Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War

Books on Cuba

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Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War

By Che Guevara

Reviewed by Emile Capouya

Mr. James Reston has recorded his impressions of a recent visit to Cuba, and it appears that although he kept his guard up as a prudent journalist should, he was a little disarmed by the spectacle of a small nation gallantly and gaily coping with the essential problem of small nations--how to keep your self-respect and still eat. One thing, though, struck him as a very jarring note in the general symphony of a country making its way through life without the help of the United States. He found that the Cubans were concerned about the dangers of invasion. They imagined that the United States, the very country they were getting along without, might invade their island. Mr. Reston found their repeated expressions of alarm quite paranoid, and he attributed the disease to hysterical official propaganda.

Let us rub our eyes. we have been dreaming again. dreaming that Cuba was not invaded seven years ago by a force armed, trained, and financed by the united States; that president Kennedy was not severely criticized at home for failing to provide air cover for the invaders; that he had not pledged himself, while a candidate for office, to subdue the Cubans for force if necessary; that Richard Nixon, also a candidate, had not stimulated shock and horror at Kennedy's declaration even though, as Vice President, he had already participated in formulating the secret plan for the invasion. we have been dreaming of American benevolence, as usual, and no demonstration of presidential ruthlessness in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or Vietnam can affect the pastoral innocence of that dream. James Reston, without question one of our most intelligent, best informed, most responsible journalists, is talking in his sleep--to a nation of dreamers.

But in order to arrive at a true estimate of men like Ernesto Guevara and his fellow-revolutionary, Fidel Castro, we should first of all have to wake up to the world in which we are living. in that world, there are two hundred million Latin Americans, most of whom are very hungry, and their hunger is a necessary feature of the political and economic arrangements that make us North Americans rich. They are ruled for the most part by armed degenerates whose brutality bears an exact proportion to the misery over which they preside, and the degenerate in question are subsidized out of the American treasury. In that waking world of hunger and hopelessness, Guevara and Castro took up the cause of the dispossessed. Most unfortunately--by our own standards of social decency, by our own ideals of freedom and personal dignity, by our own humane professions--they are in the right and we are in the wrong. That is what all the shooting is about.

Ernesto Guevara was, next to Fidel Castro, the most influential spirit and the best mind of the Cuban Revolution--both in its military phase and, after the overthrow of Batista, in the phase of intensive social reconstruction that still goes on an has earned James Reston's guarded approval. Guevara's classic work is Guerilla Warfare. Two translations have been published in this country, both of them technically and stylistically faulty. Guevara was, among other things, a first-rate writer, and no available translation of any of his works does him justice. Readers must be warned, accordingly, that the point and bearing of his ideas are misrepresented in English.

Guerilla Warfare is more than a treatise of irregular military operations. it is a manual of political struggle in regions ruled as Latin American is ruled. For Guevara, guerrilla warfare is important because it is the most appropriate political instrument--and also the most effective instrument of political education--in countries like pre-revolutionary Cuba, where three general conditions exist: poverty, a predominantly rural economy, and no legal means of reform and redress. that insight, incidentally, is at the heart of Regis Debray's brilliant essay, Revolution in the Revolution?, published here in Bobbye Ortiz' excellent English version. For understandable reasons, neither the conservatives nor the adherents of the traditional leftist sects and parties in North and South America are willing to accept the thesis.

Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War is Guevara's unadorned memoirs of his own service in that struggle. They suffer somewhat from having been set down as occasion offered, and because the author confined himself strictly to what he himself had done or observed. Guevara hoped that other participants in the revolution would write their own accounts in the same sober spirit, and produce collectively an accurate report of that turning-point in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The most interesting sections of the present book are concerned with the hand-to-mouth stage of the revolution, when, after the rout of the Gramma expedition, the 12 survivors, including Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Camilio Cienfuegos, were fugitives rather than soldiers.

Semi-starved, often bivouacking without shelter, for a long time, their object was mere survival and their immediate enemies were the climate and the terrain. Whether we are concerned with political and military history or with the history of particular souls, the transition from the stages of survivors in flight to the phase of effectual rebellion is the highest interest. Despite the circumstantial character of Guevara's narrative, unfortunately, that transition accomplishes itself offstage, for there is a hiatus in the account precisely at the point where the material and moral current must have shifted to permit the first forays upon Batista's troops.

What does emerge clearly enough is Guevara's personal development in the course of the fighting. When it began, he was an enthusiast for revolution and the next thing to an invalid (he suffered all his life from incapacitating attacks of asthma), and, for all his spirit, hardly a likely soldier, one would think. but he fought along on sheer nerve, bearing severe physical hardship with his comrades, and showing reserves of will that marked him as a natural leader in difficult undertakings. Fidel Castro says of him that his failing as a soldier was excessive disregard of danger, and coming from that authority the judgment is one we had better accept. Yet there is no doubt that Guevara was one of the master tacticians of recent military history.

In that respect, Guerilla Warfare is his witness; it is the only significant work on the subject written in the West--for the good reason that no other writers have had clear strategic notions in the light of which their tactics might be developed. The strategic aims of Western commentators tend to be, as it were, subconscious, and in any case unavowable. But in Guevara's writings, strategy is always conceived in terms of political evolution, and is necessarily more ample, more adequate in terms of reality, than the abstract geo-politics plus games theory that passes for military thought in other places.

For an example of his astuteness as a political analyst, the reader is referred to the epilogue to guerilla warfare, in which, writing in 1959, he predicts the manner and means of the invasion of Cuba that was to take place in 1961. Another classic of analysis and polemic is his speech at the Punta del Este conference (reproduced in Che Guevara Speaks, Merit Publishers), called for the purpose of quarantining Cuba and containing the Latin-American revolution by means of the Alliance for Progress. Guevara's exposition of the program's defects, had they been heeded, might have saved Mr. Moscoso from resigning his directorship in despair when time had made clear to everyone what was clear only to the Cuban delegation at Punta del Este.

The present volume ends with 26 remarkable letters written by Guevara, for the most part while he was serving as a bureaucrat of the revolution after the seizure of power. I think it impossible to read those letters--direct, unassuming, austere--and not know that one is in the presence of a rare being, a man of principle, deserving of Castro's eulogy: "Immensely humane, immensely sensitive."

Ernesto Guevara was wounded in the Bolivian mountains, captured, and apparently shot after capture. then his body was exhibited to photographers by relieved officials. from his point of view, fair enough--he had sought out just such a fate. But our perspective must be different. He was a very great man. He died at 30. In terms of the political evolution of Latin America in this century, the loss cannot be made up.

Source: Commonweal (12 April 1968)

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ERNESTO "Che' GUEVARA (1928-67), Latin American guerrilla leader and revolutionary theorist, who became a hero to the New Left radicals of the 1960s, was born into a middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina. Guevara received a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1953.

Convinced that revolution was the only remedy for Latin America's social inequities, in 1954, Che went to Mexico, where he joined exiled Cuban revolutionaries under Fidel Castro.

In the late 1950s, he played an important role in Castro's guerrilla war against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and when Castro came to power, he served as Cuba's Minister of Industry (1961-65).

A strong opponent of U.S. influence in the Third World, he helped guide the Castro regime on its leftward and pro-Communist path.

The author of two books on guerrilla warfare, Guevara advocated peasant-based revolutionary movements in the developing countries. He disappeared from Cuba in 1965, reappearing the following year as an insurgent leader in Bolivia.

He was captured by the Bolivian army and shot near Vallegrande on Oct. 9, 1967.

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update 8 November 2008