ENGLISH
It is the text of the lecture presented by the Author in the International Conference «Karl Marx: life, ideas, influence. A critical examination on the Bicentenary». The Conference was organized by the Asian Development Research Institute (Adri) in Patna (Bihar, India) on 16-20 of June 2018.
GUEVARA AND MARX: Critical remake of an old film
by Roberto Massari
First half:Ouverture:Scene 1 [La Paz, 1996] Scene 2 [Dar es Salaam,1965] -Flashback:Scene 3 [Lima,1952] Scene 4 [Rome, 1969]
Interval: Scene 5 [Sierra Maestra, 1956-58]
Second half: Orthodoxy Story:Scene 6 [from Havana to Moscow, 1959-63] - Heresy Story:Scene 7 [from Moscow to Havana, 1963-65] - Marxist Story:Scene 8 [Prague, 1966] - Fade-out:Scene 9 [Vallegrande, 9 October 2017] - The end (Works cited)
First half
OUVERTURE
Scene 1[La Paz, 1996]
At 10:30 am on Tuesday, October 1, 1996, five visibly excited people took the lift down the 30 metres to the Banco Central de Boliviabasement. Three were journalists, one a photographer and the fifth a researcher of Guevara: for the first time, the Bolivian government had given them free access to the «A-73» safe-deposit box in which the original copy of Che’s Bolivian diary was and is still kept.
However, the box contained other very important material, as Carlos Soria Galvarro Terán (1944) – my great friend, companion in research and leading scholar of Che in Bolivia [at the time together with Humberto Vázquez Viaña (1937-2013)] – was to discover with great emotion In fact, they found a) the original copy in Spanish of Pombo’s diary, which was believed to have disappeared after its translation into English; b) evaluation forms of all the guerrilla members; c) the red loose-leaf notebook with the diary pages from 7 November to 31 December 1966 (in addition to notes and drafts of press releases); and d) the German leatherette agenda with the diary pages from 1 January to 7 October 1967.
But it is exactly at the end of this agenda, in the five final pages, that Carlos made the most disturbing discovery for we researchers into Che and where from it starts this reflection of mine on the relationship between Guevara and Marx: these five pages contained a list of 109 book titles (15 of which marked with a red cross), divided by months (to be reduced in quantity) from November 1966 to September 1967. This was completely new documentation that showed the deep interest Che had continued to nurture for study and theoretical elaboration up to the last hours of his life, despite finding himself in desperate circumstances and knowing that he was by then destined to defeat (military).
Carlos let me have the photos of the list and I published it in colour (to highlight the red crosses) in number 2 of Che Guevara. Quaderni della Fondazione/Cuadernos de la Fundación [Cgqf], 1999, pp. 261-3.
The titles cited covered a wide range of themes and did not seem to refer to a particular bibliographic scheme. We scholars thought that they could be divided roughly into six categories: 1) philosophy and science; 2) political and military doctrine; 3) Latin American history and society; 4) Bolivian history, society and anthropology; 5) novels and world fiction; and 6) working tools such as dictionaries, statistical repertoires and medical issues.
The first group is the one of interest here and could include – besides N. Machiavelli (The Prince and other political writings), G.W.F. Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit) and L. Morgan (Ancient society) – works on Marxism or of Marxist inspiration such as the following:
C.D.H. Cole, Political orgnisation;
B. Croce, [with the title used in Spanish] La historia como hazaña de la libertad – (The philosophy of history and the duty of freedom)];
M.A. Dinnik, History of philosophy I;
F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy, Dialectics of nature;
M. Gilas, The new class;
V. Lenin, The development of capitalism in Russia,Materialism and empirio-criticism, Certain features of the historical development of Marxism, Philosophical notebooks;
Liu Shaoqi, Internationalism and nationalism;
G. Lukács, The young Hegel and the problems of capitalist society;
Mao Zedong, On practice;
K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right;
R. Mondolfo, Historical materialism in F. Engels;
L. Trotsky, The permanent revolution, History of the Russian revolution I and II;
J. Stalin, Marxism and the national and colonial question, The national question and Leninism, Problems of Leninism;
C. Wright Mills, The Marxists.
A last name on the list – the only one for the month of September 1967 – was first roughly identified as «F.O. Nietzsche», bringing a sparkle to the eyes of those who were already hoping to write an essay on Che’s potential «supermanliness». However, Carlos Soria later better deciphered the name and established that it was the great military expert Ferdinand Otto Miksche (1904-1992) and his work Secret Forces[cf. Cgqf. No. 8/2010, p. 273].
For many years we did not know how to interpret that list of books, so wide but also so apparently disordered as to make one suspect that instead it must have had its own order, albeit very hidden. How else could it be explained that it had been jotted down in a diary that functioned as a military diary and in a situation that was certainly not conducive to study. Moreover, the quantity of over a hundred books (some in large volumes) would have been too excessive for imagining that Che could have taken them with him during guerrilla movements. And if he had left those books in hiding places built by him in camps prepared in the early months – and thus confiscated by the army after their discovery – they would surely have re-emerged in the «clandestine» market of Guevarian objects run for years by some of the officers who had taken part in counter-guerrilla operations: the military, in fact, privately sold everything that belonged to Che, and his supposed «travelling library» would certainly have had very high starting bids.
All that remained was to think of a wish list formulated by a Marxist scholar such as Guevara, who had a wide range of interests and had already proved to be a great devourer of books throughout his life. Or, alternatively, to think that it was a precise reading plan, in which the «Marxological» sector was of particular importance.
This second hypothesis turned out to be correct, but we were only able to confirm it some time later, with the emergence of a new document which had remained unpublished for a long time despite the importance it would have had «in the heat of the moment» for a precise definition of the most authentic Guevarian theoretical dimension. The wave of nonsense written after his death in books and articles on Che’s «Marxism-Lenism» and on his presumed orthodoxy could have been avoided thanks to the letter I am about to examine and which provides the explanatory key to the «Bolivian» reading scheme mentioned here.
Scene 2[Dar es Salaam, 1965]
Holed up in the house of the Cuban ambassador in Tanzania (Pablo Rivalta, 1925-2005), recovering from the defeat of the military expedition in Congo («la historia de un fracaso», as Guevara himself called it) and before moving to Prague, Che wrote an important letter to Armando Hart Dávalos (1930-2017) on December 4, 1965. Armando Hart was a historic leader of the July 26 Movement [M26-7], husband of the founder of Casa de la Américas (Haydée Santamaría Cuadrado [1920-1980]) and father of «Trotskyist-Guevarist» Celia Hart Santamaría (1963-2008), as she described herself in her last few years, before dying in a car accident. Armando Hart was the first Minister of Education in the Cuban government, from 1959 to 1965. He was then to become Minister of Culture from 1976 to 1997 and would leave a series of theoretical works, among which it is worth mentioning here the essay on Marx, Engels and the human condition(2005). We will see why.
After a premise in which Guevara informed Armando Hart of his revival of interest in studies on philosophy, the letter developed two fundamental themes: 1) desolate observation of the state into which studies on Marxism in Cuba were falling due to the lack of material except those produced in the Soviet world; 2) a well-structured study plan to be approved and implemented as soon as possible.
It should be noted that the premise contained Che’s admission that he had twice tried to deepen his understanding of the philosophy of «maestro Hegel», always ending up defeated but with the conviction of having to start philosophical studies from scratch (see point 2).
Regarding the first point, Guevara said that there was no serious Marxist material in Cuba, excluding «the Soviet bricks that have the disadvantage of not letting you think, because the party has done it for you and you have to digest». A method that Che defined as «anti-Marxist» and was based on the poor quality of available books (mostly of Soviet origin). Books that were published both for editorial convenience (since the Ussr contributed financially, I add) and for «seguidismo ideológico» [ideological tailism/khvostism] towards «Soviet and French authors». By the latter, Guevara intended to refer to the official Marxists of the Pcf – which at that time were the vogue, not only in France but also in various other Communist parties – gathered under the supervision of Roger Garaudy (1913-2012), at the time still a Stalinist, before embarking on the many turnabouts that were to lead him to convert to Islam in 1982.
With regard to the second point, it is not difficult to recognise an interpretative grid applicable to an important part of the reading plan that Che was to draw up in Bolivia about a year later, which has already been mentioned. This previous study project (which was personal, but which the Ministry should have also organised for the Cuban people) appeared divided into eight sections. And for each section some authors were indicated to be published or gone into further:
1. The history of philosophyto be set within the work of a possibly Marxist scholar (mention was made of Michail Aleksandrovič Dinnik [1896-1971], author of a history of philosophy in 5 volumes), without obviously neglecting Hegel.
2. The great dialectics and materialists. To begin with, Guevara cited Democritus, Eraclitus and Leucippus, but the Bolivian notes help us understand that he was also thinking of the work of Rodolfo Mondolfo (1877-1976), a well-known Jewish Italian Marxist who emigrated to Argentina in 1939 to escape the racial laws adopted by fascism. His history of El pensamiento antiguo(Ancient thought) had been translated from Italian and published in various editions, starting in 1942.
3. Modern philosophers. No names were made in particular, but Che did not exclude the publication of «idealist authors», provided they were accompanied by a critical apparatus.
4. Classics on economy and precursors. Adam Smith, the Physiocrats, etc.
5. Marx and Marxist thought. Guevara complained that some fundamental Marxist texts were non-existent in Cuba and proposed the publication of works by Marx-Engels, Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, Stalin «and many contemporary Marxists who are not totally scholastic». This latter opinion was linked to point 7.
6. Construction of socialism. With particular attention to rulers of the past and the contributions of philosophers, economists and statisticians.
7. Heterodox and capitalist theorists(unfortunately collected under the same section). In addition to Soviet revisionism (for which Guevara could not but cite the Kruschev of the time), among the heterodox theorists he included Trotsky, accompanied by a cryptic annotation, almost as if to say that the time had come to take note that he had alsoexisted and «had written» things. Among the theorists of capitalism, Marshall, Keynes and Schumpeter were cited as examples to «be analysed thoroughly».
