che guevara

Cuba’s Revolutionary World

On January 2, 1959, Fidel Castro, the rebel comandante who had just overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, addressed a crowd of jubilant supporters. Recalling the failed popular uprisings of past decades, Castro assured them that this time “the real Revolution” had arrived. Castro’s words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen but for Latin America and the wider world.

Fidel Castro announcing the arrival of “the real revolution,” 1959.

The political turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the twentieth century’s most transformative events. Initially, Castro’s revolution augured well for democratic reform movements then gaining traction in Latin America. But what had begun promisingly veered off course as Castro took a heavy hand in efforts to centralize Cuba’s economy and stamp out private enterprise. Embracing the Soviet Union as an ally, Castro and his lieutenants, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, sought to export the socialist revolution abroad through armed insurrection. Chairman Khrushchev’s early support aided the Cuban revolutionaries in defeating of the CIA invasion of Cuban émigré fighters at the Bay of Pigs. However, he subsequently lost his job over the 1962 Missile Crisis that pushed the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

By the end of the 1960s, rural and urban uprisings linked to the Cuban Revolution had spilled over from Central America into the bigger countries of South America. Revolutionary groups whose leaders had trained in Havana were operating in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. Most of the rural and urban guerrillas may not have traveled to Cuba. Yet they certainly followed Fidel’s “anti-imperialist” example. Che himself attempted to spread the revolution to Bolivia, where he died. Other rebel groups with names such as the Tupamaros and Montoneros and still others with initials like FALN, ELN, and MIR defined the 1960s as the age of student unrest.

Castro’s provocations inspired intense opposition. Cuban anti-communists who had fled to Miami found a patron in the CIA, which actively supported their efforts to topple Castro’s regime. American presidents supported anti-communist forces that often utilized disproportionate violence against pro-Cuban dissidence in their own countries. The insurrections fomented by leftist guerrillas lent support to Latin America’s military castes, who promised to restore stability. Brazil was the first to succumb to a coup in 1964. A decade later, juntas of generals governed most Spanish and Portuguese-speaking nations of the Western Hemisphere. Rightwing terror claimed increasing numbers of casualties into the 1980s. Thus did a revolution that had seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America produce its tragic opposite.

Latin America’s military establishments especially came to oppose revolution because they learned what had happened to the Cuban army that failed to defeat Castro’s guerrilla rebellion. Revolutionary firing squads killed hundreds of military and police officers when the Batista dictatorship fell. Consequently, Che Guevara’s travels in Latin America proved especially toxic. President Jânio Quadros of Brazil resigned one week after presenting Guevara with a medal and Argentina’s army generals deposed President Arturo Frondizi several months after he “secretly” met with El Che.

Omar Torrijos and Fidel Castro in 1976

However, it is instructive that two generals who performed coups d’état in 1968 took advantage of the nationalist feelings of peasants and workers to establish pro-Cuban juntas. Generals Juan Velasco of Peru and Omar Torrijos of Panama ousted elected governments in order to implement overdue social reforms. Many countries of Latin America followed the Brazilian example of establishing long-term counterrevolutionary military dictatorships. Brazil’s generals governed for twenty-one years.

The Cold War that Cuba introduced to Latin America affected the lives of countless ordinary citizens. Humberto Sorí Marín, the revolution’s first agriculture minister. opposed the turn toward communism, resigned, and fled to Miami, only to return with a cache of weapons for an uprising against Castro. He died before a firing squad. There was also Osvaldo Ramírez, the bandit king of the Escambray Mountains who led a widespread guerrilla rebellion against Castro’s rule until militia troops shot and killed him in battle. His anti-communist guerrilla successors endured within Cuba until 1965.

Cuban militiamen capture an anti-Castro guerilla fighter, c. 1962.

Antonio “Tony” Zamora was one Castro opponent who survived. He aspired to study law but left Cuba in 1960 to join the brigade of exiled Cuban youths who landed at the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy ransomed Zamora and his fellow prisoners following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tony became a lawyer in Miami and went on to advocate greater dialog with the Castro regime as the Cuban Revolution approached its fiftieth anniversary.

Cuba’s revolution attracted youthful visitors from all over Latin America who wished to learn how they too might become armed revolutionaries. Julio García left the University of Buenos Aires to learn how to fight as a guerrilla in 1962. However, he and several other Argentineans quit the camps after training became too rigorous for them. Venezuelans like Luben Petkoff did finish Cuban guerrilla training. Luben engaged in combat for nearly ten years only to give up finally with a pardon from one of the few democracies that survived the 1960s.

