GUEVARA AS FRESH AIR AGAINST SILENCE

Okello Oculi celebrates the legacy of Che Guevara, a radical with a cause

GUEVARA BELIEVED IN HONOURING HUMAN DIGNITY IN EVERY INDIVIDUAL; ENCOURAGING CREATIVITY IN EACH INDIVIDUAL TO BLOOM

Colonial governments threw curtains of silence over Africa between 1952 and1959 when university students in Cuba led by Fidel Castro turned to armed challenges against a government of Batista that was serving interests of American companies growing sugar cane and tobacco on the most fertile lands; as well as owning brothels and gambling casinos in Cuba’s major towns. Che Guevara, a medical doctor who had travelled by motor bike from his native Argentina, met in Mexico a group of young Cubans who had jumped out of prison, and were plotting to invade the island and seize power from a ‘’neo-colonial’’ government and economic regime. Their struggle was different from anti-colonial liberation wars that later raged in Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde and Zimbabwe. It was closer to Mao Zedung’s liberation war in China whose guerrilla army and ideology was fed by recruiting from local communities bitterly exploited and despised by land lords; Japanese, Americans, Britons, German and other Europeans.

The Cuban exiles accepted this Argentinean medical doctor who lacked military experience like themselves. Che Guevara had read his uncle’s autobiography, a colonial governor in Peru, who graphically described brutal Spanish decimation of indigenous peoples and Africans who had reached Mexico and Peru long before Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean. He had also observed current forms of exploitation of local peoples in countries he rode his motorcycle across. Those contacts prepared him for the fury he saw in the young Cuban rebels.

Guevara’s book on their struggle to reach the Sierra Maestra mountains in Cuba and fight to capture rural and urban centres including the capital Havana, became a guide to other fighters like the writings of Mao Zedung. The war from the mountains gave Guevara and his Cuban comrades a view of building socialism more suited to Cuban conditions than doctrinaire views of Cuba’s Communist Party based in urban areas and guided by the Soviet Union.

As Governor of the Central Bank; Minister of Finance, and of Industry, Guevara would roll up his sleeves and cut sugar cane; take off his shirt to join workers fabricating industrial machines thereby boosting workers’ morale as commanders had done on the war front.

This restless spirit led to his leaving the cabinet to implement the strategy of defending Cuba against American invasion by creating ‘’ten Vietnams’’ around the world. This would overstretch America’s troops and weaken her economy. Accordingly, he led 150 Cuban fighters across Lake Tanganyika to start fighting to overthrow Mobutu Sese[i] Seko in Zaire (later D.R. Congo). He was soon disillusioned by ethnic conflicts between Congolese and immigrant Tutsi from Rwanda; while Laurent Kabila, the local ‘’revolutionary’’ leader spent more time with beer bottles and prostitutes in faraway Dar es Salaam.

Unlike Chou en-Lai, China’s foreign minister, who declared in Nairobi that ‘’Africa was ready for revolution’’, Che saw more potential in Bolivia. Its location between Argentina and Brazil made it ideal for liberation war as a ‘ripple effect’ rolling across South America. This spirit and strategy of exporting Cuba’s revolutionary impact in competition with the expansiveness of American imperialism became his most legendary legacy.

In1975 and 1988 Cuban troops crossed the Atlantic Ocean and defeated armies of racist South Africa. Those victories prevented a recolonisation of Angola by South Africa; chased racist troops out of Namibia; strengthened the hands of military and business leaders pushing for the end of Apartheid governance, and the release of Nelson Mandela from 27 years in prison. This was Cuba’s greatest tribute to the staccato of Che Guevara’s footsteps and vision for democracy and human dignity across southern Africa.

As a medical doctor, Guevara was bound to draw medical doctors and nurses into armed struggle; evolving into Cuba’s export of thousands of health workers into Vietnam, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola and across South America. These doctors do not work in rich urban areas but in remote villages. The village of 24 people in Bolivia where Guevara was murdered - after being captured alive - now has a Cuban doctor running its clinic.

The legacy of Cuba providing high quality health services to poor people took a new twist when Hugo Chavez of Venezuela flew over patients from other South America countries to receive treatment by Cuba’s top medical experts. He paid with oil exports to Cuba at lower prices.

Guevara believed in honouring human dignity in every individual; encouraging creativity in each individual to bloom. In a letter to someone who claimed that she was so proud that Guevara was distant blood relation, he wrote to say that sharing the sense of human brotherhood to all was a more important solidarity.

He was assassinated on October 9, 1967. Uganda became independent on October 9, 1962. On May 25, 1963, her Prime Minister, Apollo Obote, rudely told President John F. Kennedy to preoccupy himself with ending racial discrimination against African-Americans in his country and not be lecturing African leaders about ‘’democracy’’. With Obote’s government also accused of supplying guns to rebels fighting Mobutu’s government in neighbouring Zaire/ Congo, American leaders may well have vindictively symbolically splashed Guevara’s blood on Uganda’s freedom day.

During a season when President Donald Trump is frantically hurling ‘’America First’’ to demolish global achievements in building collective peace and human security with UNESCO and the Paris Agreement on galloping climate hazards, the world can breathe fresh air by breaking roars of silence over the virtuous legacy of Ernesto Che Guevara. With his spirit of rising to confront evil rolls of imperialism, Africa’s youth should surge forth to serve Africa and fight for her liberation across boundaries of the continent and the globe. Venceremos.