Malcolm McAllister: Guevara's struggle for Cuba's revolution

Peter Calder claims the movie The Motorcycle Diaries is sentimental and dishonest. He means the director should have let us know that the young romantic rebel, Ernesto Guevara, later turned into a "Stalinist revolutionary thug who summarily executed dissenters; who founded the forced labour camps that would later hold dissidents, homosexuals and people with Aids; who ached for the Cuban missile crisis to escalate into purifying nuclear holocaust; who abandoned the revolution because he thought Castro was a sissy; and who died in Bolivia organising a peasant revolution that failed to enlist the support of so much as a single Bolivian peasant".

Calder also adds the "regime Guevara was to design would routinely deny food to its non-believers".

Guevara might have been stern, even harsh, on himself and on his combatants. This is hardly surprising considering the rebel army, outnumbered 10 to one, facing betrayal, hunger, bombs and bullets, had to urgently forge a tight-knit fighting force.

However, it never resorted to torture or humiliation of the enemy, one reason why the dictator Batista's soldiers readily surrendered.

Nor was Guevara a Stalinist - his writings on economics and culture make it clear he disagreed with the Soviet model of socialism.

An executioner of dissenters? He oversaw public trials and executions in the immediate aftermath of the victory in 1959, not of dissenters but of the torturers and murderers of Batista's police force.

Guevara did not set up "forced labour camps" in the mid-1960s. He was not even in the country for most of that time. The camps were set up by figures within the Army who wanted an alternative to military service, and disbanded after three years.

The anti-homosexual purges of the 1960s were later condemned by the Government as a stain on the revolution.

People with Aids in Cuba are not locked up in forced labour camps, as Calder claims. When Aids first exploded worldwide in the 1980s, infected Cubans were humanely treated in sanatoriums. Since 1993 they have lived in the community and are treated and housed for free by the family doctor system. Cuba has one of the world's lowest Aids rates.

Slanders that the leadership wanted to fire missiles during the 1962 missile crisis have circulated for years. The Cubans reluctantly allowed the Soviets to install missiles in Cuba not because they thought such weapons were needed to defend Cuba from assault, but as an act of international solidarity.

The US had installed missiles in Turkey and had the Soviet Union surrounded by strategic nuclear arms. The Cubans had just defeated a US-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs and were geared up for another one.

The entire civilian population was organised into militias, armed and ready to fight. This prevented a US invasion and nuclear war. Cuba's President Dorticos said at the time that "if we are attacked, we will defend ourselves". But somehow Calder deduces from this that Guevara was a nuclear warmonger "aching ... for a purifying nuclear holocaust".

The slanders pile up. Guevara, according to Calder, "abandoned the revolution because he thought Fidel Castro was a sissy". But he left his posts with the blessing and support of Castro, to extend, not "abandon", revolution as the Cubans had done it, by guerrilla warfare, first in the Congo, then Bolivia.

Guevara's aim was to draw the US away from Vietnam. Did he think Castro was a sissy? Both Che's final Letter to Fidel and Castro's accounts of Guevara reveal only a deep and comradely affection.

Did Guevara's effort to spark revolution in Bolivia fail to enlist the support of a single Bolivian peasant? There were 12 Bolivians in his group of 27.

Does the Cuban Government "routinely deny food to its non-believers"? Every Cuban receives the same ration as his or her neighbours. Doesn't an equality of relative poverty beat the gluttony of the few amid widespread hunger that blights much of the rest of the Third World?

Food was scarce about a decade ago when 80 per cent of trade with the Eastern bloc was cut off overnight. But, despite hardship, there was never a famine, as Calder claims. At other times the ration book has supplied adequate calories.

Calder finishes his review by quoting an English writer: "It's as if someone were to make a film about Adolf Hitler by portraying him as a vegetarian who loved animals and was against unemployment. It would all be true, but would rather miss the point." The comparison works only because, to Calder, both men, despite their sensitive sides, were odious political monsters.

It is hardly surprising that Guevara has his slanderers. He helped lead a socialist revolution, the most audacious affront to US interests in the Western hemisphere. Rumours and lies about Cuba abound, emanating from the embittered former ruling class in Miami, the State Department, and the CIA.

All we ask of any journalist writing about Cuban history and politics is to consult the Cuban record, rather than relying on the lies, out-of-context quotes and sweeping generalisations that mark the writings of the revolution's many detractors.

The inaccuracies in Calder's other articles are less glaring, dotted as they are among his usual lively prose and avowed sympathy for the Cuban plight.

He writes: "The grim joke about the high literacy rate that does the rounds there ('Everyone can read and write but there's nothing to read and you have to be careful what you write') would resonate for the visual artists, too." However, the Cuban art scene today is as vigorous, open and varied as anywhere.

Is there "nothing to read" in Cuba? Most Cubans have only the tiniest amount of spare cash, so they have few books on their shelves at home. Just like in the rest of the Third World, there is no chain to equal Borders. Yet Cuban public libraries are full, they are building more of them, and printing cheap editions of Cuban and world literature.

The drama, elation and passionate hatreds of the era in which Guevara fought and died may seem distant. But the evils he fought against - neo-colonial servitude, vast inequalities in wealth, war for profit - are still with us.

So, too, is the Cuban revolution, which still bears his stamp. Che Guevara lives.

* Malcolm McAllister writes on behalf of the Auckland and Hamilton Cuba Friendship Societies.