How an Argentine doctor from an upper middle class family died a revolutionary is an all-too-familiar story. Lenin was a lawyer. Trotsky was born into a family of wealthy farmers. Castro's father was a wealthy sugar planter. What makes Che Guevara different was the humanist spirit of his revolutionary ethos.
Che was born in 1928 in the city of Rosario, Argentina. While his father supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, his mother had more radical tendencies. She openly opposed the quasi-fascism of Argentine President Juan Perón and his supporters. Che's half-Irish and half-Spanish mother even carried a pistol for protection from her political enemies. Loving mothers are often the spark of their children's imagination.
With his friend and fellow medical student Alberto Granado, Che set out to explore Latin America. His journey changed his perception of the poor and downtrodden forever. While there were moments in his Motorcycle Diaries where he commented on the laziness of indigenous people in Latin American cities, he came to visualize human suffering in a way that was previously impossible. In Chile, he shared blankets with an older Communist couple. Oppressed for the political beliefs, they were forced to become migrants without a home. The only work that would employ them was in the deadly copper mines in the north of Chile. Unwisely but boldly, Che challenged one of the mine's foremen for its cruel practices. His white, middle class demeanor ultimately saved him from punishment.
Later on in his journey, Che visited a Leper colony, intending to further his study of the disease. The nuns who ran the colony demanded that Che and Alberto wear gloves to avoid directly touching those who were infected with Leprosy. Typical of Che, he defied the nuns and shook his bare hands with the lepers. It's hard to overstate how the reactions of the infected empowered Che. Their sense of solidarity drove his sympathy for the masses into action. He came to see poverty as the root cause of disease. It was his responsibility as a doctor the cure the disease and end poverty through revolution. Che later remarked that the equality and cooperative life that existed inside the leper colony should be a model for all future societies.
Che Guevara's actions during the Cuban Revolution are something that his critics often condemn. He executed a man for betraying the rebels, which lead to many deaths at the hands of Batista's soldiers. He signed off on the execution of over one hundred war criminals of Batista regime. Still, he never took pleasure in these acts. Che carried them out stoically, with the weight of necessity hanging over him. He never wavered or questioned his judgment on these matters, maintaining an optimistic view of human nature.
In Socialism and Man, written in 1965, Che Guevara expressed most articulately his humanist view through the lens of Marxism. His entire argument was that socialism does not suppress the individual. that the individual reaches his or her highest potential under the direct democracy of socialism. To him, socialism offered a form of participation in society that capitalism could not. Acts of revolutionary heroism by ordinary people were genuine participation that could lead to revolutionary consciousness.
To Che Guevara, the individual was the center of the revolution. Education and the realizing one's human potential through artistic expression, action, and dignity were the key to humanist consciousness:
I think the place to start is to recognize the individual's quality of incompleteness, of being an unfinished product. The vestiges of the past are brought into the present in one's consciousness, and a continual labor is necessary to eradicate them. The process is two-sided. On the one hand, society acts through direct and indirect education; on the other, the individual submits to a conscious process of self-education.If he was alive today, Che would deny the claim that he was a hero. He would claim that the contours of his life were only the expression of the fulfillment of his human potential. Che teaches us that the only way to find ourselves is through connections with other people in the process of the struggle for human liberation. Nothing else matters.
Comments
Post a Comment