I have been thinking a lot about Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who, in his death perhaps even more than in his life, has achieved an iconic status. Three reasons underlie these thoughts. First, the recent opening of U.S. policy on Cuba and a photograph of a street mural of Che my husband took on a visit there late last year. The mural is faded, its paint chipped, and the wall on which it is painted is exposed and crumbling. Second is the openness of large segments of American youth to the ideas of socialism and revolutionary change, most evident in the supporters of Bernie Sanders. There is no doubt that, with this burgeoning progressive movement, the iconography of Che will experience a new resurgence in American popular culture. And third is a new book, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice by Samuel Farber, a Marxist sociologist-historian born in Cuba. For these reasons, and after reading Farber’s book, I realized that my memories of Che are like the faded mural in my husband’s photograph, and that I need to refresh these memories. I realized that I never fully mourned Che’s death, nor really considered the meaning of his life.One evening in 1968 I sat in my small apartment in Berkeley, recovering from a severe asthmatic attack precipitated by the tear gas used to disperse demonstrators at a “Stop the Draft” march in Oakland. Wheezing, struggling for breath, and over-stimulated by medicine containing adrenaline, I read Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, which had just been published. Che, plagued by lifelong asthma as I was, became a doctor and then a revolutionary. His youthful experiences led to his militant opposition to the oppression and imperialism he saw threatening Latin America. He joined Fidel Castro in 1955 and was part of the crew of the Granma boat which invaded Cuba in 1956, the beginning salvo which led to the overthrow of the Batista government in 1959. Eight years later in 1967, Che was killed in the mountains of Bolivia, fighting a guerilla war with tactics exported from the Cuban revolution, with often unwilling Bolivian peasants, and against a much stronger Bolivian military heavily supported by the CIA. He was alone, isolated, and gripped by severe asthma without any medication. Bolivia was a doomed effort from the start.I was profoundly influenced by Che’s words and experiences. Reading about Che’s work as a physician and his leadership of guerillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains of Cuba, all the while suffering from asthma, I felt less alone with my own disease, and encouraged to continue my part in the anti-war struggle. My decision to become a doctor was inspired by Che, as was my later decision to specialize in infectious diseases, and particularly to work with HIV patients, guided by Che’s work with leprosy patients. Che died when he was 39. I continued to live my life, and with the passage of time, my perspective on Che became less romantic and memories faded.Sam Farber’s book is the first serious and critical look at the politics of Che Guevara since the 1997 comprehensive biography written by Jorge Castañeda, Compañero. Farber’s book summarizes the important facts of Che’s life and, more importantly, discusses in depth, and from a Marxist perspective, his political thought and action. Farber acknowledges the success of the Cuban revolution, as well as the heroism, passion, bravery, egalitarianism, and moral integrity of Che. But he adds a perspective that has often been ignored, as he delineates the more problematic aspects of what he labels “Guevarism.” The youth movement of today will benefit greatly from Farber’s perspective, because it ultimately asks important questions about what a revolution really entails, what the process of revolution may be, and what role democracy will have in that process.Farber’s perspective comes from a view that there are two kinds of socialism (a perspective articulated by Hal Draper in a 1966 pamphlet, “The Two Souls of Socialism”)—socialism from above, which is inherently undemocratic and is administered by an often bureaucratic leadership, and a socialism from below, which is rooted in democracy and representation of autonomous workers and popular power. He makes the case that Che was the former kind of socialist. He shows how Che was influenced by “Stalinized Marxism” and that for Che, the essence of socialism consisted “in having the state, led by the vanguard Communist Party, control the economic life of the country.”Farber further supports his perspective in his discussion of Che’s theory of the role of the vanguard, guerilla warfare, and Che’s participation in the suppression of dissident thought and activity in early post-revolutionary Cuba. In his writings, Che articulates his belief that the role of the vanguard is to be the prime mover in a revolution, and that the vanguard must educate the masses to follow their lead. Flowing from this was Che’s belief that vanguard-led guerilla warfare was possible throughout all of Latin America—and internationally—regardless of the economic, social, and political conditions in each country.Che’s belief in the vanguard-led Cuban government