OUR COMMON CAUSE: Che's face still stirs rage on injustice

January 26, 2005
Issue 

The image of Che's face — of indignation, of determination, of strength yet intelligence and purity, with piercing eyes — is the most reproduced image of the 20th century. Millions wear it on T-shirts; capitalism ironically uses it to sell lip balm and vodka. Argentine soccer star Maradona has it tattooed on his arm. Che flags flutter in Palestine and when I went to Athens I bought a Che scarf.

Che is unique. He was a symbol of the radicalisation of the 1960s and also of the 21st century. When I participated in one of the world's largest anti-capitalist protests in Genoa, Italy, in 2001, the most widely worn symbol of the sweaty young radicals was Che.

He is so popular today because millions of people know that he left his family in Cuba and gave up his life for his ideals, whilst most people just gave up their ideals. He fought for the poor and defended the weak. Even after the Cuban Revolution, which Che helped lead, he lived a life of integrity working as a volunteer sugar-cane cutter and accepting no bureaucratic privileges.

Ernesto Guevara (Che was a nickname; it translates to "Hey, you!", the way he would often begin sentences) was born in the small town of Rosario, Argentina, in 1928. He came from a middle-class family. He was an asthmatic, a ravenous reader, devouring Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and he studied medicine.

The majestic and moving film The Motorcycle Diaries, which came out last month, captures the experiences that first got him interested in socialist politics: the meeting with the shivering communist Chilean miners, and his work in the leper colony.

With a single candle providing light, he shared a meal of bread and cheese, and heard the stories of the mining couple. They had spent three months in prison and their comrades had mysteriously disappeared. Che gave them the $15 that he was meant to spend buying a swimming suit for his girlfriend.

Five years after this trip across the spine of Latin America, Che would meet exiled Cubans, like Fidel Castro in Mexico. In November, 1956, 82 combatants set off to launch a guerrilla war against the US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

The voyage was meant to take five days, but took seven. Many of the barbudos — the "bearded ones" as they were later known — got seasick, they landed in the wrong spot, they got shipwrecked, and they had to leave much of their food and ammunition behind. They were ambushed soon after reaching shore. Only 21 of the 82 made it to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra.

By January 1, 1959, Che — with a radical Cuban leadership and millions of peasants and workers — would make a revolution.

Within a few months after the revolution, rents were reduced by 30-50%, racial discrimination was outlawed, land was given to the peasants, and later Texaco and Exxon refineries were nationalised. State resources were poured into health and education.

Over the next few years, Che became head of the national bank, a minister of industry, wrote extensively on economics, and carried out some of Cuba's international work. At 36 he left his family and children and tried to foment revolutions in the Congo and in Bolivia. He was captured and then murdered on October 9, 1967, by the Bolivian military with the help of the CIA.

To stop Che becoming a martyr, his hands were scythed off and he was buried in a secret grave. To prove they had killed Che, the killers debated whether to sever his head and preserve it. In the end they just cut off his hands.

On October 18, 1 million Cubans (from a population of 6 million) attended his wake in Havana. His grave was finally found 30 years later when the author of Che Guevara: a Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson, was told where the body was buried by a retired Bolivian general. In the small town where his body was found is the scrawled graffiti: "Che: Alive as they never wanted you to be."

Che's ideas and actions remain just as relevant today, in a world where 3 billion people earn less than $US2 a day and the US rules. He continues to inspire people across the world who are looking for alternatives to neoliberalism, including the Socialist Alliance in Australia. As long as injustice lives, so does Che.

James Vassilopoulos

[James Vassilopoulos is a member of Socialist Alliance. A version of this article first appeared in the Canberra Times]

From Green Left Weekly, January 26, 2005.
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