Of Guerrillas and Gorillas

CARRERA, ANTONIO DE LA

Of Guerrillas and Gorillas Che Guevara: The Failure of a Revolutionary By Leo Sauvage Prentice-Hall. 282 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Antonio de la Carrera Former member, 26th of July Movement, and...

...For the others were Ro-gelio Garcia Lupo, whom Sauvage describes as "one of the most pro-Castro writers in Argentina," and Salvador Allende Gossens, the late Chilean Marxist leader...
...His concept of justice, however, is not the democratic ideal of equality for all...
...Of this, Sauvage comments...
...Western Fidelistas began to lose faith when Castro approved of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, an event discussed in the book...
...He would have pushed aside the tin crown imposed on him by so many devout followers or cynical politicians and the plastic mythology erected around him by so many swindlers or idiots, fakers and demagogues...
...Despite the attempt of some of his admirers to present him as an "anarcho-syndicalist," Guevara's devotion to dogma and orthodoxy was such that he could write a complimentary introduction to a pamphlet by Otto Kuusinen, the Finnish quisling...
...and, finally, self-education, the procedure whereby the individual, on his own, succeeds in maintaining his place in the new society...
...When Castro's propagandists found that Juan de Onis, then the Latin America correspondent of the New York Times, was among the three people Rojo thanked in his acknowledgements for "help and advice," they immediately labeled him a faithful agent of imperialism...
...In a chapter sarcastically entitled "The Second Liberation of Latin America," Sauvage develops what could be called "The Myth of the Good Gorilla" ("gorilla" being a derogatory term for a military dictator in Spanish...
...and (3) all survive in such a society by learning how to toe the line...
...If there is an untouchable in the international revolutionary hagiarchy, it is Ernesto Guevara...
...He extolled "hatred as an element of the struggle...
...There are many in North America and Europe who still do not seem to understand the importance of this distinction...
...Not only did he praise the Soviet Union on innumerable occasions, but he called the old Communist party of Cuba "the party of the workers" and was shocked to hear the head of the labor arm of the 26th of July Movement refer to the old Communists as "Stalinists...
...In Guevara's last essay, "Socialism and Man in Cuba," and in his "Message to the Tricontinental," Sauvage finds sufficient evidence to establish that the heralded "romantic" was a dogmatist of the first order...
...Moreover, Sauvage reminds us, Che was "a warrior and not only a guerrilla...
...Not long ago, a popular song titled "Che" became a hit in France...
...This gambit is being used, Sauvage fears successfully, as a smoke screen to obscure the real issues and to postpone the eradication of the evils that have retarded Latin America's material and social progress...
...To smooth over the discrepency with Castro's decline, Sauvage points out, a new myth has been created: "If Che had lived," he would have protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the arrest of Padilla, etc...
...The fact that one of them was dead (Humberto Sori Marin), and two others had been in prison for several years (Major Huber Matos and David Salvador), did not mitigate his abuse...
...Rather, it is a revolutionary expedient, unhesitatingly imposed on those who differ with his point of view...
...To circumvent the charge that the system he envisions may lead to "the subjugation of the individual to the state," Guevara idealizes such a state and its ruling party, "assigning to the revolutionaries in power . . . almost supernatural virtues...
...The fact that de Onis had been in Cuba several times without ever writing a single line contrary to Castro was of no avail...
...In attacking such notions, Sauvage pays due homage to George Orwell and his exposure of the British Left's inability to take a realistic view of the Soviet Union in the late '40s...
...at the same time, it was necessary to expunge the other two sinners, equally linked to the author, because attacking them would have nullified the desired propaganda point...
...When Ovando seized power from a constitutional regime in 1969, his first act was to neutralize Left-wing criticism by nationalizing the properties of Gulf Oil in Bolivia—whereupon he was absolved of the coup, of Che's death, of everything...
...If the charge against de Onis was unfair, the exclusion from blame of the other two named by Rojo betrayed a characteristic double-standard...
...At various points he cites Che as "a man of principles," "truly courageous," "a man of his word," and "faithful to his convictions...
...A similar mystery surrounds Guevara's sudden disappearance in Cuba after his return on March 14, 1965, from a tour abroad...
