Published at 07:55 on 19 August 2025
Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s autobiographical account of his 1952 journey through South America is something I have been wanting to read since seeing the movie based on it about two decades ago. (Talk about procrastination.)
I had been hoping to, in part, gain some insight into Che’s eventual support for authoritarian leftism.
On that latter term, some leftists disagree with it, saying leftism is intrinsically anti-elite and therefore “leftist” regimes like the one in Cuba (which do have a ruling elite) are in fact anti-leftist. I find such arguments unconvincing, because the motives of the authoritarianism in such regimes are different from the motives of it in right-wing authoritarian regimes. One strives to use force to replace capitalism with a more egalitarian system (and tends to not much concerned with preservation of traditional values), the other strives to use force to maintain traditional hierarchies and values.
Trying to overthrow traditional hierarchies on the grounds that they are unjust is classic leftism, therefore I feel the “authoritarian leftism” label is both fair and descriptive. Moreover, it jibes well with conventional terminologies, and I see value in not adopting a rhetoric so divorced from conventional usage as to impede comprehension. It is the mission of the political left to engage with society and to change it, not to retreat into inward-looking subcultures that are mostly irrelevant to the masses.
But I digress. Back to insights into how Guevara became the political force he eventually became. In this respect, I was not disappointed.
The appendix of the book I have contains the translated text a retrospective speech given by Guevara in 1960, in which he claimed “When I started out as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.”
I disagree with that assessment, or at least I find it highly misleading. The young Guevara does express core sentiments that stayed with him throughout his life, so far as I can see, and while these core sentiments might be outnumbered by his later insights, they stayed with him and profoundly guided him to become what he became.
Namely, it is clear that Guevara did not in any way reject authoritarianism. This became obvious when reading his near-admiration for Pedro Gutiérrez de Valdivia and his “indefatigable thirst to take control of a place where he can exercise total authority” (“Abaca Chile,” “The End of Chile”).
Authoritarianism has been, sadly, part of the scene in Latin America, where nations have, despite the aspirations of many for something better, tended until quite recently to be led by a succession of one strongman after another. Guevara came of age in Argentina under Perón, and writes in his diaries of how, as Argentines, he and Alberto Granado (his travelling companion), were often admired as being from the nation where Perón had won some gains for the working class and the poor.
Many decades ago I read an essay on Guevara that claimed he was, in a sense, a Peronist. At the time, I thought the charge preposterous. Now, I think it has a lot of truth in it. He wasn’t strictly a Peronist (Juan Perón was not a revolutionary and in fact was quite the traditionalist in some aspects), but Guevara did, like Perón, see politics as an exercise in using strongman power to improve the lot of the less fortunate.
To this we can add how Guevara’s personal experiences with liberal democracy as practiced by the USA ranged from somewhat to profoundly unpleasant. First, there was his unplanned stint in Miami at the end of his 1952 journey, in which he got to experience the injustice and hypocrisy of the Jim Crow-era South first-hand.
Even more tragically there was Guatemala, where by a minor miracle (it is always a miracle when left values triumph in a bourgeois society), a leftist, Jacobo Árbenz, won a presidential election and set about reforming Guatemalan society. Árbenz was not a strongman, and did respect civil liberties. The changes happening in Guatemala inspired Guevara, who travelled there to assist the Árbenz government.
But the liberal, democratic values of the Guatemalan revolution didn’t matter. The response of the USA to the democratic, peaceful social revolution Árbenz was trying to create was to sponsor a coup d’etat and overthrow him. Forty long years of bloody repression and civil war followed.
In a world where resistance does not have to be small-l libertarian, in a political culture where pro-liberty values were the exception more than the norm, where a nonviolent revolution that tried to espouse these values till the end had seen them exploited as weaknesses by the forces of superpower imperialism, and where there was a competing superpower holding the promise of leftist revolution with competing values, it is pretty obvious where on the political spectrum Ernesto “Che” Guevara would probably end up.
Which, basically, is where he did end up.
