The canonisation of Che Guevara

Comment by Bill Vann

Thirty years after his death in a guerrilla fiasco, the remains of Ernesto "Che" Guevara were laid to rest in Santa Clara, Cuba. The long-dead Argentine-Cuban guerrilla was interred together with six of his comrades, whose bodies were also discovered last summer in an unmarked grave in the Bolivian jungle.

The Castro regime turned the occasion into a major state event, with quasi-religious overtones. The boxes bearing the remains were presented for a public viewing in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion, and their interment in a specially-constructed mausoleum in Santa Clara was accompanied by military parades, hymns and a speech by Cuban President Fidel Castro.

For its own purposes, the Castro regime has joined in an international effort to mythologise Che, turning him into an icon which has little to do with the views which he espoused in life.

The Cuban government long ago renounced the conceptions of a continental-wide guerrilla war which Che Guevara insisted was the only means of liberating the continent from the oppression of US imperialism. By the early 1960s Castro had forged his bargain with the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy. Moscow sought to restrain the more radical nationalist trends in the interests of its policy of "peaceful coexistence" with Washington, and Castro did his best to oblige. In more recent years, following the USSR's collapse, the Castro regime has sought to keep itself afloat by encouraging European and Canadian private investment on the island and increasing the flow of foreign tourists.

The ceremonies in Cuba were noteworthy for the virtual absence of those forces from throughout Latin America who sought to emulate Guevara's guerrilla war strategy. This thesis, which insisted that the road to revolution lay through the formation of bands of guerrillas in the countryside, served to divert a generation of Latin American youth into suicidal adventures. By isolating some of the most militant and self-sacrificing elements of the younger generation from the masses, it likewise solidified the grip of Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist parties over the working class, thereby helping pave the way to the terrible defeats and dictatorships of the 1970s.

Many of those who followed Che's example ended up like him, hunted down, tortured and murdered by US-backed military forces. Others have moved on in their political careers. Teodoro Petkoff, the former Venezuelan guerrilla leader who in the 1990s became the government minister in charge of implementing IMF austerity measures, epitomises this layer. The Colombian MIR abandoned "armed struggle" in return for parliamentary seats for its leaders and small business loans for its members. Nicaragua's Sandinistas and the FMLN in El Salvador followed similar paths. Still others continue a form of guerrillaism which is aimed not at transforming society, but rather raising funds through kidnappings, extortion and providing security for drug traffickers.

The current attempts at a Che revival, not only by the Cuban government but also various middle class left groups and even commercial ventures seeking to market his well-known image, are the antithesis of a serious examination of his politics or their bitter legacy.

For the Castro regime, Che is used as a symbol of nationalist pride. His self-sacrifice is invoked whenever today's Cuban youth are pressured to perform free labour in the sugar cane fields or on construction sites. The image of the selfless and martyred hero, however, is increasingly at odds with the growing social inequality in Cuba, where a dollar economy flourishes to the benefit of a privileged minority and prostitution is growing at a rate which will soon bring it back to the level of the Batista era. Meanwhile, the Cuban regime is itself marketing Che's visage on everything from T-shirts to cigarette lighters.

Middle class left tendencies the world over have joined in the canonisation of Che. They are attracted not merely by vague notions of the romantic rebel or martyred revolutionary but by very definite political conceptions. Guevara's politics were founded upon a rejection of both the revolutionary role of the working class and the necessity for a revolutionary Marxist party striving for the development of socialist consciousness within this class. Revolution for him was not the working class liberating itself and thereby putting an end to capitalist society. Rather it was the product of armed actions by small groups of guerrillas which would provoke state repression and, in turn, push the masses into resistance, quite independently of the latter's conscious aims.

While the organisations invoking Che's memory have no intention of waging guerrilla warfare, it is this conception that the middle class radical can lead or, more precisely, manipulate the masses, that appeals to them.

Thirty years after the death of Che Guevara, the social conditions facing workers and peasants throughout Latin America are as bad or worse than those which gave rise to the tumultuous events of the 1960s and 1970s. To prepare for the inevitable outbreak of new mass struggles, it is decisive that a balance sheet be drawn of the tragic experience with petty-bourgeois nationalism and guerrilla movements throughout the continent. Only the assimilation of the lessons of this period, above all the necessity to build revolutionary parties in the working class fighting for the perspective of international socialism, will lay the basis for genuine revolutionary political activity.

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