Note on the Margin

Originally posted 14 February 2009

The following is an excerpt from Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson; it recalls a passage Che recorded while he was writing Notas de Viaje (The Motorcycle Diaries). At age 25, he received a political revelation which seemed to prevision the path his life would take; three years later, under Fidel Castro's leadership, he would join other revolutionaries with the intention of overthrowing Cuban dictator, General Fulgencio Batista.

Without knowing where the "revelation" had taken place, Ernesto had situated himself in "a mountain village under a cold star-filled night sky." A great blackness surrounded him, and a man was there with him, lost in the darkness, visible only by the whiteness of his four front teeth. "I don't know if it was the personality of the individual or the atmosphere that prepared me to receive the revelation, but I know that I had heard the arguments many times by different people and they had never impressed me. In reality, our speaker was an interesting guy; when he was young he had fled some European country to escape the dogmatizing knife; he knew the taste of fear (one of the experiences that makes you value life), and afterwards, after rolling from country to country and compiling thousands of adventures, he had come to rest his bones in this remote region where he patiently awaited the coming of a great event.

"After the trivial phrases and common places with which each put forth his positions, the conversation languished, and we were about to part ways. Then, with the same rascally boy's smile which always accompanied him, accentuating the disparity of his four front incisors, he let slip: 'The future belongs to the people, and little by little or in one fell swoop they will seize power, here and in the whole world. The bad thing is that they have to become civilized, and this can't happen before, but only after taking power. They will become civilized only by learning at the cost of their own errors, which will be serious ones, and which will cost many innocent lives. Or perhaps not, perhaps they won't be innocent because they will have committed the enormous sin contra natura signified by lacking the capacity to adapt.

"'All of them, all the unadaptable ones, you and I, for example, will die cursing the power we, with enormous sacrifice, helped to create....In its impersonal form, the revolution will take our lives, and even utilize the memory of that which for them remains exemplary, as a domesticating instrument for the youth who will come after. My sin is greater, because I, more subtle and with more experience, call it what you wish, will die knowing that my sacrifice is due only to an obstinacy which symbolizes the rotten civilization that is crumbling....'"

This mystery speaker, by inference a Marxist refugee from Stalin's pogroms whose conscious sin was his "inability to adapt" to the new power wielded by the uncivilized masses, now turned his premonitory attention to Ernesto.

"'You will die with the fist clenched and jaw tense, in perfect demonstration of hate and of combat, because you are not a symbol (something inanimate taken as an example), you are an authentic member of a society which is crumbling: the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and moves in your actions; you are as useful as I, but you don't know the usefulness of the help you give to the society which sacrifices you.'"

And now, duly warned of the consequences of the revolutionary path, came Ernesto's own "revelation." "I saw his teeth and the picaresque expression with which he took a jump on history, I felt the squeeze of his hands and, like a distant murmur, the protocolar salute of farewell....In spite of his words, I now knew...I will be with the people, and I know it because I see it etched in the night that I, the eclectic dissector of doctrines and psychoanalyst of dogmas, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or trenches, will bathe my weapon in blood and, mad with fury, will slit the throat of any enemy who falls into my hands.

"And I see, as if an enormous tiredness shoots down my recent exaltation, how I die as a sacrifice to the true standardizing revolution of wills, pronouncing the exemplary mea culpa. And I feel my nostrils dilated, tasting the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, of dead enemy; now my body contorts, ready for the fight, and I prepare my being as if it were a sacred place so that in it the bestial howling of the triumphant proletariat can resonate with new vibrations and new hopes."

This passage reveals the extrodinarily passionate--and melodramatic--impulses at work inside Ernesto Guevara at the age of twenty-five. Powerful and violent, uncannily precognitive of Ernesto Guevara's own future death and the posthumous exploitation of his legacy by many so-called revolutionaries, "Note on the Margin" must be seen as a decisive personal testimonial, for the sentiments it contained would soon emerge from the penumbra of his submerged thoughts to find expression in his future actions.