...And New Yorkers will recall the pornographic Off Broadway play, Che...
...When Sauvage finishes with this scheme, Guevara's formula looks like: (1) the individual is brainwashed...
...observing at the outset that John Gerassi has acclaimed it as "one of the great documents in the history of socialism...
...To many who followed Cuban affairs closely, there was no question that his vanishing was due to a major disagreement with Castro...
...He takes as an example General Alfredo Ovando Candia, who was the head of Bolivia's Armed Forces at the time of Che's death and presumedly issued the order to kill him...
...This effort suffered a major setback in 1968 with the publication of Ricar-do Rojo's My Friend Che, which revealed the quarrel was so serious that Che sent a letter by hand to his mother warning her not to go to Cuba "for any reason whatever," and that his wife in Cuba was unable to reach him with the message that his mother was dying...
...He concludes that "the arrogant and inhuman totalitarianism which Orwell fought was the 'socialism' advocated" by Che...
...In the process, Sauvage draws a parallel between Trotsky and Guevara that is interesting not only for the similarity in their views but for Isaac Deutscher's observation that "there was hardly a single plank in Trotsky's program of 1920-1921 which Stalin did not use during the industrial revolution of the '30s...
...He loved the life of the soldier...
...Accordingly, in his Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria, published in 1963, he disparages the men who fought with distinction against Batista but who later opposed the imposition of a Communist system on Cuba...
...Instead, he was branded "an agent of the OA"—standard procedure for discrediting a source of unwanted information...
...It was further intensified by the arrest and forced confession of the poet Heberto Padilla in April 1971, a move that drew numerous letters of protest from prominent intellectuals...
...Guevara's last letter to his children is often quoted by his idolaters, particularly the passage where he urges them to "be capable of feeling deep inside any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world...
...correspondent for Le Figaro and author of L'Autopsie du Castrisme, Sauvage has closely followed the Cuban revolution from its early days in the Sierra Maestra...
...That is the crucial difference between the Cuban uprising, where Castro was seen as fighting for democracy and agrarian reform, and the guerrilla wars that have been waged since then...
...We have here a classic illustration of the way the totalitarian mind functions: !t became convenient to smear Rojo by linking him with an American correspondent, so that was done...
...Sauvage's Che is a ruthless man capable of employing "systematic terrorism" against peasants, and of rewriting history when it served his purposes...
...Despite his total opposition to Guevara's avowed ideology, Sauvage does hold him in high regard as a person...
...Indeed, in place of the fair and independent revolutionary some have portrayed, Sauvage puts together a picture of Che as the militant fanatic who "does not miss a single propaganda cliche" in spewing the official party line...
...Though an atheist, he is one of the Catholic Left's most venerated saints...
...Scornful of the ignorance, superficiality, wishful thinking, hypocrisy, and outright bad faith of the many who have romanticized it, he stands in awe of no one as he storms the entrenched positions of Leftist ideologues...
...Nonetheless, since Che's death Castro's supporters have sought to dispel the belief that such a split ever occurred...
...From his Diary and the numerous photographs he took, it is evident that Guevara wanted his activities to be known...
...As Sauvage shows, the only way Che could have enlarged his forces was by publicizing his presence in Bolivia...
...Sauvage rejects this Utopian vision as "not much different from the ancient philosophy of enlightened despotism...
...He loved the sight of weapons...
...Consequently, de Onis was barred from Cuba while Allende continued to be praised as a great revolutionary hero...
...He was dishonest enough to ignore the Soviet invasion of Hungary, while condemning the "landing of North American troops in Lebanon...
...When the Hungarian Communist party criticized him for irresponsibility, he exploded, "How I would like to gain power just to unmask the cowards and lackeys of every kind and rub their snouts in their excrement...
...Disillusionment grew with his mismanagement of the Cuban economy and the failure of his sugar plan...
...In the end he sums up: "Che Guevara was not an ordinary man...
...Guevara, meanwhile, continues to be eulogized in countless books and in poems by Robert Lowell in the U.S...