8. Polemics. With the caution that Marxist thought had advanced precisely thanks to polemics, Guevara declared that one could not continue to know Proudhon’s Philosophy of povertyonly through Marx’s Poverty of philosophy. It was necessary to go to the sources. Rodbertus, Dühring, revisionism (here referring to that of German social democracy), the controversies of the 1920s in the Ussr. This section was indicated by Che as the most important and the aim of a polemic directed against rampant conformism in the Cuban party and in the whole of the pro-Soviet world was evident. And it is no coincidence that the theme of «seguidismo» [«tailism»] reappeared in the conclusion of the letter, with a hint of veiled complicity addressed fraternally to Armando Hart against «the current makers of ideological orientation» to whom, according to Che, it would not have been «prudent» to show that type of study project.
An invitation to «prudence» that Armando Hart took a little too literally, deciding to keep such a precious text hidden for some decades. But in addition to Che’s well-founded concerns, he had a special reason for not circulating the letter (and daughter Celia told me [in October 2006] that she could not forgive him when she came to know about it): the Cuban minister of Education had had and perhaps still had some special sympathies for Trotsky and had jealously kept it secret since it had never emerged in any of his books. But Guevara - the only Cuban leader who had occasionally been interested in the Trotsky question - had somehow learned of it. For this reason, when he named the famous «heretic» in the letter, addressing Armando Hart he called him «tu amigo Trotsky” [«your friend Trotsky”]. In the Cuba of 1965, a month before the Tricontinental Conference (January 1966), in which the concluding speech by Fidel Castro (1926-2016) was going to mark officially and definitively the passage of Cuba into the Soviet field (which had already occurred in substance some time earlier), the suspicion of Trotskyist sympathies would have been incompatible with the government post he held. This is why the letter «disappeared» for over thirty years.
It would be published for the first time in September 1997 in Contracorriente(year III, No. 9) and then by Hart himself in 2005, in the book on Marx and Engels cited earlier (pp. XLIII-XLVIII), with photostatic reproduction of the original pages.
It was in this way, only after having seen a text so precious for establishing the level of reflection on Marxism achieved by Guevara, that it became possible for those of us interested in doing so to provide a valid explanation for the reading plan sketched in the agenda of the Bolivian diary. In the words taken from Otro mundo es posibleby Néstor Kohan (b. 1967), the leading scholar on Che in Argentina:
«This letter allows us to grasp the degree of maturity achieved by Che regarding the need to seek an autonomous philosophical and ideological alternative to Marxist ‘orthodoxy’, including both the official culture of the Soviet Union and the officialism existing at the time in China» (Otro mundo es posible, p. 155).
At the time he wrote such an important letter, Guevara was going through a period of tumultuous transition, perhaps the most unstable and certainly the most dramatic of his life: he left Cuba and he had been defeated in the great economic debate; he resigned from government offices and had no citizenship; he was deprived of the support of his great friend Ahmed Ben Bella (1916-2012) who was overturned in June 1965 by the coup d’état of Houari Boumédiène (1932-1978) with which the decline of the Algerian revolution began; he had gone through the Congolese disaster; he was hostile to the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence, and a lucid and fierce critic of the model of construction of socialism in the Ussr; he was aware of the involution that the Cuban revolution was experiencing, anxious to return to what he considered to be a genuine revolutionary practice (guerrilla war); and he was wary of the theoretical certainties touted as «orthodox Marxism» and «Leninism».
It was clear that the theoretical reflection he wished to resume in a systematic and almost «professional» form - and about which he had first spoken to Armando Hart (perhaps because he too had the faint smell of heresy...) - was in turn a product of more recent political delusions. There remained only the doubt about how ancient in the theoretical field were the «genetic» roots of those delusions which the new reflections should have remedied.
FLASHBACK
Scene 3[Lima, 1952]
To answer, it is necessary to step back in time to the first encounter with Marxism that the young Ernesto had personally experienced in Lima, Peru, during a period of his life in which he had already decided to engage in the search for his own path outside Argentina. That is, outside of a great country where, in the early 1950s, the ideological alternative for a young radical who wanted to fight for ideals of social emancipation risked being crushed between two main poles: anti-communist PeronismorStalinist anti-imperialism. There were certainly no alternatives of the third or fourth type, «better» but lesser, since the homeland of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) and of the continental movement of University Reform(«el Grito de Córdoba» of 1918) had offered the main culture broth for heretical or heterodox currents more than any other Latin American country, perhaps second only to Mexico. But for some time the young Ernesto had no sense of it or did not feel the need for it.
Of some interest in the history of his theoretical training is the fact that at the end of high school he had begun to compile a «philosophical dictionary», of which there are some excerpts and the description given by his childhood friend in Alta Gracia, José (Pepe) González Aguilar (b. 1928?).
The Guevara spouses were anti-Peronists but they were not Marxists, Catholics but not practising. The mother (Celia de la Serna y Llosa [1906-1965]) was a very independent woman, radical and endowed with considerable intellectual interests, which were non-conformist for the time and the environment in which she lived: her influence was decisive on Ernesto’s training and this is recognised by many, starting with the second of the brothers (Roberto Guevara [b. 1932]) who spoke to me about it with great emphasis for the first time in November 1992.
The group of friends belonged mostly to anti-fascist and anti-Francoist families, but they were not communist. An exception was university friend Tita Infante (d. 1976), with whom Ernesto maintained a long and intense exchange of letters starting in 1947, which she corresponded with feelings that went beyond mere friendship. Tita was enrolled in the Communist Youth of the Faculty of Medicine of Buenos Aires, and Ernesto sometimes communicated to her the progress made in reading the first Marxist texts. According to the testimony of Celia Guevara de la Serna (sister of Che, b. 1929) – reported by Adys Cupull (b. 1937) and Froilán González (b. 1943) (in Cálida presencia, p. 12) – it was she who introduced him to the reading of Aníbal Ponce (1898-1938), the great Argentine psychologist who died in Mexico, of whose extensive work the two read in particular the most properly Marxist works: Education and class struggle, The wind in the worldand above all (and fundamental for the future development of a Marxist ethics by Che) Bourgeois and proletarian humanism.
In the circle of friends, an exception was represented by «Petiso», the companion on the famous motorcycle trip – Alberto Granado Jiménez (1922-2011) – the biochemist who since his university years had been linked to the Argentine Communist Party which was than headed by a notorious exponent of Stalinism, the Italian Victorio Codovilla (1894-1970).
And it was during the journey with Granado that the young Ernesto had the opportunity to frequent Dr. Hugo Pesce (1900-1969), the Italian-trained and internationally renowned leprologist who was a specialist in physiology, passionate about philosophy and an intellectual with a «formidable Marxist culture» – as Ernesto described him in a letter to his father (Don Ernesto Guevara Lynch [1900-1987]). Pesce was a member of the Peruvian Communist Party and in 1929, at the Communist Conference of Buenos Aires, he was one of the two Mariateguian delegates, that is followers of José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), the main Latin American Marxist whose thinking from that moment began to have a considerable influence on the formation of the young Ernesto, above all in stimulating an early «discovery» of the indigenous social question, Andean in particular.
It cannot be excluded, in fact, that the theoretical interest of Ernesto for the indios(born initially from the passion for pre-Columbian archaeology and only later transformed into the theme of anti-imperialist struggle) and for the work of Mariátegui began right in the home of Hugo Pesce. He had the two young friends lodged in a hospital, but he often had them as guests at mealtimes. From their diaries we know what a positive influence the conversations with that direct pupil of Mariátegui – in turn, a man of Marxist science and dialectics – had on Ernesto. If Guevara’s Marxism really took off from there – as the main biographers are inclined to think – it must be said that it could not have had a better start in the political and philosophical sense.
«Coming at the right moment in his own quest for a guiding social philosophy, Pesce’s beliefs and personal example offered a potential structure to emulate. From then on, the idea that he should find something similar for himself began forming in Ernesto’s mind. As for Marxism-Leninism, he was interested, but he still had to acquire more knowledge before committing himself to a particular ideology» (Anderson, pp. 85-6).
The respect that Guevara was to keep until the end for this complex and fascinating figure of doctor/militant/Marxist (a clear reflection of what Ernesto himself aspired to become, finding a sort of «alter-super-ego» in Pesce), is confirmed by the words he wrote to him in 1962 as a dedication in the book La guerra de guerrillas(Guerrilla warfare):
«To Doctor Hugo Pesce who will provoke, perhaps unknowingly, a major change in my attitude towards life and society, with the usual adventurous enthusiasm, but aimed at ends which are more harmonious with the needs of America [of the American continent, ed.]. Fraternally, Che Guevara».
Scene 4[Rome, 1969]
By pure chance, the second decisive influence on Ernesto Guevara’s adherence to Marxism was also Peruvian, in the person of a young economist with unmistakable Inca traits, a militant of the left wing of Apra (Alianza popular revolucionaria americana[American popular revolutionary alliance] founded in 1924 in Mexico by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre [1895-1979]), a refugee in Guatemala and politically active in the world of the exiles: Hilda Gadea Acosta (1925-1974), Che’s first wife and mother of Hildita (1956-1995). Her personal story as a woman first long courted, then wife and mother, as «professor» of Marxism for Che, as a companion of struggle in Guatemala in 1954 and in Mexico until almost the launching of Granma in 1956, intertwined with years that were fundamental for Ernesto’s theoretical itinerary: the years in which his definitive adherence to Marxism took place, primarily for ideological reasons but also for political tasks and those related to struggle. A perfect union of theory and praxis which was difficult to find exemplified in the «Manuals» or in other famous exponents of «Marxism-Leninism».
