'The True Revolutionary Is Guided by Strong Feelings of Love'
THE AFRICAN DREAM The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo; By Ernesto "Che" Guevara ,Translated from the Spanish by Patrick Camiller; Grove Press: 304 pp., $14.95;
CONFLICTING MISSIONS Havana
By JOHN GERASSI
John Gerassi, a former editor of Time and Newsweek magazine and a correspondent
for the New York Times, is the author of "The Great Fear in Latin America"
and editor of "Venceremos: Speeches and Selec
December 16 2001
Neither terrorism nor the longing for revolution will ever stop, as
long as the people of what was once called the Third World remain convinced
that their misery is the
result of the greed and contempt of the United States. But terrorists
in their desperate and inchoate rage kill innocent people and cannot become
genuine heroes even
to the world's most downtrodden.
Revolutionaries, however, can. Whether they fail or succeed, genuine
revolutionaries often win the hearts of the world's romantic and idealistic,
especially the young,
who admire in them their passionate rejection of an unjust economic
and social order which they insist causes so much hopelessness and needless
death. Ernesto
"Che" Guevara, "probably the most genuine revolutionary leader," as
even Henry Kissinger admitted in his memoirs, inspired such admiration--admiration
that can be
seen still in the banners and T-shirts worn by a younger generation
seeking to protest "globalization."
Two new books open a window on Guevara and his quixotic quest to remake
the world and on his comrades who, like him, were, as he wrote, "willing
to forgo
every comfort to fight for another country" and to follow him into
the worst abysses, from Zaire to Bolivia. In 1965, Che, as he is known
the world over (the
nickname meaning "hey" was given to him by the Cubans because he constantly
used it, as do most Argentines, to call someone, usually accompanied by
vos, "you")
and some of his top aides, veterans of the victorious 1959 revolt against
Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, secretly went to Zaire (then called Congo)
to help the
remnants of the nationalist movement of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba,
who had been murdered with the connivance of Belgian and CIA agents.
In 1967, after Belgian and CIA mercenary armies forced the Cubans back
across Lake Tanganyika into Tanzania, Che, with only 16 of his Congo veterans,
launched a guerrilla operation in Bolivia, hoping to unleash anti-U.S.
wars of liberation throughout South America. Yankee imperialism is like
an octopus, he
explained; its tentacles reach across the globe. "We must cut them
off: create two, three, many Vietnams."
Defeated by 1,800 CIA-trained and CIA-led Bolivian Rangers, Che was
caught wounded but alive in October, tortured then summarily shot through
the heart by a
Cuban veteran of the Bay of Pigs who had become a CIA officer. He was
then displayed bare-chested (neatly patched up so as not to show torture
marks) in the
hope that no more such attempts would ever again be initiated against
pro-U.S. regimes. Instead, Guevara became a quasi-religious symbol of justice
and liberation
to the poor and exploited all over the world and to many of the socially
conscious new generations, then and today. "Be like Che," Fidel boomed
to Habaneros on
the day he announced his death. "May our children be like Che," he
still says today.
Most works published in the United States since his death 34 years ago
scoff at such ludicrous but provocative slogans. Jon Lee Anderson, who
has written the
longest (814 pages) of the spate of recent biographies ("Che Guevara:
A Revolutionary Life"), views the Castro-U.S. rivalry as a tit-for-tat
game and, while admiring
Guevara, cannot take charges of U.S. domination of the Third World
seriously, which makes Che's commitment appear somewhat absurd. Alma Guillermoprieto,
a
courageous Washington Post correspondent in Salvador during its worst
military repressive days, sees Che as a fanatic unable to "back down, admit
defeat." Jorge
Castaneda uses his analytic powers ("Companero: The Life and Death
of Che Guevara") to try to destroy the Che legend as incompatible with
a Mexican middle
class which seeks accommodation, peace and tranquillity. The late Tad
Szulc, once the New York Times' most perspicacious correspondent in Latin
America, feels
that Che failed because he ignored Castro's suggestions ("Fidel: A
Critical Portrait"), though he does admit, as he wrote in the Los Angeles
Times in 1997, that Latin
America is still, as Guevara complained, "torn asunder by hunger, poverty,
disease, injustice and hatred. In this sense, Guevara's offering may be
found in the lessons
of his short life."
During each of his ventures, or shortly thereafter, Che wrote, and Cuba
later published, a detailed memoir about the revolution's goals, tactics,
risks and
achievements. Brutally honest about his own character, he gave his
critics plenty of ammunition with which to condemn his temper, his arrogance
and his misplaced
self-confidence. From his "Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary
War," skeptics could ridicule his assertion that "the true revolutionary
is guided by strong
feelings of love." In his "Bolivian Diary," they picked at his lament
that he did not feel at home--or wanted--in Cuba, abandoning his wife and
children and the fruits of
power for meaningless bravado.
