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[The following review was written by Mitchel Cohen and
originally appeared in the November 1996 issue of Z
Magazine. Electronic distribution is by The Brecht Forum
and NY Transfer News Collective. It may be freely
reproduced provided that credit be given to Mitchel
Cohen, The Brecht Forum, NY Transfer, and Z Magazine, and
that The Brecht Forum's address and NY Transfer's
signature logo be retained on all printed or electronic
reproductions.]
The Gratitude of a People:
Ernesto Che Guevara--The Movie
reviewed by Mitchel Cohen
A Movie Review: _Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian
Diary_. 1994, 94 minutes. Written and directed by Richard
Dindo. Made in Switzerland, originally in French. Newly
translated into English, 1996. Voices (in English) by
Robert Kramer (reading from Che Guevara's Bolivian
Diaries) and Judith Burnett (narrator).
_Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary,_ which recently
closed at the Film Forum, offers previously unreleased
clips of Che that are alone worth the price of admission.
In a revealing clip near the beginning of Richard Dindo's
crisp documentary film we see rare footage of 34-year old
Che Guevara visiting Moscow. Part of a Cuban delegation
seeking desperately-needed funds, Che is barely able to
bite his tongue and check his scathing sarcasm for the
Russian bureaucrats.
No question about it, Che Guevara--the only one among the
victorious guerrilla leadership in the Cuban revolution
who had actually studied the works of Karl Marx--despised
the bureaucrats and party hacks. As early as 1961, at a
conference in Punte del Este, Uruguay, Che Guevara--born
in Argentina and a student of medicine there--was huddled
in discussion with some new leftists from New York when a
couple of Argentine Communist Party apparatchiks passed.
Che couldn't help himself, and shouted out: "Hey, why are
you here, to start the counter-revolution?"
Like many in the emerging new left around the world, Che
had first-hand experience with party apparatchiks and
hated their attempts to impose their bureaucracy on
indigenous revolutionary movements, crushing the spirit.
Indeed, contrary to the common perceptions of many in the
U.S. today, the revolution in Cuba was made independent
of, and at times in opposition to, the Cuban Communist
Party. It was only several years after the revolution
succeeded in taking state power that an uneasy working
relationship was established leading to a merger between
the revolutionary forces and the Party--a merger that
provided no end of problems for Che.
One such problem: Cuba's increasing dependence upon the
Soviet Union. In its desperation for currency to buy
needed items, the government--after strenuous debate--
decided to forego diversification of Cuba's agriculture
in order to expand its main cash-crop, sugar, which it
exchanged for Soviet oil, using some and reselling the
rest on the world market. Despite Che's (and others')
warnings, Cuba gradually lost the ability to feed its own
people--a problem that became a tragic crisis with the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
[Editorial note: Questions concerning the logic and
necessity of this policy--especially in its historical
context--are still being debated in Cuba today. There is
no question that, following the collapse of the USSR,
Cuba suffered food shortages and was forced to implement
a rationing plan. However, Cuba has redirected its
agricultural policy toward food self-sufficiency and
diversity, and has made amazing progress toward this
goal. Additionally, Cuba is the only nation in the world
where organic farming is national policy; through organic
agricultural techniques, including biological pest
management, crop rotation, composting and mulching, use
of natural fertilizers, and soil conservation and
rejuvenation methods, Cuba's farm output has increased
significantly and the overall quality of crops grown and
processed organically is higher than crops grown using
conventional means.
Of course, any discussion of scarcity in Cuba--whether it
involves food, medicine, oil, or consumer goods--must
factor in the effects of the U.S. blockade and embargo,
which has been relentless since the earliest years of the
Cuban Revolution. Results--good or bad--of all Cuban
national policies must be evaluated in this context.
--BK]
Similar crises had beset the Soviet Union and other
avowedly socialist countries when they pursued industrial
models of development and tried to pay for it by
producing for and competing in the world market. Che's
response: Don't produce for the world market. Reject
cost/benefit analysis as the measure for what gets
produced. To hell with efficiency--it undercuts
communalistic attempts at home. A truly new society, Che
believed, needs to aspire to and implement immediately,
in the here and now, what they dream for the future. And
that means communist society must reject "efficiency" as
the basis for production.
