Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

the socialist utopia 257
Castañeda’s Che is a man who could not bear the natural ambivalence
of the world and found relief from it (and, curiously, from the torment of
asthma) only in the unequivocal rigors of battle and radicalism. Appointed
fi rst to the National Agrarian Reform Institute and then to head the Central
Bank in Fidel’s revolutionary regime, he was, like so many other battle
heroes before and after him, fl ummoxed by the day-to-day realities of governance.
Why should Cuba have a monetary policy that sought to placate
imperialism? Why was it necessary to compensate exploiters and oppressors
for their sugarcane haciendas instead of merely expropriating the land
for el pueblo? Why corrupt workers by offering them more money to work
harder? Che nearly killed himself accumulating “volunteer work hours” of
his own, cutting cane and stacking sacks of sugar after the grueling hours he
put in at his desk, in order to prove that moral incentives could beat lucre
as a stimulus to productivity. He may have begun to suspect toward the end
of his stay in Cuba that other mortals liked to put their free time to a different
use. He certainly believed that the Revolution’s leadership was tacking
dangerously toward pragmatism. “The New Man”—a new type of human
being that the Revolution was to manufacture—was not being turned out
swiftly enough.
Che was unable to deal with his disapproval of the course that Fidel
was taking and his simultaneous love for the man; with his disillusionment
with the Soviet Union and the self-satisfaction of the burgeoning Cuban
bureaucracy; with the palace intrigues of the new regime (particularly those
of Fidel’s brother Raúl); and, probably, with the gnawing awareness of his
own failings as a peacetime revolutionary. It seems reasonable to interpret
his decision to leave Cuba as Castañeda does—as the result of his need to
get away from so much internal confl ict. (In the course of explaining this
decision, Castañeda provides an extraordinary account of the ins and outs of
Cuban state policy, Cuban-Soviet relations, and Castro’s dealings with the
United States.) Che was leaving behind a second wife, six children, his comrades,
his years of happiness, and the revolution he had helped give birth to;
none of these were enough to convince him that he belonged.
Guevara’s original intention was to return to his homeland and start a
guerrilla movement there. A 1965 expedition to the Congo, where various
armed factions were still wrestling for power long after the overthrow and
murder of Patrice Lumumba, and his last stand in Bolivia, Castañeda writes,
followed improbably from Fidel’s anxious efforts to keep Che away from
Argentina, where he was sure to be detected and murdered by Latin America’s
most efficient security forces. Castro seems to have felt that the Congo
would be a safer place, and the question of whether it was a more intelligent