Remembering Ernesto Che Guevara - 42 Years After Death And Still Alive -

My first incursion into learning about Che was as a kid aged 13 after I had read a biography of Chairman Mao Tsetung which was a birthday present from my Dad after talking about issues of poverty and injustice.

Four years later entering medical school and disillusioned about being too “bookish” opted to join the terrain of student political activism. In the process of getting myself “equipped” for this journey, I decided to update my knowledge and oratory which led to my discovery of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin and a more in-depth update on Ernesto “Che Guevara.

“Che” was murdered by the Bolivian Government in Vallegrande, Bolivia, and buried in a shallow unmarked grave on October 6, 1967, as an attempt to stop his revolutionary zeal and determination to propagate guerilla warfare and skills for the emancipation of the poor and the downtrodden. While Che was murdered and his body buried in an unmarked grave to make him vanish, his spirit has since lived on while he is nowhere but everywhere at once. His revolutionary principles of self-sacrifice, honesty, and dedication endeared him to new followers transcending time and ideology and nurturing and inspiring towards making them new generations of fighters and dreamers. This was very appealing to me and within the guidelines of my ideals further entrenched in the fact that his being a physician gives me a similar professional impetus.

His birth in Rosario, Argentina was shrouded in secrecy with his date of birth recorded and a birth certificate issued for June 14, 1928, when in reality he was born on May 14, 1928, because his mother got pregnant for his father outside wedlock and had to get married quickly before she was old enough to do so within Argentina law, with the change necessary to hide the fact that the pregnancy was before the marriage.

His parents belonged to a top middle class with Irish and Spanish ancestry with his paternal grandparents born in California, USA giving him an opportunity if he had wanted to become a citizen of any of the aforementioned three countries.

He was not known to be political in high school neither was he an activist while he was a medical student at the University of Buenos Aires. There were records of him supporting Juan Domingo Peron more in line with his being against President Castillo who was pro-Nazi and overthrown by Peron(who was the driving force of military group GOU) in a period when the Second World War was tearing the world apart. The end of WW11 saw the emergence of the US as a very powerful and dictating tune to most South American countries. This also brewed his hatred for this control by the USA. A childhood friend of his, Ricardo Campos had stated “He had very clear ideas about certain things. Above all from an ethical perspective. More than a political person, I saw him at that time as someone with an ethical posture”. 

Despite being an avid reader of many philosophy books and early reading of Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, Brief History of the World by H.G. Wells, Freud’s general Theory of Memory, and many others, his outlook on social issues at an early stage in life was not well defined. This changed to an extent when he took his first trip on a bicycle exploring rural Argentina and covering over 4,000 kilometers over 6 weeks. A second trip was made later with a childhood friend Alberto Granado using Alberto’s motorcycle dubbed La Poderosa II(The Powerful II). This trip took him to other rural areas of Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and the USA (Miami). In one of the sad encounters of seeing a very poor woman die from an attack of Asthma which he has also been afflicted with since childhood, he wrote “There, in the final moments of people whose farthest horizon is always tomorrow, 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. How long this order of things based on an absurd sense of caste will continue is not within my means to answer, but it is time that those who govern dedicate less time to propagandizing the compassion of their regimes and more money, much more money, sponsoring works of social utility.” Due to his frequent Asthma attack, he was forced to leave Caracas, Venezuela alone(leaving Alberto behind) and returned to Argentina via Miami(free cargo plane ride that had to go to Miami first) to complete his medical education and finally pass his final examination on April 11, 1953, and graduating as a physician in June 1953 and celebrating his 25th birthday a few days later.

Less than a month later, he was off again on another trip through South America but now as a veteran road gypsy and as a medical doctor, this time with another friend Calica. On this trip, he travelled through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, etc. It was while in Guatemala that his revolutionary convictions started to germinate. There amid Guatemala’s leftist revolution, he met others of like minds including some Cubans who stood out from the other political expatriates taking refuge in Guatemala’s new social order as veterans of an armed uprising against the dictatorship of Batista despite their efforts having failed. One of the Cubans he met and became very friendly with was Antonio “Nico” Lopez who nicknamed Ernesto “El Che Argentino” because of Ernesto’s stereotypical Argentine habit of using the Guarani word Che, meaning “Hey You”.

It was also around this same time that he was hanging out with a Marxist, Hilda Gadea with the focus of their discussions more on the need for a violent revolution and a stop to Yankee imperialism. While in Guatemala, he wrote a book on Social Medicine and deepened his readings of Marx, Lenin, Engels, the Peruvian Jose Carlos Mariategui and Mao Tsetung’s New China. This enabled him to admire Mao’s work and see the similarity between the Chinese peasant’s problems that led to their revolution and the problems being faced by the Latin American peasants. This foundation may later explain his fondness for China and his angst toward the Soviet Union. It was also while in Guatemala that he saw the reactionaries as the Press and the Catholic Church who aided and abetted the USA in Guatemala’s President Arbenz down-fall and noted them down as possible problem areas if socialist revolutions needed to succeed. 

