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Feeling under the heels the ribs of Rocinante words and ideas

Who does not know Che? The one syllable nickname has replaced the given name, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. Half a century after the revolution and over forty years after his own death, he remains along with Fidel Castro, the defining personality of the Cuban revolution.

After formally resigning from his official positions in the Communist Party and the Cuban government, and indeed renouncing his very citizenship of Cuba, Che ‘disappeared’ from early in 1965 with the full knowledge, if not the willing consent, of Fidel Castro, eager once again “to feel under his heels the ribs of Rocinante” in his self-deprecating words.

A little over two years later he was dead, having been captured and killed by Bolivian troops near Vallegrande in eastern Bolivia where he had been trying to organise a peasants’ insurrection on October 9, 1967. He was not even forty when he died. Even before his death Che had become a revolutionary icon. His call to the January 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, “Create two, three, many more Vietnams” became a powerful slogan for revolutionary movements of the 1960s.

Post the collapse of the Soviet Union and the seemingly relentless march of globalisation and the so-called free market, that slogan may seem an antique piece of history. This is not so.

One can draw positive lessons even from the most grievous of setbacks, as Che does in his account of the misadventure of Cuban intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1965. (The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo, The Harvill Press, London, 2000), one of the most passionate and honest accounts of contemporary history I have read.

Before he went to Bolivia, Che spent eight months (April-November 1965) in Eastern Congo, part of what was then known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 1971 and 1997 it was known as Zaire, and briefly as Congo Kinshasa, and has now reverted to its original name. He was the leader of an expeditionary force of Cuban guerillas to assist the resistance to the central government under President Kasavabu, the beneficiary of the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first prime minister, and his two colleagues, Mpolo and Okito.

The resistance, led by Gaston Soumialot of the radical Council for National Liberation was widely blackguarded by the western media, one recalls, as the so-called Simba rebellion led by drug-crazed and bloodthirsty savages.

In due time, this resistance too was crushed with the assistance of Belgium and the U.S., and what was left of the Cuban expeditionary force.

It is now established that Belgium (and the US, though not directly) was complicit both in the coup against the Lumumba government and the murders. Following the findings of an official inquiry, Belgium formally acknowledged the government’s role in the turbulent events that followed the granting of independence. (see, The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo Witte, Verso, 2001). Cuba’s decision to lend active support to the resistance arose from its understanding of the situation: the formal retreat of colonialism accompanied indirect neo-colonialist control.

In one way or the other, this has been the trajectory of decolonisation in much of Africa.

Like all practicing revolutionaries, Che wrote extensively about what he was doing, analysing the victories and setbacks of revolutionary initiatives. Truth, for Che (and Fidel) was always revolutionary. The Diaries are a fine example of that maxim. The exhortation of Amilcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau, who was profoundly influenced by the Cuban revolution, to his fellow guerrillas, is equally apposite: “Tell no lies, claim no false victories”.

Thus, Che begins his account with this admission: “This is the history of a failure,” modifying this later to “the history of a decomposition,” not of the Congolese revolution, but the “decomposition of our own fighting morale.”

However, even defeats had to be honestly recorded, because “it was essential to analyse in depth the problems that are posed, and to find a solution to them.” This commitment to truthful analysis comes through in almost every page of the book, most clearly in the chapter entitled ’The Beginning of the End’, admitting that optimism was no longer possible. The Epilogue is a model of an honest political post mortem. In retrospect, the Cuban intervention in strategic terms was not a disaster. The lessons learnt were applied in Guinea-Bissau, and above all in Angola in 1975, and again in 1980, both crucial in the eventual liberation of South Africa.

M.S. PRABHAKARA

kamaroopi@gmail.com

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