Now, in his "The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War
in the Congo," critics will be able to mock his lack of irony, his talk
of creating a just society
by "rebuilding men's souls" and his conviction that revolutionary soldiers
"cannot be formed in an academy but only in warfare." Written in Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania,
in the weeks after he escaped from Congo in 1964, this diary reveals
Che in all his strengths and weaknesses. He is harsh with his men but harsher
with himself,
intolerant of carelessness but forgiving of mistakes, incapable of
wooing the Congolese into concerted action but always willing to lead his
contingent head first. Cuba
did not publish "The African Dream" until Laurent Kabila, whom Che
had met in 1964 and who decades later toppled the dictator Mobuto Sese
Seko from power,
was assassinated last January. Che had described Kabila as a lazy,
hard-drinking, womanizing opportunist (albeit with great charisma) and
his ragtag forces as
superstitious, incapable of military discipline and too proud to listen
to instructions.
With only one rather useless map of the whole contested area, however,
and none showing the deployment of forces, this memoir has little historical
or military value,
though it contains many psychological insights into Guevara's character.
The battle plans are confusing; the camp sites hard to locate or even imagine;
the
confrontations murky. Even the list of names offered as dramatis personae
fails to explain who was where and who did what. But those details are
mercifully included
in Richard Gott's first-rate introduction, which gives a clear overview
of Congo's bloody history from its 1961 independence from Belgium to the
present and a
step-by-step account of the 160-strong Cuban force which went with
Guevara hoping to end the Belgian-U.S. design upon Congo's vast mineral
wealth. Gott never
underestimates the problems facing Guevara and his men, nor does he
dismiss the CIA's vicious campaign to capture that wealth. His account
dramatically supports
Guevara's warning that neocolonialism "is the most redoubtable form
of imperialism--most redoubtable because of the disguises and deceits that
it involves, and the
long experience that the imperialist powers have in this type of confrontation."
In "Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976,"
Piero Gleijeses brilliantly describes those deceits and disguises, with
all their accompanying
blood and guts and glory. Over the 10 years it took him to research
this book, Gleijeses seemingly tracked down every lead, every participant,
every document on all
sides of the conflicts. His book is a necessary corrective to past
misinterpretations of how and why the Cubans intervened in Africa. He shows
that Anderson's faith
in his CIA sources was naive, that many of Castaneda's "facts" were
wrong or invented, that Guillermoprieto's judgment was flawed and that
Szulc misread Che and
Castro's squabbles.
Gleijeses persuaded the Cuban authorities to open their archives and
even obtained a copy of Che's Congo diary before Che's widow, Aleida March,
edited it for
the American edition and even before it had been published in Havana.
British mercenaries and CIA officers he interviewed speak candidly and
reveal their
arrogance and prejudice, and Cuban survivors describe their fears,
their suffering and their commitment even now to the revolutionary project.
The result is a fascinating account of Cuban involvement in Africa,
starting with Castro's overtures in 1962 to Ben Bella, newly independent
Algeria's first president,
including an account of how the Cubans defeated South Africa's white
elite corps in "Operation Carlota" in Angola in 1975 and ending with how
the Cubans helped
to bring down South Africa's apartheid regime.
But Guevara's diaries are the record more of failure than of success,
and one has to ask whether the citizens of one country want to be led by
strangers from another.
And do their leaders want to be led by such a stranger? The Cubans
never did win the support of Congolese peasants. But Guevara blamed neither
his Congolese
comrades, who had no experience mounting revolutionary war, nor his
men, who couldn't speak Swahili, much less the local dialects. (He took
lessons and tried
hard, but there was never enough time.) He repeatedly complained that
everyone had misjudged how much time it would take to start making progress.
Back in
Havana, he wailed: They thought in terms of months. He had estimated
at least five years. In reality, it would take 30.
Of one thing there can be no doubt: the personal courage and commitment
of Guevara and his men. They were totally committed dedicated revolutionaries.
They
fought under unbelievably adverse conditions in Congo, often going
without food for days at a time, ravaged by malaria, mosquitoes, scorpions,
snakes and
superstitious allies (whose cult forbade them to touch a dead man).
Sixteen of the Cuban survivors of the forlorn African adventure would go
on to join Guevara in his
equally arduous and doomed attempt to generate a continental guerrilla
revolt in Bolivia. Like Guevara, they sometimes got depressed, sometimes
lost their cool,
sometimes wanted to quit, sometimes lost their lives. But they stuck
it out, because, like Guevara, they believed that human beings deserve
a better world--a world
worth fighting for in the face of imperial intransigence. That desire,
however tarnished by acts of terrorism (which Guevara, for one, always
condemned), is an impulse
which cannot be stilled and which yet has the power to impassion people
throughout the world.
For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com/rights