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Title: The Myth of Che Guevara
Author: MLB
Date: 2017, Winter
Language: en
Topics: Fifth Estate, Cuba, Fifth Estate #397
Source: Retrieved on December 4th, 2016 from http://www.fifthestate.org/archive/397-winter-2017/the-myth-of-che-guevara/
Notes: From Fifth Estate # 397, Winter, 2017

MLB

The Myth of Che Guevara

Since the 1960s, Ernesto (Che) Guevara has been celebrated in leftist

circles, and even among some anarchists, as the model of a

revolutionary. A wide variety of musical and theater productions,

political posters, T-shirts, bumperstickers, as well as advertisements

for vodka, jeans, laundry soap, and promotions for church attendance

bear his iconic image and proclaim: “Che, live like him!”

He is presented in innumerable books and articles as a shining example

of an unrelenting fighter for justice and against imperialism and

capitalism, a brave and determined man who rejected both bodily comforts

and personal gain, who resisted and defied physical limitations and

chronic health problems, and followed his dreams, a source of

inspiration for youth everywhere.

But, is this the whole story? Are there other things about Che Guevara,

how he related to other people, and what he was actually fighting for,

that people should also know? Are there things that might not coincide

with anarchist aspirations?

Some negative aspects of his personality and beliefs can be gleaned even

from sympathetic sources. For example, in a well researched biography

lauded by supporters, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee

Anderson writes that Guevara was an ardent Stalinist who admired the

dictator’s brutal rule in the Soviet Union.

Che was not politically naive and was fully cognizant of many of the

brutalities that appalled others, including the infamous Moscow show

trials of the 1930s that featured tortured Bolsheviks and others as

traitors to be humiliated and executed, the Nazi-Soviet 1939

non-aggression pact, the crushing of the 1953 East German uprising and

the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

Anderson also tells us that Guevara was convinced that individuals had

to be subordinated to the collectivity, embodied in the political

vanguard and the nation-state it developed. In the 1960s, he famously

declared that “one has to constantly think on behalf of masses and not

on behalf of individuals…It’s criminal to think of individuals because

the needs of the individual become completely weakened in the face of

the needs of the human conglomeration.”

Che maintained that the individual “becomes happy to feel himself a cog

in the wheel, a cog that has its own characteristics and is necessary

though not indispensable, to the production process, a conscious cog, a

cog that has its own motor, and that consciously tries to push itself

harder and harder to carry to a happy conclusion one of the premises of

the construction of socialism—creating a sufficient quantity of consumer

goods for the entire population.”

Guevara’s admiration for authoritarian Communist principles went well

beyond the abstract. He was integrally involved in developing and

consolidating the Cuban vanguard for instructing, guiding and

controlling the activities of the majority of people, both before and

after the Castro regime took power.

As part of the July 26 guerrilla force that Fidel Castro established in

1956, Guevara enthusiastically embraced strict military discipline and

authoritarian hierarchy. He willingly submitted himself and others to

this discipline.

Several admiring authors, including Anderson, also report that Guevara

bullied those below him in rank, often publicly expressing harsh

judgments of them without concern for their feelings. Moreover, he had

no qualms about cruelly punishing those who fell short of what he

demanded of them.

For example, on several occasions he is known to have implemented mock

executions, in order to humble and break the will of those who had

committed offenses. He also proved well-suited as an emotionally

detached executioner and supervisor of executions both during and after

the guerrilla struggle.

However, most of the accepted leftist descriptions of Guevara are marred

by the simplistic, dualistic perspective that can only recognize those

who voiced criticisms of him or the Castro regime as

counterrevolutionaries. They refuse to even consider that there might be

valid reasons for opposing self-appointed liberators who act in

authoritarian ways.

To gain a fuller understanding of the Cuban revolution as well as of the

life of Che Guevara, it is necessary to read critical Marxists, such as

Samuel Farber, and anarchists, such as Sam Dolgoff, Frank Fernandez, and

Larry Gambone. Because of these authors’ dedication to grassroots

self-organized activity, and concern with opposition to dictatorial

rule, they delve into aspects of Guevara’s behavior and ideas that are

all too often justified, glossed over or ignored by supporters of the

Castro regime.

In “The Resurrection of Che Guevara” (New Politics, Summer 1998), Samuel

Farber notes that Che Guevara unashamedly turned to the Cuban Communist

Party, known at the time as the Partido Socialista Popular (Popular

Socialist Party, PSP) for assistance in indoctrinating anti-Batista

fighters with the Stalinist authoritarian ideas he admired as far back

as 1957.

This despite the Party’s history of collaboration with the dictatorial

Batista regime. While the guerrillas were still fighting in the Sierra

Maestra, Guevara utilized PSP instructors for political education of

cadres to help consolidate Communist influence among the aspirants to

power.

In his book The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice, Farber

delineates how Guevara and Raul Castro both later facilitated the Castro

government’s adoption of the Soviet model of bureaucratic, centralized

“monolithic unity.”

