Che Guevara

I was never much interested in this guy, but someone gave me a book about him. I opened it up and looked at a picture showing his dead body in Bolivia. This interested me, but I lost interest when I read a short section of the book at random, and I was going to trade it for another book.

But then a started again at the beginning, and found he was an interesting person - and also a writer, like me. I have just finished reading about the Cuban revolution, and his part in it, about half of the book. Che was a communist (with a lower-case c), he was also enamored with the Soviet Union at the time. He broke with it later. He was an idealist, and when he found out what the USSR was really like, he couldn't stand it.

However, this was later and he was largely responsible for Cuba's alignment with Russia - along with Raul Castro, the brother of the big man. Castro himself, according to this book, was (and is) a consumate politician - a power person, to use my terminology. A dictator who is still in favor with the people (that's why the Bay of Pigs failed). Che and Raul had secret meetings to set up the new government while Castro was away trying to trying to get support from the US.

This is a debate Che had with Enrique Oltuski, who would later have a very complicated career in the Cuban government: he was a high-level minister several times, and also spent time in jail. Anyway, this was the exchange:
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Oltuski: All the idle land should be given to the peasants, while heavily taxing the large factory farms in order to buy their land with their own money. Then the land would be sold to the poor farmers at cost, with loans for production.

Che: What a reactionary idea! How can we charge people for the land they work? You are the same as all other the people who come from the plains. [According to Che, the true revolutionaries came from the mountains, and the people in the plains and the cities were unimportant.]

Oltishi: For crying out loud, what do you want to do? Give it to them? So they can let it go to seed, as they did in Mexico? Men must feel that it takes an effort to get what they have.

Che: (shouting as the veins in his neck stand out) You're full if it!

Oltuski: Anyway, we must disquise things. Don't believe for a moment that the Americans are going to sit idly by and watch us do things so openly. We have to play it smart.

Che: (scathingly) So you are one of those who believe we can make a revolution behind the backs of the Americans. What a shitface you are! We must make the revolution within a struggle to the death against imperialism, from the very onset. A true revolution cannot be disguised.
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'In a true revolution.', he often said, 'Alienating the bankers, landowners, or America was of no importance.' He considered confrontation with the United States indispensible, because he wanted Cuba to align itself with the USSR.
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You probably know the rest. A confrontation with US was not exactly a good policy. And Che himself tried to export the revolution, Cuba style, to Africa and Bolivia. And he ended up a corpse.

Comments

[ismail, india]

che was the greatest revolutionary