Argentine by birth, he was Latin American in spirit, in his heart…Much is written about all revolutionaries, and this was the case with Che. Some tried to present him as a conspirator, a subversive and shadowy individual, dedicated to devising plots and fomenting revolutions…As a young man, Che had a special curiosity and interest in the things that were going on in Latin America, a special yen for going to see all our homelands…It was a matter of minutes for Che to join that small group of us Cubans who were working on organizing a new phase of the struggle in our country.”
Eventually, Che was accepted as a member of Fidel Castro’s rag-tag army, which, by now, was preparing to come back to Cuba to start a revolution. In his letter to his parents, Che wrote, “My future is linked with that of the Cuban revolution. I either triumph with it or die there….If for any reason that I can’t foresee, I can’t write anymore, and later it is my luck to lose, regard these lines as a farewell, not very grandiloquent but sincere. Throughout life I have looked for my truth by trial and error, and now, on the right road, and with a daughter who will survive me, I have closed the cycle. From now on I wouldn’t consider my death a frustration, only, like Hikmet [the Turkish poet]: I will take to the grave only the sorrow of an unfinished song.”
On November 25, 1956, cloaked with the predawn darkness, eighty two men, including Che, boarded the Granma which set sail toward the southeastern coast of Cuba seven days later. At the point of landing, Granma struck a sandbar and was shipwrecked. Castro and his men were forced to leave behind most of their ammunitions, provisions and medicine. At the same time, Batista’s army was on alert of the invasion. Meanwhile, a coast guard cutter spotted the shipwreck and alerted the armed forces. Three days later, Batista’s army located and attacked Castro and his men with all the firepower they could muster. According to some reports, nineteen or twenty-two members of the rebel army survived, including, Castro, Raul and Che who was hit in the neck but the wound was superficial. They hid and regrouped in Sierra Maestra until they came down from the mountain in January 1959 as conquering heroes for driving away Batista and his corrupt government.
Che held several positions in the Castro government but Fidel strategically ensured Che would not be popularly hailed as a folk hero because he was not Cuban. One of these jobs was to be the Supreme Prosecutor whose main task was of “purging the old army, to consolidate victory by exacting revolutionary justice against traitors, chivatos, and Batista’s war criminals.” Che’s singular devotion to the revolution transformed him into a ruthless administrator of revolutionary justice. One of Che’s henchmen, Duque de Estrada, said this about the tribunal: “Che consulted with me but he was in charge, and as a military commander his word was final. We were in agreement on almost one hundred percent of the decisions. In about one hundred days we carried about fifty-five executions by firing squad, and we got a lot of flak for it, but we gave each case due and fair consideration and we didn’t come to our decisions lightly.”
His father, Guevara Lynch, described the change in Che’s personality: “He confronted an armed youth who was on guard duty, grabbed his rifle away, and in a firm, dry voice, ordered his arrest. I saw the desperation on the boy’s face, and I asked [Che] why he was arresting him. He answered me: ‘Old man, nobody here can sleep on guard duty, because it puts the whole barracks in danger.’” In another instance, Guevara Lynch was puzzled with Che’s last remark to him and yet it’s prescient: “As for my medical career, I can tell you that I deserted it a long time ago. Now I am a fighter who is working in the consolidation of a government. What will become of me? I don’t even know in which land I will leave my bones.”
That would be Bolivia.
By this time, Che was no longer an invaluable asset of shaping the future of Cuba. So he focused his attention of aiding the communist rebels in other countries, particularly, in Latin America and Africa. But not much was going on in terms of a successful revolution for the communist resistance armies. One more time, he decided to return to the revolutionary battlefield. On November 3, 1966, Che arrived in La Paz, Bolivia wearing a disguise as a middle-aged representative of the Organization of American States from Uruguay. Soon after, he went to the mountains to meet his army. This part of Che’s adventure was depicted in a movie entitled Che: Part Two starring Benicio Del Toro as Che. He also maintained a diary which was later turned into a book by Bantam Books, Inc. in July 1968 entitled The Diary of Che Guevara, Bolivia: November 7, 1966—October 7, 1967. His first entry was upbeat. He wrote: “A new stage begins today. We arrived at the farm by night. The trip was quite good.” His last entry was the opposite, having to lead a decimated army. “The 17 of us left under a waning moon, the march was very tiresome and we left many traces in the canyon where we were. There are no houses nearby, but there are some potato fields irrigated from the same creek. At 2 we stopped to rest, since it was useless to continue advancing. Chino becomes a real load when it is necessary to walk at night.” Two days later, on October 9, 1967, Che Guevara at age 39 was dead.
On the night of October 18, nearly a million people assembled at Plaza de la Revolution in Havana to hear Fidel Castro make an impassioned tribute to his former comrade. He said: “If we want the …model of a human being who does not belong to our time but to the future, I say from the depths of my heart that such a model, without a single stain on his conduct, without a single stain on his behavior, is Che! If we wish to express what we want our children to be, we must say from our very hearts as ardent revolutionaries: we want to be like Che!”
21 March 2025