...While his analysis is undoubtedly correct as far as it goes, it overlooks what in my opinion is the more basic reason for the collapse of all the post-Castro revolutionary movements in Latin America: the fact that the insurgents have had to identify themselves as Communists...
...Returning to the Guevara myth, Sauvage devotes an entire chapter to Che's last essay, "Socialism and Man in Cuba...
...Sauvage, unlike too many others who have spoken with seeming authority on the subject, carefully examines Guevara's own writings and speeches as well as the record of his actions...
...Certainly, he sent Debray away with the specific mission of giving his campaign world-wide publicity...
...the indirect education flowing from the masses to the individual...
...He went on to become one of Latin America's "progressive" military rulers, a group that is getting to be a plague...
...until he too was overthrown the following year...
...Sauvage presents Guevara as an advocate of "an unrelenting totalitarian 'socialism,' a 'socialism' without liberty and without humanity, where there could be no talk of either thaw or spring...
...Rojo, who was a firm supporter of Castro, subsequently endured vicious attacks from the Cuban press, but Sauvage records that not a single one of his points was refuted...
...The decision to zero in on Guevara is the result of Sauvage's recognition that although Fidel Castro's mystique is on the wane, Che's remains in full bloom...
...Reviewed by Antonio de la Carrera Former member, 26th of July Movement, and secretary to President Manuel Urrutia Leo Sauvage's new study of Che Guevara is a serious attempt to expose and explode the myths that have come to surround the guerrilla leader and the movement he was a part of...
...If "Socialism and Man in Cuba" is one of the great documents in the history of socialism, Sauvage argues, "Then the history of socialism will have to resign itself to include the most cynical justifications of gutless servility...
...And he was arrogant and authoritarian enough to call the Bolivian campesinos "little animals" who have to be tracked down "in order to speak to them...
...Sauvage shows that by playing the role of the "good gorilla," the military oligarchy is transferring responsibility for the sorry state of most of the Hemisphere from its own shoulders, where it belongs, to the North American companies that came onto the scene to fill the vacuum created by the mismanagement, incompetence, exclusiv-ism, apathy, and selfishness of those who have ruled the region for generation after generation...
...Guevara, of course, not only had to fight for Communism, he had to carry with him the dismal record of the Castro revolution...
...But he does not seem very Christ-like after Sauvage quotes him on the subject of hatred...
...a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine...
...this was no less true, years later, of the relationship between Guevara and Castro...
...The Russian myth eventually collapsed but the Cuban myth took its place," he notes, adding that "Che's share in that myth is now larger than ever because more and more 'intellectuals of the Left' are wavering in their unconditional allegiance to Castro and need a substitute...
...and Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the USSR...
...As a U.S...
...Before enshrining Che as a dead hero, Castro kept him waiting, alive, in the tomb of the unknown soldier...
...In both cases, the well-being of the people, if not the birth of the new man, depends upon the will—the good will—of an aristocracy...
...Yet Castro refused to disclose Che's whereabouts until his death in October 1967...
...According to Che's essay, he points out, the "new man" that the Socialist revolution has the duty to create would be molded through the direct education of the individual by the state...
...2) the brainwashed further brainwash each other...
...He loved the battle...
...Regis Debray, the French revolutionary theoretician, has remarked that Guevara "brought to mind, irresistibly, the image of Christ...
...Che Guevara was not always human...
...Then he focuses on the plight of the common man in Communist Cuba, demonstrating that while Che endorsed "moral incentives" he also supported punitive measures, such as lower earnings for those who did not fulfill their quotas, the establishment of labor camps for uncooperative workers, and the like...
...Most recently, it reached a climax with Castro's firm and unqualified support of the USSR's position visa-vis China, and of the Arab stand against Israel...
...Turning to the Bolivian debacle that ended in Guevara's death, Sauvage joins most other observers in attributing the guerrillas' failure principally to their inability to attract local peasants to their ranks...
...He was sometimes a tragic figure...

Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 7


 
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