Venezuelan Leftist Guerillas

Women too became involved in the turmoil. The guerrilla Tania gave up her life for the revolution, this one in Bolivia. Tania’s real name was Tamara Bunke Bider, an Argentinean-born East German who first met Che Guevara as a government translator in East Berlin. She immigrated to Cuba in the early 1960s and eventually became Che’s spy in La Paz, Bolivia. Tania campaigned with Guevara’s last guerrilla group in 1967 and suffered the fate of most of his followers.

Student rioters in Córdoba, Argentina, 1969

Argentina’s Norma Arrostita visited Havana in 1967 to attend a conference of armed leftists from all over Latin America. When she returned to Buenos Aires, Norma acted as the lookout for the kidnapping and killing of a former general who once served as Argentina’s president. A founding member of the urban guerrilla group known as the Montoneros, Arrostita later “disappeared” in a military prison like thousands of other suspected radicals.

As Mao used to say, “The revolution is not a dinner party.” Fidel Castro provided the corollary. “But the counterrevolution” he said, “is always more cruel.”

Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (2017)

For more on twentieth-century Latin American revolutions, try these:

Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (1978).
The foundational text for any serious study of Cuba’s three revolutions in the modern age: the Wars of Independence, the 1933 Revolution and rise of Fulgencio Batista, and the 1959 Revolution of Fidel Castro and his many associates.

Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (1997).
A fascinating account of Havana-Moscow relations culminating in the October Missile Crisis of 1962. The authors had access to Soviet and US document collections but only a few Cuban ones, which are generally not available to researchers. The title derives from a statement by President Kennedy during a White House discussion about Premier Khrushchev’s possible motivations for placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Jan Lust, Lucha revolucionaria: Perú, 1958-1967 (2013).
The most thorough study of a guerrilla movement in any country of Latin America during the 1960s. The author interviewed survivors and collected detailed information on leaders and fighters from a variety of sources.

Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (2014).
An important study of the student movements of one important country in South America during an age of youthful protests and cultural change wrought by national political turmoil and military interventions. The book covers the period from the 1955 overthrow of Juan Perón to the 1976 coup d’état that preceded the last military dictatorship of the country.

Che Guevara’s Last Interview

by Jonathan C. Brown

October 9th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Among the documental gems housed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library is Guevara’s last interview. It occurred on the very morning of his execution. A Cuban-American agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, Félix Rodríguez, conducted the interview. Rodríguez composed a memorandum of his talk with the revolutionary and sent it from Bolivia to CIA headquarters at Langley, which forwarded it to the White House.

The CIA agent even convinced Guevara to pose for his last live photograph.

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency had been tracking the activities of the Argentinean-born revolutionary who served as Fidel Castro’s guerrilla lieutenant, economic czar, and international agent provocateur. In the spring of 1964, CIA lost the scent. They speculated that Che Guevara was dead. The White House did not learn that he might still be alive until April 1967, when Bolivia’s president, René Barrientos, wrote directly to President Johnson requesting urgent military assistance. Barrientos was facing a guerrilla uprising by both Cubans and Bolivians led by the legendary El Che.

Why Bolivia? Guevara had grown weary of his leadership role in socializing Cuba’s economy and having to explain why production had declined drastically. At the same time, his diplomatic role involved justifying Cuba’s deviation from the doctrines of its chief benefactors in Moscow. Fidel and Che aided revolutionary insurgencies abroad at a time that Soviet leaders carried on policies of “peaceful coexistence” with the West.

Guerrillero Heroico, 1960 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Ideologically, Guevara had more in common with Chairman Mao Zedong than Leonid Brezhnev. Yet on his final trip to Beijing, Mao refused to meet with Che. Other Chinese officials accused him of “revisionism” for accepting aid from the Soviets. Guevara decided to retire from politics and economics and devote himself to what he knew best – guerrilla warfare.

Che Guevara had always fancied himself as Latin America’s chief guerrilla strategist. He suggested that the lessons of the Cuban Revolution could be replayed elsewhere in Latin America. Guerrilla movements were still active in Central American and in Colombia and Venezuela. His idea was to spread thin the forces of imperialism, to “create two, three Vietnams,” as Guevara wrote in his famous message to the Tricontinental Conference. Che, then 38 years old, wanted to ignite the revolution in Southern South America while he still had the stamina he had under Fidel’s orders nine years earlier.

In the eastern foothills of Bolivia, Che assembled a fighting force of about fifty men, divided between thirty Bolivians and the rest Cubans and other foreigners. Remarkably, neither the CIA nor Latin American customs officials had picked up any indication of the movement of men and arms into the heart of South America. Guevara had planned that Paraguayans, Peruvians, and Brazilians would join his group and gain sufficient skills to begin guerrilla uprisings in their own countries. Eventually, Che wanted to return to his native Argentina with a band of his own paisanos. It was not to be.

