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June 14
was the 75th birth anniversary of Che Guevara It is the only
banner in the world that can have only a face on it with no words
- and yet convey meaning. It is the only face that can generate
an electric mood and emotion, anywhere in the world, transcending
cultural, social, generational and national divisions. From the
streets of San Francisco to the homes of Hambantota, he is the link
in common. He is the only
one of the 'long twentieth century' or the 'unfinished twentieth
century' you see. You no longer see Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin,
Trotsky, Mao or Ho Chi Minh. But you see Che. The criterion could
not be that of contribution or achievement, because any of these
others would qualify. Could it be cinematic good looks? Yet you
never see Jack or Bobby Kennedy. Courage, then? Surely Churchill
would qualify. Spartan abstemiousness? Then it would be Uncle Ho.
Why Che? The literary imagination of genius is often more intuitive
about the movement of history than that of the historian, philosopher
or social scientist. In 1842, six years before the publication of
the Communist Manifesto, Heinrich Heine foresaw the role and fate
of Communism in these dramatic terms: "Communism is the secret
name of the dread antagonist setting proletarian rule with all its
consequences against the present bourgeois rule. How it will end
no one knows but gods and goddesses acquainted with the future.
We only know this much: Communism, though little discussed now and
loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark
hero destined for a great if temporary role in the modern tragedy." Of all those
who auditioned for the role of that dark hero of modern tragedy,
none played it as memorably on the screen of history as Che. His
looks and his 'Look' (in the Sartrean sense of 'the gaze'), the
specific aesthetic he constituted, are symbols of the trinity of
rebel-hero-martyr. Soren Kierkegaard wrote of two types of heroes:
'heroes of thought' and 'heroes of action'. There are passionate
individualist intellectuals, thinkers, writers who stand out from
the norm, mountain eagles alighting on lonely crags. There are,
on the other hand, those who engage in Herculean or Sisyphean enterprise
in the service of a collective cause. Che was a synthesis. It is difficult
to imagine Che at 75, as he would have been this Saturday, June14.
But I think I can. He would have been like Fredrick Engels, with
the latter's sensibility, his coolly confident and lucidly analytical
writing style, his intense interest in the military aspect of international
politics, his Pauline interventions in the international socialist
movement. Except for one set of qualities, which Engels didn't have:
Che's restlessness, his inner tensions, his self-reflexivity, his
risk-taking, and the propulsive pressure he subjected himself to:
his Messianism. Friedrich Nietzsche
critiqued Christianity, the French Revolution and Socialism pointing
to their commonality, continuity and contiguity. Others have said
that Marxism was a 'secular religion' (Raymond Aron), the third
great global religion (Regis Debray) following Christianity and
Islam. (Hinduism and Buddhism did not spread globally). Marxism
shares with these religions, two structural characteristics: 'The
Book' and 'martyrdom'. Scholars such as Zbiegniew Brzezinski and
Hugh Seton-Watson have gone further and pointed out that the trajectory
of Communism is similar to that of the Church: from persecution
to power, from slave ideology to state faith, the doctrinal splits,
the sects and schisms, the hunt for heresies, the Inquisitions.
We for our part can discern, in retrospect, that the Church survived
the fratricidal bloodletting but Communism did not, because it was
precisely a secular religion. Defeat and failure could not be consoled
away by faith in the Almighty or the afterlife. Fidel often
said that Communists in the clandestine life were like Christians
in the catacombs and that his idea of highly committed cadres is
the orders of nuns. For the Communist movement as for Christianity,
"the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church".
