Che Guevara, anti-Semitism and the Jews

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara is best known as the consumerist icon of what we can – with some reservation - call ‘Western Counterculture’ and has been the subject of much positive and negative polemic across the broad ‘left’ and ‘right’ divide. Having read most of the work available in English on Che I felt that what has been overlooked in discussions of Che is his identification of jews as one of his enemies.

To be sure Che identified jews with capitalism generally and the United States of America specifically - largely as Marx himself did - (1) and phrased his objections to them in Marxist-Leninist phraseology and the consequent ‘reservoir of knowledge’ as Wirsching put it. (2) That said the feeling the jews were the exploiter and the general enemy of the ‘proletariat’ was something that Che did subscribe to and even if he may not have realised it: Che talked about jews as an entity apart from any other in the exactly the same manner that anti-Semitism - current and historic - does.

In his ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ Che only mentions jews once and late on in the published version of the work. His comments are as follows:

‘The main problem now was getting to Iquitos; so we buckled down to the task. Our first target was the mayor, a certain Cohen, who we were told was Jewish but a good sort; there was no doubt he was Jewish, the problem was finding out if he was a good sort. He palmed us off on the shipping agents, who then palmed us off on the captain, who received us well enough and promised, as a huge concession, to charge us a third-class fare and let us travel first-class.’ (3)

Here we can see that Che is identifying the mayor of Iquitos - who to be sure had a uniquely jewish surname - as jewish and not as anything else. Che is essentially treating the jews as a nationality in their own right in much the same way as one might assert that Americans in Argentina are still Americans. It is clear that what Che is indirectly informing us here is that he viewed jews as a international nation if you will as jews have no true homeland - although Israel had been in existence for four years - it was very much a nascent state with little actual hope - so it seemed at the time - of survival. If Che had merely viewed jews as a religious belief system as opposed to a nationality then he would have no need to point out twice that said Cohen was of jewish origin on the basis of his name and let it pass without further comment.

A confirmation of our point here can be found in the comments of Che’s companion in his motorcycle trip around South America - which forms the basis of the ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ - Alberto Granado. Granado also comments on jews in a similar way to Che when he records in his account of that journey:

‘Intrigued, we gradually worked the conversation round to what brought them here. And this is how we found out about a terrible form of exploitation perpetrated by the Argentine, German, Jewish and Yankee landowners of this extremely wealthy agricultural region.’ (4)

We can see in the above quotation that Granado is using exactly the same point of reference to Che in regard to jews in that he simply lists them as another nationality of the exploiters of the South American Indians, which he and Che refer to constantly in usually glowing and often explicitly racial terms. We need to understand Che and Granado’s comments about jews in this intuitive racial light if we are to understand that Che and Granado both saw jews as a biological as opposed to a religious entity, (5) which their leftist apologists would probably try to assert if they had picked up this nascent anti-Semitism on Che’s part. (6)

Nor is this hyperbole or unsubstantiated rumour since many of the mine owners in South America that employed and exploited the local American Indian population were in fact jewish with one example being those owned by the famous Guggenheim family. (7) Granado claims that he recognized this fact – as cited above – but that Che did not, (8) but this seems unlikely given Che’s comments about Cohen – the Mayor of Iquitos – show at least a nascent understanding of jewish influence and financial power across Latin America.

We also know that Che grew up around several jewish families in Buenos Aires (9) so would have had some idea of the power and privilege of jews as capitalist – or exploiters as Che would later style them – in Latin America.

That Che was aware of the jewish angle – contra to Granado’s assertions – can be found in the fact that one of his main revolutionary proteges Jorge Ricardo Masetti – the leader of Che’s failed revolutionary expedition to his homeland of Argentina – (10) was a former member of Tacuara – a pro-Falange political organization – (11) and was often accused of being anti-Semitic. (12)

The failure of Masetti’s revolutionary campaign and death hit Che very hard emotionally (13) and the fact that Masetti had the two known jewish recruits to his ‘guerrilla foco’ – a jew from Buenos Aires called ‘Pupi’ and another named ‘Nardo’ (real name: Bernado Groswald) - court-martialled and executed in 1964. (14) Necessarily suggests that Masetti identified the enemy of the working class in Latin America as well as its composite nations as being one and the same with that enemy being jews.

That Che knew about this is almost certain and given his own comments in ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ and Granado’s own commentary on the fact that the Marxist class struggle in Latin America was in large part that between the non-jewish American Indian workers and jewish capitalist exploiters suggests that Che was almost certainly an anti-Semite.

The fact that his last girlfriend – Tamara Haydee Bunke Bider – (15) was a jewish woman from East Germany (16) is not an argument against this since we know of confirmed anti-Semites who have multiple jewish wives such as Wilhelm Marr (who had three). So thus, a predilection for jewish skirt cannot be taken as an argument against someone being anti-Semitic and we must therefore focus on their beliefs and actions not their sexual partners to define whether they are anti-Semitic or not.

The evidence is therefore clear.

Che was an anti-Semite: leftists need to deal with this fact not pretend it doesn’t exist!

References

(1) See Jerry Z. Muller, 2010, ‘Capitalism and the Jews’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 33-44 for an excellent - if somewhat apologetic - summation of Marx’s views on the close historical relationship between jews and capitalism.

(2) Andreas Wirsching, 2010, ‘Violence as discourse? For a ‘linguistic turn’ in communist history’, Twentieth Century Communism, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 12-39

(3) Che Guevara, Ann Wright (Trans.), 1996, ‘The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America’, 1st Edition, Fourth Estate: London, pp. 124-125

(4) Alberto Granado, Lucia Alvarez de Toledo (Trans.), 2003, ‘Travelling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary’, 1st Edition, Pimlico: London, p. 26

(5) It is interesting to note that neither Humberto Fontova, 2008, ‘Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots who Idolize Him’, 2nd Edition, Sentinel: New York or Alvaro Vargas Llosa, 2006, ‘The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty’, 1st Edition, The Independent Institute: Oakland have noticed this not very obvious fact about Che Guevara considered that both of them are strongly critical of him and have picked up on his racial views.

(6) The only biographer of Che’s who has picked up on this trend in Che’s thought is David Sanderson, 2001, ‘Che Guevara’, 2nd Edition, Chancellor Press: London, p. 89

(7) Anne Mustoe, 2007, ‘Che Guevara and the Mountain of Silver: By Bicycle and Train through South America’, 1st Edition, Virgin Books: London, p. 137

(8) Granado, Op. Cit., p. 26

(9) Lucia Alvarez de Toledo, 2010, ‘The Story of Che Guevera’, 1st Edition, Quercus: London, p. 36

(10) Ibid., pp. 288-289

(11) Ibid., p. 295

(12) Ibid.

(13) Manuel Pineiro, 2001, ‘Che Guevara and the Latin American Revolutionary Movements’, 1st Edition, Ocean: Melbourne, p. 64

(14) De Toledo, Op. Cit., pp. 294-295

(15) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/haydee-tamara-bunke-bider-jewish

(16) Ulises Estrada, 2005, 'Tania: Undercover with Che Guevara in Bolivia', 1st Edition, Ocean: Melbourne, pp. 140