Che Guevara

In Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara ( Garden City, N.Y., 1972), his first wife, Hilda Gadea, claims that Che had belonged for a short time to the Communist Youth in Argentina and was already well versed in revolutionary Marxism when he joined Fidel's July 26 Movement in Mexico - a movement launched by Cuban exiles for the purpose of overthrowing the dictatorship in their country. She also recalls how in Guatemala Che talked openly about his communist convictions and how, on arriving in Mexico City in October 1954, he affirmed that communists should be in the vanguard of every armed struggle against Latin American dictators.

Che Guevara anticipated that the socialist camp would continue to expand and that, in view of the overall struggle against imperialism, major efforts toward social change required a confrontation with US economic interests. With evident sympathy for the Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet conflict, he held that policies designed to promote the peaceful co-existence of socialism and capitalism constituted a betrayal of the national liberation struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Only through the nationalization of basic resources and the socialization of the means of production, Che Guevara insisted, could the struggle for independent social development succeed. Furthermore, he argued that the confrontation with the native oligarchies and with the main enemy, US imperialism, had to be an armed one supported by the people. He believed that, if Arbenz had only armed the people, his government might have survived.

Later, in his reflections on the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara underscored the need to educate the people in armed self-defense. The Guevarist insurrectional foco or center is a revolutionary commune for living and fighting together. Its principal task is to catalyze the masses into taking independent action in defense of what are taken to be their basic interests. Since people have reason to fear repression and are generally unprepared to resist a military coup against a popular government, they have to be educated for that eventuality from the start. Moreover, they have to be encouraged by the exploits of the insurrectional foco to follow its example and to provide armed support for a popular movement of resistance.

With the March 1958 assassination of Frank Pais, a leader of the July 26 Movement in Santiago de Cuba, the people of that city took to the streets in protest. There followed the first political general strike against the dictatorship which, despite its lack of political direction, completely paralyzed the province of Oriente with repercussions on the neighboring province of Camaguey. This spontaneous mass uprising was easily crushed. But, as Che Guevara recalls in his 'Social Projections of the Rebel Army' ( January 1959), it made the guerrillas aware for the first time of the need to incorporate the working class, and not only the peasantry, in the overall struggle for liberation. Thus began the first clandestine efforts to organize the workers in their centers of production for the purpose of helping the Rebel Army in its struggle to seize power.

In 'Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution', Che Guevara himself stressed the differences between the insurrectionary and postinsurrectionary stages of the Cuban Revolution: the first stage of armed action lasting to I January 1959; and, after that, the second stage of political, economic and social transformation.

During the postinsurrectionary phase, however, Che Guevara continued to be concerned with problems of armed strategy, and in 1965 he renounced his role as supreme director of Cuban industry to return to that of a guerrilla commander. Among his reasons for doing so was the conviction that the parallel construction of socialism and communism in Cuba depended for its success on opening new revolutionary fronts in the Third World and in Latin America in particular. The development of Che's thought was accordingly more complex than his own two-stage analysis of the Cuban Revolution might suggest.