They were «decisive years» for the birth of this figure which has now become one of the most emblematic of 20th century revolutionary Marxism, as the title of the book rightly recalls (Años Decisivos, 1972): the book that Hilda decided to write to recount that human and political story. Thanks to that decision (suffered, as I can personally testify), it has left us an irreplaceable, theoretically elaborate, sincere and reliable testimony, enriched by the further merit of describing also from within, thus in psychological terms, such an important ideological transformation of Ernesto Guevara.
In addition to the task of recounting the Guatemalan-Mexican story of Che, Hilda had, however, taken on another task to be fulfilled, given that her brother Ricardo Gadea (b. 1939, leader of the Movimiento de izquierda revolucionaria[Mir] - Revolutionary Left Movement) was in prison in Peru, together with other famous political prisoners such as Hugo Blanco (b. 1934), Héctor Béjar (b. 1935) and Elio Portocarrero Ríos, who were always at risk of their lives. Given that in Italy there were some well-known personalities from the world of culture (composer Luigi Nono [1924-1990], painter Ennio Calabria [1937] and others) willing to engage in a campaign of denunciation, Hilda chose Italy to give life to a Committee of Solidarity with Peruvian political prisoners, spending long periods there between 1969 and 1971. The year before in Cuba (where I had been a guest of the Government from July to December 1968) a strong understanding and beautiful friendship had been created between the two of us, so she asked me to help her set up and direct the Committee. All this was made easier by the fact that in Rome Hilda lived in the house of my sister Rossana (b. 1940), where I also stayed for a while because I did not yet have a permanent home. And it was there that she began to write the book of memories on Che and it was me who, through a fortuitous series of events, was the first or one of the first «readers» to whom Hilda recounted what could later be read in her book.
Everything that happened between Guatemala and Mexico is now a known story, recounted in the main biographies; but in the late 1960s Hilda was the only direct and reliable source of Che’s Marxist training, given that she had been his «teacher»: this was able to happen because she was more prepared than Ernesto, having a degree in economics, and above all because she had an anti-orthodox Marxist training with roots in Apra (therefore more genuinely Latin American) and not Sovietic (that is, Stalinist and dogmatic).
I have already provided an account of those «Roman» conversations with Hilda in my book of 1987 Che Guevara. Pensiero e politica dell’utopia[Che Guevara. Pensamiento y política de la utopía], and it is not the case to repeat here. It may be interesting, however, to mention the titles or names of the authors that the two read, commented on and discussed (sometimes even animatedly as Che wrote in a letter to the family): Tolstoy, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Kropotkin (Memoirs of a revolutionary), Engels (Antidühring, Origins of the family, Socialism: utopian and scientific,etc.), Lenin (What is to be done?, Imperialism) and of course various works by Marx, in addition to The Communist Manifestoand Capital. About the latter, Hilda wrote:
«...and Capitalby Marx, with which I was more familiar for my studies of economics» (p. 36)].
Wanting to summarise Hilda Gadea’s point of view regarding that phase of intense theoretical sharing and fresh and enthusiastic Guevarian adherence to Marxism, I must say that in the conversations she had with me she placed the emphasis on two aspects which were then indeed crucial and which time has instead dispersed among the mists of the theoretical divergences that are now surpassed and obsolete.
In the first place, Hilda kept alive and transmitted to Ernesto the conception that the revolution in the backward, dependent or developing countries cannot rely on the national bourgeoisie, neither as such – that is collectively in historical concretions of certain dependent capitalist classes (those which when I talked with her I referred to as «sub-imperialistic») – nor on their allegedly progressive sectors. These sectors appeared inevitably marked by class interests that ultimately would have led them to clash with the processes of real social emancipation, both in the rural world and with the urban proletariat. With regard to Hilda and to the credit of Guevara, it must be recognised that he never failed in this fundamental political intuition derived from the best theoretical tradition of 20th century revolutionary Marxism.
Secondly, she tried to win Ernesto over to a radical critique of Soviet Marxism, both for the responsibilities it had in the past for the degenerative process of the October revolution, and for its contemporary policy of convergence with imperialism in maintenance of the global status quo. It is true, however, that Hilda harboured illusions about Chinese communism, and at the time the Ussr-China conflict was a burning topic. We will see that Guevara will not always listen to her on this double aspect of a single international reality born in Yalta and will go through oscillations in favour of and against Soviet Marxism, for and against so-called «Maoism», unfortunately losing life before arriving at a superior synthesis of both these refusals.
But more about that later.
On the commitment Ernesto put into the study of Marxism in the years of Guatemala and Mexico (1954-56) we also have three testimonies of his friends or future companions on the expedition to Cuba. Mario Dalmau de la Cruz, a Cuban exiled in Guatemala after having participated in the attack on the Moncada Barracks, talks about it (Ernesto «had read a whole Marxist library» in Granmaof October 29, 1967). Darío López talks about it and tells us that it was Che who chose the Marxist works in the library of the training camp for those taking part in the Granma expedition and that the Mexican police would seize (in Granmaof October 16, 1967).
And it is talked about by Argentine Ricardo Rojo (1923-1996), the travelling companion who wrote the first highly contested biography of Guevara and who invented the famous phrase erroneously attributed to Che («Hay que endurecerse, pero sin perder la ternura jamás» [«One has to grow hardbut without ever losing tenderness«]). Rojo informs us that thanks to the friendship with Arnaldo Orfila Reynal (1897-1998), the Argentine who ran the largest publishing company in Mexico (Fondo de Cultura Económica - Fce), Guevara could put himself to selling books and therefore had access to many works that otherwise he would not have been able to buy:
«The classics of Marxism, the collection of the works of Lenin, texts relating to the military strategy of the Spanish Civil War passed before Guevara’s greedy eyes during the night, and in the morning they returned to the leather folder with which they visited offices and private houses»(Mi amigo el Che, p. 87).
The director of Fce provided Che with the three volumes of Capitaland – whether he had read them in full or not, given the limited time available and the difficulties of study that they involved – he found himself within a few months giving lessons to Cubans of the 26th of July Movement on Marxism and Marx. The latter now jokingly called by him «San Carlos», ironically referring to the «heroes» of the Holy Family.
Ernesto communicates his new commitment in a somewhat coded letter sent to his mother on June 17, 1955. And similarly he writes to the beloved aunt Beatriz Guevara Lynch on January 8, 1956:
«... I often read Saint Charles and his disciples, I dream of going to study the cortisone [the countries beyond the border (ed.)] with one of these French girls who know everything ...».
The theme of «San Carlos» appears in various other letters of the period sent to loved ones: on April 15, 1956 to his father; between August and September to his mother; towards October to Tita Infante («assiduous reader of Carlitos and Federiquitos and others ‘itos’»); again in October to his mother («Now St Charles is primordial, is the axis, and will be in the years when the spheroid allows me in to its outermost layer».
There can be no doubt, therefore, that while adherence to Marxism was initiated in conversations with Hugo Pesce, it was actually built with the avalanche of readings carried out in Guatemala and Mexico, partly under the guidance of Hilda Gadea, in part under the pressure of events and new political commitments including the military training given by the Spanish Civil War general Alberto Bayo y Giroud (1892-1967), his arrest and Mexican prison, and final preparation for the Granma expedition.
In between there was also «discovery» of the class struggle, the real, armed and mass struggle, which was worker in social composition and demands: it was the Bolivian revolution that started in 1952 and which Guevara experienced as a direct witness in the summer of 1953. And this decisive experience should also be seen as one of the elements that won Guevara over to Marxism, above all to a characteristic and more authentic conception, for which the commitment in practice should never have been separated from the theoretical elaboration. However, on the importance of the first Bolivian experience of the young Ernesto, one can only refer to other works.
The same applies to the experience of the failed revolution of Jacobo Árbenz (1913-1971) in Guatemala: an event in which Guevara saw his first true revolutionary dream frustrated and in which he actively participated in a mass struggle for the first time. Disillusioned by the conciliatory and submissive behaviour of the local communist party, the Partido guatemalteco del trabajo(Pgt) [Guatemalan party of labour] he drew up a negative balance of that experience in his first political article. He also blocked his adherence to the party he was about to join, having understood that it was not enough to call oneself «Marxist» to actually be so: his distrust towards the party form as such began from that moment. In the course of his intense political life as a fighter for the cause of the revolution he was not to join any party that was really such. Instead, he was a member and active member of the M26-7 and of its armed expression (the Exército Rebelde) as long as this movement survived. In fact, it is known that Guevara left Cuba before the constitution of the Cuban Communist Party (Pcc) was formalised and the October 1965 designation of its Central Committee of which Che was never part.
Interval
Scene 5[Sierra Maestra, 1956-58]
The interval was real: an authentic «epistemological» break it could be said with Althusserian irony, since between departure for the Granma expedition and the victorious conclusion of the Las Villas campaign – which Guevara ended with the battle of Santa Clara which gave rise to his «legend» – there was an interruption in philosophical reflection on Marxism texts and reading itself of the texts. The interruption lasted a little more than two years, starting with the departure from Tuxpan (when the only person with a previous military experience was the Italian Gino Doné [1924-2008] who had taken part in the Resistance in Veneto), passing through occupation of the two main military strongholds in Havana – under the leadership of Che and Camilo Cienfuegos (1932-1959) – and ending with the establishment of the new regime headed by Fidel Castro. They were times of guerrilla warfare on the mountains and attacks in the cities, strikes, agrarian reform, expropriation and nationalisation, and the creation of a new state structure. Certainly not times of theoretical reflection, of study or of exploring the Marxian message.
Guevara’s Episodes of the Cuban revolutionary warand the memoires of various fighters give the perception of a profound disregard for the problems of political theory by the Castro leadership - in this very differently from what had happened in the first period of the Russian revolution - and one gets the impression that Che was closed in a sort of theoretical self-isolation. He admitted this himself in writing to the political figure that I personally consider to have been the most representative of the Cuban revolution (commander René Ramos Latour [«Daniel», 1932-1958]), who died in combat, but only after having stood up to Che in a controversy that deserves the greatest attention and instead, out of political hypocrisy, is almost always ignored or in any case belittled.
