Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Prologue to the English Edition
- List of Abbreviations
- The Combatant: A Che Guevara Enigma
- Truths, Lies, and Historical Conjectures
- A Text in Search of Its Author
- Just How Anonymous Can a Pseudonym Be?
- A Pseudonym in Search of Its Creator
- Leads and Clues on a Celebrated Anonymous Someone
- The Contingent Motivations of the Celebrated Anonymous Someone
- Nicknames and Pseudonyms, Collective Authors and Anonymous Authors
- Appendix: Bolivia: Analysis of One Situation
- Series Index
Prologue to the English Edition
“In this preface we will anticipate only the measure of our heresy; let us take the time and space necessary to argue it at length.”
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “La necesidad de este libro,” in Apuntes Críticos a la Economía Política, circa 1965–1966
In the social sciences, any serious and long-term research on a specific topic is always replete with vanishing points. An important part of the research’s central argument, a vanishing point is a concrete problem which at a given moment and under particular circumstances may become independent from that general argument. Becoming more and more complex, the vanishing point transforms into a new line of argument, different and autonomous from the one it sprang from.
Such is the case of the book the reader now holds in their hands. It was some years ago now that I first undertook the project of writing an intellectual anti-biography of Che Guevara. This anti-biography would for the first time be capable of recuperating Che’s dimensions (not yet seriously studied or analyzed) as a critical Marxist theorist of real global significance. Since then, my research has found its way down multiple far-ranging paths which encompass world history during the long twentieth century and the general history of Latin America in the same century, as well as the particular histories of the revolutionary movements and organizations of all of Latin America during that era.
←ix | x→These vast horizons progressively delimit the different contexts that frame and partly explain both the personal odyssey of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and his rich and complex intellectual journey. They clearly demonstrate the enormous intellectual stature which made Che the most important Latin American Marxist of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as one of the three most important Marxists in the world during the same period, alongside Frantz Fanon (the theorist of the Algerian and African revolutions) and Mao Zedong (the theorist of the Chinese, Asian, and world revolutions).
Conceptualized from these broad frameworks of true global history, our research on the theoretical, analytical, reflective, and intellectual dimensions of Ernesto “Che” Guevara has over the course of its evolution encountered many such vanishing points. Among these vanishing points is the issue of Che’s participation in the “long Cuban 1968,” that is, in the Cuban manifestation of the World Cultural Revolution of 1968. Like the “specter of communism,” this revolution traversed literally the entire world, appearing in France and in Argentina, in the United States and in Japan, in Italy and in China, in Germany and Mexico and of course in Cuba itself, where the Cuban 1968 had the peculiarity of profoundly fusing with the overarching process of the entire Cuban social revolution.
Another vanishing point has been the much-debated problem of Che’s position toward the famous Sino-Soviet polemic and the resulting question of whether he was a Maoist, pro-China, anti-Soviet, or none of these, and why then he has been sometimes accused and other times exalted for his positions of clear sympathy toward Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution. There is also the vanishing point of why he made his likewise-explicit criticisms of the model of building socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Details
- Pages
- XX, 80
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781636670850
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781636670867
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781636670874
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20548
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (April)
- Keywords
- Che Guevara Cuban Revolution Bolivian History Journal Pensamiento Crítico Bolivian guerrila Latin American Revolution Latin America History Anticapitalistic Movements Carlos Antonio AGUIRRE ROJAS The Combatant A Che Guevara Enigma
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Lausanne, Oxford, 2023. XX, 80 pp.
