PROPHET OF REVOLUTION

Residents of the town of Alta Gracia in the Argentinean province of Cordoba still remember all details of those events, though it is difficult to identify now what is true and what is false as many years have passed since then.

In the middle of the 1940s, a local electricity company jacked up prices for electricity. Since the population of Alta Gracia was not so wealthy, the poorest residents were the worst hit by the new price, but most of them expressed their outrage at home. One night all the lights installed by the electricity company in the streets of Alta Gracia were broken. The company thought that this was the doing of local teenagers and installed new lights. But soon someone broke them again, and word started going round that this will continue until the company reduces the price of electricity again. The company was taken aback. There is no point in catching boys in the dark streets as you cannot attach a policeman to every lamppost. The damage from the broken lights was much higher than revenues from the new price. The company was forced to give in. Soon Alta Gracia learnt the name of the person who had organized the impressive act of retribution. It was Ernesto, the older son of engineer Ernesto Guevara Lynch and his wife Celia de la Serna. The family had moved to Alta Gracia from Rosario because their older son suffered from asthma. No-one could really assume at the time that this boy, from a family of classical representatives of the "middle class", would become a well-known revolutionary, romanticist and a symbol of the "rebellious generation", while his portrait in his famous beret will have the largest print-run in history.

Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna was born on 14 June 1928, which means that he would have turned 80 this year. But it is difficult to imagine the legendary Che as an old person who writes interesting memoirs. He himself made his choice and went to the very end.

Perhaps, people who are sure that they must make the world better appear at all times. But not everyone manages to change the world and leave their mark on history.

First Ernesto Che Guevara did not even think of becoming a politician or a revolutionary. He was too young when he read the works of Karl Marx, Engels and Freud from his father's library. Perhaps, he studied some of them before he entered the Cordoba State College in 1941. However, Spanish immigrants who had fled to Argentina from Franco's regime during the civil war in Spain had already made a deep impression on Ernesto. And then, Argentina itself faced a long litany of dirty political crises which resulted in the establishment of the "left-wing fascist" dictatorship of Juan Peron to whom Guevara's family had an extremely hostile attitude.

Che's biographers will say later that this period changed his world outlook completely. Che Guevara was disappointed in parliamentary democracy which he regarded as a "pantomime". He hated military dictators with all his heart and soul. As for Americans, he hated them even more, because they were ready to patronize these dictators though they talked about democracy all the time. Although Ernesto's parents, and first of all, his mother, were actively involved in anti-Peron activity, during his time at the University of Buenos Aires (where he entered in 1947), he did not take part in students' revolutionary movement and was not really interested in politics. People believed that he would make an excellent career as an engineer, but Ernesto decided to become a doctor in order to ease the suffering of other people.

At the end of 1948, Ernesto decided to start his first big journey in the northern provinces of Argentina on a bike. It was exactly this journey that formed the basis of one of the most sensational biographical films about Che Guevara. After passing his penultimate university exams in 1951, Guevara and his friend Granados started a more serious journey, making their living by doing accessory work in places where they travelled. He then visited southern Argentina, Chile where he met Salvador Allende (according to other reports, he met him in person much later), Peru where he spent several weeks working at the San Pablo leper colony, and Colombia where he was briefly arrested. He also visited Venezuela and Miami in Florida.

Che himself admitted in conversation with Soviet poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko later that he decided to become a revolutionary after an incident that happened during that journey.

- I wanted to become a doctor, but then I realized that you cannot save people only with medicine, the commandante said slowly without turning around. Then he suddenly turned around and looked away again. His eyes emitted cold, and the dark spots around his eyes seemed red-hot.

- Do you cycle? The commandante asked. I looked up expecting him to smile, but his pale face did not smile.

- Sometimes a bicycle can help you become a revolutionary, the commandante said, sitting in a chair and taking a cup of coffee with his narrow fingers of a pianist.

- As a teenager, I thought of travelling around the world on a bike. I once got on a big cargo plane with my bike. It was bound for Miami. It was carrying horses to a race. I hid my bike in a haystack and I hid myself. When we arrived, the owners of the horses were furious. They were feared to death that my presence had affected the horses' nervous system. In revenge, they locked me in the plane. The plane became hot because it was quite warm outside. I became delirious from heat and hunger… Do you want another cup of coffee?... I chewed hay and felt sick. The owners of the horses came back drunk one day later, and they seemed to have lost. One of them threw a half-empty bottle of coca cola at me. The bottle broke. Some liquid was left in one of the pieces. I drank it and cut my lips. When we flew back, the owners of the horses drank whisky and teased me with sandwiches. Luckily, they gave the horses to drink and I drank together with the horses from a canvas bucket… Yevtushenko retold that conversation with the legendary commandante Che in his poem "Fuku". Hunger - this is what makes people revolutionaries - your own hunger or somebody else's hunger - when you feel it as your own hunger.

In his first years after university, he still tried to be a doctor. Having received a letter from Granados who offered him an interesting job in Venezuela, Ernesto happily accepted this proposal and went there with his friend via Bolivia. In La Paz, he witnessed a national revolution which, however, disappointed him: another pro-American government came to power. Then Ernesto moved to Guatemala thanks to his love for archaeology and the history of the ancient Incan civilization. He met Hilda Gadea here. She became his wife and introduced him to Fidel Castro, or to be more precise, to Nico Lopez, one of his companions.