On December 14, 1957, Che wrote him a long letter, very critical of the positions of the llano(the M26-7 in the cities where Daniel had been the main leader after the death of Frank País [1934-1957]), stating:
«I am, through my ideological preparation, one of those who believe that the solution of the problems in the world is to be found behind the so-called Iron Curtainand I consider this movement as one of the many provoked by the anxiety of the bourgeoisie to free itself from the economic chains of imperialism.
I have always considered Fidel as an authentic leader of the left bourgeoisie, even if his personality is characterised by personal qualities of extraordinary value, which place him far above his class.
With this spirit I started the struggle: honestly without the hope of going beyond liberation of the country, willing to leavewhen the conditions of the next struggle turn all the action of the Movement to the right (towards what you represent» (my italics)].
It would be too long here to explain the subject of the polemic that is however of the greatest interest for understanding the dynamics of the Cuban revolution, and in any case I have already done so in detail on other occasions. But at least two aspects must be kept in mind: a) Guevara had come to consider himself definitively part of the communist (Soviet) camp and, as a Marxist, he considered himself an isolated militant within a bourgeois democratic movement like the M26-7 and, although he was engaged in an armed struggle, he was willing to trust only up to a certain point (here Hilda Gadea’s teaching was evident); b) as early as 1957 he believed he could not conclude his revolutionary action within the Cuban movement and, with authentic prophetic spirit, announced his intention to leave for «other lands of the world» - as was to happen less than ten years later - if his ideological training should become incompatible with the ongoing revolutionary process. It was unequivocal proof of the internationalist spirit that animated his recent adherence to communism, although for the moment it coincided with the Soviet orientation.
It was much, but it was also everything. Nothing more of interest for our reflection on the evolution of his Marxism can be obtained from the years on the Sierra Maestra and the first formation of the new Cuban regime.
Second half
ORTHODOXY STORY
Scene 6 [from Havana to Moscow, 1959-63]
As is well known, the revolutionary government assigned commander Guevara with tasks of great importance, but all within the economic sphere as president of the Banco Nacional de Cuba, in a first phase, and then as Minister of Industry (at the time unified in a single ministry) until the day of his resignation became operational between the end of 1964 and the spring of 1965.
He was also entrusted with important missions abroad which he carried out almost as a real foreign minister – at the United Nations, the Organisation of American States (Oas), the Comecon countries, the new African nations and various national liberation movements – becoming a sort of «itinerant ambassador» of the Cuban revolution. This very important part of his government activity goes beyond our reflection. Practically all biographies of Che speak about it, but for an overview and a direct testimony, I recommend in particular Caminos del Cheby commander «Papito» Jorge Serguera (1932-2009) who, thanks to his total identification with the secret directives of the Cuban government, found himself playing a major role in very «delicate» operations: for example, as ambassador to Algiers at the time of Ben Bella or in charge of relations with Juan Domingo Perón (1895-1974) in Spanish exile.
Che’s years as Minister of Industry are years in which he takes up his studies of Marxism again, as well as of the various other subjects necessary for the management of his Ministry: a field in which he had to learn everything from scratch, but in which he demonstrated really exceptional learning skills. It is obvious that the particular nature of the position led him to deepen his study of Marx and followers, especially in the field of critique of political economy. But as we shall see in the next scene, this did not produce economicistic-type derivations in him. Far from it.
And even his assiduous and hyperactive frequentation of factories and other production centres did not make him a «workerist». From this point of view his anti-dogmatic and originally unorthodox Marxist training constituted an effective vaccine against deformations that would have been «natural» in a neophyte of communist statism, admirer for a whole first phase of the Soviet model and the works of its ideologues in the economic field; these began to circulate in Cuba in Spanish long before the country officially became part of the Comecon [Cmea] (1972). This part of Guevarian activity and economic formation has been largely reconstructed by his former deputy minister, Orlando Borrego (b. 1936) in the 2001 book Che, el camino del fuego(in particular in the first five chapters).
The best anthology of Che texts devoted to economic issues was instead published on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his death, edited by historian Juan José Soto Valdespino (Temas económicos, 1988). Obviously, it could not contain the Guevarian texts dedicated to the polemics with Soviet economic conceptions, publication of which was delayed by the Cuban government until 2006, when the Ussr had no longer existed for about 15 years (I will talk about this later). For a more up-to-date study of Che’s economic ideas, one can resort to Introducción al pensamiento marxista(Introduction to Marxist thought) edited by Néstor Kohan for the Cátedra Ernesto Che Guevara of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.
Outside the commitment in the economic field, Che continued to read as much as possible of Marx and official Marxism, being totally identified for this phase in the policy of rapprochement with the Soviets that Fidel Castro undertook on the island starting from the first months after revolutionary victory. On this road Guevara played a leading role in proposing that the State publishing company should publish theoretical texts produced beyond the «Iron Curtain», but above all in the difficult task of «rehabilitating» the local Communist party (the Partido socialista popular[Psp). In addition to the original hostility towards the M26-7 and the absence as a ruling group (but not as grassroots militants) from the revolutionary process, this party had also to be forgiven for the support given in 1940-44 to the first government of Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973) – in which it had taken part with two ministers – and subsequent relationships of ambiguous collaboration with the second government (after the Batista coup of 1952), even coming to oppose attempts to overthrow him such as, for example, the attack on Moncada Barracks.
Did Guevara know about these past collaborationist episodes of the Psp? It is difficult to say to what extent and up to which point, also because after the victory of 1959 all the possible compromising documents about the Psp of Blas Roca (1908-1987) disappeared from the Havana main library, as I was able to verify in person in 1968. But after the seizure of power, Che’s identification with the Soviet model was so strong as to push him to underestimate these episodes of Cuban Stalinism. He was to come to regret it bitterly later, when the hardest attacks on his management of industry were to come precisely from the former Psp while, after his disappearance, the apparatus of international Soviet propaganda would launch a campaign of slander about his alleged loss of reason, so much so as to have become ... Trotskyist.
But in the early 1960s, none of this seemed to be on the horizon for minister Guevara. In fact, these are the years in which his Marxism is homologous with the dogmatic and scholastic standards of Soviet brand «dialectical materialism» – the notorious Diamat– pushing him to formulations imbued with vulgar evolutionism and mechanicism that only later he would reject.
The basic and most famous text for this «scientistic» reduction of Marxism is «Notes for the study of the ideology of the Cuban Revolution» (in Verde Olivo, October 1960) in which the adherence to Marxism in the ambit of the social sciences is equated with the definition that the scientist self-attributes in the field of natural, physical or mathematical sciences. The comparisons that Guevara provides are very significant when he states that no one will ask a physicist if he is «Newtonian» or a biologist if he is «Pasteurian» because they are these by definition and by natural impulse. And even if new research and new facts lead to changing the initial positions, there will always remain a background of truth in the tools used to reach presumed scientific certainties. And this is what happens to those who consider themselves Marxist and actually are. The «scientific-naturalistic» comparison with Marxism continues citing Einstein with relativity and Planck with quantum theory which, according to Guevara, have taken nothing away from the greatness of Newton: they havesurpassedhim but only in the sense that «the English scientist represents the necessary passage» for this further development (Escritos y discursos, IV, p. 203).
Guevara does not escape from a conclusion definable as deterministic and evolutionistic at the same time, when he states that there are «truths so evident, so inherent in the conscience of peoples, that it is useless to discuss them. One must be ‘Marxist’ with the same naturalness with which one is ‘Newtonian’ in physics or ‘Pasteurian’ in biology» (pp. 202-3). This is a not even a refined way of affirming a dogmatic conception of social science, that is to say, in the case of Marxism.
Continuing the analogy with the mathematics in which we have had «a Greek Pythagoras, an Italian Galileo, an English Newton, a German Gauss, a Russian Lobachevsky, an Einstein, etc.», Guevara states that also in the social sciences the itinerary of a great process of accumulation of knowledge could be traced from Democritus to Marx – but this, I add, in total disregard for the discontinuity that Marxism attributes to the historical dialectic marked by ruptures, leaps, rearrangements and syntheses. But by now Marx has become for Che not only the scholar who «interprets history and understands its dynamics», but also he who «foresees future events», who «prophesies» (further on he even speaks of the «predictions of Marx the scientist»), who is «architect of his own destiny» and, besides interpreting nature, now has the tools to «transform it». Hence the obvious reference to the need for revolutionary action as a logical consequence of so much scientific knowledge of nature, history and the world made possible by Marxism, now considered definetely to be a science.
This flatly materialistic vision was certainly derived from very simplistic interpretations of works by Engels (Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of nature, Socialism: utopian and scientific) and Lenin (Materialism and empirio-criticism) which are not cited here, but which Ernesto had read in Guatemala and Mexico. The equation of Marxism with the mathematical, physical or biological sciences – which had been a common currency for Marxology in the Stalinist period – now opens into the grossest philosophical evolutionism when Guevara draws a line of continuity between «Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong», even going so far as to include the»new Soviet and Chinese rulers» in this pyramid scheme of presumably Marxist thinking (Escritos y discursos, p. 204]): of all these, according to Che, one should have followed «the body of doctrine» and even «the example» (but on Kruschev he would change his mind shortly thereafter ...).
It would be ungenerous to continue with other quotations from this naive listing of the presumed scientific-naturalistic merits of Marxism – which strangely however is never called here «dialectical materialism» according to what instead Stalinist tradition would have prescribed – and if anything we should take it up with how many (many, too many) have indicated in this article one of the top peaks reached by Guevara in his re-elaboration of Marxism. Unfortunately, C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) – who included this unique Che text in his famous anthology The Marxists (1962) –is one of these. (Guevara will reciprocate by including in his own Apuntes(Notes) of 1966 – which we will speak of – various passages taken from The Marxists.)
