Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara by his
Father
By Ermesto Guevara Lynch
Edited and Translated by
Lucía Álvarez de Toledo
(Vintage Books, 350 pages, $14.95 paper)
Young Che is the latest addition to the vast flood of
devotional literature on the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto
(“Che”) Guevara. At first blush, the inexhaustible appetite for
this sort of thing is mystifying. Surely everything that could be
said on the subject has had plenty of time to see the light of day?
It has been a good forty years since Guevara was captured and
executed in Bolivia, fifty since he landed in Cuba with Fidel
Castro to fight his way to power, sixty since he departed his
native Argentina to make his way around Latin America. The
revolution for which he is known (now celebrating—if that is the
right word—its fiftieth year) has reduced Cuba to ruin. No Latin
American country, not even Chávez’s Venezuela, is pursuing his
recipes for social transformation. Paradoxically, Guevara’s star
shines brightest in countries that have never known violent
revolution and are not likely to know it in the future.
The phenomenon of Che nostalgia is now a decade old. It feeds
principally on the end of the Cold War, which allows the figure of
Guevara to be conveniently decoupled from the monstrosity that was
Communism (a process that would have caused him no end of
indignation were he here to see it). Under these circumstances he
becomes merely a generic rebel, a kind of meaningless icon ripe for
an Annie Leibovitz portrait in Vanity Fair. Young people
in what the New York Times likes to call “rich countries”
mindlessly don T-shirts emblazoned with his image; his brand is
even purloined by manufacturers of cheap watches and beer!
Apparently to restore some ideological meaning to his figure,
Guevara’s epigones have been busily at work. The latest
contribution is the volume under review, which is really two books
in one. The first, by the revolutionary’s father, appeared in
Spanish as long ago as 1981 and is available in English for the
first time. The second is a collection of Che’s letters and diaries
beginning in 1950, first written as a medical student roving around
Argentina, and then later as a kind of revolutionary doctor in
Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and finally Guatemala. The last section
deals with Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro, whose rebel band he
famously joined.
These documents are stitched together with a commentary and
notes provided by the editor. Though I have been reading material
on this subject for nearly forty years and have written a fair
amount about it as well, I cannot recall ever hearing of Mme.
Álvarez de Toledo. She appears to be an Argentine lady of very
advanced progressive views living in London, one who imagines that
American readers are so ignorant of history that they need
everything explained to them. The biographical notes instruct us as
to the precise identity of such obscure figures as Karl Marx,
Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, John Foster
Dulles, and Nelson Rockefeller, though not always accurately. She
ends her prologue by boasting that at present “Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela have democratically elected
governments whose policies and ideals are probably closer to
Guevara’s than to those of the United States”—a statement that
blurs crucial distinctions beyond all imagination.
Guevara senior’s “memories” are often revealing, though not
necessarily in the way intended by the editor. The revolutionary’s
parents—one, a Guevara Lynch, the other a De la Serna—were both
from “old” Argentine families, although in both cases they had long
since lost their estates and were forced to labor in the liberal
professions (Guevara senior was an architect). As Karl Marx on one
occasion reminded us, downward mobility is often a generator of
revolutionary sentiment, and in fact both parents were what we
might call parlor pinks. At various points in the narrative it is
obvious that while very left of center politically, the Guevaras
mère et père lived a thoroughly haut-bourgeois
lifestyle (even their home—the actual address is given in the
text—was located in what is still one of Buenos Aires’ smartest
districts). Moreover, according to this account, they were not
reluctant to take advantage of their prestigious social
connections.
Though asthmatic, their son Ernesto Junior grew up with the best
of medical care, spent summers at the ranches of wealthy relatives,
and could count on his parents to bail him out when he got into
trouble. Señor Guevara’s narrative is painful to read. Though
apparently an educated man, he writes with the voice of an agitated
and disturbed 13 year old who has not fully digested the day’s
Daily Worker. Here are some examples:
My son Ernesto had to teach me…the duty of men who fight for
humanity…the enemy was not in Argentina, or Cuba, or Peru, or any
other part of Latin America; the enemy was further away— it was
from where the capitalist elite originates, and from where it sends
its forces against those oppressed people via the heads of
governments who serve their interests.
*****
For the world around us, the fall of Batista should signify the
return to a “democratic” type of government, where the people would
elect their representatives and leaders. Experience has shown us
that it is precisely in this type of government that the greatest
contradictions are hatched.
And the most embarrassing of all:
The United States’ policies of direct interference in Latin
America, in order to avail itself of the natural resources of the
underdeveloped countries of Latin America over the last forty years
[this was written in 1980], may have changed in appearance, but not
in depth. The United States needs the natural resources of the
Latin American continent in order to continue to be the world’s
superpower—today more than ever, in view of the military defeats it
has suffered in Asia, and the fear that these may repeat themselves
in Africa and the Middle East. The present scarcity of energy and
proteins is of great importance for this nation. The Latin American
continent possesses vast oil reserves and enormous mineral wealth,
as well as sufficient land to be able to become the bread-basket of
the world. These are valid reasons for the United States to refuse
to let go of its prey.
If this is what Guevara junior heard around the breakfast table
every, one cannot be surprised at his subsequent ideological
development.
THE SECOND PART OF the book consists of letters and diaries
written by young Ernesto from various points in Latin America, some
of which were found as recently as the 1970s. They make somber and
often tedious reading. Much of the narrative concerns personal
details of a rootless intellectual wandering around with no
immediate focus, someone dwelling as it were in the interstices of
life. Many obvious features of the Latin American environment are
treated as if startling scientific discoveries— for example, that
in Peru and Bolivia there are impoverished Indian populations. Or
that Mexico—far from being a revolutionary state—is run by a clique
of generals in tandem with corrupt businessmen and bought-off
intellectuals. There is also much critical comment about Latin
American politicians, even ones who at the time were regarded as
mildly progressive. Behind the region’s problems, major and minor,
there supposedly lurks the evil United States, which stays awake
nights worrying about how to make things worse for the poor. The
dogmatic intolerance of his statements foreshadows his sanguinary
appetites when in charge of the execution squads at the La Cabaña
fortress in Havana after the triumph of Castro’s revolution.
Guevara in power is of course far less interesting a subject
than the young man morphing into a triumphant revolutionary. What
kind of fascination attaches, after all, to a minister of
industries who produces toothpaste that turns to stone upon being
squeezed from the tube? Moreover, by focusing on the early years,
all kinds of embarrassing questions can be avoided—such as the kind
of regime that Guevara helped install in Cuba, complete with a
censored press, neighborhood spies, and prison camps for
non-conformists, Catholics, or homosexuals. Why dwell on the 16,000
executions or the more than 100,000 Cubans who have been jailed on
ideological and political grounds? Only backward folk who watch Fox
News could possibly be interested in such details.
The most important reason, however, why book publishers and
movie producers seem so fixated on Guevara’s early years is even
easier to explain. For liberals, intentions (real or imagined) are
of greater value than results. In fact, for many of them results do
not matter at all, only stated intentions. (Have you ever tried
discussing rent control with one?) While Ernesto Guevara did not
quite die in time to avoid all historical judgment, by flooding
movie theaters and bookstores with prettified versions of a
harmless revolutionary youth the purveyors of the myth can satisfy
their yearnings for social change that is painless and pure.
Perhaps it is no accident, as Marxists like to say, that these
things are reaching high tide at this particular point in American
political history. People who ordered this book on Amazon.com also
ordered Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. A
coincidence? Possibly, but probably not.