led to the imprisonment and even execution of political opponents who were innocent of any crimes during his administration of La Cabaña prison in 1959. His participation in the labor camps in Guanahacabibes in 1960, which initiated extrajudicial incarceration for minor offenses, set the precedent for the later UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) camps for the confinement of dissidents, homosexuals, and later people with AIDS, established after Che was no longer in government. Farber acknowledges Che’s later criticisms of the bureaucratic tendencies of the pro-Moscow communist parties, as well as Soviet style “socialist realism” in the arts, but he does not see this as a significant move away from Che’s “Stalinized” political theory.Ultimately, Farber states that socialism is truly liberating only when society is controlled by those who, through their labor, make social existence possible. A socialist society must be democratic, with majority rule and respect for minority rights and civil liberties. Economic reforms alone cannot bring about full emancipation.Farber’s book raises issues about the meaning of history and about how we view historical figures. I prefer to think of people, to paraphrase the psychologist Carl Rogers, not as products, but as processes. And in looking back on Che’s life I do not see a static figure with a completely developed political theory, but rather a person who was still in the process of political evolution at the time of his early and tragic death.Che was certainly influenced by “Stalinized Marxism.” But I see contradictions within his thought most evident from the mid-1960s to the time of his death. Had he lived, I would like to think that these contradictions might have evolved into a more humanistic, democratic, and compassionate Marxism. As early as 1961, at a national meeting for production, Che noted that “the Ministry (of Industry) has often issued orders without consulting the masses; it has often ignored the labor unions and ignored the great working masses.”In 1965 Che delivered a speech while in Algiers. In this speech he laid out his critique of pro-Moscow Communist parties. A month later he wrote his famous, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” in which he criticized Soviet style “socialist realism” in the arts, and in which he initiated his discussion of the relationship of the individual and socialism. These two events strained his relationship with Fidel and Raúl Castro, as he was accused of “indiscipline and irresponsibility.” The speech and the article were anathema to Moscow.In his article, Che reveals many of the contradictions in his thought about the revolutionary process, about consciousness, and the role of the vanguard. On the one hand he still speaks of the vanguard as “the catalyzing agent that created the subjective conditions necessary for victory.” At the same time, he speaks of the “close dialectical unity between the individual and the mass, in which both are interrelated and in which the mass interacts with its leaders.” True, despite his use of the term “dialectical,” he has not yet reached an appreciation of the complexity of the relationship between the revolutionary leader, social circumstances, and the led. He still sees “the mass” as a passive receptacle of education by leaders, rather than as subjective makers of their own history, from whom leaders may learn. Che’s passive view of “the mass” is critiqued by Marx in his third “Theses on Feuerbach”:. . . the materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore changed men are products of other circumstances . . . forgets that men themselves change circumstances and that the educator himself must be educated.But there is an indication here that Che’s thought is opening to the need for leaders at least to interact with the men and women making up a socialist society rather than simply to issue directives. For someone who had not immersed himself in the early writings of Marx, and who was not exposed to the developing Marxist humanism movement among Western socialists, Che devoted a great deal of thought to the relationship of the individual and a changing society, to the development of a new consciousness. “What is important,” he says in his article, “is that each day individuals are acquiring ever more consciousness of the need for their incorporation into society and, at the same time, of their importance as the motor of that society.” Further, “. . . one must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds.” He expresses a beginning understanding of the need for reciprocity between leadership and the led, when he says with real humility, “At times we lose our way and must turn back. At other times we go too fast and separate ourselves from the masses. Sometimes we go too slow and feel the hot breath of those treading at our heels.” And finally:Socialism is young and has its mistakes . . . We revolutionaries often lack the knowledge and intellectual audacity needed to meet the tasks of developing the new man and woman with methods different from the conventional ones.After Algiers, Che was essentially excluded from leadership in Cuba. He graciously resigned all his leadership positions and embarked on the fateful ventures in the Congo and in Bolivia. And in these situations he began to acknowledge some limitations of his views on the primacy of the vanguard guerilla. Regarding his experience in the Congo, he wrote in an unpublished manuscript of 1966, “Our situation was getting more and more difficult and the notion of building an army was slipping through our fingers . . . Still imbued with a sort of blind optimism, I was incapable of seeing it.”And from Bolivia, “I know Bolivia and it is very difficult to have a guerilla struggle in Bolivia. There has already been a land reform and I don’t think the Indians would join a guerilla struggle.” These are statements from a person devoting profound and critical thought to his life’s work as a revolutionary.Malcolm X was another revolutionary in the process of transformation at the time of his death. A year before his assassination, after a trip to Mecca, he stated, “I’m a revolutionary and I’m a Muslim. That’s all I know about myself. Where I’m going to go, what ideology I’m going to develop, I don’t know. But I must crawl before I walk. I must walk before I run, and I don’t think I’ll have time.” Thus the American Marxist Grace Lee Boggs said of her friend, Malcolm X, “I think that’s one of the most important qualities of a revolutionary, to be transforming yourself, to be expanding your humanity as events challenge you.” I believe that Che Guevara was in a similar process of transformation.Had Che lived, he might have been in Cuba to meet the great Trinidadian Marxist, C.L.R. James, who visited Havana in 1967. He might have been able to engage with James at a cultural Congress in Havana and been challenged by James’ remark, “We are having a body of intellectuals talking about culture. You have not invited here the Socialist workers of Cuba to take part.” He might have learned from James’ seminal book, The Black Jacobins, a critique of repression of direct democratic expression within the Haitian revolution. He might have met the British Marxist humanist E.P. Thompson, whose planned trip to Cuba was approved by Castro, but prevented by the pro-Moscow Cuban Communist Party. Thompson, later famous for his work, The Making of the English Working Class, was a vocal challenger of the Stalinist deformations of Marxism and insisted on the importance of human agency in making change, with attention to the cultural contributions of class experience in forming that change.Indeed, Che’s abiding interest in the role of consciousness in the revolutionary process might even have even led him to read the 1933 pamphlet by the German Marxist psychologist Wilhelm Reich, “What is Class Consciousness?” which so eloquently challenged the very “scholasticism” on the part of the Communist leadership that Che decried in his Algiers article. For Reich, this “clinging to old, worn out, ossified dogmas” kept a potentially revolutionary movement out of touch with the lives, the needs, and concerns of the very people whom they wanted to reach.People change. I witnessed change in my own parents, who left the Stalinist CP and became socialist humanists—a transformation that was important to the evolution of my own perspective. Change has occurred in many socialist and revolutionary leaders—Eugene Debs, Gandhi, even Lenin. We cannot know what Che would have thought, written, or done had he lived; we can, however, appreciate that his thought was evolving, that it was not a closed book.The Mourner’s Kaddish certainly does not require that the person mourned be Jewish. The prayer does compel the mourner to consider how the meaning of life is changed by the loss of the deceased; it is an invitation for the mourner to incorporate the meaning of the deceased’s life into the life of the living, “during your lifetime and your days, and the days of all the world.” Ultimately, the Kaddish asks us to heal a world diminished by the loss of one person by continuing the work begun by that person. And so as I mourn the death of Che Guevara, I also take this moment to affirm life, my life and the lives of the people around me, as well as the life of a new movement for radical transformation we are witnessing in this country. The Kaddish compels us to continue the evolution of thought and action that Che was unable to achieve at the time of his death; it compels us to rescue the worth of Che from the finality of his death. His politics must be understood, as Farber so conscientiously elaborates, but those politics cannot fully characterize him if we consider that the seeds of change were present in his thought. Memory of Che can allow us to continue the journey that he began. In Cuba there is a slogan “Seremos como el Che” (“We will be like Che”). For me it will be “Seremos como el Che podría haber sido” (We will be as Che might have been”), for a revolutionary transformation of ourselves and our world, in which human creativity and imagination is valued, in which all have a voice in a democratic process, and in which dissent, and differences are respected. Let the memory of Che Guevara help us to maintain and expand our own humanity as we struggle for the changes we want in this world.