[Marxism] Che Guevara - Myth and reality

[Nikolai Beltov <beltov1895@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've noticed that there has been some discussion of Cuba/Castro and Che Guevara 
on this list, and I'd be interested to know what people think about the 
critique made of them by the communist left, in particular the International 
Communist Current.

We recently published some correspondence with someone who was pro-Che on the 
40th anniversary of his death. The full article is here:


http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2007/che-guevara

The main points we made in reply were:

Is Che Guevara an
example for today's revolutionary youth?...One may idolise the austere "hero" 
of the Sierra
Maestra, the "guerrilla leader" who died a few years later in the mountains
of Bolivia, but in reality, he played the role of doing the dirty work of
placing in power a regime that is communist in name only.

Che Guevara: internationalist?Basically, after
World War II, the world found itself divided into two antagonistic blocs, one
led by America,
the other by the USSR.  "National liberation" proved itself
to be a perfect ideological mystification used to justify the military
mobilisation of populations.   Neither
the working class nor the other exploited classes had anything to gain from
these wars.  They were simply used by the
different bourgeois fractions and their imperialist sponsors.  The division of 
the world into two blocs
after the Yalta accords meant that
any exit from one bloc would result in the entry into the opposing bloc.  And 
Cuba
is the perfect example of this:  this country
went from the corrupt Batista dictatorship, directly under Washington's
thumb, controlled by its secret services and every sort of mafia, into the 
Stalinist
bloc.  Cuba's
history is the tragic epitome of the "struggles for national
liberation" of the last half-century.

Did Che "depart
from the social-imperialist model of the USSR"?...The Cuban missile affair 
showed the leaders
of Stalinist imperialism that they lacked the means to defy the U.S in its own
backyard and that they needed to be prudent in Latin America.  This was a point 
that Guevara and a fraction
of the Cuban leadership refused to understand, to the point of becoming a 
nuisance
not only to the USSR,
but also to their own Cuban friends. From that moment, Che Guevara's destiny
was sealed:  after the disastrous
adventure in Congo,
he ends up alone in Bolivia,
with a handful of comrades in arms, abandoned by the Bolivian CP which, in the
end, lined up with Moscow.  For the more "Muscovite" factions,
the adherents of the "foco" (the Guevara-inspired guerrilla
"theory" of revolution) were a bunch of petty bourgeois adventurers,
"cut off from the masses". 
And for the factions of the CPs who favoured armed struggle, who
critically supported every other movement, the "officials" of the CPs
were coffee-shop revolutionaries, privileged bureaucrats who were also "cut
off from the masses."  For us
left communists, these are two forms of the same counter-revolution, two
variants of the same great lie, that the Stalinist counter-revolution was in
continuity with the October revolution, and that the USSR
was communist.






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