Franklin W Knight

In October the first hints of nature's seasonal change appear outside the tropics. Within the tropics, of course, to all intents and purposes there is no seasonal change. For practical purposes there, the year is divided into alternating rainy and dry seasons. In some places the year is even marked by harvests - although in the Caribbean the demise of sugar production largely brought an end to the calendar significance of harvests. Elsewhere, however, the four seasons are dramatically different in their individuality, especially autumn. The days get shorter. The leaves of deciduous trees change colour and then eventually cascade to carpet the ground. A beehive of activity preparatory for the long winter preoccupies the average individual. In the USA, autumn is the prime political season.

Throughout the world since 1967, October has become associated with the untimely death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the idealistic Argentine revolutionary in the unlikely
Bolivian village of La Higuera, deep in the Andean jungles. No revolutionary pantheon anywhere in the world is without a representation of Che. His face is probably more recognisable than most of the present living leaders of the world's most important countries. Certainly, no face has been carried on more T-shirts. Probably no individual represented the iconic revolutionary of the 1960s more appropriately than Che Guevara.

The biography of Che Guevara is well known. The recent release of The Motorcycle Diaries film will spread his fame even more. The outlines of his life are as stark and simple as a wind-blown divi-divi tree. Born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 15, 1928, his parents came from the marginally comfortable middle class. An incurably asthmatic child, Guevara studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires and made two gruelling motorcycle journeys throughout Latin America, the last one ending up in Nicaragua in 1953.
A voracious reader and prolific diary writer, Guevara recorded impressions of what he saw as well as many whom he met along the way. He wrote astutely on politics, and has even been considered a revolutionary theorist whose controversial contribution to political theory is the concept of the foco.

GUEVARA... executed October 9, 1967

In Guatemala, Guevara found the radical Jacobo Arbenz government worthy of his admiration and ardent support. No sooner was he fully employed there, however, that government was overthrown by the CIA. Guevara fled to Mexico and the rest, as the saying goes, was history. In Mexico, also enjoying the involuntary pleasures of exile were Cuba's Fidel Castro and his 26th of July band of would-be revolutionaries. They joined their militarism with Guevara's ideological conviction and were soon installed in power in Cuba in 1959. Castro and Guevara got the opportunity not only to talk about revolutionary change but to practise it.

Guevara played many roles in Cuba in the early phases of the revolution. As the minister of finance, he implemented the non-convertible peso to avoid the flight of capital, and issued a vigorous challenge at the meeting of the Organisation of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 1961 to John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. Cuba, he then declared, would by the end of the decade become the most developed Latin American country in the hemisphere. He also served as minister of industry between 1961 and 1965 and was extremely influential in establishing the amicable relations between Cuba and the then Soviet Union as well as the various African states that received considerable Cuban military, economic and social aid between 1965 and 1981.

In 1965 Guevara abruptly resigned his posts, relinquished his Cuban citizenship and left surreptitiously to serve the wider cause of revolution. After wandering around Asia and Africa he ended up in the remote mountains of Bolivia - as unlikely a locale as any for revolution. The revolutionary theories he had advocated failed him miserably. He was captured by the Bolivian army and executed on October 9, 1967. Today, Bolivia - one of the poorest countries in the Americas - seeks to exploit the life and death of Che Guevara by opening a five-day tourist trail leading to the site of his death. Neither in spectacular panoramic vistas nor indelible historical importance can this trail rival the neighbouring Inca trail in Peru. As in the case of Guevara's life, the promise exceeds the performance.

Like Christopher Columbus before him, the man and his deeds pale compared with the longevity and far-reaching significance of his aftermath. In his life, in all truth, the accomplishments of Che Guevara were extremely modest.

As a warrior in Cuba he led the successful campaign into Las Villas that provided the coup de grâce to the isolated Fulgencio Batista regime. As a political theorist the less said the better. As a writer he was no José Martí. And as a bureaucrat he did make some profound changes in the Cuban regime both short-term and long-term. What then was the elusive appeal of this provincial Argentine? In the case of Guevara the whole exceeded the sum of the parts.

The enduring legacy of Che Guevara lies in the life he lived and the example he set. He was a romantic, idealistic revolutionary but that alone would not have endeared him to such a wide constituency, most of whom never met him or were not even born during his lifetime. Guevara was intellectually curious, honest, idealistic, egalitarian, incorruptible, altruistic and totally committed to revolution. He sincerely felt that revolution was the only way to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders of society. In Cuba, he was certainly the most beloved character after Fidel Castro. He never asked of others what he would not himself do. Those who worked with him or simply met him in the everyday routine of their common lives remain mesmerised by the experience. Yet few saw then the fatal flaw in the theory and the practice advocated by Guevara. Revolution by itself cannot be the panacea for social and economic injustice. Neither should martyrdom be confused with good management. Guevara made people think.

Franklin W Knight is the Leonard and Helen R Stulman Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

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