Che Lives ... on a T-Shirt
What progressives should know about Cuba’s most iconic revolutionary.
By Kay Steiger
October 12, 2007
Sculpture of Che Guevara in the Plaza De La Revolucion, Havana, Cuba (stock.xchng).
This week is the 40th anniversary of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s infamous death in Bolivia, and his legacy is still hotly contested. There’s a website called TheCheStore.com. On it, you can buy t-shirts, caps, “collectables,” and camouflage gear—all pasted with the iconic image of South America’s most famous revolutionary. It’s one of many commercial endeavors devoted to selling gear—including watches, key chains, and even bikinis—decorated with Guevara’s image. The New York Times pointed out that Guevara’s face is now “as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon.” Richard L. Harris is re-releasing his book Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevara’s Last Mission, and Stephen Soderbergh is working on a movie called Guerrilla, starring Benicio Del Toro as Guevara, to be released next year. We live in an age where Guevara “sells.”
This man, born as Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, was born in Argentina to a family of wealth. He studied medicine in his youth, but while traveling, met leftist revolutionaries Fidel and Raúl Castro. It was then that they formed a plan to overthrow Cuba’s capitalist government and replace it with a socialist one. They fought a long guerrilla war, and Castro finally seized power on January 1, 1959. He recruited Guevara to lead Cuba from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrialized one.
Governing is hard work, and it requires tolerance and patience. It’s debatable whether those are skills that Castro possessed, but Guevara most certainly did not. When Guevara’s impatience with governing had reached its limit, he traveled to other communist countries in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa. While in Africa, he felt the Congo was ripe for a socialist revolution in the same way Cuba had been, so he returned to lead the guerilla mission there. But Guevara miscalculated the political situation, and language barriers prevented him from truly becoming one of the Congolese fighters. By his own admission, the endeavor was a failure. Instead, he turned his attention to Bolivia, hoping to incite a socialist “Latin Revolution.” He failed there too, and was executed after being captured by the Bolivian army.
Guevara was intelligent and hugely prolific, compulsively keeping volumes of diaries throughout his life; his seminal work, Guerilla Warfare, was published posthumously in 1969. The books in his personal library were jammed in the margins with his own notes and thoughts. During a journey highlighted by the Oscar-winning “Diarios de Motocicleta” (“The Motorcycle Diaries”), he provided medical treatment to Peruvian Indians, who were living examples of social injustice, suffering from poverty and disease. Early in life he resolved to aid those who like himself, battled asthma. (Guevara suffered from the disease for his entire life.)
He was a man of principles, to a fault. Despite his promotion to a high-level position in the Cuban government Guevara kept his wife, Aleida, and four children (in addition to his ex-wife and her daughter) on a strict salary that was equal to what he earned as a soldier in Fidel Castro’s rebel army, according to New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson in his definitive biography of Guevara. Aleida routinely borrowed money from the bodyguards to make ends meet. His frugality was motivated by ideology; he was deeply devoted to the works of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. The Socialist Worker Online paints its own rosy version of Guevara’s life, emphasizing his concern for the common worker and his courage as a fighter.
Because of his close relationship to Castro, it’s hard to separate feelings about Guevara from feelings about Castro, and from political baggage of the Cold War. Of the first time Guevara met Castro in Mexico, Anderson writes,
Ernesto and Fidel shared some traits. Both were favored boys from large families and extremely spoiled; careless about their appearance; sexually voracious, but men to whom relationships came in second to their personal goals. Both were imbued with Latin machismo: believers in the innate weakness of women, contemptuous of homosexuals, and admirers of brave men of action.
At best, Guevara’s politics advocated for a mindless devotion of the working man (with an emphasis on “man”) to socialism, but left out other causes many progressives have worked long and hard for: equality for gender and sexual orientation. In fact, gays were persecuted following the Cuban revolution. (Poet and novelist Reynaldo Arenas, who included descriptions of his openly gay lifestyle in his writings, was killed as the result of the government’s prosecution of gays.)
Guevara was raised with a Catholic outlook on life, in which the “good” girls saved themselves for marriage. Wealthy Argentine boys tended to sexually exploit the family mucama, or servant girl, and Guevara was no exception. Anderson tells of a cousin who once “watched in astonishment from his place at the dining table through the open doors leading to the kitchen as Ernesto had quick sex with the muchama on the kitchen table, directly behind their aunt’s unsuspecting back.” His treatment of his first wife, Hilda Gadea, highlights his mistreatment of women, which was well-known to those around him. Guevara used her connections to revolutionaries like Castro, married her reluctantly once she was pregnant, and then, following the Cuban Revolution, traded in Hilda in for his new, younger wife, Aleida.
