History

Photo (Public Domain): Cuban photographer Alberto Korda taking a picture of Che Guevara walking through a throng of cameramen down the streets in Havana, Cuba, with arms linked to his wife Aleida March in 1960.

Guevara and Marx: Critical Remake of an Old Film – 4

By Roberto Massari*

This is the fourth of a nine-part series. Read Parts 1, 2 and 3.

BOLSENA, Italy (IDN) – Everything that happened between Guatemala and Mexico is now a known story, recounted in the main biographies; but in the late 1960s Hilda was the only direct and reliable source of Che’s Marxist training, given that she had been his “teacher”: this was able to happen because she was more prepared than Ernesto, having a degree in economics, and above all because she had an anti-orthodox Marxist training with roots in APRA (therefore more genuinely Latin American) and not Sovietic (that is, Stalinist and dogmatic).

: Phil Harris; THE WORLD; Latin America & the Caribbean; 19 August 2018

Photo: Hilda Gadea Acosta (21 March 1925 – February 1974) – a Peruvian economist, Communist leader, author, and the first female Secretary of the Economy of the Executive National Committee for APRA, American Popular Revolutionary Alliance – was Che Guevara's first wife. She married Guevara in Mexico in September 1955, after learning she was pregnant. The marriage ended in a divorce in May 1959. They had a daughter named Hilda Beatriz "Hildita" Guevara Gadea (February 1956 – died 1995). Source: alchetron.com

Guevara and Marx: Critical Remake of an Old Film – 3

By Roberto Massari*

This is the third of a nine-part series. Read Parts 1 and 2.

BOLSENA, Italy (IDN) – FLASHBACK: Scene 3 [Lima, 1952]

To answer, it is necessary to step back in time to the first encounter with Marxism that the young Ernesto had personally experienced in Lima, Peru, during a period of his life in which he had already decided to engage in the search for his own path outside Argentina.

That is, outside of a great country where, in the early 1950s, the ideological alternative for a young radical who wanted to fight for ideals of social emancipation risked being crushed between two main poles: anti-communist Peronism or Stalinist anti-imperialism.

: Phil Harris; THE WORLD; Latin America & the Caribbean; 18 August 2018

Photo: Guevara atop a mule in Las Villas province, Cuba, November 1958. Wikimedia Commons.

Guevara and Marx: Critical Remake of an Old Film – 2

By Roberto Massari*

This is the second of a nine-part series. Click here for Part 1.

BOLSENA, Italy (IDN) – Scene 2 [Dar es Salaam, 1965]

Holed up in the house of the Cuban ambassador in Tanzania (Pablo Rivalta, 1925-2005), recovering from the defeat of the military expedition in Congo (“la historia de un fracaso”, as Guevara himself called it) and before moving to Prague, Che wrote an important letter to Armando Hart Dávalos (1930-2017) on December 4, 1965. Armando Hart was a historic leader of the July 26 Movement [M26-7], husband of the founder of Casa de la Américas (Haydée Santamaría Cuadrado [1920-1980]) and father of "Trotskyist-Guevarist" Celia Hart Santamaría (1963-2008), as she described herself in her last few years, before dying in a car accident.

: Phil Harris; THE WORLD; Latin America & the Caribbean; 17 August 2018

Photo: Guevara in rural Bolivia, shortly before his death (1967). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Guevara and Marx: Critical Remake of an Old Film – 1

By Roberto Massari*

This is the first of a nine-part series.

BOLSENA, Italy (IDN) – In June 2018, I was invited to make a presentation on the relationship between Che Guevara and Karl Marx at the International Conference on Karl Marx: Life, Ideas, Influence. A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, organised by the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) in Patna (Bihar), India.

What follows is the fruit of my work to that end and is conceived along the lines of a documentary film structure: