Che Guevara;"an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom"
–Nelson Mandela.
Che Guevara is "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age"
—Jean-Paul Sartre.
"The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels, the Spanish conquistadors and the Argentinean patriots. Evidently Che inherited some of the features of our restless ancestors. There was something in his nature, which drew him to distant wanderings, dangerous adventures and new ideas.
— Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Che's Father
Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS
1965 was a very eventful year in Algeria. Jammu and Kashmir leader Sheikh Abdullah, who had been released from prison in India, under the pretext of seeing Algerian Revolutionary leader and President Ben Bella turned up in Algiers and met with Chinese Prime Minister Chou en Lai, also visiting Algeria. Soon after, President Ben Bella himself, residing at the Peoples Palace, just across my flat on Rue Franklin Roosevelt, was overthrown in a peaceful coup d'etat by Houari Boumeddienne, the military chief of the Algerian Liberation Army. Twice, preparatory meetings for the Second Afro Asian Summit failed to agree on an agenda or the date or even the venue.
But it is the 80th anniversary of Che Guevara's birth on 14 June and the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution which Che helped plan and execute with Fidel Castro, which brought back memories of the visit to Algeria of that legendry revolutionary icon of 1960s and beyond.
Having won its independence from France three years earlier after a bloody 8 year long guerilla war, in which a million Algerians out of eleven million population were sacrificed, Algeria was then at the forefront of struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Its capital Algiers was a thriving hub for freedom movements and revolutionary groups from all over Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Every week there were seminars, meetings and summits for Arab, Afro-Asian and Third World solidarity and struggle. It was for one such seminar in February 1965 that Che Guevara himself, and then Minister of Industry in the Cuban government turned up He was indisputably the dazzling star of the show. After the meeting people queued up to shake his hand and so did I, then posted as a young diplomat at Algiers. I said hello and perhaps added how are you. It was like getting an autograph of a celebrity.
With only a few years into the diplomatic service after an engineering degree from Banaras I was still reading up on history and international relations and was not fully cognizant of the Che Guevara phenomenon and his revolutionary past. But the man had a charismatic presence in green olive fatigues and black beret at a rakish angle .The very best of the Hollywood and Bollywood stars all rolled into one; say our Ajit, Raj Kumar, Dharmendra, and Errol Flynn et al. Later when I recounted my meeting and shaking hands with Che, many students, leftists and ladies would shake my hand to partake some of that revolutionary 'barkat' which might still be lingering in my fingers.
Later I learnt more about Che (so nicknamed because of his constant use of Che - dear), his full name being Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. Born in 1928 in a well-educated middle class Argentine family, he was the eldest of five siblings. He played excellent chess as a child and was an aggressive rugby player. During adolescence and later he remained passionate about poetry, especially that of Neruda, Keats, Machado, Lorea, Mistral, Vallejo and Whitman, He could also recite Kipling and Hernandez from memory. A home library of more than 3,000 books, allowed him to be an enthusiastic and eclectic reader of philosophers and poets, even writings of Jawahar Lal Nehru (with whom Che had lunch during the visit to New Delhi), apart from Marxist and existentialist writers.
Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS
He had a brilliant medical academic career and was an exceptional athlete in spite of asthma. But his motorcycle trips across Latin America, where he encountered American imperialism at first hand changed his vision of the world. A bloody revolution was necessary to throw out capitalism and imperialism.
"After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people." --- Che Guevara in 1960.
After finishing his medical studies, he reached Guatemala in December 1953, where President Jacob Arbenz Guzman heading a democratically elected government, through land reforms and other measures, was attempting to improve the condition of the peasants .Che wanted to settle down in Guatemala, but for the overthrow of the Arbenz government by Washington which confirmed Guevara's view that USA as an imperialist power would oppose and attempt to destroy any regime that sought to redress the socio-economic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing countries. This strengthened his conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such a condition.
Che then shifted to Mexico City in September 1954, and renewed his friendship with the Cuban exiles he had known in Guatemala. In June 1955, he met with Raul Castro and later his older brother, Fidel Castro. The revolutionary leader who was planning to overthrow the dictatorship of US backed Fulgencio Batista in what became hallowed as the Cuban Revolution. Guevara recognized at once that Castro was the cause for which he had been searching. He joined Castro and was promoted as Commander in Castro's 26 July Movement, playing a pivotal role in the successful guerrilla campaign to overthrow the Batista. After Castro's army rolled victoriously into Havana the revolutionary government in February 1969 proclaimed Guevara "a Cuban citizen by birth" in recognition of his role in the triumph.
After the revolution Che served in many prominent governmental positions, including as president of the national bank, minister of industry, and "supreme prosecutor" over the revolutionary tribunals and executions of suspected war criminals from the previous regime. He also went traversing around the globe to meet with an array of world leaders to explain and promote the Cuban socialism .Che was a prolific writer and diarist. One of his most prominent published works includes a manual on the theory and practice of guerilla warfare. Time Magazine, which described Che Guevara as one of the hundred most influential persons of the 20th century wrote that, "Che convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience. When grenades were needed, Che set up a factory to make them. When bread was wanted, Che set up ovens to bake it. When new recruits needed to learn tactics and discipline, Che taught them. When a school was needed to teach peasants to read and write, Che organized it."
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