Guevara treated his fellow freedom fighters brutally. He would deny his men the personal comfort of writing a diary even though he kept his own. He often held tribunals where he would execute his own guerrilleros if he questioned their loyalty to the revolution, labeling them “counterrevolutionaries.” These served as models for Guevara’s tribunals at a prison called La Cabaña. The New Republic has described the events at the prison as “one of the darkest periods of the revolution,” where an estimated 200 men were killed without any kind of due process for fighting against the revolution. Anderson wrote in his biography that Guevara “acquired a reputation for a cold-blooded willingness to take direct action against transgressors from the revolutionary norms.”
Guevara is perceived as a revolutionary icon, and serves as powerful symbol for many young progressives. But he was cruel and militantly dogmatic in ways that should make the left squirm. The fascination with him is understandable; he was a charismatic figure that believed in something so much that he was willing to devote his entire life to it. Although we live in a post-Cold War world, where socialism has been widely discredited, the desire to make life better for the working man is still an admirable goal. The discussion of Guevara is still divisive and complicated, years after his death, and it should be.
Kay Steiger is an associate editor of CampusProgress.org.
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Che Guevara shirts do serve a sort of useful function… a very convenient shorthand for knowing whose political opinions you’ll never have to take seriously.
Great write-up, by the way. I knew Che was a war criminal, didn’t realize he was also a bigot and a rapist.
— Joe - Oct 12, 04:40 PM - #Excellent article and perspective. One of the most frustrating and difficult aspects of our generation is the fact that they jump on bandwagons and fail to follow through to educate themselves on the issues. This was a really nice approach to a complicated and hirtorically-rich issue. Thanks.
— Heather - Oct 12, 05:07 PM - #sorry – not Joseph Lenin – that was Stalin
— Kelly - Oct 12, 05:30 PM - #That kind of authoritarianism is the inevitable conclusion to an ideology based on taking control of the state and using it to reshape society (and by extension, people) by force.
That’s also why some of the most inspiring revolutions and radical movements in the past 20 or so years have been ones that aren’t even interested in seizing state power – look at everything from the Zapatistas to the anti-globalization movement to the Argentinian cooperative movement.
Sorry Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Stalinists, Castroists, etc.: you had your chance, and you all blew it.
— Patrick - Oct 12, 05:38 PM - #Jon Lee Anderson’s work – which appears to be a primary source of information for this piece – should be taken with a grain of salt. Readers may recall his article published in the summer of 2006 (Atlantic?) where he was convinced that Cuba would simply fall apart once Fidel Castro was gone. Fidel went under the knife a week later, and more than a year later no one continues to make such predictions.
But on the subject of Che Guevara Anderson is only one of several biographers and while he has some valid perspectives his book, for one, is quite ahistorical when it comes to Cuba. Lines like “Anderson tells of a cousin who…” would furthermore be hearsay to any serious researcher, and there is little in the great body of work on Guevara that suggests a life filled with disrespect towards women, quite the contrary.
Word’s like “Che’s tribunals” meanwhile negate fact that a social revolution, ultimately involving millions of people, took place in Cuba. Che in fact was in charge of La Cabana fortress, but did not “preside” over the trials, which were institutional in nature, with courts, attorneys, prosecutors, convictions and acquittals. Moreover, the outgoing regime was universally recognized for its brutality, which directly affected thousands of people and which resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people. Cuba has had its problems, but there is simply no way one can compare the new and old regimes in this regard. The trials were even deemed as “necessary bloodletting” – albeit in a very condescending way – by none other than John Foster Dulles. The US had no problem with them until that point in time that CIA assets began to be tried and imprisoned or executed. There were plenty of people in Cuba who welcomed the trials and the executions, and then later left and became some of the most vociferous opponents of the Cuban government.
Executions of combatants in combat situations for infractions and disloyalty have been a norm of warfare for years. As a military commander, was Che any worse or better than others in this regard? We can say that we are against application of the death penalty, period. This is my own personal belief. But to lay this on the Cubans or on Che Guevara in the contexts mentioned in this piece is quite ahistorical. (It is also quite ironic for anyone in the United States to pontificate on this while continuing to allow our federal and state governments to continue routinely executing people!) If one looks at things historically, instead of freeze-framing that which took place 50 years ago as if it were today, then judging a Che Guevara in this regard becomes a bit more complicated proposition.