With regard to the «Marxism» of Marx there is not much more, because the rest of the article launches itself into a very imaginative analysis of the progress of the Cuban revolution which I leave out here without remorse. In the past, however, I devoted some attention to the hasty manner in which Che had dismissed some statements in that text from of the two founding fathers related to Mexico and Bolivar. Here I limit myself to mentioning the piece by Guevara, but for my comment I refer to the detailed analysis I made in Che Guevara. Pensamiento y política de la utopía, pp. 54-9. With a word of caution: as incredible as it may seem, the piece of criticism of Marx that I am about to mention was suppressed, in an evident attempt at censorship, by the editors of Escritos y discursosin 9 volumes of Editorial de Ciencias Sociales (which is the collection that is normally used for the works of Che after 1957): see to believe vol. IV, p. 203. Moreover, in the past the Guevara Foundation has identified various other examples of censure in this «official» collection and in other Cuban editions of the Works of Che, then making the denunciation of such a scandalous and ridiculous situation public (see CgqfNo. 6/2006, pp. 73-84).
But since the right hand of bureaucracy often ignores what the left does, the piece can be found entirely reproduced in the collection of Works 1957-1967, curated not by chance by the Casa de las Américas in 1970, when it was directed by an intelligent and anti-conformist woman like Haydée Santamaría. From there I report it in full, both because it is a beautiful piece by Che (which does not seem to have softened the soul of the censors), and as a humble tribute to Marx on the occasion of his 200th birthday:
«Marx as a thinker, as a scholar of the social sciences and of the capitalist system in which he lived, can obviously be accused of some inaccuracies. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his judgment on Bolivar and with the analysis which, together with Engels, Marx made of Mexicans, taking for granted certain theories about race or nationality which are inadmissible today. But great men, discoverers of luminous truths, survive in spite of their small errors, which serve to make them more human: they can make mistakes without this damaging our clear awareness of the level reached by these giants of thought. And for this reason we say that the essential truths of Marxism are an integral part of the cultural and scientific community of peoples and we accept them with the naturalness that comes from something that needs no further discussion» (pp. 93-4).
The criticisms that Guevara addressed to Marx-Engelsian texts on Latin America could refer to some entries compiled by Marx and Engels for the New American Cyclopaedia(published in New York in 16 volumes between 1858 and 1863, under the direction of Charles Anderson Dana [1819-1897], also director for some twenty years of the New York Daily Tribune), but above all to a letter from Marx to Engels dated December 2, 1854 (in Complete Works, XXXIX, p. 434).
After having reconstructed the complicated story, in my comment I openly agreed with the two great friends and disagreed with Guevara. But I added a much more serious consideration about the fact that, in the essay dedicated by Che to analysis of the ideology of the Cuban revolution, there was no mention of the great libertadores(liberators), no mention of any Latin American thinker or writer involved in the anti-Spanish ideological struggle, not even José Martí (1853-1895) himself. Greek philosophers, physicists and mathematicians from various eras were mentioned, as well as a lot of Marx, but no one indigenous to Cuba or Latin America. A foolishness certainly produced by the anxiety of the neophyte who wanted to show himself more Marxist than Marx, flaunting an acquired familiarity with his work, but that cannot fail to leave one taken aback. More than the vulgar materialist conception of Marxism exhibited therein, it is the absence of references to Latin American ideologies or political conceptions which constitutes the most serious deficiency of that unfortunate text, which was so popular at the time and may still continue to delight.
This was not, however, an isolated case because in other texts of the period there were similar reductive and distorted visions of the Marxist method of analysis, accompanied by a clear ignorance of the great tradition of debate that had developed during the whole of the 20th century starting from the original Marxian legacy.
See, for example, the most interesting interview ever with Guevara. I refer of course to my friend Maurice Zeitlin (b. 1935) who interviewed Che on September 14, 1961, and immediately published the interview in Root and Branch(photostatic copy in CgqfNo. 9/2014, pp. 219-26), a magazine based at the University of Berkeley in California, which was repeated on various occasions (see for example Cuba, an American Tragedy). For the occasion, despite having touched on political topics of great theoretical actuality, Guevara repeated in synthesis the previous materialistic vulgate, including the comparison with biology which, as a doctor, he was evidently fond of:
«We regard Marxism as a science in development, just as, say, biology is a science. One biologist adds to what others have done, while working in his own special field. Our specialty is Cuba» (p. 54).
To make the comparison with biology even clearer (and more serious), in the subsequent answer Guevara extended it also to Lenin: a «eulogy» that he would have to regret later (in 1964) when he was to clearly distance himself from fundamental aspects of the Leninist vulgate:
«The value of Lenin is enormous - in the same sense in which a major biologist’s work is valuable to other biologists. He is probably the leader who has brought the most to the theory of revolution. He was able to apply Marxism in a given moment to the problems of the State, and to emerge with laws of universal validity».
This is the interview in which Guevara, pressed by Zeitlin (who in fact offered an exemplary model of behaviour for a true «interviewer» who does not want to remain passive and supine in the face of the answers of the person being interviewed), had to recognise that he was not familiar with great figures of socialism like Eugene Debs (1855-1926) or Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). As for the latter, he formulated only a kind of ungenerous epitaph, saying that «she was a great revolutionary and she died a revolutionary, as a consequence of her political mistakes» (p. 54). Six years later, the same words could have been applied to the Bolivian Guevara, just as ungenerously.
The use of the formula «dialectical materialism» appears widely in a speech given by Guevara during a prize-giving at the Ministry of Industry on January 31, 1962 (Escritos y discursos, VI, pp. 79-90). After enthusiastically praising a book by Blas Roca, Che presents a sort of synthesis of the degree of understanding of Marxism he had achieved in that phase, totally unbalanced on the side of the last Engels, as was now unanimously accepted in Soviet Marxology.
The passage that follows (p. 81) brings together a) the naively materialistic (and in any case unfounded) theory of the existence of twosciences, the bourgeois and the proletarian; b) the attribution to Engels even the paternity of theory for the origin of life on earth; c) the applicability of the dialectical materialistic method to all aspects of reality (with Stalin we had reached linguistics and genetics); and d) and the de facto identification of such a method with non-capitalist science, thus with «proletarian» science, even if not further specified.
In short, Guevara shows an integral adherence to the theory of Diamat and its claims of cultural hegemony over every aspect of individual and social life.
«The concept of life that dialectical materialism offers us is different from the concept of life that capitalism offers us: the concept of the sciences of dialectical materialism is also different. Many years ago, Engels had defined life as a way of being of albuminoid material; it was a new concept, something that at the time revolutionised ideas [...]. For this reason we must look for such bases, learn to think correctly through the method of dialectical materialism in every field, not only in political discussions or on specific occasions, but for applying it as a method in every scientific or practical task that we have to fulfil. All interpretations of the technique, and above all interpretation of the economy, change enormously if examined in the light of dialectical materialism or under the false lights of capitalist conceptions».
Moreover, if the Che Minister of Industry displayed uncritical adherence to the conceptions of Soviet Marxism in the first years of the revolution this was due to the fact that those conceptions were naively imported and accepted in all their crude and brutal mechanicism by the entire Cuban leadership. By some passively, by others actively: among these and first of all Guevara and Raúl Castro (b. 1931), considered from the beginning the only other «communist» present in the leadership of M26-7. They were then to be joined by Osmany Cienfuegos (b. 1931), immediately after the death of his brother Camilo, coming from the Psp and future leader of the Organisationof Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America(Ospaaal).
These are also the years when ideological work (propaganda, cadre schools and publication of the main magazines) ended up in the hands of the leaders shaped in the old Psp who in the meantime had been called to be part of the new Cuban leadership. They were entrusted practically – and for a few crucial years – with the management of the properly «cultural» activity of the party in view of a true fact: namely that they were the only ones to have some sort of theoretical preparation.
But even this is a page that Che was to rewrite radically in his ideal testament of March 1965 (Socialism and man in Cuba, see the edition edited by Argentine José «Pancho» Aricó [1931-1991]), denouncing the «socialist realism» and official culture that, under the pretext of being «within reach of all», was in reality «within the reach of officials» that is, of the bureaucracy. In that text he was also to make a harsh criticism of «the scholasticism that has held back the development of Marxist philosophy» and the fact that «a formally exact representation of nature» has been converted into «a mechanical representation of the social reality that was wanted to be shown».
On May 30, 1963, Guevara had written a laudatory preface, which verged on ingenuity and apologetic intent, for a book published in Cuba by the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution(Pursc). This was the name of the intermediate party that existed practically only on paper - from March 1962 to October 1965 - in the phase in which Fidel Castro imposed the unification of a single organisation of the three main political currents that had survived in Cuba: the pro-Soviet communists of the Psp, Directorio Revolucionario 13 de Marzoand M26-7. Those who did not share that choice (the most famous case was Carlos Franqui [1921-2010], author of Libro de lo Doce) was excluded or emigrated abroad.
The title was high-sounding (El Partido Marxista-Leninista), but in reality it was a question of some of Fidel Castro’s speeches added to one of the most «celebrated» liturgical texts in the Soviet world, namely Manual of Marxism-Leninismby Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen (1881-1964). He had been the historic leader of Finnish Stalinism who remained unscathed through decades of purges and political wrangling, «famous» for having been placed at the head of the puppet government created by the Soviets when they had vainly attempted to occupy Finland (1939-40) according to the clauses of the Secret Protocol that had accompanied the Pact signed by Stalin (Molotov) with Hitler (von Ribbentrop).
The preface by Guevara to that pamphlet can be considered as the lowest point he reached in the exaltation of «naturalistic materialism», that is, of Soviet-type Marxism-Leninism. A date that marks the limit in the theoretical degradation of his Marxism and after which there began to re-emerge with difficulty the anti-conformist, lucid and anti-dogmatic Marxist, who had admired the Mariateguian Hugo Pesce years earlier and had listened, but not sufficiently, to the theoretical counsels of young leftist member of Apra Hilda Gadea.
