Travel Guides: Che Guevara

In this excerpt from his book Escape Routes: For People Who Feel Trapped in Life’s Hells, Arnold reflects on a person who has “stretched me to understand life’s battles in a fuller, more fundamental way.”

Years ago, I wouldn’t have picked Che Guevara as an example of someone whose life gives hands and feet to rebirth. Far from an inspiring figure, he struck me as a misguided genius. Long a popular icon of radicals and advertisers, he was also, to my mind, a cold-blooded man of violence, and I found nothing attractive in his philosophy of life. After all, I’ve always believed that peace can only be achieved by nonviolent means, whereas Che is hardly known for pacifist tendencies. As an internationally-known guerrilla, he was instrumental not only in bringing revolution to Cuba, but in executing dissidents and organizing armed struggles in the Congo and Bolivia as well.

My prejudices began to dissolve after visiting Cuba and discovering that this man – though murdered over thirty years ago – still lives on in the hearts of a new generation. I met Che’s spirit in one of the last places I would have expected it: at a Baptist church in Havana. I was speaking to a youth group about nonviolence and forgiveness, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights in the United States (the church is named after Martin Luther King Jr.), and when I asked them if there was anyone they looked up to as a fighter for social change, they immediately responded by telling me about Che and what he meant to them. The sparkle in their eyes was unforgettable.

It’s been said that a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. As I learned more about Che’s life, I came to see his vision and his deeds as a sharp and much-deserved rebuke to Christians who claim to have left everything to serve their fellow human beings. Trained as a physician from an upper-middle-class Argentinean family, he abandoned his considerable opportunities for a greater cause. He traveled up and down Latin America and saw firsthand how the common people were ground down by a ruthless landowning class supported by American business and military interests. He joined Fidel Castro’s rebel group determined to overthrow the corrupt and murderous dictatorship in Cuba, and his leadership qualities became clear in combat.

Promoted to the rank of commander, he nevertheless accepted no concessions for himself, at great personal cost to his physical health. Severely asthmatic, often without the medications he needed and desperate for air, he still lugged his own bags and weapons through the mountains, jungles, and swamps. (Che’s good-humored disregard for his health was well known. When his doctor limited him to one cigar a day, he went to the manufacturer and ordered custom-made Havanas that were twice the normal size.)

After Castro’s triumph over the Batista regime in 1959, Che threw himself into the formidable task of reorganizing Cuban society. His high idealism was legendary, but even more remarkable was the absence of any drive for personal political power. His demands on himself were relentless. After six days of working eighteen-hour days at his government job during the week, he’d volunteer his Sunday mornings to help with the sugar cane harvest or work as a stevedore. His dedication to fighting for the poor led him to abandon his position of power in Havana to join freedom fighters first in Africa and then in Bolivia. The words he wrote around that time, as he departed for the unknown in pursuit of his calling, still resonate today:

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.... One must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth, to avoid falling into extremes, into cold intellectualism, into isolation from the masses. Every day we must struggle so that this love of living humanity is transformed into concrete facts, into acts that will serve as an example....

To quote him further, from his last letter to his children:

Above all, try always to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary.

It was this vision of love and transformation – and Che’s willingness to give his life in order to make it reality – that inspired these young people. As they spoke about what he’d taught them about self-sacrifice in service to the causes of economic and social justice, the words of President Kennedy (ironically, Che’s implacable enemy) came to my mind: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Che’s last mission to Bolivia in 1967 proved unsuccessful. When the Bolivian army unit that was hunting down his doomed band of guerrillas captured him in the jungle, he was a defeated man, physically worn down and despondent over the deaths of his comrades. A CIA operative working with the army unit informed him that he was to be shot, and later reported to Washington:

Early in the morning, the unit receives the order to execute Guevara and the other prisoners. When Sgt. Terán (the executioner) enters the room, Guevara stands up with his hands tied and states, “I know what you have come for. I am ready.”

Terán tells him to be seated and leaves the room for a few moments. When Terán comes back, Guevara stands up and refuses to be seated. Finally, Guevara tells him: “Know this now, you are killing a man.” These are his last words. Terán fires his M2 carbine and kills him.

Jesus taught that not all those who say “Lord, Lord” will enter heaven. The prize, he said, is for the man who loves his sisters and brothers so deeply that he will lay down his life for them. Che did exactly that. His failures aside – he could be ruthless to enemies and traitors – he laid down his life for the suffering people with whom he identified, not just in dying but all along the way. His example would go on to inspire many, from the European student demonstrators of 1968, to Nelson Mandela in the 1980s, to the Zapatista rebels of Mexico in the 1990s.

Che showed that when we have found a vision to live by, no sacrifice will be too great for us, not even our physical death – which explains the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s remark that Che was “the most complete human being of our age.” I have come to believe that he wasn’t just a great revolutionary, but also, despite his shortcomings and his sins, a better follower of Christ than most who claim that label.

What exactly was the heart of Che’s vision, that it still animates young people around the world? His words on the revolutionary power of love hint at one answer. So, perhaps, does a poem found in his backpack after his death:

Christ, I love you,
not because you descended from a star,
but because you revealed to me
man’s tears and anguish;
showed me the keys that open
the closed doors of light.
Yes, you taught me that man is God,
a poor God crucified like you.
The one at your left,
at Golgotha – the worst thief –
he, too, is God.

León Felipe

From Escape Routes: For People Who Feel Trapped in Life’s Hells.

Che Guevara