Today, October 9, 1967, marks the day that Latin-American Che Guevara was assassinated in a CIA-backed coup. Many of you have heard of Che Guevara, and if you haven’t you have at least seen his likeness on posters, t-shirts, or on television. After reading this article, you might find that Che Guevara has as much to do with the principles of Pan-Africanism and revolutionary thought as any other figure that you may have heard of.
If one could identify the three reasons for Che Guevara becoming the man that he was, they would be
1. Knowledge: The Guevara home contained more than 3,000 books. His favorite subjects in school included philosophy, mathematics, engineering, political science, sociology, history and archaeology. Years later in this declassified dossier, the CIA noted Guevara’s intelligence and wide range of academic interests, adding that “Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino.” Che was fluent in both Spanish and French, and was literate in English.
2. Political Awareness: Growing up in a family with leftist leanings, Guevara was introduced to a wide spectrum of political perspectives even as a boy. His father would often hold discussion groups in the home with veterans of the Spanish Civil War.
3. Empathy: Very early on in life young Che developed an “affinity for the poor”.
At the age of 20, Che began studies as a medical student at the University of Buenos Aires. While completing his education, he also fulfilled his wanderlust with two treks across South America on motorcycle – travelling 4,500 and then 8,000 miles. This trek exposed Che to a variety of working conditions, and the negative impact that capitalism and white values had on the indigenous workers in places like Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. He was struck by the crushing poverty of the remote rural areas, where peasant farmers worked small plots of land owned by wealthy landlords, and by the political persecution of those who dared to stand up against western democracy.
By the end of his trip, he came to view Latin America not as collection of separate nations, but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide liberation strategy (sound familiar?). His conception of a border-less united Hispanic America sharing a common Latino heritage was a theme that prominently recurred during his later revolutionary activities.
Guevara would write about coming into ”close contact with poverty, hunger and disease”, “inability to treat a child because of lack of money” and “stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment” that forces fathers to “accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident”.
These experiences showed Che that his true path lied not in medicating and giving charity to the poor and exploited, but to leave the realm of medicine, and consider the revolutionary political arena of armed struggle.
Evolution of Revolution
“It is well established that guerrilla warfare constitutes one of the phases of war;
this phase can not, on its own, lead to victory.”
On his travels, Guevara was particularly appalled at the working conditions endured at the United Fruit Company (the same company that Marcus Garvey had worked for and revolted against as a young man). He was encouraged by the efforts of the popular and democratically elected Guatemala President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Guzmán fought to liberate Guatemala from the handful of Western corporations – including United Fruit – that owned all the nations primary electrical utilities, the nation’s only railroad, and the entire banana industry, which was Guatemala’s chief agricultural export industry.
Guzman began with sweeping land reforms (even giving up a large amount of his own land) that gave property to the poor and working class of the country. He also began purchasing military arms from Communist Czechoslovakia, prompting the CIA in the United States to quickly organize a force to overthrow him.
With Guzman overthrown and banished to Mexico, right-wing dictator Carlos Castillo Armas was installed and supporters of Guzman began organizing into militias to take their country back from the west and their puppet dictator. Guevara was one of thousands who picked up arms.
Guevara observed that “The last Latin American revolutionary democracy failed as a result of the cold premeditated aggression carried out by the U.S.A. Its visible head was the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence, was also a stockholder and attorney for the United Fruit Company.”
This overthrow is an excellent example of how bad U.S. interventionist policy actually produces more enemies for the country. The overthrow of the Guzman regime cemented Guevara’s view of the United States as an imperialist power that would oppose and attempt to destroy any government that sought to improve socioeconomic inequality in developing countries – and he was determined to fight back by any means necessary.
In 1955, a Cuban exile introduced Che Guevara to Raul and Fidel Castro, leaders of the 26th of July Movement that aimed to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista - the U.S.-backed military leader of Cuba.
In Che’s mind, this was the fight that he had been waiting for. The revolutionary alliance between Che and Fidel Castro would change the world forever.
Less than one year later, a small group of 82 members of the rebel movement landed in Cuba on board a leaky cabin cruiser with a plan to wage a new type of guerrilla lightning war against Batista’s forces. For two years, the starving, poorly armed, and highly outnumbered rebels fought and won unbelievable victories against Batista’s well-trained and well-funded military.
Using special tactics developed by Che himself, at times fewer than 200 men would fight against and defeat Batista’s army and police force, which numbered between 30,000 and 40,000 in strength. Guevara had seen the importance of radio communication during the overthrow of the Guzman Administration in Guatemala, and so he created the secret Radio Rebelde (Rebel Radio) in February 1958. Radio Rebelde broadcasted news to the Cuban people with statements by the 26th of July movement, and provided communications between the growing number of rebel groups in Cuba.
Guevara proved to be a brilliant military leader, a ruthless tyrant, and a humanitarian all at the same time. Guevara set up factories to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread, taught new recruits about tactics, and organized schools to teach illiterate soldiers and peasants to read and write. At the same time, he was feared for his brutality and ruthlessness – deserters would be chased down and executed without mercy.
On January 1, 1959, Batista’s regime officially came to an end, and Castro’s revolutionary government was installed. While Fidel Castro was most concerned with land reform and cooperative farming, Guevara went to war on illiteracy. Before the 1959 revolution, the official literacy rate for Cuba was between 60–76%. Guevara dubbed 1961 the “year of education”, and mobilized over 100,000 volunteers into “literacy brigades”, who were then sent out into the countryside to build schools, train new educators, and teach the illiterate peasants to read and write. The campaign was “a remarkable success”, raising the national literacy rate to 96% by the program’s completion.