Guevara’s commitment to bringing Cuba closer to the Ussr and identifying the ideological aims of the Cuban revolution with the Marxist vulgate spread by the Soviet propaganda apparatus was enthusiastically reconstructed (and in large part invented) in a book of «Guevarological-Marxist paleontology», published in Russian in 1972 and in Spanish (Editorial Progreso of Moscow) in 1975. The title was simple - Årn∂sto C∂ G∂vara(Ernesto Če Gevara [Ernesto Che Guevara]) - but the background of the author, Iosif P. Lavretskij, was less simple, being the pseudonym of a Soviet secret police agent, also hidden behind another name as we have shown in Cgqf No. 4/2001 (see note)*. The pages in which the Kgb emissary most celebrates the pro-Sovietic commitment of Che are 183-205 of the Russian edition and 178-98 of the Spanish edition.
[*For some time it was believed that Iosif P. Lavretskij was a Soviet scholar, although there remained the suspicion that he could be identified with a Lithuanian-Russian author of works on Guevara: Iosif Romual’dovič Grigulevič (1913-1988). At one point it was clear that Grigulevič and Lavretskij were two different names and surnames of one author: the first was a physical person, an agent of the Nkvd and then of the Kgb (with the name of «Teodoro Castro Bonnefil»), involved in various important murders (Nin, Trotsky, etc.) and at some point commissioned to kill also the president of Yugoslavia Tito; the second was one of his pseudonyms. The library catalogues of Harvard University in the United States report that the two names identify the same author. On p. 427 of his book La vida en rojo, una biografía del Che Guevara(1997), Jorge Castañeda Gutman (b. 1953) wrote that «Lavretskij» was the pseudonym behind which Soviet historian and Kgb agent Josef Grigulevič hid. In June 2001 in a speech at the conference of the Guevara Foundation in Acquapendente, Zbigniew M. Kowalewski (b. 1943), the leading Polish scholar of Che, confirmed that «Lavretskij» was the pseudonym of Grigulevič, a former Soviet secret police officer. In the same meeting, Czech scholar Vladimír Klofáč reported that Miloslav Ransdorf (1953-2016), vice president of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, had indicated the name Lavretskij/Grigulevič (thus associating the two names) in the note on p. 50 of the book Muž Svědomí (Man of Conscience). Ernesto Che Guevara, Nakladatelství Futura, Prague 2000. All these hypotheses were definitively confirmed by the publication of the Archive of Vasilij Nikitič Mitrochin (1922-2004) in 1999-2000 and, posthumously, in 2005. I add a little curiosity: in the «Reading plan in Bolivia», Che included Pancho Villaby the same I. Lavretskij in the books listed in November 1966.]
HERESY STORY
Scene 7[from Moscow to Havana, 1963-65]
The starting scene for describing this intellectual revival of Guevara’s Marxism is set in Moscow and he described it himself in one of the Stenographic recordingsof the bi-monthly conversations he held at the Ministry of Industry from 1962 to 1964. Here we are especially interested in some of the recordings of Che’s last year in Cuba as a minister. They are informal but precious materials; even more precious because they have not been re-elaborated or reviewed thus, reflecting Che’s immediate - and by no means diplomatic - thoughts. These recordings were published in 1967 (but Guevara had already been able to see the drafts in 1966) in Vol. VI of the first extremely limited edition (around two hundred copies) of his works, edited by Orlando Borrego (El Che en la Revolución cubana). In Cuba they were never republished, nor ever included in collections of his works and therefore for a long time they could be read above all in editions and translations made abroad: the first were in French, edited by Michael Löwy (b. 1938) and published by Maspero (1932-2015), and in Italian by il Manifestoin 1969 and then in my collection of Scritti scelti[Selected Writings] of Che in 1993. Until they were finally included in the volume of Apuntes, published in Cuba in 2006.
The scene takes place on December 5, 1964 in the Cuban embassy in Moscow where Che is listened to by some fifty Soviet students, but also challenged by some of them regarding his theory of the priority of moral incentives, based on the growth of conscience of workers more than the use of material incentives.
«At this point, when (the problems) began to be posed, the confrontation became violent. The Bible - namely the Manual- because unfortunately the Bible here was not the Capitalbut the Manual. Some points began to be challenged, while things that were dangerously capitalist were also said: it was then that the question of revisionism emerged» (Apuntes, p. 369).
It is important to point out that the «Manual» ironically referred to here is the Manual of political economy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ussr, to which Guevara was to dedicate a whole volume of devastating criticism at the beginning of 1966 and which we will return to.
For now it is important to establish that the atmosphere changed in Moscow with regard to Commander Guevara (considered «glorious» above all for his military exploits and not for his Marxism) and that the criticisms he addressed in the meantime to Soviet economic conceptions left their mark. He is no longer the ultra-Soviet apologist, slavish supporter of the almost metaphysical superiority of dialectical materialism, but an intellectual in a «revisionist» crisis, as he is accused of in Moscow, who has now understood that for the emancipation of the human being «the exact method to do so has not been found in any country and in some cases people have fallen into the extremes that today we call ‘Stalinists’» (September 12, 1964, p. 548)].
And since in Moscow no doubt on fundamental questions of this nature is allowed, one can imagine what reaction could have been caused by the negative judgements on Soviet economic management that Che had formulated during the great economic debate. The verdict could not be anything other than the classic damnatio iudicii, propaedeutic to damnatio memoriae: it was clearly «Trotskyism».
«But because I am identified with the budgetary financing system, I get confused with that of Trotskyism. They say that the Chinese are also fractionists and Trotskyists, and they put the San Benito [a penitential garment of the Inquisition (ed.)] even on me» (p. 370).
«And so it was there, precisely in the Soviet Union, that greater clarity could be achieved. Does this mean that it is about revisionism up to Trotskyism, passing through the middle? [...] Rather, Trotskyism emerges from two sides: one (the one that least attracts me) comes from the side of the Trotskyists who say that there is a series of things that Trotsky had already said. I believe only one thing, and it is that one must have the capacity to destroy all the contrary ideas on a given subject or let the ideas express themselves. The opinion according to which they should be destroyed with blows is not an opinion that brings benefits» (p. 369).
To understand the true Marxist maturation of Che it is essential to read carefully and go into the ideas that are scattered among the stenographic recordings, mixed with a thousand other problems (the operation of factories, problems of workers, polemics of opponents, negative but not yet drastic judgements on the economic ideas of the Soviets). It is not easy to reconstruct the thread running through Guevarian reflection and it is not even possible to summarise it here. I will limit myself to pointing out two references to Marx’s works which have a great qualitative importance for our reflection.
The first concerns the «young Marx». It was the mid-1960s and in France the stir produced by the great controversy over Marxian humanism (which can be reconstructed starting from theWritings of the young Marx on Philosophyand the Manuscripts of 1844) had not yet died down, both because of the rigidly anti-humanist positions of Althusser (1918-1990) and of the stance taken by Soviet ideologues. Guevara appears clearly fascinated by the controversy and comes out on the side of the humanism of the young Marx. He had already done so in the course of the economic debate, citing it explicitly: he returns to it in the virtually contemporary conversation of December 21, 1963.
He reconstructs the terms of the controversy, admits that the «Hegelian» language of the young Marx is not that of the «mature» Marx (author of Capital), but affirms that the basic Marxian thesis – according to which the development of society corresponds to the development of its economic contradictions in relation to the class struggle – was already contained in the Marx of 1844.
The reconstruction made by Guevara of this starting point acquires a particular value because it leads it back to the Marx of maximum acquired maturity, expressed in the text in which the philosopher of Trier had given his own conception of socialist society and of the transition to it: the Critique of the Gotha Programme.And this is the second important reference to Marx that flows through various conversations (e.g. pp. 270, 309, 311-12).
The attention given by Che to the Marx of 1844 and to the Marx of Critique of the Gotha programmeleads him to develop his own personal hobby-horse, namely the importance of the subjectiveelement for Marxism not only during the revolutionary struggle, but also during the transition to socialism, of the construction of the new society and of thenew man. According to Guevara, there cannot be communism that does not make Marxian «concerns» with respect to the humanisticnature of revolution its own. Indeed, there can be no revolution if the right role and the right importance are not attributed to the subjective commitment – in the ethicalsense – of the worker considered as a class.
This characteristic position of Guevarian Marxism allowed Michael Löwy to speak first of therevolutionary humanismof Che (La pensée de Che Guevara, l970). It was then to be my turn to take up the concept and develop it extensively in my frequently cited 1987 monograph: Che’s entire philosophy or vision of the world can be summed up in this phrase - revolutionary humanism.
Over time I have become increasingly convinced that any attempt to place Che’s theoretical heritage outside of his personal and original revolutionary humanism makes it practically impossible to explain his behaviour: not only of his relationship which was experienced existentially and with extreme coherence between theory and praxis, but not even his ethics of socialism and personal commitment. From this point of view, a commitment that was very Sartre-like, and it is no coincidence that Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was able to recognise great personal and intellectual qualities in him as early as 1960 (Visit to Cuba).
In conversations and in other texts, Guevara also takes on the Marxian problem ofalienationwhich, as we know, was a fundamental element of Marx’s criticism of Hegel and, in my personal opinion, the main element of philosophicaldifferentiation from Hegelian statism for an entire initial phase, and of politicaldifferentiation for the rest of Marx’s life.
While it is not part of my reflection, it is interesting to recall that Guevara contrasts the idea of transition to Marx’s socialism (starting from the relationship between given subjective consciousness and the process of self-emancipation from the mechanisms of capitalist alienation) with the uncertainties and real turning points that he rightly attributes to Lenin without, however, giving the question the importance it deserves.
