Che Guevara
Che Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary who played a key role in the Cuban Revolution alongside Fidel Castro. He became a symbol of anti-imperialism and revolution, advocating for armed struggle to overthrow capitalist regimes. Guevara's legacy extends beyond his political activities, as his image has been widely used as a symbol of rebellion and social justice.
8 Key excerpts on "Che Guevara"
eBook - ePub50 Speeches That Made the Modern World
Famous Speeches from Women's Rights to Human Rights
- (Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Chambers(Publisher)
...22 Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara Argentinian revolutionary leader Ernesto Guevara de la Serna nicknamed Che (1928–67) graduated in medicine at the University of Buenos Aires (1953). He travelled widely in South America, then joined Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement in Mexico (1955), and played an important part in the Cuban Revolution (1956–9). He was awarded Cuban citizenship in 1959 and held several government posts under Castro. An activist of revolution elsewhere, including Africa, he left Cuba in 1965 to become a guerrilla leader in South America, and was captured and executed by government troops in Bolivia while trying to foment a revolt. He became an icon for left-wing youth in the 1960s. ‘To be a revolutionary you have first to have a revolution’ 19 August 1960, Havana, Cuba The repressive policies and economic struggles that marked Castro’s long regime in Cuba have diminished his folk-hero status. No such problem for his right-hand man Che Guevara, whose good looks and youthful death (aged 39) created an enduring romantic image. But Che – whose nickname is an Argentinian greeting – was more than simply a handsome pin-up. While training as a doctor, he developed a keen understanding of politics, economics and Marxist ideology; he later became an expert guerrilla strategist. He was famously described by the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre as ‘the most complete human being of our time’. During the revolution led by Castro, Guevara spent two years living in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains, and helped lead the peasant army to victory, overthrowing the despotic regime of General Fulgencio Batista. After Castro’s installation as prime minister, Cuba underwent rapid socio-economic change, forging an alliance with the USSR in defiance of American sanctions...
eBook - ePubLatin American Guerrilla Movements
Origins, Evolution, Outcomes
- Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán, Alberto Martín Álvarez, Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán, Alberto Martín Álvarez(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It supplanted the slow and patient actions of the existing communist and socialist parties by the promise of a historic political and military victory by means of the immediate, resolute and swift action of a handful of committed revolutionaries. Cuba’s influence cannot be underestimated. In the early 1960s, the collective enthusiasm of Cuban society, the easy-going approach of Cuban officials, the intoxicating effects of interviews with the glorious heroes of the rebel army, perhaps even with the iconic Fidel or the fascinating Che, were seductive and long-lasting. Just one of the many examples is a veteran Brazilian guerrilheiro, trained in Cuba in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who recalls how proud he felt to be one of the future leaders at the forefront of his nation: He who went to Cuba thought he’d be back as guerrilla comandante…. There was an intense mythology about it because the Cubans encouraged the idea to the organizations of Latin America that, when you went there, spent there a period, and endured training, you would return half Che Guevara, half comandante. 2 While, following his death, Che Guevara attained the status of a civil saint due to his exemplary heroism, abnegation, willpower, self-sacrifice and martyrdom, younger generations of guerrilla leaders travelled to Cuba to consult Fidel Castro on political and military matters. In later years, Castro, given his age, reputation and experience, was regarded as a revolutionary oracle and visionary strategist. He was a father figure for the Central American guerrilla comandantes, in El Salvador and Guatemala at war, and in Nicaragua in power, and for the future military socialist Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Cuba, albeit the most significant, was not the only influential country...
eBook - ePubProbings and Re-Probings
Essays in Marxian Reawakening
- Sankar Ray, Shaibal Gupta, Sankar Ray, Shaibal Gupta(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It should also be added that the Guevarian reflection on the theme of alienation (whether Marxian, Sartrian or humanist) was soon overwhelmed by the birth of the myth of his person and the hijacking of it by the mass society of the spectacle. This reabsorption of the figure of Che which could not avoid sweeping away his relationship with Marxism has been magnificently described in one of the most beautiful books written on contemporary “Guevarism”, that is, on how the world of culture and entertainment lives on and exploits his figure so many years after his death: see Michael Casey (b. 1967), Che’s Afterlife. The Legacy of an Image. If the communist and internationalist connotation of his political action, the fascination of his rebellion against any conformism, the ethical value of his renunciation of the management of state power (a unique case in the history of the twentieth century), and his original theorisation of the theorypriaxis relationship that I have defined as “revolutionary humanism” all have been lost, could his relationship with Marx have possibly survived? Of course not. All that remains is to close our remake of the old film with a famous aphorism by Woody Allen: Marx is dead, Guevara is dead … and I’m not feeling too well myself. THE END (translated by Phil Harris, June 2018) BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Jon Lee, Che Guevara. A Revolutionary Life, Bantam Press, London 1997. Borrego, Orlando, Che, el Camino del Fuego, Imagen Contemporánea, Havana 2001. Borrego, Orlando (edited by), El Che en la Revolución Cubana, 6 Vols., Minaz [Sugar Ministry], Havana 1967. Casey, Michael, Che’s afterlife. The Legacy of an Image, Vintage Books, New York 2009. Cátedra Ernesto Che Guevara, Introducción al Pensamiento Marxista, edited by Néstor Kohan, Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo/La Rosa Blindada, Buenos Aires 2003. Che Guevara. Quaderni della Fondazione/Cuadernos de la Fundación/Notebooks of the Foundation,. (CGQF), Massari editore, Bolsena 1998-2016, Nos...