A new political storm began in Guatemala soon. The socialist president, Arbenz, was overthrown and his supporters were forced to run away. Ernesto moved to Mexico where he worked in the central hospital from 1954. Here he was joined by Hilda Gadea and Nico Lopez and met Fidel and Raul Castro. The Castro brothers had recently come from Cuba where they had made a botched attempt to storm the Moncada Barracks in order to overthrow Batista's dictatorship. This cost them several years in jail. They were released under public pressure, but it was dangerous to stay in Cuba.

Here in Mexico, they came up with a reckless plan: to buy a yacht, knock together a detachment of volunteers, go to Cuba, land there and raise a revolt in order to overthrow Batista's reviled dictatorship. Ernesto Guevara happily accepted the proposal of the Castro brothers. Here he was given the nickname Che, of which he was proud for the rest of his life. Che is a typical Argentinean exclamation in a friendly conversation.

The rebels were seriously preparing for guerrilla warfare under the command of the captain of the Spanish Republican Army, Alberto Bayo, the author of the book "One Hundred Fifty Questions to a Guerrilla" and an experienced soldier of the civil war in Spain who had excellent knowledge of theoretical issues of this fight from Soviet and Chinese sources. Che became his best student. However, soon the rebel camp was spotted and broken up by the police, while all the Cubans and Che were arrested and released one month later in June 1956. It was not possible to waste time any more, and soon the legendary Granma started its legendary voyage to the Cuban coast.

Guevara first joined the crew as a doctor. But soon he became commander of one of the brigades and was given a top revolutionary rank - commandante (major).

Perhaps, from this moment Guevara's life started turning into a legend. When the revolutionaries landed in the port of Tuxpan on 25 November 1956, they met with stiff resistance from the dictator's troops. Only 20 people from their detachment survived. But the army of "barbudos" (bearded men) was joined by more and more volunteers: hate for Batista's dictatorship was very strong. The revolutionary command took control of more and more territory, while agrarian and social reforms only multiplied the number of revolutionaries.

Commandante Che was one of the most courageous, decisive, talented and successful brigade commanders. Even his enemies recognized this. Exacting with his fighters and merciless with his enemies, he gained a number of brilliant victories over the government troops. His most impressive victory, which predetermined the victory of the Cuban Revolution, was the fight for the strategic town of Santa Clara which began on 28 December 1958 and ended with its seizure on 31 December. One day later, the revolutionary army entered Havana. Cuba started its new life. Che was regarded as a second person in Fidel's new government. In February 1959, he was granted Cuban citizenship and appointed to the highest government positions. Che Guevara organized and headed the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, eliminating semi-feudal rules of land use and securing its effectiveness. He was minister of industry and was elected president of the National Bank of Cuba. He had no experience in state administration or economic management, but nevertheless, he carried out monetary and industrial reforms. In 1959, he signed the historical agreement with the Soviet Union on exports of sugar and import of oil, ending the dependence of the Cuban economy on the United States.

He could rest on his laurels until the end of his life. His authority in Cuba was too high. In Cuba, Ernesto did his most famous and inexplicable deed. In October 1965, Che left all his high state positions, gave up his Cuban citizenship, and dropping a line to his wife and children, disappeared. To be more precise, he went to a new war.

Later his biographers tried to prove that state building and guerrilla warfare are dissimilar tasks and that he regarded office work as too boring and bureaucratic. But while the press of the whole world guessed where the Cuban minister disappeared, Che Guevara was spotted in Africa in 1966. Che was seen in several African countries where he prepared the ground for anti-imperialist revolts. Later, he returned to Cuba, knocked together a detachment of 120 volunteers and went to Africa again - the Congo - in order to restore the socialist government in Kinshasa by means of guerrilla warfare. In April 1967, Che and his detachment illegally entered Bolivia where guerrilla warfare was beginning. Everything seemed to be good right at the start. But then the government launched punitive operations. Che was chased by choice punitive units which killed anyone who gave him asylum until they found a traitor.

On 8 October, Che Guevara's detachment was surrounded on the outskirts of the village of Vallegrande. The punitive unit attacked Che and his companions. Che was wounded - a shot "from that side" damaged his rifle.

Many said later that when the punitive unit broke into a school classroom in the village of La Higuera, Che only swore when they ordered him to stand up. They tried to interrogate him and executed him in the morning, having failed to achieve anything.

Many were scared of him even after his death. His hands were chopped off and sent to La Paz for dactylography, his body was cut into pieces and strewed all over the selva. Even the house where the "commandante" was interrogated was set on fire.

This is probably the moment when "life after life" starts. Maybe those who say that a living legend always has a reflection of death are right, but living legends do not really die. After his death in Bolivia, Che Guevara was fated to become a symbol not just of the revolution, but also of the ideological choice that was made not just by the grass roots, but also by boys and girls from bourgeois "middle class" families who sincerely believed that they had to make the world better and cleaner - like the son of an Argentinean engineer once decided. His portraits will become a symbol of "the university rebellion" in 1968. His pictures will be printed on T-shirts and badges to make a capitalistic fortune on the anti-imperialist moods of the youth, while Che Guevara's beret will become a political symbol. Even those who may not know about all details of Che Guevara's biography learnt one thing firmly. Che is not a hero that was chosen by time. He himself chose the revolution with a capital R.