Reynaldo Arenas, meanwhile (and this is something of a sidebar here but was raised in the piece) did not die at the hands of any Cubans, but rather of AIDS in New York some years after he left the island. Gays were persecuted following the Cuban revolution, before the Cuban revolution, throughout Latin America, and in the United States (hey, it seems that LGBT persecution is still alive and well here!). Guevara really has little to do with the situation confronting LGBT persons in Cuba, and perhaps from another angle it would surprise people that transgendering medical procedures, as well as hormones and needed drugs, are provided to Cuban citizens today free of charge, to give just one example of where the gestalt of LGBT rights may or may not be in Cuba today. The story of the LGBT community in Cuban history is much more complicated than what is presented by a single writer such as Arenas, and such conditions can hardly be attributed to a foreigner who came to live there for a less-than ten year period of time in the 1950s and 60s.
There is plenty more in this piece that I could comment on but I’ll limit myself to Che’s motives to leave Cuba. The guy was from Argentina and his “dream” throughout his life was to address conditions in Latin America, as this piece would suggest. In that respect, Cuba was something of a sidebar, if also a great source of training and I would imagine inspiration for him.
Rightfully or wrongfully – like many others throughout Latin America, including thousands who had grown up as activists and organizers within the electoral arena – Guevara assumed that there was no other way to work for social justice then through armed action because the governments of the regions left no room for the full participation of the protagonists of social justice. Guevara also assumed – rightfully or wrongfully like many others throughout the region – that a broadly applicable model for guerrilla warfare had been developed in Cuba. Guevara may in fact have not relished his work in Cuba in the early 1960s – this is unclear at best and Anderson’s treatment sheds little more than hearsay on the particular subject (my reaction to such arguments is, in the scheme of things who cares?) But more importantly, Anderson exhibits little in his book about that period of Che’s life when, among other things, he introduced cost accounting practices into the Cuban economy and pushed for the use of wage incentives, making it clear that the Cuban government could not be utopian in its outlook and expect to move the island’s economy in a positive direction. His approach was almost Keynesian and would be considered quite rational by many economists. This is one of the most ironic items in the historical treatment of Guevara, because there is plenty of evidence that he was in fact less utopian and more pragmatic than his Cuban counterparts during that period of time!
But whether or not everything Guevara did was “right” or “wrong” in this regard, or regardless of whether or not he was somehow disillusioned with Cuba, it is certain that he expressed a strong desire to return to the continent. This existed before he ever set foot in Cuba and was in fact greatly influenced by what he experienced first hand in Guatemala in 1954 – a series of events that as much as the Cuban Revolution and certainly as much as Che’s existence and anything he may have said served to push many people and political parties throughout the continent to the left and towards a stridently anti-US position. The CIA-organized overthrow of the democratically-elected Guatemalan government, and the inability of that government to defend itself militarily is not mentioned at all in this piece and it was arguably the most important single post-World War II event affecting US-Latin American relations.
While the tactics are different, the political will generated by that and other events such as the similar overthrow of the elected Allende government is very much on display today in Latin America. Today’s “name” protagonists – be they Evo Morales or Sub-comandante Marcos or Lula or Hugo Chavez – still work in the name of social justice, to say nothing of the millions of people who comprise the social movement organizations and electorates of the region. To these people, it is Che’s vision of social justice and his uncompromising effort to attain it that remain his legacies in Latin America, much more so than a specific ideology or set of strategies to which he professed partisanship during his lifetime.
— Louis - Oct 12, 07:00 PM - #Great article. I completely agree with Joe’s comment. Che shirts actually hurt the progressive movement by pointing out how eager some people are to embrace an icon without knowledge of the historical context.
— Ian - Oct 12, 07:34 PM - #Che was a cold-blooded killer. When will liberals stop glorifying (or equivocating on) known killers, Louis?
— Simon - Oct 12, 08:15 PM - #good article – but it was Vladimir Lenin, not Joseph Lenin.
— Dave - Oct 13, 10:50 AM - #You know, it’s always easy for the privileged of the West to look down on third world revolutionaries.
News flash — you can’t do things the way college students in America would like them to do. If Che had put on a peace t-shirt and asked the fascists nicely to let the peasants live with dignity, he would’ve been dead immediately.
