Daily Times

One of the world’s most renowned revolutionary fighters against capitalist oppression and imperialist hegemony, Che Guevara was brutally murdered under the supervision of CIA operatives in the rugged mountain terrain about 40 miles south west of La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, on October 9, 1967. A US declassified memorandum dated October 11, 1967 to United States then president Lyndon B. Johnson from his National Security Advisor Walt Whitman Rostov, called the decision to kill Guevara, “stupid” but “understandable from a Bolivian standpoint.”

Che was a Marxist revolutionary and along with Fidel Castro was the main leader of the Cuban Revolution in1959. In Mexico City, Che had met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement to overthrow the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He played a crucial role in the victorious two-year guerrilla struggle. However, the general strike of the industrial workers in Havana and other towns of Cuba, where the imperialist-owned industry was mainly based, played a pivotal role in making the victory a reality.

Through Marxist study and understanding, Che came to the conclusion that the only solution for the liberation of the oppressed classes and subjugated peoples lay in the class struggle on the basis of proletarian internationalism and success of the world revolution. Che wrote: “The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed… Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny…Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.”

After the Cuban revolution when Che took charge of governmental responsibilities he described the new developmental method: “There is a great difference between free-enterprise development and revolutionary development. In one of them, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a fortunate few, the friends of the government, the best wheeler-dealers. In the other, wealth is the people’s patrimony…This is not a matter of how many pounds of meat one might be able to eat, or how many times a year someone can go to the beach, or how many ornaments from abroad one might be able to buy. What really matters is that the individual feels more complete, with much more internal richness and much more responsibility.”

On December 11, 1964, as head of the Cuban delegation to the UN General Assembly session Che Guevara spoke passionately for more than an hour: “This epic would be written by the hungry masses, peasants without land and exploited workers mistreated and scorned by imperialism… It would be during this hour of vindication that this anonymous mass would begin to write its own history, with its own blood, and reclaim those rights that were laughed at by one and all for 500 years… this wave of anger would sweep the lands and the labouring masses who turn the wheel of history, for the first time, awakening from the long, brutalising sleep to which they had been subjected.”

In a letter from New York Che wrote: “The laws of capitalism, blind and invisible to the majority, act upon the individual without his thinking about it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how capitalism’s propagandists, who purport to draw a lesson from the examples like Rockefeller about the possibilities of success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people, in general, see this.”

Helen Gaffe, the author of Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution, wrote: “In Guevara’s private writings from this time, he displays his growing criticism of the Soviet political economy, believing that the Soviets had ‘forgotten Marx’. This led Guevara to denounce a range of Soviet practices including what he saw their dangerous policy of peaceful co-existence with the United States. Guevara wanted the complete elimination of money, interest, commodity production, the market economy, and mercantile relationships…Che criticised the Soviet Manual of Political Economy, correctly predicting that if USSR would not abolish the law of value it would eventually return to capitalism.”

As Guevara prepared for Bolivia, he wrote a letter to his wife and to his five children to be read upon his death: “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”

Where Che was revered and loved he was also hated and feared by the imperialist bosses and capitalist strategists. The imperialists were desperate to eliminate Che Guevara. Philip Agee, a CIA agent from 1957-1968, wrote in his memoirs: “There was no person more feared by the company [CIA] than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies.”

In July 2008, the Bolivian government of President Evo Morales unveiled Guevara’s ‘sealed’ diaries composed in two frayed notebooks. It was in this land of Bolivia that Che Guevara, who was mutilated and killed after brutal torture by the CIA, received all honours by the Socialist Movement party’s government. The Bolivian flag was flown at half-mast, and the parliament observed a silence to pay him respects on the anniversary of his assassination. Che’s legacy not only lives on but also he is even more revered today than ever before as an icon of hope and revolution. In his last public declaration Che Guevara wrote what became his epitaph: “Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons.”

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com