Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life Review
I read Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson some time back in 2015-2017. A few days after I finished reading it, I wrote the following brief review, which I will re-post here now, 10 years later.
The review:
This week I finished Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson. It is widely considered to be the greatest and most definitive biography of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, as it utilizes a lot of sources that were not widely available until relatively recently to paint a more complete picture of who Che was and what his life was like.
I have long been a huge admirer of Che. Despite the fact that he is painted as a bloodthirsty villain by people in this country, I’ve always been fascinated by how remarkable his life was and how tirelessly he worked and sacrificed to spread socialism and free Latin America from United States neoimperialism. I have read other books about Che and read many sources that talk about various aspects of his life in both a favorable and a negative light, but never before I had read just one book that paints such a complete picture of him, and from a fairly impartial and unbiased point of view as well. I came away from this book with a greater admiration for him than ever, and I truly believe that in his fight for socialism and against American imperialism, he was one of the great heroes of the 20th century.
Just to give a very brief outline of his life:
He was a man who was born into a fairly well-off family, and in his youth he was a fairly spoiled boy who did not care much for anything except himself, as is quite typical for people his age. His family was not very political, but they were still involved in some of the Argentinian politics of the time. When he got older and went into medical school, he began to travel a lot through South America, and first began to develop a political consciousness as he witnessed the widespread poverty that many of the peasants lived in, as well as the tremendous influence that American companies had on the local economies of many countries through South America, and the exploitation they employed to make profits. During this time period, he described the importance of racial unity against American influence by referring to the fact that Latin Americans were all one mestizo race.
After he finished medical school, he travelled some more and eventually found himself in Guatemala, where a socialist government had recently been elected. He began to learn more about socialism during his time in Guatemala, and joined political groups that were in support of the government. It was during his time in Guatemala that he first began to identify as a socialist. After an American-backed coup toppled the socialist government, Che was a known communist who was forced to flee to Mexico, where many of the political thinkers in Guatemala ended up. At the time, Mexico City was a place where many leftist thinkers from all Latin America congregated, and it was there that Che met Fidel. Fidel was trying to organize a group of rebels to slip into Cuba to begin an armed revolution there, and Che immediately signed up. He had a tremendous admiration for Fidel and his vision of the future for Cuba, and despite the fact that he was an Argentinian and therefore a foreigner among all the Cubans, his intelligence, bravery, and leadership ability quickly made him Fidel’s right-hand man. Eventually they would go to Cuba, and lead an armed revolution where they would initially be reduced to just a dozen men before eventually winning against impossible odds and overthrowing Batista. In the postrevolutionary period, as Fidel solidified his power, Fidel himself did not have terribly strong opinions on the economic nature that Cuba should take going forward, and it was largely Che and Raul Castro’s counsel, as well as some strategic errors on the part of the US, that led postrevolutionary Cuba into the arms of the Soviets and turned it into a socialist country.
During this time, Che would take on an immensely important role in the Cuban government, and would play a large part in urging Fidel to use Cuban resources to spread socialism throughout Latin America and in other third world countries, and to combat American influence in those countries. During his time in the government, Che would turn out to be a prolific writer on the topics of adapting Marxist ideas into the economies of Latin American countries, ideas of how to implement guerilla warfare to overthrow capitalist governments, as well as urging all developing nations to band together and be unified in order to stand against American imperialism. He was a strong believer in the use of violence to overthrow capitalist societies and to combat American influence. When Vietnam broke out, he saw it as an exciting example of what could be replicated across the globe: the American imperial machine being mired down in guerilla warfare in distant lands in an attempt to slow the spread of communism. He believed that if this scenario could be replicated across the globe, it could lead to the United States overextending itself, and possibly another World War as China and the Soviet Union stepped in as these conflicts spread across the world. He envisioned that this next World War would result in the fall of American imperialism and the rise of socialism across the world.
Using Cuban resources, he began to work closely with various guerilla groups throughout the world, but particularly with those in Latin America and in Africa. They would give ideological, material, and tactical support to these guerillas in an attempt to achieve his vision of “multiple Vietnams”. Unfortunately, virtually all of these attempts met with failure, because the United States, having learned a lot from the Cuban Revolution, would immediately step in when they detected significant guerilla activity in a country and would provide weapons, training, and intelligence to those countries so they could effectively crush the fledgling guerilla movements.
The Soviets, shaken by their experience with the Cuban Missile Crisis, were very averse to the idea of spreading multiple conflicts, and they began to use economic pressure to force Fidel to stop supporting these guerilla movements throughout the world. The Soviets also contacted their various communist parties throughout Latin America and made it explicitly clear that they did not support the idea of an armed struggle, and that they were to try to achieve the spread of communism through legal means. Che, frustrated by the widespread failures of these guerilla movements and sensing that Cuba was too tightly held in the grasp of the Soviets, decided to step down from the Cuban government to personally lead guerillas. First he went to the Congo, but found the forces he was fighting with there to be incredibly inept, and they were quickly overrun and defeated. Then he decided to go to Bolivia, as it was in the middle of South America and victory there meant that guerillas could move to many different countries surrounding Bolivia and use the Andes Mountains as a base from which all of South America could eventually be claimed.
This attempt also ended in a miserable failure, as the Bolivian government too quickly found out about their presence and they were forced to begin fighting before they were prepared. As American counterinsurgency forces came to assist the Bolivians, the following year would see the guerillas whittled down until Che was finally captured and then executed. Almost every single member of his guerilla band was killed. Meanwhile the Communist party in Bolivia failed to assist him in any meaningful way. His death, and the failure of his armed struggles do not in the least discount his ideas, his enemies were simply too powerful and there was far too much division among the leftist forces of the world as to how to best spread socialism, and therefore Che was left with far too few resources to combat the forces of the most powerful superpower of the world.
The man led an absolutely incredible life, and he is not only to be admired for his ideas (he was a brilliant Marxist intellectual) of socialism and anti-imperialism, but also for the sacrifices he was willing to make to achieve his goals. He demanded unity and sacrifice from all those around him in order to create a better socialist society, and he never hesitated to demand that of himself as well. While some Cuban officials used their power to increase their material wealth, he gave up all of that to focus on spreading the revolution, and he didn’t hesitate to sacrifice his own life for the cause as well. A true revolutionary is not just a good soldier and a good leader, they are also intellectuals, and Che was without a doubt a true revolutionary.
If there is anything that this book has taught me, aside from the facts of Che’s life and who he was, it’s that to achieve our goals of spreading socialism, it is vitally important to be united to be as strong as possible, that one should always be on the look-out for opportunities to act whenever possible, that one must be adaptable and ready to innovate to best apply socialist principles to the present conditions, and that one must be willing to dedicate their whole life to the spread of socialism if that is what is required, even their own life if need be. What socialists demand is a change to the very fabric of society itself, to make it more fair and equitable for all, and achieving these changes can only be accomplished if you and those around you are willing to sacrifice everything to make it happen.