The Literature Ernesto Guevara Saved Us From

The Literature Ernesto Guevara Saved Us From / Luis Cino Alvarez
Posted on October 7, 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, October, www.cubanet.org – Che Guevara used to say that
the history of the Cuban Revolution shouldn't be written by others who
were not its protagonists. The writers, whom he didn't consider
revolutionary enough, did not inspire confidence in this task.

In fact, he himself, who did not lack a literary vocation and talent,
was the first who ventured a narrative. Reminiscences of the
Revolutionary War was good effort to start writing the story of the
Castro insurrection, from the Sierra Maestra to the taking of Santa Clara.

In any case, although fragmented and incomplete, the result was much
better when Guevara wanted to give expression to his military thinking
in Guerrilla Warfare, which was a diffuse manual of insurgency tactic
and strategy.

A few years later the Frenchman Regis Debray attempted what Guevara
hadn't achieved: to establish guerrilla theory. But Debray himself,
after the publication of Revolution in the Revolution?, acknowledged
that failure of his theories. It wasn't easy to theorize about the
fortuitous and almost providential events of the Cuban Revolution. The
Castro insurrection, with disasters such as the attack on the Moncada
Barracks and the shipwreck at the landing of the yacht Granma, could be
dramatic examples of what a guerrilla movement should never do unless it
aspires to suicide. Not all guerrillas have the luck of facing barely
professional troops,corrupts and demoralized as was the army of the
dictator Batista. Che Guevara's disasters in the Congo and Bolivia
tragically demonstrated this.

Nor did Che Guevara manage to clearly define his social and economic
thinking in a book. Man and Socialism in Cuba is frightening in its
immoderate and super-human statist idealism. With regards to the
economy, for years the economists who are trying to ensure the survival
of the Castro regime have unsuccessfully tried to work Che Guevara's
ambiguous and contradictory concepts into a body of practical and
coherent ideas applicable to the Cuban situation.

Guevara considered socialist economic planning banal. "Without Communist
morality, it doesn't interest me at all," he confessed to the French
journalist Jean Daniel in 1963.

Today, Guevara's thesis of creating two, three, many Vietnams… would be
counterproductive to the reinvention of socialism, but with a market
economy.

Che Guevara saved us the horror by not writing about his time as an
executor of the Revolutionary terror in the La Cabaña Fort in the first
months of 1959. It's terrifying to imagine what his narrative may have
been. The murdered puppy gives us an idea. The only account he wrote is
impeccable, but very cruel. Bringing to mind the call to Revolutionary
fighters to become, according to his own words, "cold killing machines."

By Luis Cino Alvarez

From Cubanet, 7 October 2013

Source: "The Literature Ernesto Guevara Saved Us From / Luis Cino
Alvarez | Translating Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/the-literature-ernesto-guevara-saved-us-from-luis-cino-alvarez/