Che -- A Revolutionary Life

So, I recently finished reading "Che -- A Revolutionary Life," the biography of Ernesto Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson.

It's a good book because Ernesto Guevara is a fascinating and exciting character. He adopts the name "Che" (which means something like "Hey You!") around the same time he becomes a solid communist. Interestingly, though, he never joins the Soviet sponsored international Communist Party. After studying to become a doctor specializing in asthma and allergies, he spends the rest of his life trying to spread the proletarian revolution in South America. The book records his early life, his struggle to bring the revolution to the world by guerrila warfare first in Cuba and later in Africa and finally in Bolivia and finally his death by execution in the Bolivian Andes.

The detail provided in the book is amazing; it was obviously very well researched. What I liked most about the book was its honesty about Che's character. It wasn't romantic or glorified but it showed him as a regular human being. It's true that he was an outstanding man who did some very remarkable things, he also had some very admirable qualities--his determination, his hard work, his passion, and his quirky and kind of weird sense of humour--but the book also records his flaws and presents him as a deeply flawed individual (just like the rest of us).

For example, Che continues to believe unquestioningly that people are basically good and that they will put their self interest aside and work for the good of the group even when he is faced by the complete self-centeredness of some of his closest comrades who, after they have commited their lives to the revolution and are told by Che to count themselves as already dead, lose faith in the struggle and abandon both their comrades and the revolution.

When he goes to the Congo, the great Congolese revolutionary fighters won't fight, they run away dropping their weapons and baggage as soon as anyone fires at them; they won't carry anything but their weapons--when asked to they say, "what do I look like? a truck?" or "what do I look like? a woman?" or "what do I look like? a cuban?" (Because Che and his soldiers ended up having to do all the heavy carrying because the Congolese wouldn't). Anyways, the Congolese revolution ended in failure because of the simplicity and self-interestedness of its fighters.

In Bolivia, Che himself is betrayed by the people he came to help. His goal in Bolivia and in all of South America was to improve the conditions of the common people and give them a stake in their government because they were being oppressed by North American backed capitalist military dictatorships. It was the common people of Bolivia who, many times over, reported his whereabouts to the Bolivian army. It was the Bolivian army that tracked down and executed Che in the Bolivian Andes as he was trying to escape the country after the failure of his short-lived guerrilla campaign.

It's a book worth reading. It shows the flaws of the communist-socialist system through the eyes of a communist. Che drew much opposition and disapproval from the officials of the Soviet Union for his methods and practices, and also his militant anti-North American stance. But his stance is justified, to a certain degree; the book shows North American adventurism and imperialism and their effects in South America resulting in the poverty of the common people and the dependence of the state on North American industry for import/export and economic aid and how this dependence was fostered by American imperialism. It also showed how the North American anti-communist campaign saw many fascist dictatorships installed in South America: Augusto Pinochet's North American backed government in Chile; Batista's regime in pre-communist Cuba; the CIA sponsored coup of the Arbenz government in Guatamala when the US government thought he was getting to be a little too socialist; and the US supported dictatorship of Rene Barrientos in Bolivia. Nevertheless, it also demonstrates the imperialism of the Soviet Union as it tried to gain exclusive control over its sattelite states.

It's a book that can change your world-view of the events of the Cold War.