The White House responded to President Barrientos by dispatching two Cuban-American CIA agents and seventeen Green Berets from the Panama Canal Zone. The Green Berets were to train a battalion of Bolivian guerrilla-hunting rangers. The intelligence agents offered to supervise Bolivian units in the field. Agent Félix Rodríguez was assigned to the Bolivian Army at the rank of a captain.

Che in Bolivia, 1967 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Months of isolation and firefights with Bolivian forces had reduced Che’s group from fifty to some twenty men by the end of September 1967. At that moment, the first units of the ranger battalion trained by the US Special Forces arrived on the front lines. In its first battle with the guerrillas on October 8, a company of rangers captured the leader. “Don’t shoot,” he yelled. “I’m El Che and I’m worth more to you alive than dead.”

Guevara’s surrender allowed several of his men to retreat, though the rangers caught up and killed many of them. On the morning of the next day, Agent Félix Rodríguez flew to the small hamlet in eastern Bolivia where the wounded Che was held prisoner. The CIA agent pleaded with the commanders to permit him to take Guevara to the Panama Canal Zone for interrogation, but they informed him that President Barrientos had already announced that Che had died in battle the day before.

Rodríguez went to talk to Che Guevara. “Nobody interrogates me!” said Che, although he did consent to have a conversation with the CIA officer. Rodríguez untied the captive and invited him outside into the bright sunlight for a photo. The agent and the prisoner returned inside for a chat.

Che refused to denounce Fidel. He told Rodríguez that Castro was not a communist until after he came to power. Moreover, Guevara wanted Fidel to know that the revolution in Latin America would ultimately succeed. Che advised his wife back home in Cuba to marry again. He knew he was going to die, reported Rodríguez, but “Che never lost his composure.”

Within a few minutes, a Bolivian sergeant came to shoot the world famous revolutionary. “Let me stand up,” El Che said to him. “Know that you are killing a man! Now shoot, dammit!”

172. Memorandum From Director of Central Intelligence Helms

Washington, October 13, 1967.

MEMORANDUM FOR
The Secretary of State
The Secretary of Defense
Mr. Walt W. Rostow
Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs

SUBJECT
Statements by Ernesto “Che” Guevara Prior to His Execution in Bolivia

Further details have now been obtained from [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] who was on the scene in the small village of Higueras where Ernesto “Che” Guevara was taken after his capture on 8 October 1967 by the Bolivian Army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion.
[less than 1 line of source text not declassified] attempted to interrogate Guevara on 9 October 1967 as soon as he got access to him at around 7 a.m. At that time “Che” Guevara was sitting on the floor in the corner of a small, dark schoolroom in Higueras [sic]. He had his hands over his face. His wrists and feet were tied. In front of him on the floor lay the corpses of two Cuban guerrillas. Guevara had a flesh wound in his leg, which was bandaged.
Guevara refused to be interrogated but permitted himself to be drawn into a conversation with [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] during which he made the following comments:
Cuban economic situation: Hunger in Cuba is the result of pressure by United States imperialism. Now Cuba has become self-sufficient in meat production and has almost reached the point where it will begin to export meat. Cuba is the only economically self-sufficient country in the Socialist world.
Camilo Cienfuegos: For many years the story has circulated that Fidel Castro Ruz had Cienfuegos, one of his foremost deputies, killed because his personal popularity presented a danger to Castro. Actually the death of Cienfuegos was an accident. Cienfuegos has been in Oriente Province when he received a call to attend a general staff meeting in Havana. He left by plane and the theory was that the plane became lost in low-ceiling flying conditions, consumed all of its fuel, and crashed in the ocean, and no trace of him was ever found. Castro had loved Cienfuegos more than any of his lieutenants.
Fidel Castro Ruz: Castro had not been a Communist prior to the success of the Cuban Revolution. Castro’s own statements on the subject are correct.
The Congo: American imperialism had not been the reason for his failure there but, rather, the Belgian mercenaries. He denied ever having several thousand troops in the Congo, as sometimes reported, but admitted having had “quite a few”.
Treatment of Guerrilla Prisoners in Cuba: During the course of the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath, there had been only about 1,500 individuals killed, exclusive of armed encounters such as the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban Government, of course, executed all guerrilla leaders who invaded its territory. . . . (He stopped then with a quizzical look on his face and smiled as he recognized his own position on Bolivian soil.)
Future of the Guerrilla Movement in Bolivia: With his capture, the guerrilla movement had suffered an overwhelming setback in Bolivia, but he predicted a resurgence in the future. He insisted that his ideals would win in the end even though he was disappointed at the lack of response from the Bolivian campesinos. The guerrilla movement had failed partially because of Bolivian Government propaganda which claimed that the guerrillas represented a foreign invasion of Bolivian soil. In spite of the lack of popular response from the Bolivian campesinos, he had not planned an exfiltration route from Bolivia in case of failure. He had definitely decided to either fall or win in this effort.
According to [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] when Guevara, Simon Cuba, and Aniceto Reynaga Gordillo were captured on 8 October, the Bolivian Armed Forces Headquarters ordered that they be kept alive for a time. A telegraphic code was arranged between La Paz and Higueras with the numbers 500 representing Guevara, 600 meaning the phrase “keep alive” and 700 representing “execute”. During the course of the discussion with Guevara, Simon Cuba and Aniceto Reynaga were detained in the next room of the school house. At one stage, a burst of shots was heard and [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] learned later that Simon Cuba had been executed. A little later a single shot was heard and it was learned afterward that Aniceto Reynaga had been killed. When the order came at 11:50 a.m. from La Paz to kill Guevara, the execution was delayed as long as possible. However, when the local commander was advised that a helicopter would arrive to recover the bodies at approximately 1:30 p.m., Guevara was executed with a burst of shots at 1:15 p.m. Guevara’s last words were, “Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will again rise in the Americas.” To his executioner he said, “Remember, you are killing a man.”
At no time during the period he was under [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] observation did Guevara lose his composure.