Guevara was also concerned with establishing universal access to higher education. The with his encouragement, the Castro regime introduced affirmative action to the universities. Che announced that the days when education was “a privilege of the white middle class” had ended. He went on to say ”The University must paint itself black, mulatto, worker, and peasant.” If it did not, he warned, the people would break down its doors “and paint the University the colors they like.”
Che Guevara’s Pan-African Connection
Guevara was more than just a sympathizer to the cause of Pan-Africanism and the Black struggle in America, he was an active fighter. In 1964, he addressed the United Nations in general (and the United States in particular) with scathing criticism:
“Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men—how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?”
Guevara believed Africa was imperialism’s weak link and therefore had enormous revolutionary potential.
The Congo had become a hotbed of political activity and was in the midst of what we now call The Congo Crisis (1960–1966) – the period of political turmoil that followed the overthrow and assassination of Patrice Lumumba. As an admirer of the late Lumumba, Guevara declared that his “murder should be a lesson for all of us”.
It was clear in his eyes that the people of Congo were ready for a revolution.
So in early 1965 accompanied by approximately 100 Afro-Cuban soldiers, Che traveled to the Congo to spark a revolution.
While this had all the makings of a successful campaign, Che Guevara failed to take into account Congolese culture. In his book, The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo, Guevara writes; ”the Congolese regarded carrying heavy loads as below their dignity and would wander off, bored, when the Cubans tried to stage ambushes. Superstitious, they relied on ”dawa,” magic potions whipped up by witch doctors, for victory, emptying their magazines into the sky with eyes shut tight.
Worse, he wrote, ”each of our fighters had glumly witnessed assault troops melt away at the moment of combat and throw away precious weapons in order to flee more quickly” . Laurent Kabila, the supposed head of the revolt in Congo, rarely visited his troops on the front-line. While Guevara shivered in torrential rain in filthy huts, doubled over with dysentery and bitten by mosquito, he regularly received reports of Kabila’s drunken binges on the other side of the continent.
Frustrated and disheartened, Che left the people of the Congo to their fate. ”The human element failed. There is no will to fight. The leaders are corrupt. In a word… there was nothing to do. ..we can’t liberate by ourselves a country that does not want to fight.” he wrote in his journal.
Assassination and Legacy
After years of travelling the world and fighting on revolution front lines Che returned to South America in 1966 with the goal of once again organizing a peasant rebellion. Unfortunately, his guerrilla force never numbered more than 50 due to Che’s inability to develop successful working relationships with local leaders in Bolivia.
On October 7, 1967, an informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of Guevara’s guerrilla encampment in the Yuro ravine. On October 8, they encircled the area with 1,800 soldiers, and Guevara was wounded and taken prisoner while leading a detachment. Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson reports Bolivian Sergeant Bernardino Huanca’s account: that a twice-wounded Guevara, his gun rendered useless, shouted, “Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and I am worth more to you alive than dead.”
Thanks to previously declassified CIA documents, we now know that on October 9th, 1967, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was put to death by Bolivian soldiers, trained, equipped and guided by U.S. Green Beret and CIA operatives. His execution remains a historic and controversial event; and thirty years later, the circumstances of his guerrilla foray into Bolivia, his capture, killing, and burial are still the subject of intense public interest and discussion around the world.
As part of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, the National Security Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project is posting a selection of key CIA, State Department, and Pentagon documentation relating to Guevara and his death. This electronic documents book is compiled from declassified records obtained by the National Security Archive, and by authors of two new books on Guevara: Jorge Castañeda’s Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (Knopf), and Henry Butterfield Ryan’s The Fall of Che Guevara (Oxford University Press). The selected documents, presented in order of the events they depict, provide only a partial picture of U.S. intelligence and military assessments, reports and extensive operations to track and “destroy” Che Guevara’s guerrillas in Bolivia; thousands of CIA and military records on Guevara remain classified. But they do offer significant and valuable information on the high-level U.S. interest in tracking his revolutionary activities, and U.S. and Bolivian actions leading up to his death.
Guevara wrote his own epitaph, stating “Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons.”
According to this Time Magazine article written in 1970, “A few minutes before Guevara was executed, he was asked by a Bolivian soldier if he was thinking about his own immortality. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’m thinking about the immortality of the revolution.’ When Sergeant Terán entered the hut, Che Guevara then told his executioner, ‘I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot me you coward! You are only going to kill a man!’
Che was right. Although his mortal remains were resigned to the earth, his revolutionary spirit endures to this day. Every morning in Cuba, school children begin the day by pledging ”We will be like Che.” His image also adorns the $3 Cuban peso. In his homeland of Rosario, Argentina, a 12-foot tall bronze statue of Che has been constructed. Bolivian peasants have canonized Che Guevara as “Saint Ernesto” to whom they pray for assistance. The monochrome graphic of Che’s face, created in 1968 by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, has become one of the world’s most universally merchandised and objectified images in advertising history.
Che Guevara was a rare man – a capable revolutionary, a superior intellect, a dedicated fighter for his causes, and one of the heroes of human history. I think it only appropriate to end this post with Che Guevara’s last words to his children:
Rest in Peace, Che Guevara.