During the conversations, Guevara talks about his change of judgement with respect to Lenin. The vulgate of «Marxism-Leninism» no longer belongs to his baggage of ideas, even if the process that led him to this view is in a sense historically reversed: Guevara does not like the Nep, because he does not like the idea that elements of the market, methods of capitalist functioning, are reintroduced in an economy of transition to socialism. He does not accept it for the Ussr and Cuba of his days, and retrospectively does not accept it for the Russia of the 1920s. Hence a drastic review of the judgement about Lenin, which is now presented in conflict with the essence of Critique of the Gotha Programme(pp. 310-12, 316, 324-6), or even with his State and Revolution, previously admired and cited by Guevara.
Many of the ideas expressed in the conversations at the Ministry of Industry are reflected in the articles written almost simultaneously for the great economic debate. The discussion took place roughly between the beginning of 1963 and the end of 1964. The interventions appeared freelyin several Cuban journals and not only the main leaders of each sector of the economy took part in the discussion - from industry to banks, with the sole exception of Fidel Castro who did not take part - but also some famous European economists such as Charles Bettelheim (1913-2006) and Ernest Mandel (1923-1995) without forgetting the importance attributed to that discussion by the Monthly Reviewof Paul Sweezy (1910-2004) and Leo Huberman (1903-1968). The best presentation of that historical discussion has been given in O debate econômico em Cuba by Luiz Bernardo Pericás (b. 1969).
An additional note should be added regarding the sources used by Che to become familiar with the personal story of Marx and Engels. He certainly read part of the correspondence between the two which had been available for some time in Spanish, but his favourite source was The life of Marxby Franz Mehring (1846-1919). He cites it expressly on more than one occasion. For example, in the conversation of October 2, 1964 (p. 325) when he affirms the need to publish the famous biography (which he describes as «moving») in Cuba and emphasises in particular the importance that Mehring attributed to Marx’s polemic with Ferdinand Lassalle (1825- 1864). Unfortunately Che does not develop the theme and it is a real pity because we could have better understood his attitude towards the statist conception of socialism, on which I have always had doubts that Guevara was a convinced adept.
On the other hand, I have no evidence that Guevara could have read the monumental biography dedicated to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engelsby Auguste Cornu (1888-1981), the first half of the Spanish translation of which was published by the Instituto del Libro in Havana in an enormous volume of over 700 pages only in 1967, although - I have been told - on explicit request made by Che before leaving.
But Guevara did something more than simply recommend Mehring’s biography. He made it a real compendium, which can be read as «Síntesis biográfica de Marx y Engels», either in its natural location – within the Notesas a chapter endowed with a propaedeutic theoretical function with respect to the subsequent polemic with the Soviets – or as a banally commercial operation (by Ocean Press), that is as a separate booklet, devoid of notes and information explaining the reasons for such an extrapolation: it is a further damage which is added to the many others done to the possibility of a scientific edition of Che’s Works. In this case, the Guevarian project of actualising the heritage of Marx and Engels aimed at the focus of the controversy with the Soviets has been also hit.
MARXIST STORY
Scene 8 [Prague, 1966]
At this point we must devote attention to this polemic, trying first of all to imagine the scene: after the lengthy confinement in the Cuban ambassador’s house in Dar es Salaam, there is a drastic change of continent – from Africa to the heart of old Europe; a large villa on the outskirts of Prague; the semi-clandestine coexistence (Cuban-Czechoslovak «Operation Manuel») with some of the closest companions («Pombo» [b. 1940] and «Tuma» [1940-1967]); chess games; study and writing.
Che remained there from March until July 1966, when he returned to Cuba to prepare for Bolivia, which in the meantime was definitively decided as a political goal, having abandoned during summer the previously chosen objective – namely, Peru. (All of this has been reconstructed and documented in detail by Humberto Vázquez Viaña, Una guerrilla para el Che). And there Guevara writes the work that is used to define «The Prague Notebooks»(but published as Apuntes críticos a la Economía política[Critical notes on political economy], although Che’s target was really the Manual of political economy of the Ussr Academy of Sciences). An enormous work of recompilation of texts (starting from the biographical compendium of Marx-Engels mentioned above), with long pieces hand-copied from works especially by Marx-Engels and Lenin, but also by Mao Zedong. It seems right, however, to add to this work of anthology recompilation also the passages that Guevara copies in a separate booklet, in the same months or in a period a little later which, unfortunately, we have not been able to identify better. This booklet, together with the «Green book» with poetic passages, was to reappear among his personal items sold in Bolivia after his death: in this case bought by the Feltrinelli publishing house, but without further specification.
The booklet was published in a very bad edition by the same Italian publishing house with errors and a ridiculous title (Before dying. Notes and reading notes). It should however be taken seriously because it contains excerpts from The Marxistsby C. Wright Mills, from the Works of Marx-Engels, of Lenin and Stalin, from Lukács, from the already mentioned M.A. Dinnik and from various works by Trotsky. From a quantitative point of view, Trotsky’s passages prevail heavily over all the other authors mentioned and the passage taken from his History of the Russian Revolutionis accompanied by the following comment:
«It is a fascinating book, but it is impossible to make a criticism because it is important to consider that the historian is also protagonistof events. However, it sheds light on a whole series of events of the great revolution that had been overshadowed by myth. At the same time, it makes isolated affirmations the validity of which is still absolute today. Ultimately, if we neglect the personality of the author and stick to the book, this should be considered a source of primary importance for study of the Russian revolution» (p. 94).
The Cuban government succeeded in preventing publication of The Prague Notebooks until 2006 (the Apuntes[the Notes]), but then had to yield not only to pressure exerted by the International Guevara Foundation, but also because some salient parts critical of the Ussr had already appeared in 2001 in the book by Orlando Borrego, Che, el camino del fuego. And among the passages reported and commented by the former Sugar Minister was the prologue by Che («Necesidad de este book» [Necessity of ths book]) in which, in addition to the many Guevarian statements inspired by Marxism that dismissed the Soviet claim to march towards socialism, the following lapidary statement referring to the Ussr stood out:
«La superestructura capitalista fue influenciando cada vez en forma más marcada las relaciones de producción y los conflictos provocados por la hibridación que significó la Nep se están resolviendo hoy a favor de la superestructura: se está regresando al capitalismo» (Apuntes, p. 27; Borrego, p. 382) [emphasis by Che (ed.)].
[«The capitalist superstructure has come to influence production relations in an ever more marked form, and the conflicts caused by hybridisation that Nep meant are being resolved today in favour of the superstructure: there is a return to capitalism».]
A similar prophecy formulated in the same months in which Fidel Castro decided to definitively enter the Soviet bloc may perhaps leave one indifferent nowadays, since everyone can see how it has actually come true. At the time, however, it implied a great intellectual courage by a sort of deputy head of state, legendary commander for the Soviet military world, who had matured the second phase of his youthful adherence to Marxism in prone admiration of the Ussr as the homeland of socialism. Any analysis of Che’s thought that does not take into account this profound transformation and instead presents a unilateral and stable vision over time of his economic conceptions does not deserve the slightest consideration. But unfortunately, for many years the books dedicated to Guevara that offer such a monochromatic and therefore deeply erroneous vision of his thought have represented almost the rule in the publishing output of Cuba or by authors related to it. I could mention Cuban, Chilean, Italian, American [Unitedstatians] etc. examples, but it would be an ungenerous way of being pitiless with the intellectual poverty of an entire generation which in the past I called «Latin-American nomenklatura[nomenclature]» and which is now finally beginning to die out.
The Notesare a very demanding work from a theoretical point of view and should be examined piece by piece, given that each paragraph refers critically to another paragraph of the notorious Soviet Manual. The language is very technical and demonstrates a new familiarity with the basic texts of Marxism: mostly Capital. The references to Lenin also abound, cited in part positively and in part to challenge certain decisons taken after the end of war communism (a topic Guevara does not speak about, even if one might presume that, generally speaking, he tended to favour it). It is evident, however, that Che totally ignored the «heretical» literature dedicated to Soviet Russia since when Lenin himself was alive. Of this great theoretical laboratory, marked by famous names of Marxism and beyond, Guevara had no hint and this was his great theoretical limit.
However, it must also be said that Che lived only 39 years, many of them travelling or fighting arms in hand for his ideals.
With regard to Notes, what interests us most is that there is wide recourse to Critique of the Gotha Programme, both as direct references, and above all as adherence to its substance. This work of the last Marx is commonly considered as the maximum concentration of his utopian vision (as I have also interpreted it in my introduction to a bilingual Italian edition of 2008) and there is no doubt that even for Che this is its most characteristic meaning. Let us not forget that a year earlier (March 1965), returning from the trip to Africa, he had delivered to the Marchamagazine in Montevideo his utopian text par excellence – Socialism and Man in Cuba– in which the inspiration from that famous text by Marx was clearly felt.
Finally, it should be mentioned that the manuscript of a study programme is also included in The Prague Notebooks («Plan tentativo» [Draft plan]). We have already recalled two other study plans drafted in the same two-year period, and this is the second in order of time. It is also the most organic and detailed, given that it has the form of a general index for a book to be written, a sort of scheme for a great monograph on the social history of humanity: from pre-capitalist production modes to imperialism, passing through slave societies and feudalism; from the Marxian categories of interpretation of capitalist development (including a broad summary of Capital) to a definition of the economy of the transitional phase (the whole of the third part); to finally arrive at the problem of building socialism (fourth and last part). Death was to prevent him from carrying out this ambitious project, about which he certainly continued to think during the guerrilla war in Bolivia, as demonstrated by the readings plan mentioned at the beginning and which is now confirmed as a series of bibliographic notes drawn up month by month as part of a wish list of readingsto be completed.