Dick

[Richard Helms, Director of the CIA]

Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Bolivia, Vol. IV, Memoranda, January 1966-December 1968. Secret. Copies of this memorandum in CIA files indicate that it was drafted by Broe and [name not declassified] in the Western Hemisphere Division and approved by Karamessines. (Central Intelligence Agency, DDO/IMS, Operational Group, Job 78-06423A, U.S. Government-President).

For more on Che in Bolivia see Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (2017)

Also by Jonathan C. Brown on Not Even Past:

On the Future of Cuba-Texas Relations
How Washington Helped Fidel Castro Rise to Power
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba
On the Phone with LBJ and Panamanian President Roberto F. Chiari

Yoav Di-Capua on the story behind an image of Che in Gaza
Edward Shore reviews Che: A Revolutionary Life by Lee Anderson
Franz D. Hensel Riveros reviews Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey

Cuba on Not Even Past

When Fidel Castro died last week at age 90 he had survived 11 US Presidents. A dictator who stifled free speech, political opposition, and nonconformity, and a revolutionary who made education, health care, and independence high priorities, his legacy will be debated for many years to come.

We have reported on Cuba regularly over the years and link below to all the articles in our archive.

In our first year online in 2011, Prof Frank Guridy (now at Columbia University) offered an online book discussion group on Cuba, leading discussions of three books you might like to read:

Louis A. Perez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture
Jana Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution
C. Peter Ripley, Conversations with Cuba

We featured Prof Guridy’s own book on the connections between Afro-Cubans and African Americans in February 2012: On the Transnational Black Diaspora. You can see our video interview with him on that page as well.

The Future of Cuba-Texas Relations

Jonathan Brown teaches courses on the history of Latin American revolutions. He is now completing a manuscript on “How the Cuban Revolution Changed the World.” Professor Brown took the first of his four trips to Cuba in 2006.

Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba

The trip in Cuba from Trinidad to Havana was very hard, as our landlady misled us in order to make a commission off a local cab company.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

by Priya Ramamoorthy, Kavya Ramamoorthy, Smrithi Mahadevan and Maanasa Nathan Westwood High School Senior Division Group Website Over thirteen tense days in October, 1962, nuclear conflict nearly broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union.

I am Cuba, for Sale (1964)

An extravagant party on the rooftop of a Havana hotel. It’s the late 1950s; hedonistic tourism is booming in the City. A band plays loud. Drinks. Laughter. Our line of vision moves from the hotel’s rooftop to a crowd of tourists below, where we see a woman and follow her into the pool. Underwater….Hailed today a classic for its inventive cinematography, “I am Cuba” was virtually forgotten for three decades.

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

In The Cuban Connection, Eduardo Saénz Rovner rethinks Cuba’s position as a hotbed of drug trafficking, smuggling, and gambling and he considers how these illicit activities shaped Cuban national identity from the early twentieth century through the rise of Fidel Castro.

The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba

Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis by James G. Blight & Philip Brenner (2002)

Throughout the Cold War and the decade that followed it, historians assumed that Cuban and Soviet leaders cooperated closely in the events associated with the Cuban missile crisis. Havana and Moscow, so went the conventional wisdom, put their lots together in a challenge against U.S.

Che in Gaza: Searching for the Story Behind the Image

On June 18th 1959, dressed in full army fatigues and accompanied by several comrades exhibiting an equally imposing revolutionary appearance, Che Guevara landed in Gaza.

Operation Urgent Fury: A Revolution Aborted

On the evening of October 27, 1983, President Reagan addressed the American people on live television to discuss unsettling events taking place on the Caribbean island of Grenada.