If Marxism was a (secular) religion, then Che was the closest it
came to a Christ-figure. One marvels at the admixture of self-mockery,
prophetic intuition and determined self-definition that made Ernesto
Guevara caption the entry for his 24th birthday in his Motorcycle
Diaries (p.134) as 'Saint Guevara's Day'! He was betrayed and abandoned
by the Pharisees of Socialism - the Latin American parties of the
Church of Moscow and the Church of Beijing. Beyond the reach and
help of Fidel, too far from Cuba, the closest he ever came to a
home, he was murdered in captivity after many hours of pain and
torment by the trained satraps of the modern day Roman Empire, the
USA. Che gave his life to 'create two, three, many Vietnams, or
a Vietnam of the world'. Months after Che's death in October '67
came his resurrection in the Spring of '68, the Tet Offensive in
Vietnam fuelling the youth revolt throughout the West with its ubiquitous
dark-red tinted poster of Alberto Korda's photograph and the slogan
proclaiming that 'Che lives!' But that alone
cannot explain the breadth and depth of Che's appeal. How is he
a symbol outside the Christian civilizational area, outside of the
zone of Western cultural influence and ontology? This is because
he epitomizes a synthesis that is rare: of Reason and Romanticism,
of individual and collective modes, of writer-intellectual and militant
man of action. The history of Revolution in general is replete with
examples of such human beings, from Tom Paine to Saint-Just and
Lenin. Che belonged to this species being. Yet he went one dimension
deeper. He was vastly more accessible because he was consciously
more transparent - through his writings, particularly his diaries
and reminiscences. He communicated more of himself, and thus left
more of himself behind. Che's writings
are cinematic: part camera, part script. Though not published in
chronological sequence, we can now apprehend the texts serially
- the Motorcycle Diaries of his trip through Latin America, the
Central American Diaries with its mention of his encounter with
Fidel and the Cubans, his various reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary
war, the lacerating Congo chronicles, the almost unreadable tragic
pathos of the unfinished Bolivian Diary. His distinctive mode was
literary/visual. The writings must be taken together with the photographs:
Che was the most photogenic and therefore the most photographed
and graphically portrayed - political personality of the 20th century.
All these texts and photographs constituted but illustrated chapters
of one autobiographical narrative, with its inner/outer dimensions,
the last pages written in blood by his agony and death. In his end
was his beginning: the Bolivian Diary reaches us with a long introduction
and the text of the Periclean valedictory oration by Fidel. We witness
Che in a way that we cannot any other leading politico-historical
personality. We are drawn into the evolution of his consciousness
and character, and finally, in the Congo Diaries and the Bolivian
Diaries we witness the torment in his soul. Che simultaneously acts,
records and reveals the dramatic context, trajectory and destiny
of his protagonist: Che himself. Every year one reads Che, one can
see more deeply into him. I now wonder whether the dialogue in the
darkness between the oracular old revolutionary exile and young
Ernesto, the undated 'Afterthought' of the Motorcycle Diaries (1952),
is a conversation between Che and himself. I wonder whether it led
to his decision fifteen years later that it was 'the right time'
for the necessary, inevitable sacrifice. We can also understand
how Che made the fateful decision to engage in a long march away
from his camp in Nancahuazu in Bolivia, a march from which he would
never return to base. It was a direct consequence of a mistake or
worse still a (perceived) weakness that he never forgave himself
for, made in the Congo, where he did not range away from the shores
of Lake Tanganyika. We can also understand his insistence on being
the sole politico-military commander of the guerrilla enterprise
in Bolivia. It was not only part of his theory and his ego. It was
part of his strategy: the very fact of his leadership, he thought,
would give a qualitative edge to the struggle. More than all these,
it was reaction to the bitter disaster in the Congo. Che had been
dependent on the decisions and conduct of personalities far less
brave, intelligent and committed than he; a situation very different
from his Cuban experience where he fought under the command of Fidel
Castro, a man whose superior ability to lead he never doubted -
and with excellent reason! The contrast
between Che's radical 'interiority' with its wit, brutally frank
self-awareness and self-disclosure on the one hand, and the self-righteous,
self-aggrandizing pomposity of Trotsky's 'My Life' on the other,
is striking. (See Box: 'Che's blues'). Paradoxically,
Che was possible because of Communism and its crisis. If not for
the rise of socialism there would have only been an Ernesto Guevara,
"eclectic dissector of doctrines and psychoanalyst of dogmas"
as he described himself at 24; perhaps a Latin American Hemingway
or Malraux, but not Che. He was the Silver Surfer on the tidal wave
of socialist revolution, its most 'avante-guard' personality - if
anyone personified the Communist category of 'vanguard' it was Che.
On the other hand, if not for the fact of de-Stalinization (which
he rightly criticized) and the Sino-Soviet split (which he lamented
and tried to step into the breach of) the space would not have opened
for the critical-creative individual expression that was Che: Byronic
hero, self-steeled by Bolshevism. For Che's emergence and role,
a rent in the curtain of the Temple of dogmatism was necessary. The Spanish existentialist critic, writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, writing a few years after Nietzsche, commended a spirit that would be 'at war in peace' and 'at peace in war'. Che Guevara was such a spirit. For Heraclitus, the founding father of dialectics, fire was the quintessential source and symbol. Che was a cold fire, which had concentrated itself. A uniquely individual personality, he harnessed himself to history and in doing so stood out against its backdrop, imprinting his visage on the shroud of time. Che's
blues - The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. January '66. Pp. 216-244 |
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