eBook - ePubA History of Modern Latin America
1800 to the Present
- Teresa A. Meade(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Nonetheless, despite its widespread reproduction on every product imaginable, Che’s face yet persists as one of the most famous international revolutionary icons. El Che, as he was known, set out to reproduce the guerrilla movements’ triumph, first in the African Congo and later in the mountains of Bolivia. Drawing on French philosopher Regis Debray’s (b. 1941) guerrilla warfare strategy, which he termed focoismo, Che argued that the Latin American hemisphere was ripe for socialist revolution, that the conditions for a socialist insurrection could be accelerated by a small band of armed militants drawn tightly together under disciplined leadership. Instead of opting for the clandestine armed struggle as a last resort, when conditions prohibited an above-ground movement, the foco formula envisioned the opposite: the emergence and proliferation of mass organizations as a result of armed actions by a covert revolutionary cadre. In this regard Che’s view broke decisively with – rather than simply ignoring, as had been the strategy of Cuba’s 26th of July Movement – the Moscow-oriented Latin American communist parties and with the conventional wisdom of Marxist-Leninist theory. Guevara chose the Bolivian Altiplano to test this theory, bringing together a tightly knit group of Cubans, an East German woman with the code name Tania, and a few urban-based Bolivian and Peruvian communists. The plan failed miserably. In 1967 Bolivian rangers, trained and supplied by the US Special Forces, captured, executed, and buried Guevara in an unknown grave, after sending to the press a photo of his tortured and emaciated body. When news of his death reached radicals and social activists in Latin America, and the student movement abroad, Che was elevated to hero status, regardless of the failure of his ill-conceived plan or that the very peasants they hoped to incite betrayed the rag-tag outsiders to the Bolivian army...
eBook - ePubLatin America since Independence
A History with Primary Sources
- Alexander Dawson(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Many seem incapable of imagining it in historical (as something that changes over time) or ambiguous terms. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are Third World heroes, standing up to US imperialism on behalf of the poor. They represent the evils of authoritarianism and drove almost 10 percent of the island’s population into exile. The Revolution taught the illiterate to read, provided healthcare to the poor, and reshaped the Cuban economy despite a crippling blockade. The revolutionaries were bumbling bureaucrats, relied on Soviet subsidies for decades, and ultimately made the island (once again) a haven for sex tourism in their effort to save themselves. Che was a model for the best kinds of youthful idealism and rebellion. Che was an incompetent ideologue who led a generation of naïve youths to their deaths. Viewed together, these competing narratives provide a baffling portrait of revolutionary Cuba. When we add to that our tendency to fetishize and massify star power, stories of the Revolution veer into the absurd. As Figure 8.1 attests, the complex ways in which ideology, youthful rebellion, and mass marketing have become embedded in narratives of the Revolution can leave us shaking our heads. The Revolution becomes an empty signifier—it can represent just about anything you might desire. Figure 8.1 Iconic Che cartoon Source: Cartoon by Matthew Diffee. The New Yorker. Then again, Bart Simpson on a t-shirt worn by Che Guevara, in a cartoon in the New Yorker, makes some sense. We understand how all these images are linked together because the Cuban government has taken a defiant attitude towards an imperial power through both its symbolic repertoire and its material acts for more than sixty years. Bart may be no revolutionary, but we can understand his resistance to unjust authority (Principal Seymour Skinner, Homer Simpson, and Nelson Muntz). Bart also shares a certain charisma with the icons of the Revolution...
