In the early part of 2012 there was a bit of a row going on about the Galway city council's decision to celebrate Che Guevara's
roots from the Galway Lynch side of his family. The council voted unanimously to place a memorial to “Che” (nickname for
friend or buddy) Guevara near Eyre Square in their city center.
Several Irish businessmen as well as two Cuban-American congress members and an Irish-Cuban Yale professor registered
their strong discontent that this infamous revolutionary who
reportedly was responsible for the execution of thousands of Cubans
in the 1959 Castro-led revolution was being honored in this way. And
as if that wasn't enough, in the town of Kilkee, Co. Clare (where Che
himself once supposedly spent the night), the organizers of a local Che Guevara
festival have announced that his daughter, Aleida Guevara, had signed on as one of the speakers at their event to take place in
September 2012.
At the same time an article appeared in
the Irish press reporting about a poll that was conducted in the United Kingdom that ranked Michael
Collins to be Britain's second greatest enemy behind Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk (the Turkish nationalist military leader who defeated the
British in the war for Turkish independence). The article said that Collins even outranked Rommel, Napoleon and George Washington (curiously no mention of
Hitler). And there was not even a whimper about this in the Irish
press. That's probably because they knew that the wind would blow away
the memory of this poll in a month's time. But a physical memorial
will last longer than a poll, a lot longer. Was the Galway council
looking to attract more tourism to their area especially in
economically hard times? If so, could they not have found some other less
controversial way to promote their area's history and beauty? Of
course, but they probably believed that this move would undoubtedly
bring in more tourist money in the immediate future. What's not to
like about some extra cash in the coming years! Anyway, the monument has yet to be erected and probably never will.
So who was
Che Guevara? You have seen his caricature on millions of posters,
tee-shirts, tattoos and the like, all around the world. The Irish
graphic artist, Jim Fitzpatrick, first drew Guevara's figure (see above) in 1967
from a photo entitled “Guerrillero Heroico” (Heroic
Guerrilla Fighter) taken by Alberto Korda. It is this depiction of
Che that has become one of the most widely disseminated figures in
the modern world.
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| Family tree on display in the Guevara home in Cordoba, Argentina |
And how was Che Guevara Irish? Che's
great grandfather Patrick Lynch, left Ireland for Argentina and
settled in Buenos Aires. He married Rosa de Galaya de la Camera, a
wealthy heiress and they had a daughter, Che's grandmother, Ana Lynch
born in 1851. She married Roberto Guevara Castro, and their eldest
son was Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Che's father, who was born in 1900 (the mother was 49 years of age when her eldest son was born???).
Ernesto married Celia de la Serna de la Llosa in 1927, and their
first child Ernesto, who would be known internationally as “Che”,
was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928. Young
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna Lynch was the eldest of five siblings.
His father, always proud of his Irish heritage, once commented
regarding his son's temperament that "the first thing to note is
that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the
Irish rebels."
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| Che (left) with parents and siblings |
The Guevara family
created an intellectual atmosphere in their home, instilling in young
Ernesto a keen interest in literature, science and philosophy. As a
youngster he was a voracious reader and excelled in school. In 1948
he entered medical school at the University of Buenos Aires
graduating in 1953. His medical studies were interrupted for a
year-long motocycle journey through Latin America with his friend
Alberto Granado. On the trip he kept notes of their experiences which
he later wrote in book form entitled The
Motocycle Diaries. In later years it
became a New York Times best-seller and was made into a film by the
same name in 2004.
This trip brought the
young Guevara and his friend into contact with common people along
their route. In Chile they were exposed to the harsh life conditions
of workers in the copper mines. In Peru they saw dehumanizing poverty
among the peasants of the countryside and in a leper colony along the
Amazon River they saw the self-sacrifice and community spirit of
those who were outcast from the rest of society. These experiences
led Ernesto to analyse the conditions that were imposed by the haves
of society that compelled the have-nots
to live as they did. He felt that all people had the right to share
the earth's resources in such a way that they could all share a more
dignified life.
After he graduated from
medical school in 1953, Che decided to go on another trip north to
pursue his dream of creating a better world free from the grinding
poverty and inhumanity that he had witnessed on his first trip. This
journey took him through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica,
Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. In Central America he
came into contact with the extensive operations of the United Fruit
Company, and saw how they operated by taking control of the land
formerly farmed by poor defenseless peasants and was now employing
them for sub-human wages and offering no benefits.
In Guatemala, where
democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz was expropriating
uncultivated lands and redistributing then to landless peasants,
Guevara liked what he saw and began to settle down. United Fruit
owned large tracts of uncultivated land and stood to lose a
substantial portion of their wealth from this land reform program.
Through United Fruit intervention, Arbenz was utlimately overthrown
by the CIA-assisted Guatamalan army. Prior to this, Che's Peruvian
economist girlfriend, Hilda Gadea, had introduced him to some Cuban
exiles living in Guatemala who were associated with Fidel and Raul Castro. But for the
moment his task was to stay out of the clutches of the new government
and so he sought refuge in the Argentine embassy until he could
obtain safe passage out of the country.