This is what made Che such a compelling figure for the
emerging new left in the U.S. and around the world: his
contempt for the officials of Marxdom (while considering
himself a marxist) and bureaucrats of every stripe; his
internationalism and identification with the poor and
downtrodden everywhere; his refusal to recognize the
sanctity of national boundaries in the fight against U.S.
imperialism; his call for radicals to strive to transform
_ourselves_ (and everyone else) into new, socialist human
beings _before_ the revolution, as a means towards
achieving it; and, the way he lived, his way of wringing
the _immediacy_ of revolution from the neck of every
moment, putting ideals immediately into practice. Each of
these overlapping areas of Che's philosophy finds
expression in his diaries which, in turn, are reflected
in this wonderful, if sobering, film.
For Che, "From each according to their ability to each
according to their needs" was not simply a long-range
slogan but an urgent practical necessity to be
implemented at once. The harrowing constraints of
developing a small country along socialist lines,
particularly in the context of continued attacks by U.S.
imperialism (including a blockade, an invasion, a
threatened nuclear war, and ongoing economic and
ideological harassment), on the other hand, militated
against Che's vision, boxing the revolutionary society
into choosing from equally unpalatable alternatives.
It was amid such contradictory pressures that Che tried
to set a different standard for Cuba, and for humanity in
general. As Minister of Finance, he managed to distribute
millions of dollars obtained from the USSR to artists and
to desperately poor farmers who in the U.S. would have
been considered, shall we say, "poor risks."
The Russian bureaucrats, like any banker, were furious
with Che's "Take what you need, don't worry about paying
it back" attitude. They leaned on Fidel to "control" him
and to regulate the "proper" dispersal of funds, just as
twenty years later under Brezhnev, and apparently having
learned nothing, the Soviet state leaned on Poland to pay
back its inflated debt to the western banks, causing
cutbacks and hardship and leading to the working class
response: the formation of Solidarnosc. Indeed, the
Soviet Union at that time was the best friend Chase
Manhattan ever had! And in so doing it paid the ultimate
price.
*****
In 1959, the guerrillas, headed by Fidel Castro, swept
into Havana having defeated the military dictatorship of
Fulgencio Batista. Although the U.S. government armed and
funded Batista, the CIA had its agents in Fidel's
guerrilla army as well. One lieutenant in the guerilla
army, Frank Fiorini, was actually one of several
operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency there.
Fiorini would surface a few years later as a planner of
the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, two years after that as
one of three "hobos" arrested in Dallas a few moments
after President Kennedy was assassinated and immediately
released (one of the other "hobos" was none other than
CIA-operative E. Howard Hunt), and again as one of the
culprits involved with the dozens of CIA assassination
attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. Fiorini became
quite famous again in 1973 as one of the burglars at the
Democratic Party Headquarters at a hotel known as the
Watergate, under the name Frank Sturgis. Indeed, it was
precisely when the Watergate hearings were on the verge
of raising serious questions about the Bay of Pigs and
U.S. covert operations in Cuba that, suddenly, the
existence of secret White House tapes was "unexpectedly"
revealed, sidetracking forever the potentially explosive
investigation. From that moment on, all we heard was what
did Nixon know and when did he know it.
And yet it was under the constant threat of warfare
by the U.S.--overt as well as the ongoing covert
operations--that the Cuban revolution, especially under
the instigation of Che, took some of its boldest steps in
introducing "socialism of a new type." As head of the
Cuban national bank, Che made Cuba's new banknotes famous
by signing them simply "Che." John Gerassi writes: "The
first question [Che] asked of his subordinates when he
took over the bank was `Where has Cuba deposited its gold
reserves and dollars?' When he was told, `In Fort Knox,'
he immediately decided to sell, converting the gold
reserves into currencies which were exported to Canadian
or Swiss banks." (1)
At that point in time, Che was concerned not so much with
developing "solvent" banking institutions, but with two
things: fighting U.S. imperialism, in this instance by
removing the revolution's gold from the clutches of the
United States government (which could all too easily
invent an excuse to confiscate it, as it later did with
other Cuban holdings); and, of equal importance, finding
ways to foster the creation of a new socialist human
being. Che best put forth his outlook, which came to be
that of the new left internationally as well, in a
speech, "On Revolutionary Medicine":
"Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to
some extent, all the other Latin American countries.
Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first
as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close
contact with poverty, hunger, and disease; with the
inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with
the stupefication provoked by continual hunger and
punishment, to the point that a father can accept the
loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often
in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And
I began to realize that there were things that were
almost as important to me as becoming a famous scientist
or making a significant contribution to medical science:
I wanted to help those people.
"How does one actually carry out a work of social
welfare? How does one unite individual endeavor with the
needs of society?
"For this task of organization, as for all revolutionary
tasks, fundamentally it is the individual who is needed.
The revolution does not, as some claim, standardize the
collective will and the collective initiative. On the
contrary, it liberates one's individual talent. What the
revolution does is orient that talent. And our task now
is to orient the creative abilities of all medical
professionals toward the tasks of social medicine.
"The life of a single human being is worth a million
times more than all the property of the richest man on
earth... Far more important than a good remuneration is
the pride of serving one's neighbor. Much more definitive
and much more lasting than all the gold that one can
accumulate is the gratitude of a people.
"We must begin to erase our old concepts. We should not
go to the people and say, `Here we are. We come to give
you the charity of our presence, to teach you our
science, to show you your errors, your lack of culture,
your ignorance of elementary things.' We should go
instead with an inquiring mind and a humble spirit to
learn at that great source of wisdom that is the people.
"Later we will realize many times how mistaken we were in
concepts that were so familiar they became part of us and
were an automatic part of our thinking. Often we need to
change our concepts, not only the general concepts, the
social or philosophical ones, but also sometimes our
medical concepts.
"We shall see that diseases need not always be treated as
they are in big-city hospitals. We shall see that the
doctor has to be a farmer also and plant new foods and
sow, by example, the desire to consume new foods, to
diversify the nutritional structure which is so limited,
so poor.
"If we plan to redistribute the wealth of those who have
too much in order to give it to those who have nothing;
if we intend to make creative work a daily, dynamic
source of all our happiness, then we have goals towards
which to work." (2)
Che's love for the people sets the screen ablaze, and we
see it radiate through his actions--even when they are
unsuccessful--and in his diary, which the movie carefully
reconstructs. We follow Che's footsteps to Bolivia--the
focus of these diaries and thus the film--where he
organizes a band of guerrillas to serve, hopefully, as
catalyst in inspiring a revolution. Che once again has to
battle Official Marxdom. He struggles with the head of
the Bolivian Communist Party for leadership of the
guerrillas. The question: Who should set policy for the
guerrillas, Che and the guerrillas themselves, or the
head of the Bolivian Communist Party. The guerrillas vote
for Che, and the Party attache abandons the guerrilla
movement.
Would Che's decision be supportable if the Bolivian CP
had not been so heavy-handed, irresponsible and
doctrinaire? (On the other hand, _can_ there be a
vanguard party that does not act in such a manner?) To
whom is the guerrilla responsible? In Vietnam, the
National Liberation Front military took their policy from
the party's political bureau, not the other way around.
This was not the case with Che in Bolivia. The
relationship of organization to mass-movement is a
problem that has always plagued radical movements when
they get to a certain stage. To whom is the affinity
group, for example, responsible? The artist? On the one
hand, decentralization is attractive, allowing for the
greatest small-group autonomy, individual freedom and
creativity. On the other hand, the larger movement must
not only be able to coordinate the activities of many
local groups but frame the actions of smaller groups who
purport to be part of the same movement within a larger
collective strategy. As we see in the movie, failure by
the guerrillas to be part of a many-pronged social
movement led to their demise. Indeed, we see Che in his
last days rueful and frustrated at the lack of working
class uprising in the mines, which would have enabled the
guerrillas to have had much greater impact. And when,
finally, the miners do go on strike (too little, too
late) we find Che wishing for just 100 more guerrilla
troops; that rather small number (he believes) would make
the difference.
The movie follows the guerrillas as they are picked off
one by one. Without additional revolutionary forces Che
and the others are forced to deal with the reality that,
at least in Bolivia at that moment, their strategy for
catalyzing a mass-based revolutionary uprising has
failed. And, with the U.S. sending military "advisors"
and arms to the Bolivian junta, it becomes only a matter
of time, a few months, before the struggle is defeated.
