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Che
Guevara is a name that most of us as 1970s teenagers
knew quite well. Name recognition did not always convey
much more than that. I didn’t realise in any
real way who he was or what he stood for. Cuba was
somewhere that hijackers used to tell pilots to take
their planes to. My exposure to Guevara came from
hippie-looking types who seemed to enjoy chanting
‘Che lives’ as they punched the air. In
my mind he was associated with non conformity, pot
smoking, long hair, and ’hey man’ phraseology
and was just something people aligned themselves as
they went through a particular phase in their lives.
I always noticed that it was people only a few years
older than myself who revered him. My father or his
age group seemed to behave as if he had never existed.
Guevara could have been the name given to a steeplechaser
for all they seemed concerned.
In
the Long Kesh, Che seemed to feature more visibly
in the INLA cage than he did in our Provisional IRA
cages. They had a much more leftist vision than possessed
by ourselves. In Cage 10 one Provisional Newry lifer
used to adorn his cubicle walls with posters of Adolf
Hitler. Whether he was of a right ideological bent
or simply using Nazi memorabilia to subvert the cage
authority I never actually concluded on. It was hardly
the type of thing you would find in the INLA section.
Later
in the H-Blocks when the Blanket protest was in full
swing there was some discussion about Che’s foco
theory of revolution but little else. Although with
our belief in will over all else and its promise of
instant results, the foco suited us better than the
laborious task of ‘mobilising the organised working
class’. Wiser voices like Pat McGeown would frustrate
us when he pointed out that calling ourselves ‘Marxist’
was merely a fad if we ignored all the lessons of
Marx. ‘Stupid old cunt, he’s in jail too
long’, I would comment to Bamber Nash, my cell
mate for much of 1980. The thing was, however, that
Pat was barely nine months older than me, had been
in jail a mere four months longer than I had, and
was a much wiser person. But such was the idealist
passion and conceited arrogance of youth that none
of this seemed relevant at the time.
Later,
when the protest was over and access to a wide range
of political literature was no longer restricted,
Marxist material abounded. If Guevara figured prominently
in our homespun education situation I don’t recall
it. Plenty of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Fanon, Freire,
Connolly, Fromm, even Marcuse and a smattering of
Habermas but surprisingly little of Che. Revolutionary
education systems were borrowed from Mozambique but
not Cuba although the latter figured more prominently
as something to be emulated. More perhaps out of revolutionary
chic than knowledge.
This
was the personal backcloth to a visit I paid to the
Culturlann yesterday evening to attend a Marxist Forum
organised by the Socialist Workers Party. The purpose
of the forum is to stimulate interest in a critique
of capitalism and yesterday’s topic was on Che
Guevara, dextrously managed by Brian Kelly.
Initially,
it seemed that the event would flop; there seemed
to be about six of us there and the empty chairs were
embarrassing. But quite suddenly row after row filled
as people, many of them youth, took their places.
Brian was spared the blushes that invariably go with
delivering a lecture that no one shows any interest
in.
The
first point raised by Brian in his address was the
manner in which Che imagery had drifted back into
public focus. He explained that there were two aspects
to this. The first is the attempt by those Che despised
- the capitalists - to present the revolutionary as
somehow symbolic of an aggressive market capitalism.
Che jeans were now on the scene. Also there had been
an attempt by a British vodka company to use a famous
photograph of the late guerrilla to help sell their
product. More positively, young people who are coming
to embrace the anti-capitalist struggle are finding
inspiration through Che. Unlike the Stalinist dictators
such as the venal Honecker and Ceausescu who have
blighted the image of socialism throughout its history,
Che’s appeal has a force grounded in a seemingly
incorruptible image.
Brian
Kelly continued his lecture by providing his listeners
with some detail about Che’s background. Born
in Argentina to high society parents, he had little
initial interest in politics. Up until the age of
25 he showed little other than a cursory identification
with the poor of his native Argentina. Even though
his tour of Bolivia coincided with a serious uprising
in the impoverished country there was no mention of
it in his diary. What really drove Che to revolutionary
politics was that his medical training had endowed
him with a certain awareness about the appalling lack
of health care for the bulk of the South American
populace. On his travels he also came to identify
with indigenous peoples whom in regions like Guatemala
were held down by a brutal and oligarchic plutocracy.
When, in 1954, the left leaning Arbenz government tried
to expropriate some land held by the United Fruit
Company and make it available to the poorer sections
of society the American government organised a coup
from its embassy in Guatemala. This for Guevara was
a major turning point.
Brian
Kelly went on to outline the success of the Cuban
revolution in overthrowing the corrupt regime of Batista
but contrasted this with the fiascos led by Che in
both the Congo and Bolivia, the latter which resulted
in his death. So convinced that his foco theory could
be applied anywhere, Che Guevara never even made the
leadership of the Bolivian national strike aware of
his presence in the country.
Overall,
there were two conclusions that Brian Kelly wished
to draw from the life and experience of Guevara. Firstly,
the ideological and moral hostility that he displayed
towards capitalism was something that people today
need to take forward with them in the struggle against
globalisation and the rule of capital. Second, was
the need to organise mass resistance rather than isolated
acts of guerrilla warfare.
Some
lively discussion followed the lecture. Douglas
Hamilton, who recently spent some time in Cuba and
who is a strong advocate of the manner in which the
nation conducts its affairs, made a number of interesting
observations, some of which challenged Brian Kelly’s
depiction of the revolution as largely divorced from
the masses and which succeeded largely as a result
of the Batista regime being little other than a rotten
door waiting to be kicked in. One woman asked if the
Marxist Forums would remain simply as discussion groups
or would they seek to take on an organisational format
which would help resist moves by Stormont to introduce
PPP and PFI. A member of the Socialist Party called
for the gains of the Cuban revolution to be staunchly
defended but argued that Cuba could not survive without
the development of socialism throughout the region.
It was, he warned too precariously perched in a region
totally dominated by imperialism.
If
there was a drawback to the evening it was that no
questions were raised about the human rights abuses
that the Cuban regime have perpetrated and which have
been documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International. For those of us who feel that Cuba
must be protected from a carnivorous capitalism waiting
to feast on the intestines of the country while children
starve, and who firmly believe it must be prevented
from sliding into the economic morass that characterises
those countries the US favours in the region, it is
imperative that human rights issues are not put on
the long finger.
Nevertheless,
Brian Kelly caught the imagination of his audience
with the lecture. Lucidly and concisely, he conveyed
both the passion and moral temperament of Che vis
a vis the cynicism and ruthless indifference of those
he struggled to overthrow.
On
leaving the meeting myself and Davy Carlin were followed
and verbally abused by the Pig Service of Northern
Ireland. Davy advised me to keep close to street lighting
rather than go up the more poorly lit Giant’s
Foot. With policing attitudes pretty much the same
as before I wondered what Che would have thought of
the Good Friday Agreement. Could we really be like
him and support it?
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