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson (2010)

Making History: Takkara Brunson

In the sixth installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Takkara Brunson about her research on Afro-Cuban women in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Brunson’s research experiences in Cuba, and stories of the fascinating women who form the core of her research offer a taste not only of life and work in a place few Americans get to visit, but also a window into the making of a social and cultural historian.

From Baseball to Politics

New works on Afro-Cubans and African-Americans

Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey (2009)

Latin America’s Cold War by Hal Brands (2010)

In this new book, covering the entire period of the Cold War in Latin America, Hal Brands restores agency and initiative to Latin American actors, in the process demolishing many of the platitudes that have governed much of the U.S.foreign policy literature.image Based on prodigious research in a dizzying array of U.S., Latin American, and even East German archives, Brands’s work advances a trenchant interpretation that cannot be ignored.

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 by Piero Gleijeses (2002)

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, takes readers beyond the familiar categories of the Soviet-American Cold War. In the wake of decolonization, as charismatic national leaders emerged across Africa – from Algeria to Zaire – statesmen in Washington and Moscow waited anxiously to see if the new governments would align with democracy or communism.

Che in Gaza: Searching for the Story Behind the Image

By Yoav Di- Capua

On June 18^th 1959, dressed in full army fatigues and accompanied by several comrades exhibiting an equally imposing revolutionary appearance, Che Guevara landed in Gaza. Considering his reputation today, one might have expected the 31-year-old Che to, perhaps, instruct the Palestinian resistance fighters (the Fedayeen) in the ways of guerrilla warfare, tell them in detail about his grand foco tactics, or take notes on their then-decade-long battle of resistance against Israel. Indeed, upon first learning of Che’s first – and only – visit to Gaza, I myself was filled with such questions. Was such an exchange of revolutionary tactics the legacy of his visit? Did he come there on purpose in order to build long-term relationship with Palestinian fighters? Was he attracted to Gaza as a hotbed of universal resistance to colonialism? What exactly came of this visit and who did he meet there? I was curious to know.

The handwritten text reads- “With Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution. Mansion of the Governor General, Lieutenant General Ahmad Salim. Gaza, 1959.” Via Wikimedia Commons

I first heard of Che’s intriguing visit about three years ago. The random person I met in the archives could not tell me much besides the fact that he read somewhere (but where?) that Che visited the Shati refugee camp and was warmly welcomed by its Palestinian inhabitants. That was not much. Searching the web yielded the image above which shows Che and other dignitaries with Ahmad Salim, the powerful Egyptian governor of Gaza. Che’s trustworthy biographer, Jon Lee Anderson, added a few more details and a date but nothing else. So, with this modest beginning, I ventured into the archive to find the story behind the visit and the photo. I started with the Israeli State Archives. From the end of the 1948 war until 1956, and again between 1957 and 1967 (when it was conquered by Israel during the Six Day War), Gaza was under Egyptian rule and their army controlled every aspect of Palestinian life, including their resistance to, and infiltration of, Israel. The Israeli State Archive seemed promising because of how closely they had monitored Gaza throughout this period and into the period of Israeli occupation. I thought that the Israelis could not possibly have missed such a high-profile visit by one of the chief theoreticians and practitioners of guerrilla warfare. To my surprise, it turned out they did. In fact, Che’s visit to Gaza left no impression whatsoever in the Israeli archives. Thus, in the absence of evidence from the Israeli archive and the absence altogether of an Egyptian archive, I turned to the Arab press. What I found was somewhat surprising. Che, it turned out, was a Cuban nobody that the Egyptians mostly ignored.

Indeed, as it turned out, Che’s visit to Egypt – then known as the United Arab Republic – was a brief, low-key event that was tightly controlled by Egyptian authorities reluctant to acknowledge competing revolutionary projects such as Cuba’s. His trip to Gaza was even further played down. The press contingent was kept to a minimum, no iconic photographs were published and – so it seems – only a single image survived. Though Che and the Cubans visited several refugee camps, by day’s end, they dined not with top leaders of the Palestinian revolutionary Fedayeen, but with the Brazilian contingent of the UN Emergency Force. In fact, not a single member of the Fedayeen was present, and there was no talk about revolutionary theory, neo-colonialism, Zionist imperialism, or any of the other 1960s sub-categories of global resistance. Twenty-four hours after Che arrived in Gaza, he was back in Cairo. The newspapers the next day buried the story.

Haile Selassie of Ethiopia circa 1960.

