On October 11, 1967, Walt Rostow, adviser to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson sent him a memorandum in which he analysed the implications of Ernesto Che Guevara’s execution. “His death marks the passing of another of the aggressive, romantic revolutionaries… In the Latin American context, it will have a strong impact in discouraging would-be gurerrillas”.”.

Che’s hands, amputated at the CIA’s order, for identification by special agents of the Argentinean police at La Higuera in Bolivia

Despite the feeling of triumph that overcame the dominant U.S. and Latin-Caribbean sectors of the time, the physical disappearance of Comandante Guevara did not impede the latent resistance of the people of our American for their national liberation.



Sergei Grek, Russia

Doctor by profession, but internationalist revolutionary by conviction, Che beyond the myth represents a permanent example of thought and action in the construction of a new type of civilisational model, as he demonstrated at various moments of his life, defending a tradition of revolutionary struggle that started with the process of independence in our continent. There was no place in it for the chauvinistic prejudices exhibited by some psuedo-revolutionaries for whom the revolution is a process developed within the frontiers of their countries, without adequately understanding the dimension of the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle alongside every other people of the planet.

Mural in Derry's Bogside, Northern Ireland



This internationalist vision of the revolution led him to leave Cuba, where he could have easily remained with his family to perform important functions of the government. Nevertheless, in its place he decided to join up with the guerrillas combating Belgian colonialism in Africa. He even had the idea of joining the guerrillas in Venezuela but, because of differences with those heading it, could not achieve it, having to wait for the moment to go to Bolivia and, from there, create the necessary conditions so that our America would rise up en masse against U.S. imperialism and its traditional lackeys. All this was in the generalised context of an anti-imperialist struggle, the most outstanding symbols of which then were Vietnam and Cuba, facing an asymmetric war against the military and economic power of Washington.





Che's statue in Santa Clara, Cuba

But apart from his known military experiences, Che demonstrated his qualities as an original theorist of revolutionary socialism, in a way that it could count on ideological tools adjusted to the Cuban reality in the first place and, secondly, serve to orient it to other latitudes with the end of destroying the prevailing order of exploitation and alienation created by the hegemonic capitalist system. This led him to theorise about the new man and woman, leaving for posterity a set of fundamental reflections to undertake the transition towards socialism.

As Comandante Fidel Castro would remember on October 15, 1967 during the gathering in his memory, Che “not only reunited the double characteristic of being a man of ideas, and of deep ideas, and being a man of action but also Che brought together as a revolutionary the virtues of a revolutionary: a man of total integrity, a man of supreme honour, of absolute sincerity, a man of stoic and Spartan life, a man in whose conduct practically not a single stain could be detected. He constituted, for his virtues, what can be called a true revolutionary model”.





"Each and every one of us pays their quota of conscious sacrifice to receive the satisfaction of having completed the duty, conscious of advancing with everything towards the New Man that can be discerned in the horizon”: Ernesto Che Guevara

For Che Guevara, the revolutionary conscience through voluntary work, without receiving any material remuneration, as is usual in the logic of capitalism, was an appropriate way of forming and elevating the socialist conscience of revolutionaries and converting it in a vital force to achieve the structural changes that the Revolution should drive and consolidate at every moment. For it, the (still relevant) dispute with Soviet dogmatism that contradicts the ideological postulations of scientific materialism and which, decades later, would confirm what Che had already anticipated regarding the true counter-revolutionary and reformist character of the existing state and bureaucracy in the extinct Soviet Union.

In the same way that Che alerted in his Message to the people of the world through the Tricontinental in April 1967, “Everything indicates that peace, this unstable peace which bears that name for the sole reason that no worldwide conflagration has taken place, is again in danger of being destroyed by some irrevocable and unacceptable step taken by the United States. What role shall we, the exploited people of the world, play? The people of the three continents focus their attention on Vietnam and learn their lesson. Since imperialists blackmail humanity by threatening it with war, the wise reaction is not to fear war. The general tactics of the people should be to launch a constant and a firm attack in all fronts where the confrontation is taking place. In those places where this meagre peace we have has been violated which is our duty? To liberate ourselves at any price”. In the current situation, his revolutionary legacy is fully relevant, beyond all dogma that tries to limit it, and is open to the new generation of revolutionaries to learn in depth from his teachings for the true and definitive construction of the socialist revolution.



Carlos Latuff, Brazil, 2002