Would Che Have Turned Capitalist?
To the Editor: In ”The World Resurrects Che” (Editorial Notebook, July 20), Tina Rosenberg jumps to an unwarranted conclusion: that if Che Guevara were alive today, ”he would be firmly in the capitalist camp.” Che often warned the Cuban leadership and people of the danger of opportunism, of watering down principles of Marxism-Leninism. Two years before his capture and execution in Bolivia, Che wrote to the editor of Marcha, a weekly newspaper in Montevideo, Uruguay. He stressed the danger of bourgeois ideology and its seductive appeal to oppressed and exploited people: ”In capitalist society man is controlled by a pitiless law usually beyond his comprehension. The alienated human specimen is tied to society as a whole by an individual umbilical cord: the law of value.” Che cited the danger of dogmatism as well as of those who would ”freeze the ties with the masses midway in the great task.” Hardly the mark of a leader who would succumb to the market mentality.