eBook - ePubTranslating Cuba
Literature, Music, Film, Politics
- Robert S. Lesman(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...First: is Che’s status as intellectual architect of the Revolution clear in the translation’s treatment of both his ideas and his rhetoric? Writing from a left perspective, Margaret Randall frames the issue for us: the Che of popular culture is much more a man of action than ideas. With the passage of time, even students of his life tend to focus more on his guerrilla struggles than on his thought. But Che was an original thinker, and one who contributed a great deal to our understanding of the problems inherent in trying to change society so that exploitation is a thing of the past and human beings may reach their full potential. (36) Paul J. Dosal describes Che in 1960 in this way: “he looked like a common soldier who had just come from the field of battle, but he sounded like a professor of revolutionary theory and practice … no other militant in the rebel army matched Guevara’s intellect” (165–66). There is significant conceptual content in the two texts we will examine, and translations that focus on or blur Che’s intellectuality have complex political implications. The second question that overarches our investigation is: can the Anglophone reader sense Guevara’s personality—the way he inserts his own humanness into his tactical and philosophical disquisitions—and can the reader feel the emotion he means to convey in his writing? This question relates to the importance of Che’s charisma in convincing readers to accept his ideas, an issue, again, with important implications for global ideological struggles. The third question regards the social status of women, a topic that arises in both La guerra de guerrillas and in El hombre y el socialismo en Cuba...
eBook - ePubFidel!
Castro's Political And Social Thought
- Sheldon B. Liss(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 The Revolutionary Leader Aristotle said that a man is a social being, and it seems I belong to that species. —Fidel Castro “Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!” chant a million people gathered in Havana’s José Marti Revolution Square to hear Castro speak. Cuba’s citizens engage in a onesided dialogue with the man who has guided their nation for over three decades and has attracted more attention than any other Latin American leader of the twentieth century. As loved and respected in Cuba as he is loathed and suspected in the United States, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz engenders debate and controversy in many quarters. To the million approving voices he epitomizes revolutionary legitimacy. Although he denies that he is synonymous with the Revolution, his political and social philosophy pervade contemporary Cuba. Cuba has a long tradition of radicalism expressed through trade unions, mass participation in cooperative actions, and worker uprisings. 1 The rhetoric of dissent, at which Fidel excels, has been an integral part of Latin American politics. His strong personality and political dominance make it difficult to deal with him dispassionately. Even his critics are often beguiled by this man who can be simultaneously enchanting and manipulative. Using sociologist Max Weber’s categories, we find that his charisma evolves from personal qualities, as opposed to the charisma of office, which arises from some sacred nature ascribed to the position. Castro is constantly in demand. At times he has on his desk as many as three hundred requests for interviews. He likes to talk and repeatedly tells his revolutionary story to interviewers. One of his friends, novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, insists that he rests from talking by talking. 2 Despite a fragile voice that sometimes sounds uncertain, he has great oratorical powers. He frequently uses the words “let us analyze it,” indicating that to him socioanalysis is the highest form of communication...
eBook - ePubCuba in Revolution
A History Since the Fifties
- Antoni Kapcia(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Reaktion Books(Publisher)
...Firstly, as we have seen, by arguing for the foco’ s ‘leading role’, Guevara was refuting the region’s Communist Parties’ traditional claim to that role; in fact, Guevara believed increasingly that those Parties, lacking their former revolutionary purpose, were often a brake on revolution. This position was then taken further in 1966. First of all the Cuban authorities published Revolution in the Revolution? by the radical French philosopher Régis Debray, which argued for the need to revolutionize those Parties and for the foco as the Left’s only way forward. Secondly, the high-profile Tricontinental Conference, organized in Havana by the Soviet Union to present itself as the Third World’s natural ally and counter the Chinese challenge, was actually won over to the Cuban ‘line’ of confrontation with ‘ US imperialism’ through armed struggle. This time, the Cuban challenge to Soviet orthodoxy was enhanced by the banner paraded throughout the event, which, proclaiming ‘The Duty of the Revolutionary is to Make the Revolution’, implied clearly that it was not therefore to sit and wait for revolution to come, as the Communist Parties were seen to be doing. Guevara’s ideas and the Cuban strategy also challenged Soviet and communist orthodoxy in other respects. As we have seen, he denied the revolutionary agency of Latin America’s working class and instead saw the alliance of workers, peasants and students as the real revolutionary force. The inclusion of the peasants seemingly echoed Maoism, rejecting those communists who – since Stalin – saw them as inherently conservative, while the inclusion of the students, reflecting the Cuban reality from the 1920s and the current reality elsewhere, was both new and attractive to increasing numbers of the new student radicals of the West and Latin America. As for Latin America’s increasingly moderate and pragmatic trade unions, they should not be the focus of revolutionaries’ efforts...