Back in Cairo, the theme continued. The Cubans were far from the talk of the town, and Egyptian attention was visibly elsewhere with the more important visit of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie. While Selassie received heavy press coverage, the Cubans, except for a few back-page reports, got hardly any. It was not that the Cubans were ignored. Though he was apparently too busy to officially greet Che in the airport upon his arrival, the following day, Nasser awarded him the United Arab Republic’s Decoration of the First Order in a quaint, sparsely-attended ceremony. The rest of the visit was characterized by a paternalistic tone, wherein the Egyptians lectured the inexperienced Cubans on methods of engendering an agricultural revolution in the interest of social equality, and various theories and suggestions were provided as to how the Cubans ought to approach the industrialization of their country. Thereafter, the Cubans left to Damascus, visited the tomb of Salah al-Din (Saladin), a renowned symbol of resistance and sacrifice, and continued on their journey to other locales in Africa and Asia.

This visit to the revolutionary heartland of the Arab world tells us in no uncertain terms that the bearded, cigar-smoking Che was not yet an international icon of global resistance and that that iconic revolutionary decade, the 1960s, had not yet truly begun. In fact, the point of his visit appears not so much to have been to launch an international revolutionary movement but to launch instead a three-month tour to the Third World so Che could introduce himself to the various countries’ progressive elites and, perhaps, along the way, forge commercial ties and hopefully sell some sugar. Yes, that’s right: sugar took precedence over guerilla warfare. But with this tour, Cuba also began a search for its revolutionary role in world affairs. Three years later, Che would emerge the universally recognizable Third World icon of the New Man, worthy of front-page coverage even in Egypt. Indeed, in his future meetings with Nasser, the tables were turned and Nasser presented himself as Che’s attentive and modest acolyte. By this point, of course, the global resistance culture of 1960s was already an integral part of daily Arab politics.

Che Guevera shakes hands with Gamal Abul Nasser. Via the Middle East Institute Journal blog.

As for Palestinians, the Fedayeen fighters of the 1950s had little to do with the guerrilla culture with which they are now anachronistically associated. But this too was about to change, as during the 1960s Che forged a close relationship with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and a new generation of Palestinian fighters were heavily influenced by his example as well as by the global culture of resistance. Their moment to act came after 1967 when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, settled in, and began making itself comfortable. In response, left-wing Palestinian guerrillas launched a sustained campaign that reached a zenith under the leadership of Muhammad al-Aswad, known at the time as the “Guevara of Gaza.”

A Commemorative poster by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine marking the death of Guevara of Gaza (1978). Via Palestine Poster Project

Al-Aswad proudly carried Guevara’s legacy all the way to his tragic end, which came during a battle with Israeli soldiers in 1973. A few years later, due to a sustained Israeli campaign, Gaza’s left-wing Palestinian resistance movement was in ruins, and a decade later, the revolutionary left did not have much to offer. Indeed, by then, military opposition to Israel was organized along Islamic lines with organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking a central role. Today, after two popular rebellions (intifadas) and after a score of other bloody skirmishes, all that is left of Che’s Gazan legacy is a few middle-aged Palestinians who, back in the 1960s, were given the name Guevara by their idealistic parents. So goes the history of Guevara in Gaza, an engagement that began modestly with a visit by an anonymous, cigar-smoking Cuban but ended, famously, with the making of an icon of resistance for Palestinians, one who sought to liberate his country as well as the world.

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson (2010)

by Edward Shore

In July 1997, a Cuban-Argentine forensic team unearthed the skeletal remains of Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Vallegrande, Bolivia.Thirty years earlier, on October 9, 1967, CIA-trained Bolivian Special Forces agents had captured and executed the thirty-nine-year-old revolutionary before dumping his body in a shallow pit near a dirt runway. While writing Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson had gathered new intelligence that led directly to the location of Guevara’s body. The forensic experts immediately distinguished Guevara’s remains from the others. After his death, Che’s executioners had amputated his hands, placed them in a jar of formaldehyde, and sent them to Fidel Castro. Following exhumation, the fallen guerrillas’ remains were placed in coffins and flown to Cuba. That summer, Che Guevara had finally returned to his adoptive homeland.

Fifteen years after its publication, A Revolutionary Life remains the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing Argentine rebel whose “epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution.” Jon Lee Anderson traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable upbringing in Argentina to the battlefields of the Cuban Revolution; from the halls of power in Castro’s government to his failed campaign in the Congo, and assassination in the Bolivian jungle. Unlike past biographers of Che, Anderson gained unprecedented access to personal archives maintained by Che’s widow, as well as Cuban government documents long kept secret during the Cold War. He conducts extensive interviews with Che’s comrades and enemies, including Felíx Rodriguez, the mercurial Cuban-American CIA operative and Bay of Pigs veteran who ordered Che’s execution.

Anderson paints the portrait of an idealistic, ambitious, and complex man whose unshakable committment was made even more powerful by his unusual combination of romantic passion and coldly analytic thought. He recalls Ernesto Guevara’s epic motorcycle journey through South America as a medical student while underscoring how U.S. intervention in Latin America crystallized Ernesto’s revolutionary consciousness. In June 1954, Ernesto sojourned as a physician in Guatemala, providing free medical care to the poor in the countryside. When a CIA coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, he sought refuge in the Argentinean Embassy. That summer, Guevara became convinced that only armed revolution could secure the future of oppressed and marginalized Latin Americans everywhere.