With the unstable situation in Guatemala, he moved to Mexico. Hilda Gadea later joined him and they got married. They were blessed with a daughter Hilda Beatriz Guevara the following year. It was while he was in Mexico that he met the Cuban Nico Lopez again. While in Mexico, Batista of Cuba had released the Castro brothers (Fidel and Raul) and with a new onset of political commotion in Havana, Raul had escaped to Mexico, becoming the first of the Castro brothers to formally meet Che whom they had heard of from Nico.

Ernesto later met Nikolai Leonov, who was then a young Russian with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.

Fidel Castro arrived in Mexico City on July 7, 1955, and a few days later met Ernest for the first time.

 Ernesto joined Fidel Castro and the other Cuban rebels to undergo military training in Mexico and later moved to the eastern shore of Cuba using an overcrowded yacht.

From there, a guerilla war was started against the Batista government and on December 29, 1958, Che’s fighters won a decisive battle against the Cuban government when his army derailed an armored government train that was carrying weapons and troop reinforcements. Two days later on January 1, 1959, Batista fled into exile and the Cuban Army surrendered to Fidel Castro’s guerilla army marking the beginning of the Cuban revolution. 

In the early days of the revolution, Fidel planned to temporize the socialism implementation to meet the US demands which Che was seriously against and making Che become Washington’s number one nemesis in Latin America. In the interim, Che divorced Hilda and married Aleida who was one of the members of the revolutionary army. While Che, held many senior positions in the new government, his eagerness to spread his revolutionary principles was still on a high burner. There were also conflicts between him and Fidel on issues of pursuing a communist agenda and what some people tagged as anti-Americanism. There were also rumors that Fidel’s taking away Che’s control of the La Cabana regiment was more of a demotion when he was put in charge of the Industrialization Department. There were many rumors of attempted assassinations of Che by people who believed he was the main architect trying to make Cuba a communist state.

A few years later, Che disguising himself in different ways led guerilla warriors to many places including the Congo to help Gaston Soumaliot and Laurent Kabila. In the Congo War, he was so disappointed by the huge apathy/laziness of the Congolese rebels and their laissez-faire attitude that he concluded that they had an extraordinary number of tendencies and diverse opinions. He also noticed their penchant in asking for money and military training in Cuba which he refused and advised that the training of revolutionaries should be within their battlefield area. He concluded by saying “Africa has a long way to go before it reaches real revolutionary maturity.” His plan to lead a military expedition personally in Congo was advised against by Egypt’s Gamel Nasser and that it was a proposition that could end badly and asked Che if he thought he could be like “Tarzan, a white man among blacks, leading and protecting them.”

Despite this advice, Che opted to lead the military expedition into Congo when he left Cuba on April 1, 1965, disguised as a staid-looking, clean-shaven man wearing glasses named Ramon Benitez leaving behind his wife, children, Cuban citizenship, his Comandante’s rank and ministerial position. At the point he left, he had no premonition or feeling of returning to Cuba and had written a letter that Fidel could read to the public at the appropriate time. Other letters were written to his parents, wife, and children with the latter a voice recording. 

By ending of November 1965, the Congo expedition had failed and because he felt he could not return to Cuba without achieving success, it was better to continue the struggle. But some of his ardent followers have started to question the wisdom of his desire for a “continental guerrilla war” after the Congo debacle. Despite this failure, Fidel Castro requested that Che returns to Havana but he refused to spend a month in Tanzania before moving to Prague, Czechoslovakia as he did not want to return under any circumstances some people also said he felt he was now a political liability to Fidel Castro after a speech in which he attacked the Soviets and China earlier that year before departing for Congo.

Che's last war started when he moved to Bolivia in July 1966 to start another guerrilla war with the expectation that the local Bolivians encouraged by the local communist party would join his team. Not only were the communist party officials and men distanced themselves away from him, the locals were also not interested in a bunch of foreigners coming to change their government.

Eventually, with the help of the US government and its CIA operatives combined with assisted military training, Che’s team was tracked down and massacred in an ambush while crossing a river for a rendezvous with another team which included Che himself. Che was having a more serious acute exacerbation of Asthma and could barely walk around requiring him to ride a horse. They were also very hungry and running short of food. The second Che’s team with Che present was finally ambushed in Vallegrande, Bolivia in October 1967. Che was captured and held in captivity while his identity was verified and the following day, October 6, 1967, he was tied to the stake and executed with the hope that his revolutionary zeal will end.

I have always asked myself why Che had the propensity to always be on the move, adventurous and taking risks. One would have expected that with his failure in Congo, he would have taken more time to plan his next guerrilla incursion with all the necessary requirements. Why did he not listen to the advice of Gamel Nasser about not going into the Congo? The only answer to this lies in the zeal and conviction of the revolutionary extraordinaire.

Today October 6, 2009, marks the 42nd anniversary of Che’s death. This is a salute to a great man, a physician, a philosopher, and a revolutionary with a great passion for justice, equity, and the creation of better opportunities for the downtrodden. 

In death, he lives on.