BY MIKE TABER
A previously unpublished book by Ernesto Che Guevara,
Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo (Episodes of the
Congo revolutionary war), is now available from Pathfinder.
Produced by Grijalbo-Mondadori, a publishing house based in
Italy, the Spanish-language book was launched in Havana at
the end of April, with 4,000 copies set aside for
distribution in Cuba.
A Cuban edition is also in preparation. It will be included in a new multivolume collection of speeches and writings of Ernesto Che Guevara, to be published later this year.
This book appears 33 years after it was written by the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban revolution.
From April to November 1965, Guevara headed what grew to a contingent of more than one hundred Cuban volunteer fighters, supporting liberation forces in the Congo who belonged to the movement founded by Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba, the founding leader of the independence movement in the former Belgian colony of the Congo and its first prime minister, was the most intransigent of the leaders resisting the efforts to keep the new nation under the thumb of imperialism. He was ousted in September 1960 in a U.S.-backed coup led by army chief of staff Joseph Mobutu, who later changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko. Lumumba, who had been under the "protection" of United Nations troops, was captured and then murdered in January 1961 by imperialist-backed forces loyal to rightist figure Moise Tshombe.
In mid-1964 a new revolt broke out in the Congo led by pro- Lumumba forces. The rebels were able to gain control of Stanleyville (today Kisangani), the country's second-largest city. They were defeated in November 1964, however, with the help of Belgian and South African mercenary armies - politically and militarily backed by Washington - whose assignment was to prevent the vast mineral wealth of the Congo from escaping imperialist control. Thousands were massacred as the imperialist forces retook Stanleyville.
Nevertheless, large numbers of rebel fighters remained in several areas of the country. These were the forces whom the Cubans assisted.
The effort to topple the country's pro-imperialist regime was unsuccessful. The Cuban forces withdrew as the Congolese resistance crumbled under the combined assault of mercenary forces from South Africa and troops of the U.S.-backed Congolese regime. A dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko was consolidated that lasted until 1997.
At the end of 1965 and the beginning of 1966 Guevara spent several months in Tanzania, where he wrote this book, using as a reference the campaign diary he had kept.
Guevara narrates the war's events, seeking "to extract the experiences that can be of use to other revolutionary movements" and "so that the experience begun by us should not be wasted, and the initiative of the International Proletarian Army should not die in face of the first failure." With a critical eye, he examines the strength and weaknesses of the Cuban volunteer contingent, as well as those of the leadership of the Congolese struggle. The book concludes with an epilogue, where Guevara reviews the central lessons of the effort, and outlines his view of the prospects of the Congolese revolution.
Extensive unauthorized excerpts from Guevara's manuscript have appeared in several books since 1994. In all cases, however, the original text was chopped up, excerpted, and reordered. Moreover, quotes from Guevara appear interspersed with commentary explaining the authors' agreement or disagreement with various evaluations of his.
Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo, on the other hand, contains the complete text of Guevara's book, in the order and with the title he intended. It also incorporates handwritten edits made by him to the original text.
The book has a prologue by Aleida Guevara March, daughter of the revolutionary leader and a veteran of internationalist missions during the 1980s in Angola and Nicaragua, where she served as a doctor. In it, she quotes from previously unpublished letters written to Guevara by Fidel Castro, including one written in June 1966, while Guevara was in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In it Castro urges Guevara to return to Cuba to help facilitate preparations for his next undertaking, which was to open a revolutionary front in the Southern Cone of Latin America, centered in Bolivia. Guevara returned to Cuba within months.
The publication of Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo is a major contribution to the history of the revolutionary struggle in Africa and of Cuba's internationalist efforts. It adds an important new chapter to the legacy of the modern working-class movement from which conscious revolutionary fighters everywhere can draw.