Anderson revisits Guevara’s diaries to recapture his first meeting with Fidel Castro in Mexico City. Seeking to recruit new volunteers for a revolutionary war against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba, Castro took an immediate liking to the zealous doctor from Argentina who longed to prove his revolutionary credentials. In November 1956, Guevara, Fidel Castro, his younger brother Raul, and eighty volunteers set sail for Cuba, launching a guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra mountains that would oust Batista on New Years Day 1959.

In January 1959, Che personally oversaw the revolution’s consolidation. He implemented the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959, presided over the trials and executions of ex-Batista functionaries, represented Cuba at the United Nations, and commanded revolutionary forces during the Bay of Pigs invasion. By 1965, Che grew tired of his desk job at the Economy Ministry. Anderson argues that the thrill of battle gave Che meaning. He dreamed of exporting the Cuban Revolution to the rest of Latin America and he chose Bolivia to open a new front. However, unlike Cuba, the Bolivian campaign was a disaster from the start. It was also Che’s last. The local Bolivian Communist Party refused to support the Cuban revolutionary effort on their soil. Che’s team also failed to recruit Quechua Indians. In autumn 1967, the guerrillas ran out of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. CIA-trained Bolivian Special Forces ambushed Guevara’s troops in Vallegrande. On October 10, 1967, the world woke up to the news that Che Guevara had been killed in the Bolivian jungle.

A Revolutionary Life is a must-read for Latin Americanists, Cold War buffs, and aspiring revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries everywhere. Anderson sheds light upon little known details of Che’s life, including his harsh criticism of the Soviet Union and his ardent support for the emergent “nonaligned” movement in the Third World. Most important, he emphasizes Che’s unyielding commitment to his beliefs. While other Marxist-Leninists exploited their privilege, Che remained a full-time revolutionary. When he wasn’t studying political economy, Che could be found teaching literacy and arithmetic to his young bodyguards or working eighteen-hour days cutting sugar cane as part of his voluntary labor program. He believed firmly in the possibility of a pan-Latin American revolution, a cause for which he readily gave his life.

Finally, Anderson’s is a biography that calls into question the dismissal of revolutionary socialism and alternative paths to development in Latin America. Today, leftists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina breathe life into Che’s pan-Latin American vision, rejecting orthodox neoliberalism in favor of state-sponsored development and regional integration. They threaten to boycott the upcoming Organization of American States (OAS) summit in Cartagena, Colombia, if the United States continues to prevent Cuba from participating. Meanwhile, Bolivian President Evo Morales recently ordered the armed forces to adopt Che’s famous salutation, “hasta la victoria siempre” or “forever onward toward victory,” as its official slogan. Ironically, the very institution that killed Che Guevara forty-five years ago now immortalizes his legacy. In 2012, Che still lives.

Photo credits:

“Memorial service march for victims of the La Coubre explosion,” 5 March 1960

Museo Che Guevara via Wikimedia Commons

Carol M. Highsmith, “Hand painted mural showing the Cuban flag and Che Guevara, neighborhood in Old Havana, Cuba,” 11 January 2010

Photographer’s own via The Library of Congress

You may also like:

Takkara Brunson’s “Making History” podcast, where she talks to us about her research in Cuba and her dissertation on gender and social identity in pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Aragon Storm Miller’s review of “Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis.”

Yana Skorobogatov’s review of “Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976”

Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey (2009)

by Franz D. Hensel Riveros

How can we make sense of the coexistence of bumper stickers depicting Rambo and Che Guevara in a traffic jam in Bangkok, Thailand? Although this book never answer its opening question, such an insight might allow us to understand Casey’s attempt to explore the different uses of an image that remains remarkably vital decades after its capture. In this sense, Casey insists, the book is less about Guevara himself and more about what we, as society, have created as “Che.” The icon is a repository for a collective set of dreams, fears, beliefs, doubts, and desires. The elusive character of such an object, both extremely present and full of competing meanings, took Casey to an impressive array of places and actors. He offers a thorough description of how the original image was taken at the Havana studio of Alberto Díaz Martinez “Korda”; the active role of the Cuban state in promoting the icon before its international appearance in 1967, seven years after the original shoot; the centrality of the European leftist network in disseminating of the image; and the divergent Latin American appropriations of Che’s guerrillero heroico in diverse places like Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Miami.