His next stop was Mexico City
where he made direct contact with the Castro brothers who were
planning to return to Cuba to overthrow the corrupt regime of
dictator Fulgencio Batista. After his Guatemala experience and
through long dialogues with Fidel Castro, Che came to a clearer
understanding that the struggle to establish the ideals he believed
in required even armed conflict. This was the key turning point in
Che's life and approach. His encounter with Fidel Castro, according
to biographer Simon Reid-Henry, led to a “revolutionary friendship
that would change the world.”
In November 1956, Guevara set
out with the Castro brothers and their band of 82 men on the Granma,
a small yacht they had purchased to cross from Mexico to Cuba.
Shortly after landing, the group was decimated by an attack of
Batista's soldiers. Sixty men were killed or captured leaving the
rest, including Guevara and the Castro's, to regroup again in the
Sierra Maestra mountains.
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| On horseback near Santa Clara |
After almost two years in the Cuban
mountains skirmishing with Batista's army, Che was gaining the
confidence of the locals and recruiting many of them for his forces.
He was developing a military prowess that helped gain the upper hand
for the revolutionaries. His intuitive ability to overcome the enemy
was recognized by Fidel even though he was thought to take some wild
chances. His small band of men once stopped a Cuban army battalion of
1500 men by surrounding them and killing many of their soldiers.
Their campaign had progressed through
most of the provinces of the island nation until January 1, 1959 when
Batista, recognizing that his end was near, boarded a plane and fled to safety with more
than 300 million dollars. The next day Che Guevara and his forces
entered Havana and the revolutionary battle was over.
At first Castro placed Guevara in
charge of the purge of former Batista henchmen, including those
considered to be traitors, informants and other war criminals. His
sense of “revolutionary justice” compelled him to authorize the
execution of thousands after conviction by collective trials. He had
become a hardened man even before this when he personally executed
traitors and spies during his days in the mountains. His essay “Death
of a Traitor” in which he tells of how he personally executed
Eutimio Guerra, is clear evidence that Che, the man of high ideals
who at first struggled to uplift the dignity of the common man, had
now become a hardened aggressor. He himself wrote in a letter to his
friend, Luis Paredes Lopez, in Buenos Aires: “The executions by
firing squads are not only a necessity for the people of Cuba, but
also an imposition of the people.” It was here that many reasonable people who up to this point had admired him, now parted his
company. Mob justice held sway.
At different points in time Che held other important posts in the new revolutionary government. He was the head of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, the head of the Cuban Literacy Campaign, the Finance Minister, the President of the National Bank, and the head of the Instruction Department of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. It was in this latter capacity that he trained many of the soldiers who repelled the CIA-financed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 that attempted to overturn the Castro revolution. In addition, Castro sent Guevara on several diplomatic missions to the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist bloc countries seeking aid for the continuance of their revolution.
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| With Khrushchev in Moscow |
In 1965 while on another diplomatic
mission that took him to several west African countries as well as to
Egypt, China and North Korea, Che also stopped off in Ireland and
celebrated St. Patrick's Day in Limerick City. He wrote to his father
with tongue-in-cheek: “I am in this green Ireland of your
ancestors. When they found out, the television came to ask me about
the Lynch genealogy, but in case they were horse thieves or something
like that, I didn't say much.”
As a result of this trip, Che was
re-directing his attention away from Cuba and becoming more
interested in exporting his brand of revolution to other countries.
Later that year, with a small band of Cubans, he went to the Congo
and collaborated with guerrilla leader Laurent-Desire Kabila. It
didn't take long for him to see that Kabila's men were undisciplined
and lacked the will to really make the revolution happen. He became
disillusioned and saw that his efforts were leading to failure. He
summed it up in the words: “we can't liberate by ourselves a
country that does not want to fight.”
Che now felt that he could no longer
return to Cuba because he had submitted his written resignation from
all his government posts to Fidel Castro and had renounced his Cuban
citizenship. Fidel read this letter to a rally in Havana, an act
which, in Che's mind, solemnized his separation from Cuba.
He next turned his attention to South
America and to Bolivia in particular. With his band of 50 men Che
scored several early successes in his battles against the Bolivian
army in early 1967. However he did not know that the US had been
tipped off about his new revolutionary effort and was sending CIA
special operatives into Bolivia to counteract him. This factor, in
addition to his inability to recruit support from the locals in the
Vallegrande area, put him at a serious disadvantage. On October 8,
1967, with the intelligence and support of these CIA operatives,
Bolivian troops captured Che. He was taken to La Higuera, to a small
schoolhouse where he was held until the next day when he was executed
by a Bolivian army sargent on the orders of Bolivian President Rene
Barriento.
Che's body was buried in an unmarked
common grave where he lay for 30 years. In July 1997 a team of Cuban
and Argentine specialists uncovered the grave finding seven bodies. By
matching dental records still on file in Cuba they were able to
identify the skeletal remains of Che Guevara. Subsequently his
remains were moved to a mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba where under
his command, his forces had dealt the decisive blow to the Batista
regime in 1959.
"He who lives by the sword will die by the sword."
Matthew 26:52
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