The forgotten 50th anniversary

Oct 17, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The latter half of the 1960s and 1970s were the heavy days for aspiring left wing revolutionaries who wanted to save Guyana in the name of socialism. And in those days, these so called revolutionaries had an iconic idol in the Argentine-born revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara.
Che was more popular in those days than Lionel Messi is today. He was an inspiration for those young men and women who wanted a better world for the poor.
Those high ideals which have young left-wing converts in Guyana don jerseys bearing Che’s image, sporting his flowing locks and wearing replicas of his trade-mark beret, have long gone. The man who was lionised as the greatest revolutionary in Latin America has been forgotten and his ideals abandoned by his former leftwing admires in the PPPC and the WPA.
So forgotten and abandoned was Che that on October 9, 2017, the 50th anniversary of his assassination by the CIA, not a whimper was heard in Guyana about Che.
It was on October 8, 1967 that Che, and his ragtag, group of rebels were cornered in the mountains of Bolivia. A farmer had betrayed the group’s position to the Bolivian Army and CIA agents which had led the operation to capture Che.
Che was shot in both legs, but before he could be finished off, he told his captors, “Don’t shoot! I’m Che Guevara – I’m worth more to you alive than dead.”
He was taken prisoner. It was a decision that he would regret. The CIA decided that he should be executed. When told, Che simply said that it was better this way but he should have died in combat.
A scared and frightened soldier, Mario Terán Salaza was given the task of killing Che. The revolutionary noticed the fear in the solider but still urged him on. He told his assassin, “Calm down and take good aim. You’re going to kill a man.”
Che had tremendous faith in the people. He once told a medical conference that, “The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. … Far more important than a good remuneration is the pride of serving one’s neighbour. Much more definitive and much more lasting than all the gold that one can accumulate is the gratitude of a people.”
Che Guevara was an extraordinary human being. In paying tribute to him, nine days after his death, Fidel Castro, his former comrades in arms, said that Che was the type of man who was “difficult to equal and practically impossible to improve upon.”
He said that “Che died defending no other interest, no other cause than the cause of the exploited and the oppressed of this continent. Che died defending no other cause than the cause of the poor and the humble of this earth.”
In recent years, revisionists have tried to disassemble the iconic character of Che. They have tried to spread the idea that Che had major differences with Fidel and the direction which the revolution was taking and that is why he left Cuba to go and fight in the jungles of the Congo and in Bolivia.
Che would have had differences with the direction that the Cuban Revolution had taken following the Bay of Pigs Attack. But Che was totally committed to the Cuban Revolution.
He understood clearly, following the Bay of Pigs Attack, that Cuba could not confront imperialism alone. More Cubas were needed. More Vietnams were needed. Che went back into the battlefields to ensure that these new fronts could have been created to help defeat imperialism.
Che did not depart from the Cuban Revolution. He left so that it could survive. He sacrificed the trappings of office for a life of struggle in the jungle. One his captors said that Che looked like a beggar when he was captured.
Che believed that socialism could not be built purely as an economic system. For him, it involved the creation of a new man. This was something that Walter Rodney also believed. Incidentally, both men were assassinated before they reached the age of 40. The CIA is also believed to have had a hand in the assassination of Rodney.
The ‘new man,’ which Che embodied has not yet emerged. For all the adulation which Che enjoyed during his lifetime and after his death, no one has come near to paralleling the revolutionary virtues which he represented.
On the fiftieth anniversary of his death when the Cuban children were pledging that they wanted to be like Che, many of his so-called admirers in Guyana; simply forgot the golden jubilee of his death.

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