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Vol. 79/No. 14      April 20, 2015

 
(Books of the Month column)
We fight ‘for the cause of
the liberation of humanity’
 
The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for April. It tells the story of the 11-month guerrilla campaign led by Guevara in 1966-67 to forge a continent-wide revolutionary movement of workers and peasants that could win the battle for land and sovereignty and open the road to socialist revolution in South America. The excerpt below is from “A Necessary Introduction,” written by Fidel Castro in June 1968. Copyright © 1994 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY FIDEL CASTRO  
Che was a man never personally interested in posts, leadership, or honors. But he was firmly convinced that revolutionary guerrilla struggle was the fundamental form of action for winning the liberation of the peoples of Latin America, basing this conclusion on the economic, political, and social situation of nearly all Latin American countries. And he strongly believed that the military and political leadership of the guerrilla struggle had to be unified, and that the struggle could be led only from the guerrilla unit itself, not from the comfortable offices of bureaucrats in the cities. So he was not prepared to give up leadership of a guerrilla nucleus that, at a later stage of its development, was intended to develop into a struggle of broad dimensions in South America. And he certainly was not prepared to turn over such leadership to an inexperienced emptyhead with narrow chauvinist views. Che believed that such chauvinism, which often infects even revolutionary elements of various countries in Latin America, must be fought, because it represents reactionary, ridiculous, and sterile thinking.

“And let us develop genuine proletarian internationalism,” he said in his Message to the Tricontinental. “Let the flag under which we fight be the sacred cause of the liberation of humanity, so that to die under the colors of Vietnam, Venezuela, Guatemala, Laos, Guinea, Colombia, Bolivia … to mention only the current scenes of armed struggle — will be equally glorious and desirable for a Latin American, an Asian, an African, and even a European.

“Every drop of blood spilled in a land under whose flag one was not born is experience gathered by the survivor to be applied later in the struggle for liberation of one’s own country. And every people that liberates itself is a step in the battle for the liberation of one’s own people.”

Along these lines, Che believed that fighters from various Latin American countries would participate in the guerrilla detachment, that the guerrilla struggle in Bolivia would be a school in which revolutionaries would serve their apprenticeship in combat. To help him in this task, he wanted to have, together with the Bolivians, a small nucleus of experienced guerrilla fighters, nearly all of whom had been comrades of his in the Sierra Maestra during the revolutionary struggle in Cuba. These were men whose abilities, courage, and spirit of self-sacrifice were known to Che. None of them hesitated to respond to his call, none of them abandoned him, and none of them surrendered.

In the Bolivian campaign Che acted with his proverbial tenacity, skill, stoicism, and exemplary attitude. It can be said that, consumed with the importance of the mission he had assigned himself, Che at all times proceeded with a spirit of irreproachable responsibility. When the guerrilla unit committed an error of carelessness, he quickly called attention to it, corrected it, and noted it in his diary.

Adverse factors built up against him unbelievably. One example was the separation — supposed to last for just a few days — of part of the guerrilla detachment. That unit included a courageous group of men, some of them sick or convalescent. Once contact between the two groups was lost in very rough terrain, this separation continued, and for endless months Che was occupied with the effort to find them. …

It was the ambush in La Higuera — the sole successful action by the army against the detachment led by Che — that created a situation they could not overcome. In that action, the forward detachment was killed and several more men were wounded as they headed, in broad daylight, toward a peasant area with a higher level of political development — an objective not noted down in the diary, but known through the survivors. It was without doubt dangerous to advance by daylight along the same route they had been following for several days, with unavoidable contact with a large number of residents of an area they were passing through for the first time. It was obvious that the army would certainly intercept them at some point. But Che, fully conscious of this, decided to run the risk in order to help El Médico, who was in very poor physical condition. …

Recalling the feat carried out by this handful of revolutionaries touches one deeply. In and of itself, the struggle against the hostile natural environment in which they operated constitutes an insurmountable page of heroism. Never in history has so small a number of men set out on such a gigantic task. Their faith and absolute conviction that the immense revolutionary capacity of the peoples of Latin America could be awakened, their confidence in themselves, and the determination with which they took on this objective — all these give us a just measure of this group of men.

One day Che said to the guerrilla fighters in Bolivia: “This type of struggle provides us the opportunity to become revolutionaries, the highest level of the human species. At the same time, it enables us to emerge fully as men. Those who are unable to achieve either of these two states should say so and abandon the struggle.”

Those who fought at his side until the end became worthy of such honored terms. They symbolize the type of revolutionary and the type of men history is now calling on for a truly difficult task — the revolutionary transformation of Latin America.
 
 
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