In this creative book, journalist Michael Casey follows the trajectory of this commodified image. He traces the connections between peoples, places, and meanings but without establishing direct causalities The apparent paradox of a worldwide-established commodity that does not benefit just one producer elucidates how commodity chains are webs and exchanges that are not always clearly guided. Casey identifies one tension as central to understanding Che’s afterlife: “the commoditization of an anticapitalist rebel who opposed all that his hypercommercialized image now represents.” The author inserts Che’s powerful icon into a larger chain of meaning in which the Cuban revolution has become a successful brand, a logo, an ideal abstraction. In short, what Casey explores in his book is not Ernesto Guevara’s biography but, to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s words, the “cultural biography” of one thing, and he finds a symbol that links diverse persons, places, and ideas. In his attempt to understand this object he draws on the entangled stories of the person related to that abstraction, the actors who contributed to creating and distributing it, and some of those who constantly give meaning to a now-immortal picture.

While Che’s Afterlife offers an extraordinary amount of evidence and revealingly inter-connected stories, the author’s conception of Latin America is ahistorical — a timeless world of magical realism. In addition, Casey insists throughout the book upon a paradoxical and ambivalent representation of Che as an anticapitalist symbol subsumed by the capitalist vortex and he revives the old western/non-western tension once prevalent in Latin American studies, without showing any interest in explaining why we “still” consider Latin America to not be part of the West. Nonetheless, the very stories he highlights complicate the simple image he wants to maintain. In the context of a growing literature on Guevara’s life and the continued iconic power of Che’s visual image, this book offers a satisfying account of the intertwined stories of the icon, the historic persona, and the specific agents and spaces that shaped the popularity of this symbol.

An image of Che in Kasaragod India, 2004. Via WIkimedia Commons.

The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba

by Frank A. Guridy

The forces that created the Cuban Revolution often get lost in polarizing debates about Castro’s Cuba. Two very different films highlight the changes that ripped through Cuban society in the 1950s and early 1960s and created the Cuban Revolution. The first is Tomás Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo) released in Cuba in 1968 and the second is Steven Soderbergh’s 2008 Hollywood biopic Che.

Memories of Underdevelopment, based on Edmundo Desnoes’s 1967 novel, is perhaps the best-known film in Gutiérrez’s long and productive career. The film dramatizes the forces rapidly transforming Cuban society in the early years of the Cuban Revolution through the eyes of Sergio (skillfully played by Sergio Corrieri), a member of the old Cuban elite that was overthrown by the revolution. Sergio is a frustrated intellectual who, unlike his elite and middle-class contemporaries, decides to stay in Cuba rather than flee to the United States. In Gutierrez’s masterful depiction of Sergio, made evident in the scenes of the coat and tie wearing Sergio aimlessly wandering the streets of Havana, one sees the rapid decline of an older civilian model of Cuban masculinity, one that was predicated on affluence, consumption, and affiliation with the United States, as well as sexual predatory “machismo.” Sergio is in many ways a prototypical “ladies man” who manifests his own alienation by preying upon young women. Yet, Corrieri’s performance evokes sympathy for a character who is lost, yet, keenly aware of the changes that are happening all around him.

Steven Soderbergh’s Che can be read as a completely different meditation on Cuban manhood. While ostensibly about Ernesto “Che” Guevara, one of the revolution’s key leaders, the film also explores the emergence of the “new man” of 1950s-60s Cuba, the new socialist individual that Guevara hoped to create in the Cuban Revolution. Soderbergh’s lengthy 4-hour movie is divided into two parts: the first portrays Che’s involvement in the guerrilla war against Cuba ruler Fulgencio Batista and the second explores his ill-fated guerrilla campaign in 1967 in Bolivia. Unlike Sergio, who relishes his class privilege, Che (brilliantly played by Benicio del Toro) is a selfless doctor who rejects the benefits of bourgeois existence to devote his entire life to becoming a career revolutionary motivated by “profound feelings of love,” as Che himself put it. Soderbergh’s depictions of Che’s encounters with Cuban peasants, his tending to wounded soldiers, and his fearlessness as a commanding officer in the guerrilla war underscore the model of revolutionary masculinity celebrated by the triumphant Cuban Revolution. While many have criticized the film’s glossing over of Guevara’s involvement in the execution of counter-revolutionaries, viewers who do not give the film a chance will miss an opportunity to gain insights into the factors that explain the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

Both films satisfy the historian’s desire for accurate representations of the past. Memories gives us a taste of 1960s Cuba not only because it was made at the time, but also due to Gutiérrez’s skillful insertion of archival footage throughout the film. Soderbergh’s beautiful costume and set design, most evident in his attentiveness to the architecture of Cuban provincial towns in the decisive scenes of the Battle of Santa Clara, show that the film was based on solid research. One may quibble with each director’s political choices, but both films are brilliantly executed and provide valuable portrayals of monumental events in Cuban history. Each highlights, in different ways, competing models of Cuban male identity that are in tension with each other to this day.

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