directed by Richard Dindo. Produced in France/Switzerland, 1994;

94 min.

Richard Dindo's movie about the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia led by Ernesto Che Guevara, which has been shown extensively at movie theaters in the United States and other countries over the last two years, presents a caricature of the Argentine-born revolutionary and his political course. It is part of a propaganda offensive by the enemies of the Cuban revolution to use the 30th anniversary of the combat in Bolivia by Che and his comrades to divide Guevara from the Cuban revolution and its central leadership and smear his legacy.

Ernesto Che Guevara, one of the great communist leaders of the 20th century, was the product of the Cuban revolution. In 1955 Fidel Castro recruited Che to the Rebel Army that he was organizing in Mexico. After graduating from medical school in 1953, Che had set off to travel the Americas. While in Guatemala a year later, he became involved in political struggle, supporting the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz against the CIA's eventually successful attempts to overthrow it. He then escaped to Mexico, where he soon joined Fidel Castro and other Cuban revolutionaries of the July 26 Movement seeking to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in the Caribbean island.

In December 1956 Guevara was part of the expedition that landed in Cuba aboard the yacht Granma to begin the guerrilla struggle. Originally the troop doctor, Guevara became a commander of the Rebel Army. As he fought alongside Castro and other combatants in the Sierra Maestra he grew to be an outstanding military and political leader. Workers and peasants in Cuba through the revolutionary war of 1956-58 took power, made a socialist revolution, and established the first free territory in the Americas and defended it against the murderous empire to the north.

Following Batista's fall on Jan. 1, 1959, Guevara became one of the central leaders of the new workers and farmers government. He held a number of posts, including president of the National Bank and minister of industry, and frequently represented Cuba internationally.

In early 1965, Guevara resigned his government posts and responsibilities and left Cuba in order to return to South America to help advance the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles that were sharpening in several countries. Along with a number of volunteers who would later join him in Bolivia, Che went first to the Congo where he aided the anti-imperialist movement founded by Patrice Lumumba. From November 1966 to October 1967 he led a guerrilla movement in Bolivia against that country's military dictatorship that was backed by Washington. Wounded and captured by the Bolivian army in a CIA-organized operation on Oct. 8, 1967, he was executed the following day.

Che died in Bolivia in 1967 fighting to extend the free territory to the southern cone of the continent. His actions exemplify the internationalism of the Cuban revolution, and the Cuban communist leadership continues on the same course to this day.

The Bolivian Diary movie gives a different picture, closer to a caricature than a real life portrait. The film discards the Cuban revolution, abstracts Che and makes him into some kind of a romantic, naive, and a good-hearted military man that peasants in Bolivia would not and could not understand.

Produced in a documentary style, Dindo's movie has little to do with the facts or an accurate portrayal of the guerrilla movement in Bolivia. At the outset, the narrator sets the political frame of the film. He states that in February 1965 Che made a speech in Algiers allegedly "criticizing the socialist camp for exploiting the Third World countries, thus collaborating with Western imperialism." Earlier you hear the narrator saying that Che was opposed to the policy of peaceful coexistence because it allowed "the Russians and Americans to divide up the world," putting words in Che's mouth.

When Che returns to Havana from a trip in Africa "Castro and Che spent the next two days behind closed doors. No one knows what goes on between the two men or exactly what it is they discussed." The narrator continues, "Nevertheless a week later Che submits his resignation to the Ministry. From that moment on he will never again be before public eye." The implication is clear and it is the same theme that the Hollywood film Che pushed in the late 1960s, where Omar Sharif played Che. That Sharif movie was a crude "cold-war" imperialist production. Dindo's movie has a left veneer, but conveys the same message regardless of writer's and director's intentions.

The rest of the film includes scenes of the locations where Che and his comrades moved along the mountains of Bolivia, selected quotes from Che's Bolivian Diary and interviews with some of the peasants who had come across the guerrillas.

One peasant remembers the guerrillas as very polite, saying they paid for what they took, "and they said that they wanted to transform the country, introduce communism, and that would be good for us." Another peasant recalled one of the combatants with Che, Inti Peredo, gave a speech to a group of peasants, saying "we have brought you together so that you understand that we are not bad people. We are fighting for the poor and the dispossessed." Meanwhile, the camera pans across a photo of peasants, pausing for a rather long time on each face who just stares, giving the impression that the words have fallen on deaf ears.

A peasant woman tells Che "they say you take things from the peasants without paying them," to which Che supposedly responds, "That is not true, seņora, the peasants have betrayed us. We are fighting for the poor, for humble people. But they have never helped us." Gloom and resentment permeates the film, not the combatants' determination to fight against great odds as they did, and the leadership capacity, and strategic thinking of their commander that reading of Che's entire Bolivian Diary conveys. The movie portrays toilers as victims, lacking the capacity to organize and fight.

Quotes from Che's Bolivian Diary are usually taken out of context. For example, disagreement with Mario Monje, general secretary of the Communist party of Bolivia, is portrayed in the movie falsely as a personal power struggle on who was going to be the military commander of the movement. And there is no mention of the fact that the leadership of the Bolivian CP sabotaged the guerrilla movement.

The disagreements between Guevara and Monje were not personal, but were based on fundamentally divergent political strategies. Che was fighting to emulate the Cuban socialist revolution, and the Stalinist leadership of the Bolivian CP practiced class collaboration and looked the other way to find possibilities to reform capitalism.

Che's strategic prognosis of the Latin American revolution was confirmed shortly after his murder by the Bolivian generals after consultation with Washington. This is elaborated by Mary-Alice Waters in her introduction to Che's Bolivian Diary. Mass struggles broke out in Bolivia in 1970, in Argentina 1969 with a semi-insurrection in the working class city of Co'rdoba, and rising working-class and peasant militancy in Chile that carried the Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende into presidency in 1970. But a conscious revolutionary leadership that could lead the workers and peasants on a continental scale remained absent.

Finally, the film belittles Che's participation in the liberation battles in Africa, and says in passing that he went there "to participate in an obscure liberation battle in the former Belgian Congo." That is not how liberation fighters assessed it. Nelson Mandela, who was in an apartheid prison at the time, spoke on this point a quarter century later, at a rally of tens of thousands in Matanzas, Cuba. Mandela acknowledged the impact of the contributions made by the "Great Che Guevara" and said that Che's revolutionary actions in Africa "were too powerful for any prison censors to hide from us."

After Che's death Cuban revolutionists continued to fight shoulder to shoulder with workers and peasants in Africa in their struggle for liberation. Over a span of 15 years several hundred thousand Cuban volunteers fought alongside the Angolan government forces and defeated the invading armies of the South African apartheid regime, the final blow being dealt to them at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in early 1988.

Referring to this victory in the same speech in Matanzas, Mandela said, "It is unparalleled in African history to have another people rise to the defense of one of us."

That is also how the conscious workers in industrialized countries and the oppressed peoples of the East saw the Russian revolution, early in the century. The internationalism of the Bolsheviks in Lenin's time and Cubans today are not isolated episodes in history, but are linked by the line of march of the working class for power. Che is part of that continuity. And a new generation of young fighters coming into politics around the world look to Ernesto Che Guevara as an internationalist revolutionary to emulate.

They will find distortions and slanders in Dindo's film. Reading what Che wrote himself in the Bolivian Diary, as well as Guevara's Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War: 1956- 58, Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla': With Che Guevara in Bolivia 1966-68 by Cuban brigadier general Harry Villegas - all published by Pathfinder - will provide an accurate picture of the Cuban revolution and the Bolivia campaign from the mouths of the combatants.  
 
 
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