The movie is terrific in finding actual members of the
guerrilla band, others who were in the Bolivian army at
the time, and peasants with whom they came into contact.
All are treated respectfully and without judgment. They
are permitted to tell their stories without comment or
superimposed sentimentality, which is a real virtue of
this film. And they all paint a picture of Che that,
thankfully, is not the hagiography of both Hollywood and
Stalinism but of a man dedicated to the poor, trying with
a small band of guerrillas to spark a revolutionary
uprising of peasants and workers to create a better life
for themselves, and meeting frustration after
frustration, and some small successes.
Most American films portray heroes as all-knowing
exceptions to the rule, thereby reinforcing our
dependence upon the myth of the heroic individual and
maintaining the impotence of the multitude. In U.S.
films, changes take place not through mass-action but
through a single moralistic or righteous figure who is
able to make the system respond positively to the
importance of his or her argument. This film, however,
projects no such illusions. Although clearly about Che,
it documents many heroes: all those who fought in the
guerrilla band, to be sure, but the peasants as well who
still live in the tiny towns they lived in 29 years ago,
leading unexceptional lives and who, clearly touched by
the brush of history, recount, movingly, their
experiences with Che. Although no one in the film says it
in so many words, clearly Che was something of a Christ
figure to them, even when they betrayed him or fired on
him.
To its credit, the film is able to reveal this without
falling into the trap of ruinous sentimentality that
pervades many allegedly "politically correct" works which
exploit the circumstances of impoverished people to
squeeze another tear from the middle-class viewer or
derive heroic inspiration from grandiose victories from
afar. Not here. This is an intelligent film, and assumes
the viewer is at least as intelligent. It doesn't lecture
us about Che's growing questions over his strategy of the
"foco," which in Cuba had worked so well. The movie,
instead, _shows_ the effects on the guerrillas, and Che's
state of mind in particular, of the failure of the
peasants to join the revolt, contrary to the guerrillas'
expectations.
When, after his capture, Che is tortured and murdered
under the direction of the CIA on October 9, 1967, the
story is remembered by a Bolivian peasant woman who, as a
young teenager at the time, had brought him food and
looked after him in his last hours. The camera does not
linger over the poverty of her village but assumes you
already know it. It doesn't zoom in and follow her tears
but allows her story, and her dignity, to speak for
itself.
And in doing so the film--stunningly photographed by Pio
Corradi--enables the beauty of the village, of the
peasants and of Che himself to emerge. We feel the
significance of Che's kindness towards this woman, now
around 40 years old, and can see that it profoundly
affected her life. Surprisingly, we identify with Che not
because of heroic delusions on our part but because his
humanity reaches us through these peasants, and it is
really nothing extraordinary, nothing so unusual--a funny
thing to say, talking about an icon. It's quite a comment
on our present condition that human touches that were
once quite ordinary seem, in today's world, exceptional.
But, in reality, there were heroes everywhere, not
because of anything special, but because it was just a
better way to live. As Che put it, "At the risk of
seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary
is guided by great feelings of love."
_Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary_ helps us
resurrect not only Che but the spirit of the times, the
willingness of so many ordinary people to commit
themselves to their vision of a different world, and how
extraordinary that love for humanity has become. And,
hopefully, it inspires us to continue "risking ridicule"
to realize those efforts today.
_Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary_, is available
from International Film Circuit, 419 Park Avenue South,
New York, New York 10016; (212) 779-0660; e-mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sorry, not yet available on video.
NOTES
1. John Gerassi, _Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings
of Che Guevara_, introduction, Simon and Schuster, p. 14.
2. Ibid. This is an edited and abbreviated extract from a
1960 speech by Che Guevara, "On Revolutionary Medicine."
The entire speech can be found in the Gerassi book, pp.
112-119.
Mitchel Cohen is a member of ArtRage, a Brooklyn-based
collective of radical artists. He also edits _Red Balloon
Magazine_, and works with the Brooklyn Green Party, the
Labor Party, the Direct Action Network to Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal, and a number of other radical groups.
//30
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