Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.9.1.0155
• Pages: 155162xxvi-157
• Published date: 01 April 2017
• Date: 01 April 2017
• Author: Renzo Llorente

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BOOK REVIEWS

Samuel Farber, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (Chicago:

Haymarket Books, 2016) pb 162pp. + xxvi. ISBN: 978-1608466016

Reviewed by Renzo Llorente

In 2017, the world will mark the 50th anniversary of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s

death in Bolivia. This anniversary will inevitably reawaken interest in Guevara’s

life and legacy, and it will almost certainly yield the most extensive reassessment

of Che since the late 1990s, when the publication of three major biographies

coincided with the 30th anniversary of Guevara’s execution. With The Politics

of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice, Samuel Farber has in effect inaugurated

this reassessment ahead of schedule, and if his book is any indication of what to

expect in 2017, the reconsideration of Che will prove very disappointing indeed.

Rather than undertaking a serious analysis of Che’s political thought, Farber’s

book offers a careless, highly tendentious account of some of Guevara’s ideas,

together with an unequivocal condemnation of the Cuban Revolution.

Readers will find little to admire in Farber’s portrait of Guevara. According

to Farber, Che’s vision of socialism consisted in ‘a new class system based on

state collectivism’ (119). In addition, Che was partly responsible for the lack of

press freedoms in Cuba (71); he ‘played a key role in inaugurating a tradition of

administrative, nonjudicial detention subject to no written rules or laws’ (74);

his political views may have led to the execution of innocent people in the first

months of the Revolution (73); he worshipped Stalin in his early years of politi-

cisation (94) and essentially remained a Stalinist until the very end; his political

outlook was hopelessly undemocratic (xviii, 117); he accepted patriarchy (36);

he was puritanical (72); he was politically tone-deaf and lacked ‘political instinct’

(46); and he had a ‘cold and distant personality’ (53).

Most of these propositions are, like the specific claims that I discuss below,

untenable. If Farber holds otherwise, it is because he has chosen to ignore much

of what Guevara himself said and wrote, just as he has chosen to ignore practi-

cally all of the scholarship on Guevara published in Cuba. To be sure, Farber

devotes considerable attention to Guerrilla Warfare, ‘Socialism and Man in

Cuba’, Guevara’s analysis of his experience in the Congo (Pasajes de la guerra

revolucionaria: Congo) and the notebooks published under the title Apuntes

críticos a la economía política; and he cites numerous other works as well. Yet