The Politics of Che Guevara

Theory and Practice

Samuel Farber

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781608466016
• eBook ISBN: 9781608466597
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This reexamination of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's thoughts on socialism, democracy, and revolution is a must-read for today's activists—or anyone longing to fight for a better world.

Fifty years after his death, Guevara remains a symbol to legions of young rebels and revolutionaries. This unique book provides a way to critically engage with Guevara's economic views, his ideas about revolutionary agency, and his conduct as guerrilla commander and government administrator in Cuba.

Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba. He has written extensively on Cuba and the Cuban Revolution and is author of Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959.

Chapter One

The Bohemian Origins of Che Guevara’s Politics

Guevara’s Family Background and Youth

When Ernesto Guevara was born, in 1928, Argentina was the most economically developed country in Latin America. Right before World War I, Argentina resembled, in terms of its wealth, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand more than it resembled other Latin American countries. In 1913, its per capita income was the thirteenth largest in the world, slightly higher than France’s. 1 The southern cone country had a powerful bourgeoisie that, in conjunction with the hierarchy of the influential Catholic Church and the powerful top army and navy brass, constituted an authentic Argentinian oligarchy. Both of Guevara’s parents, Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna, had high-society backgrounds. While Guevara senior was a spendthrift (as well as a bad businessman) and his family was often broke and experienced a certain degree of downward mobility, it still belonged to the “right” social class and retained the innate confidence of those born into affluence that things would turn out all right in the end. 2

Che’s architect father and his wife were cultured people. Celia in particular showed a strong affinity for French culture. 3 They were politically progressive people who closely followed and were strongly identified with the fate of the Spanish Republic at a time when Argentina was witnessing the emergence of a nationalist, Catholic, and virtually fascist right that embraced anti-Semitism, racism, eugenics, and Nazism and that sided with right-wing general Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). 4 Later, they supported the Allied cause in World War II, and when the movement supporting Juan and Evita Perón developed shortly afterward, in the mid-1940s, a political phenomenon that disoriented much of the left and deprived it of popular support, they openly and unambiguously opposed it. 5

The most distinctive characteristic of Che Guevara’s parents, and of his mother Celia in particular, was not their relative downward mobility or their progressive politics but their incipient bohemianism. 6 This was a lifestyle whose adherents attempted to free themselves from many of the predominant cultural values, norms, and prejudices of the bourgeois world and at least implicitly posed a cultural critique of the conventions that governed that world. 7 Thus, Ernestito, or Teté (Che’s childhood nicknames), was conceived out of wedlock, an unusual circumstance for upper-class Argentinians in the 1920s, in contravention to a number of social and religious taboos involving the preservation of a woman’s virginity until marriage. 8 Contrary to the prevailing bourgeois norms regarding the proper appearance and administration of a respectable home, the Guevara household was disordered, even chaotic. Dedicated to the cult of creativity, Celia would bring home all kinds of colorful people from a wide variety of social backgrounds: from itinerant painters who worked as bootblacks to wandering foreign poets and university professors who stayed for any length of time, from a week to a month. In the process, Celia became estranged from her husband. Although they continued to live in the same house, they led increasingly separate lives. 9 Celia also encouraged her children to lead completely unstructured and disordered lives and to develop friendships with children of all social classes, who were welcome to play and eat in the Guevara household. 10 The Guevaras even stopped attending church in their regular parish after the priest berated Celia for the insufficiently modest dress she had worn to Mass. 11 They also requested of the schools that their children attended that they be exempted from religious classes. 12 Celia set several “firsts” for women in her socially conservative circles with such activities as driving a car and wearing trousers. 13 None of this, however, stopped Celia and Ernesto Sr. from continuing to be well received in upper-class circles because of their cool elegance and indisputable pedigree, even if they were criticized behind their backs.

Ernesto Jr. grew up suffering from asthma and was forced to spend a lot of time in bed. He became an inveterate reader, especially of authors of adventure and science fiction, including the French authors Alexander Dumas and Jules Verne and the Italian writer Emilio Salgari, that for many decades were favored by young Latin American readers. Young Ernesto developed a strongly competitive personality and engaged in attention-getting exploits such as drinking ink out of a bottle and playing torero with an irascible ram. 14 His infrequent bathing, which may have been related to his asthma, and his parents’ bohemianism may explain his adoption of a messy and slovenly appearance, which led his friends to call him “el chancho” or “the pig,” a nickname that infuriated his father, who saw it as a slight to the family’s honor. 15 Ernesto Jr. liked to shock people. In addition to his deliberately shabby appearance (he used to boast of not having washed his shirt in twenty-five weeks), 16 he was contemptuous of formality and demonstrated a confrontational sense of humor and combative intellect that would lead him to say outrageous things and scandalize people around him. 17 His contrarian style, however, did not extend to the gender norms of his time. Like his father and so many of his male contemporaries, he exhibited an ingrained “machismo” and a profound aversion to homosexuality. 18

Yet, although the future Che shared the antifascist and progressive political inclinations of his family, he resisted getting involved in organized political activity in his teens and early twenties even though he had several friends and acquaintances who were members of the Federación Juvenil Comunista or Communist Youth. 19 However, his strong antifascist sentiments led him to stand up in class to a notoriously pro-Nazi history professor and to physically defend Raúl Melivosky, a Jewish student, from the bullying and physical threats of a fascist student group. 20 He also became attracted to the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of Indian independence. 21 It is not difficult to understand Ernesto’s affinity with Gandhi’s thought. Aside from his opposition to British imperialism, Gandhi was at ease associating with people whom the ruling groups considered socially inferior, a trait that must have strongly resonated with the egalitarianism Guevara had acquired from his mother and that he so vigorously upheld until his death. He also shared with the Indian leader a profoundly ascetic disdain for material comforts (although in Guevara’s case that might have derived from a bohemian critique of bourgeois materialism) and an opposition to injustice that was more moral than explicitly political. 22

Politics was not a topic of conversation for the young Guevara in those days, and on the few occasions he did talk about politics, he tended to make radical and dramatic sounding pronouncements. He refused to join a street demonstration, claiming, “I will go if they give me a revolver, [since] without arms it is all a futile gesture, and I don’t want to go just to be beaten up.” 23 The young Guevara’s reluctance to get involved in actual, organized political activity might be linked to the dominance that Peronismo had achieved in Argentine politics, including street politics, after the mid-1940s. Peronismo was an authoritarian and politically ambiguous movement that drew the support of the great majority of the Argentinian population, especially the working class, because of the material advantages and respect they gained as a consequence of the Perón government’s policies. This placed the left in a very tough position of neither ignoring working-class and popular sentiments nor joining Perón and becoming apologists for his regime. Guevara’s parents were firmly anti-Peronista, but Ernesto Jr., who sympathized with their general progressive politics, refused to take sides for or against Peronism, perhaps as a negative reaction to the pronounced class prejudices of the many middle- and upper-class anti-Peronistas that his family’s social milieu represented. 24 He even seemed to have remained largely indifferent to what was the most important political event he had witnessed until then: the demonstrations of October 17, 1945, when the working class of Buenos Aires came out en masse to rescue Perón from prison and literally carried him to the presidency of Argentina. 25 It is likely that Guevara’s abstention was a response to a very difficult political juncture for the left, which he, as a progressive bohemian, had no inclination to address. 26 But it was precisely this lack of involvement that prevented him from developing a sense for the portent of political events, which may help to explain the political tone-deafness—the frequent inability to understand specific political situations—he was to exhibit in the future. This stands in sharp contrast to Fidel Castro’s ability to immediately intuit the nature and direction of the political conjuncture and develop a tactical response to it.

Nevertheless, Guevara’s future political evolution must have drawn on the considerable political reading of his bohemian, pre-activist youth. As his biographer Jon Lee Anderson described it, Guevara had read in his early youth Benito Mussolini on fascism, Josef Stalin on Marxism, Alfredo P...

Table of contents

• Selected Chronology
• Introduction: Che Guevara’s Political Relevance Today
• 1. The Bohemian Origins of Che Guevara’s Politics
• 2. Che Guevara’s Revolutionary Politics: Ideas and Practices
• 3. Che Guevara in Power
• 4. Che Guevara’s Political Economy
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes
• About the Author