Once Batista was overthrown, they both worked to consolidate the new

government’s power to administer society, instituting militarized

hierarchical leadership in every phase of life. Guevara famously

proclaimed that he wanted the entire Cuban nation to become a guerrilla

army, always thinking and acting as part of a disciplined military. And

he never wavered in his belief in the state as the institution best

suited to shape the development of the new kind of person he wanted to

create.

In early 1959, in consultation with agents from the Soviet Secret

Police, Guevara, along with other top Cuban government officials,

created a state security apparatus known as G-2. Guevara himself became

the head of G-6, another agency in charge of ideological indoctrination

of the military.

Che Guevara also had a key role in creating the Committees for the

Defense of the Revolution, locally and regionally based bodies for

spying on and controlling people in the neighborhoods where they live.

This machinery was used from early on to repress dissidents, including

anti-Communist democrats, socialists, and anarchists who challenged the

consolidation of a single-party dictatorship in Cuba. Many of those who

had been part of the July 26 Movement in the cities or as guerrillas in

the mountains were not spared.

In both his articles and books, Farber notes that Guevara was intolerant

of individuality, and opposed to “politically conscious,

independent-minded, rational individuals who hammer out collective goals

and programs through democratic discussion and voting.”

Not all dissenters were right-wing as Castro regime supporters would

want people to believe. Farber describes leftists in the July 26 urban

underground who were anti-imperialist, but had a “strong critique of the

Communists, who they considered to be conservative and sectarian,” and

who they hated because of their collaboration with the Batista regime

for most of its existence.

One glaring omission from Farber’s writings is discussion of the

anarchists who were part of the anti-Batista resistance and were among

the earliest victims of the Castro regime’s repression when they dared

to express dissenting opinions. Many were punished with imprisonment or

even death. This is clearly documented in The Cuban Revolution: A

Critical Perspective (1976) by Sam Dolgoff, and in Cuban Anarchism: the

History of a Movement (2001) by Frank Fernandez, an exiled Cuban

anarchist union activist.

In February 1961, Guevara became the head of the newly created Ministry

of Industry, and supervised the completion of the subjugation of the

trade union movement, making it a tool of the state, while justifying

this policy with the argument that the government was the best

representative of the interests of the people.

He was directly involved in suppressing independent union activists,

including anarcho-syndicalists and other non-Communists. Fernandez

describes how the combined application of political manipulations, lying

propaganda and brutal repression succeeded in completely destroying the

Cuban anarcho-syndicalist movement, something neither the Spanish

colonialists nor a succession of dictators could do.

In Saint Che: The Truth Behind the Legend of the Heroic Guerilla,

Ernesto Che Guevara, (1997) Canadian anarchist author Larry Gambone

describes the active role Che played in the elimination of the remnants

of workers’ control of their unions, making it much more risky for

workers to engage in strikes or other on-the-job resistance. Guevara

strongly supported Law 647, which specified that, “The Minister of Labor

can take control of any union, dismiss officials and appoint others”

when he deems it necessary.

Guevara was also the prime author of the policy requiring people to do

unpaid, so-called voluntary work in order to develop communist

consciousness. As the head of the Ministry of Industry, he developed a

system for punishing employees for moral offenses not specified in the

criminal code, such as favoritism shown to relatives or friends,

intentionally covering up a mistake, or having an affair with another

man’s wife.

Those judged guilty of such offenses were expected to volunteer to go to

a special labor camp at Guanahacabibes, the westernmost point on the

island, where they worked under very harsh conditions, for between a

month and a year depending on the offense.

This practice set the precedent for the later development of

non-voluntary, non-criminal labor camps known as Military Units to

Augment Production for the punishment of those deemed political

dissidents and social deviants, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s

Witnesses, practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions, and others.

Some of these policies have been made less stringent or stopped since

Che’s death and the end of the Soviet Union, and the Cuban state now

tolerates homosexuality and offers perhaps the best medical support for

AIDS victims in the world—a few decades too late for those oppressed by

the earlier cruel treatment.

Moreover, the regime still retains the form that Guevara helped give

it—a centralized one-party state that closely supervises public

expression and limits grassroots self-activity of all sorts.

Are these really the kinds of accomplishments anarchists aspire to?

Did Che Guevara live in a way compatible with the struggle to create a

non-hierarchical, self-organized and egalitarian society, in which

people decide their own fate without reliance on dictates from above?

The answer should be an unequivocal, “No!”

MLB lives in the Pacific Northwest. They do not play or watch baseball.

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Sept. 19-Oct. 2, 1968

https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/62-sept-19-oct-2-1968/the-diary-of-che-guevara/

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https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/269-february-1976/cuba-dawning-american-imperialism/

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https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/378-summer-2008/anarchist-cuba/

Cuba: From State to Private Capitalism Adios Socialismo by Walker Lane

Fifth Estate #383, Summer, 2010

https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/383-summer-2010/cuba-state-private-capitalism/

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https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/383-summer-2010/state-violence-cubas-ladies-white/

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https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/394-summer-2015/anarchists-confront-the-marxist-state-in-cuba/

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https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/396-summer-2016/the-train-to-matanzas/