— Zaid - Oct 13, 02:52 PM - #Campusprogress.org has invented a new revolutionary: Joseph Lenin. Who is this Joseph Lenin? When did he live? What is his contribution to society? (Seen on this web page: http://campusprogress.org/opinions/2018/che-lives-on-a-t-shirt)
— Raff Ruff - Oct 13, 04:49 PM - #Now, that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, he was quite a fellow. Known as Lenin (not the Joseph kind of Lenin), he actually made quite a mark on history. I could go on and on, but — well — you can look all this up in the history books and on the web.
nice article kay. there’s a piece in this week’s economist arguing the same basic point as you – that che has become a marketing icon and the people who flock to it seem to have no idea what the man stood for and why they might not have liked him all that much – but bring in some other interesting anecdotes to show it. was nice to see the “kay touch” though (big ups to gender equality)
— zach marks - Oct 14, 12:51 AM - #You beat The Economist to this by a day: http://economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9968985
— Ben Regenspan - Oct 15, 01:52 AM - #There’s a difference between Communism and Socialism. Cuba is Communist. France is pretty much Socialist. As far as I know, the French are doing fine. Statements like “Socialism has been widely discredited” are fundamentally flawed. You can’t discredit one movement based on the flaws of another.
— lucky - Oct 15, 04:42 AM - #Here’s a great short article on the commodification of revolutionary movements:
http://www.racewire.org/archives/2007/10/revolutionary_style.html
— Tanya Paperny - Oct 15, 11:43 AM - #(Poet and novelist Reynaldo Arenas, who included descriptions of his openly gay lifestyle in his writings, was killed as the result of the government’s prosecution of gays.)
Do you mean exiled? Arenas died of AIDS in 1990 in the US
— factual errors - Oct 16, 02:26 PM - #““News flash — you can’t do things the way college students in America would like them to do.”“
O RLY? Chile’s economic reforms under Pinochet have so far gotten the best results out of all approaches in Latin America.
Unless you’d like to argue that all that violence he committed was really necessary to push his economic reforms through, I’d argue that something close to what I, an “American college student” would like — Chilean-style economic reform with less violence in bringing it about — is quite possible.
— Joe - Oct 17, 09:32 AM - #“O RLY? Chile’s economic reforms under Pinochet have so far gotten the best results out of all approaches in Latin America.”
That’s really a joke. Why don’t you actually do your reading? Most of the population fell into poverty. You must be some friedmanite social liberal who doesn’t understand poverty.
— Zaid - Oct 20, 01:04 AM - #What is Campus Progress? Today’s version of the National Student Association? Citing Alva Varga Llosa as an expert on Che Guevara would be like citing James Dobson on the National Organization for Women. Llosa is a long-time rightwing ideologue (just like his father, the Peruvian novelist), who now runs a thinktank out of the Independent Institute, which has a bunch of dubious people on its staff, including S. Fred Singer—the well-known global warming skeptic. Frankly, Che Guevara’s reputation will remain intact no matter the mud slung at him by Ms. Steiger. As an offshoot of the Center for American Progress, I imagine that she has far more to atone for than Che Guevara. The politicians backed by this Democratic Party think-tank have been George W. Bush’s “soft cop” for the past 6 years or so and the American people are finally waking up to the con game that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. By comparison, Che Guevara was Mother Teresa.
— Louis N. Proyect - Oct 25, 02:01 PM - #War-Junkie Worshipers
Those who live to shoot and kill are really just one man:
Bonaparte and Patton, Alexander and his clan
Curtis Lemay, good ole Che, and the Son of Sam
Killers one and all. Why can’t you understand?
An appetite for murder isn’t something one should tout
Don’t tell me that their cause was just. That ain’t what it’s about
‘Twas not for love of country Patton killed so many Krauts
Had he been born a German, he’d have been a Nazi lout
It’s always a mistake to worship human beings
But idolizing killers is way beyond obscene
Actors, barons, rock stars, billionaires and queens
Should suffice for grownups who act like love-struck teens
Historians and novelists and tv talking heads
— eat irish oatmeal - Oct 26, 02:59 PM - #Reenactors and war-wankers who hail the “happy dead”
Are so quick to overlook so many who have bled
Perhaps they should revere blessed peacemakers instead
its not surprising that amercans who are unable to defeat the legacy of Che or defeat the love that the people of cuba have for him and for the revolution which has given them a much better life than america, despite your sanctions, that you people have to stoop so low as to run this hate campaign with malicious stuff about che.
lets not forget your own infamous presidents and the american way of life in general.
at least che sacrificed the best years of his life, fighting for the dignity and equality of people in Latin America and Africa, both coutries that the United States has abused and exploited. Maybe you should spen your money and time investigating that instead of ches sex life.
nandita
— nandita rao - Nov 21, 06:07 AM - #