HAVANA, Cuba. – On October 9, 1967, in La Higuera, an officer of the Bolivian Army, carrying out orders from the dictator René Barrientos, killed the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Guevara, who had been captured, wounded in the leg, the day before.
Abandoned to his fate by the Cuban Government, his guerrilla group was annihilated by novices rangers Bolivians, to whom Guevara, in his Campaign Diarycontemptuously called “little soldiers.”
It was not Che Guevara’s first military failure. In 1965 his ultra-secret foray into the Congo It culminated, just over six months after it began, when Guevara and the Cuban soldiers who accompanied him had to cross Lake Tanganyika, with the enemy on their heels, and seek refuge in Tanzania.
“There was not a single trait of greatness in that retreat,” Guevara would bitterly admit in the notes he wrote during the several weeks he spent taking refuge in the Cuban Embassy in Dar Es Salaam before being able to fly to Algiers and then to Prague.
Most of the war events in which Guevara participated, beginning with the landing of the yacht Granma, which he himself described as “a shipwreck,” were pathetic failures. The only military success could be recorded was in December 1958, against the soldiers of the army of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who, demoralized, did not show much effort in preventing the rebels from taking the city of Saint Clare.
He also did not serve as an economist. Before Fidel Castro appointed him Minister of Industries, he presided over the National Bank. In both positions he performed poorly. When he went to fight in the Congo, he left a calamitous mark on the Cuban economy, which the followers of Soviet guidelines had to repair.
No matter how much he spoke and wrote about how to organize the socialist economy, Guevara, with Trotskyist and Maoist leanings, never managed to specify his economic thinking clearly and coherently. In Socialism and man in Cuba He only managed to show the excessiveness and impracticality of his statist-collectivist and suprahuman idealism.
Although he had writing skills, Guevara was not good at theorizing. After writing Passages from the revolutionary war, when he wanted to express his military doctrine in the book guerrilla warfarewhat came out was a confusing manual of tactics and strategy. Clarifying Guevara’s theory of the guerrilla focus would require French Regis Debray and his book Revolution in the revolution?
As a doctor, he barely practiced. He preferred weapons and training combatants who, in his words, were “killing machines.” Like the men of the firing squads who carried out their relentless orders in the fortress of La Cabaña, during the first months of 1959.
Despite the fact that he failed in everything he undertook and that he had an unfriendly personality due to stoicism, which led him to dehumanized extremes of demand and discipline, Che Guevara, 57 years after his death, remains the most revered and incombustible icon of the world left.
The photo of Guevara that Korda took in 1960 during the funeral of the victims of the La Coubre explosion and that Ferlinghetti later spread around the world, appears, like a fetish of consumer society, on posters, t-shirts, mugs and key chains.
Most Europeans and North Americans who wear T-shirts with Che’s face, many of them peace lovers, as they say they are, have a vague and romantic notion of who the character was, oblivious to his extremist penchant for revolutionary violence.
Undoubtedly, the posthumous legend of Che Guevara turned out to be the most successful and lucrative exercise of marketing of Castroism.
