BOOKS
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Che's moral heroism, his attempt to transcend the material environ–
ment, was the tragic flaw which finally destroyed
him
in Bolivia. When
he left Cuba he wrote to his children: "Above all, always be able to
feel deeply any injustice committed against anyone in any part of the
world. -It's a revolutionary's most beautiful quality"; and to his parents:
"Essentially, nothing has changed, except that I am much more con–
scientious, my Marxism has struck deep roots and is purified." Again
the Kantian note is struck. Conscientiousness took him to his death,
because it led
him
to ignore political and military facts, and especially
Barrientos' ability to mobilize peasant support.
When I stress Che's moralism, I do not want to underestimate
his intellectual qualities. Americans in particular should read the speech
rejecting the Alliance for Progress made at the Punta del Este Con–
ference of the OAS in 1961; about that particular Kennedy cloud–
cuckoo project Guevara has proved alarmingly right. But when Guevara
is not being critical of imperialism, he is all too apt to substitute in–
vocations of honor or of the spirit of sacrifice for intellectual analysis.
Guevara's student admirers are indeed moved precisely by this and so
is John Gerassi who has done scholarship a service by his collection of
Guevara's speeches and writings. Yet what they admire is just that
abstract moralism which Marx himself ought to have taught us to
suspect. Che's last letter to his parents begins with an allusion to
Cervantes: "Once more I feel Rocinante's ribs under my heels; I'm
taking to the road again with my shield on my arm." Perhaps as he
wrote this he should have remembered that other reminiscence of Cer–
vantes in a footnote in
Capital
which ends by Marx remarking that
"Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that
knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society."
Alasdair Macintyre