Published too late to have any influence on the theoretical training of the new generations of Cuban intellectuals, Noteswill remain forever in the history of Marxism as proof of the highest level of understanding of Marxian theoretical heritage achieved by Guevara. But they will also be considered as the most complete testimony of his lucid capacity of analytical prediction in relation to a political world – hispolitical world – which shone for dullness of mind if not real blindness with regard to the imminent fate of the Soviet bureaucratic regime.
FADE-OUT...
Scene 9[Vallegrande, October 9, 2017]
The scene is composite, polychrome and multiple-sound. On the large clearing for what in the past was to become the Vallegrande airport in Bolivia, some thousands of people convened by the government of President Evo Morales are gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Che’s fall in combat. There are many multi-coloured flags, but mostly red with the silhouette of Korda’s famous photo, Andean and Caribbean music, and the banners of political, trade union and cultural associations of various Latin American origins. In the days that preceded, scholars of Guevarism from various parts of the world had spoken: the author came from Italy but, incredibly, was the only one from Europe.
«Che lives» is the slogan most repeated, but the church-shaped building erected on the site where the bones of Guevara were found is there to testify to the contrary. And that tomb is mentally associated with the Cuban Mausoleum of Santa Clara, inside which the atmosphere is even more strongly mystical and religious according to a Cuban hagiographic tradition, already started in October 1967. For those wishing to deepen or extend the discourse on this evolution of the figure of Guevara – anti-materialistic (hence anti-Marxian), mystical and popular-irrational – a fascinating research has been conducted for years by a professor emeritus of art history at the University of California (Los Angeles): David Kunzle (b. 1936), Chesucristo. The fusion in image and word of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ .
Che is dead, of that there is no doubt. But through the reflection conducted so far what is dead is above all his relationship with Marx. And this did not happen fifty years after La Higuera, but while the famous Commander was still alive. In fact, after the wealth of theoretical references contained in The Prague Notebooks, no further reflections by Che on issues related to Marxism can be found. We have the titles of the works that he would have liked to read or read again at the end of the Bolivian Diary, but the names of Marx, Lenin or other famous Marxists are totally absent from that famous diary. Trotsky is the exception but only because that day (July 31, 1967) Guevara complains of the loss of one of his books. The reader can easily verify all this because since 1996 there has also been a name index for the Bolivian Diary: I put it together for the version I edited of the Illustrated Bolivian Diaryand it is the only one existing in the world. And I have always wondered whether this incredible shortcoming – namely that there exists no edition of the Diary (not even in Cuba) with a proper index of names – is not a symptom of the theoretical disinterest in the last ideological evolution of Che.
If in the first years after the defeat in Bolivia the lack of interest could have had political reasons – since Guevara was totally indigestible for the capitalist countries, but even more so for the countries of the alleged «real socialism» (including China and indeed in pride of place given that there news was ever even given of his death) – as time passed there were other reasons that could explain why the Guevara/Marx union lost much of its potential theoretical attraction.
First, there was the fact that Che’s polemic against the Ussr had lost much of its interest and its subversive potential after the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 (and yet in Cuba it had long been forbidden to talk about it ever since the end of the 1960s). It should also be added that the Guevarian reflection on the theme of alienation (whether Marxian, Sartrian or humanist) was soon overwhelmed by the birth of the myth of his person and the hijacking of it by the mass society of the spectacle.
This reabsorption of the figure of Che which could not avoid sweeping away his relationship with Marxism has been magnificently described in one of the most beautiful books written on contemporary «Guevarism», that is, on how the world of culture and entertainment lives on and exploits his figure so many years after his death: see Michael Casey (b. 1967),Che’s afterlife. The legacy of an image.
If the communist and internationalist connotation of his political action, the fascination of his rebellion against any conformism, the ethical value of his renunciation of the management of State power (a unique case in the history of the twentieth century), and his original theorisation of the theory-priaxis relationship that I have defined as «revolutionary humanism» all have been lost, could his relationship with Marx have possibly survived?
Of course not.
All that remains is to close our remake of the old film with a famous aphorism by Woody Allen:
«Marx is dead, Guevara is dead ... and I’m not feeling too well myself».
THE END
(translated by Phil Harris, June 2018)
Works cited
Anderson, Jon Lee,Che Guevara. A revolutionary life, Bantam Press, London 1997]
Borrego, Orlando,Che, el camino del fuego, Imagen Contemporánea, Havana 2001
Borrego, Orlando(edited by),El Che en la Revolución cubana, 6 vols., Minaz [Sugar Ministry], Havana 1967
Casey, Michael, Che’s afterlife. The legacy of an image, Vintage Books, New York 2009
Cátedra Ernesto Che Guevara,Introducción al pensamiento marxista, edited by Néstor Kohan, Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo/La Rosa Blindada, Buenos Aires 2003
Che Guevara. Quaderni della Fondazione/Cuadernos de la Fundación/Notebooks of the Foundation, (Cgqf), Massari editore, Bolsena 1998-2016, Nos. 1-10
Cupull, Adys-González, Froilán, Cálida presencia. Su amistad con Tita Infante, Ed. Oriente, Santiago de Cuba 1995
Franqui, Carlos, El libro de los doce, Instituto del Libro, Havana 1967 (Ediciones Huracán, Havana 1968)
Gadea Acosta, Hilda, Che Guevara. Años decisivos, Aguilar, Mexico 1972 [I miei anni con il Che, Erre emme (Massari ed.), Rome 1995]
Guevara, Ernesto Che,Apuntes críticos a la economía politica, Ciencias Sociales, Havana 2006
Guevara, Ernesto Che,Illustrated Bolivian Diary, edited by Roberto Massari, Editora política (Havana)/Massari editore (Rome) 1996
Guevara, Ernesto Che,Escritos y discursos,9 vols.,Ciencias Sociales, Havana 1977
Guevara, Ernesto Che, Marx y Engels. Una síntesis biográfica, Centro de Estudios Che Guevara (Havana)/Ocean Press (Sur), 2007
Guevara, Ernesto Che, Obras 1957-1967, 2 vols., Casa de las Américas, Havana 1970
Guevara, Ernesto Che,Prima di morire. Appunti e note di lettura, Feltrinelli, Milan 1998
Guevara, Ernesto Che, Scritti scelti, edited by Roberto Massari, 2 vols., Erre emme (Massari ed.), Rome 19963
Guevara, Ernesto Che, El socialismo y el hombre nuevo, edited by José Aricó, Siglo XXI, Mexico (1977) 19792
Guevara, Ernesto Che, Temas económicos, edited by Juan José Soto Valdespino, Ciencias Sociales, Havana 1988
Guevara, Ernesto Che and others, El gran debate sobre la economía en Cuba (1963-1964), Ciencias Sociales, Havana 2004
Hart Dávalos, Armando,Marx, Engels y la condición humana. Una visión desde Cuba, Ciencias Sociales, Havana 2005
Kohan, Néstor,Otro mundo es posible, Nuestra América, Buenos Aires 2003
Kunzle, David,Chesucristo. The fusion in image and word of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ,with a Postface by Roberto Massari, De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2016[Massari ed., Bolsena 2016]
Лаврецкий, Иосиф, Årn∂sto C∂ G∂vara, Molodaja Gvardija, Moskva 1972 [Lavretski, Iosif, Ernesto Che Guevara, Editorial Progreso, Moscow 1975]
Löwy, Michael,La pensée de Che Guevara, Maspero, Paris
Massari, Roberto, Che Guevara. Pensamiento y política de la utopía, Txalaparta, Tafalla (Navarroa)/Buenos Aires 1992-20048[Che Guevara. Pensiero e politica dell’utopia, Erre emme (Massari ed.), Roma (1987) 19945]
Pericás, Luis Bernardo,Che Guevara e o debate econômico em Cuba, Xamã editora, São Paulo 2004 [Che Guevara and the Economic Debate in Cuba, Atropos Press, New York/Dresden 2009; Che Guevara y el debate económico en Cuba, Corregidor, Buenos Aires 2011]
Rojo, Ricardo,Mi amigo el Che, (J. Álvarez, Buenos Aires 1968), Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires 1998 [Mondadori, Milan 1968]
Sartre, Jean-Paul,Sartre visita a Cuba, Ediciones Revolución, Havana 1961 [Visita a Cuba, Massari ed., Bolsena 2005]
Serguera Riverí, Jorge («Papito»), Caminos del Che. Datos inéditos de su vida, Plaza y Valdés, Mexico 1997
Soria Galvarro Terán, Carlos, Andares del Che en Bolivia, Cienflores, Ituzaingó (Buenos Aires) 2014
Soria Galvarro T., Carlos (ed.), Campaña del Che en Bolivia, Huellas, La Paz 1997
Vázquez Viaña, Humberto,Una guerrilla para el Che. Antecedentes, 2aenlarged edition, El País, Santa Cruz de la Sierra 2008 [La guerriglia del Che in Bolivia. Antecedenti, Massari ed., Bolsena 2003]
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Many of the various scholars mentioned in the text are members of the International Guevara Foundation. To allow the reader to identify them, the composition of the Editorial Board of Quaderni/Cuadernos Che Guevara, theoretical body of the Foundation, is as follows:
Roberto Massari [Dir.], Aldo Garzia [Man. Dir.], Enrica Matricoti, Roberto Savio, Aldo Zanchetta (Italy), Néstor Kohan (Argentina), Michael Casey (Australia), Carlos Soria Galvarro Terán (Bolivia), Luiz Bernardo Pericás (Brazil), Adys Cupull, Froilán González (Cuba), Michael Löwy (France), Richard Harris (Hawaii), Ricardo Gadea Acosta (Peru), Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski (Poland), David Kunzle, James Petras, Margaret Randall, Maurice Zeitlin (USA), Douglas Bravo (Venezuela), Antonella Marazzi (Editorial Assistant)
In memoriam: Humberto Vázquez Viaña (Bolivia), Celia Hart Santamaría, Fernando Martínez Heredia (Cuba), Sergio De Santis, Giulio Girardi (Italy).
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