ANATOMY OF A REVOLUTIONARY

According to me, this world is filled with extremists. There are those who practice materialism in its ugly form and go to any and every extent to exploit, manipulate and reduce others in their quest to unlimited wealth and most of the times glory as well. And then there are a select few (a bunch on the verge of extinction) who lead their lives as epitomes of selflessness and fight for all the people who are oppressed or denied their right to live. The world calls them “Revolutionaries”. These demigods normally lead a troubled but fulfilling life and die with no wealth and limited glory but find immortality in the hearts of all the people they touched and healed. And then there we are, caught in the middle, in no man’s land, leading a life of a dream interspersed with ambition. We want the wealth but our conscience comes in the way (hopefully) when it comes to exploiting others. We dream to be a messiah and fight for a cause but we lack the temerity, discipline and will to give ourselves up. Some people call it normal life; others ordinary!

We don’t have to look hard for the first type; ironically they are well documented and celebrated and for the third type, we only have to look inward. But what does a revolutionary look like? Well, pretty much like you and me, a little thinner and beaten down may be but not necessarily! He (or she) may be less educated than us but certainly more learned; most certainly well read with an eclectic passion for poetry; a consciousness driven more by moral values than materialistic incentives. He wears restlessness and anger on his sleeve and he fears death as much as we do though for different reasons. But there is just one thing that really defines a revolutionary: Love. It may sound ridiculous but it is the love and compassion for a fellow human being that makes a man fight. And he would most certainly have an insatiable hunger to explore the world which gives him a whole new perspective of life and wakes him up to the injustice around. A revolutionary would have most certainly seen the world before the world sees him!  

Until a week ago, the only thing I knew about Che Guevara was that he was an important figure in the Cuban revolution and the only image I had was a stylized visage from a famous photograph that can be seen everywhere worn as T-shirts by youngsters. I am not sure how many of them know his fascinating story, but I sure didn’t. And a small peek into his life tells you what a revolutionary is. But to me the story of how he became one is even more fascinating because it is not about heroic feats but about 2 lives with similar aspirations and dreams running in parallel for a while and how one metamorphoses into the other. Born in a well off and respectable family in Argentina, Ernesto Guevara was an intellectual right from his early days with great passion for poetry, literature and sport. He studied medicine and his hunger to explore the continent he had only known in books took him on an 8000 kilometer journey through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, Venezuela and Panama that would fundamentally change how he viewed himself and Latin America.

Filled with restlessness and an impassioned spirit, fueled by love for the open road, accompanied by his best friend Alberto Marrero and an old motorcycle that peed oil, Ernesto embarks on a journey that would take him to the farthest reaches of human spirit. In Chile he has his first tryst with a patient when he abandons his date to examine an old lady and feels completely powerless as he sees a plea of forgiveness and solace in her dying eyes. Then he finds himself enraged by the working conditions of the miners in Anaconda copper mine. His overnight encounter with a persecuted communist couple in the Atacama Desert brings him face to face with flesh-and-blood victims of capitalist exploitation. In that cold night, amidst those tragic and haunting faces he starts to feel closer to the strange human race. The deeper he goes into the Andes Mountains, the more indigenous people he encounters who are homeless in their own land. Here the crushing poverty of the peasant farmers who worked small plots of land owned by wealthy landlords takes a heavy toll on him.

The world has already changed in his eyes when he and Alberto arrive at the San Pablo leper colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River. About 600 patients live on the South of the river while doctors and caretakers live in the North side. The segregation pains him. He and Alberto refuse to wear gloves and shake hands with patients who call them “real men”. He coaxes a young patient who has lost hope into operation by saying: “You have to fight for every breath and tell death to go to hell”. He sings and dances with them, plays football and literally lives with them. Their camaraderie and spirit make him wonder how the highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise and persist among such lonely and desperate people. On the day before they are supposed to move on with their journey, his birthday is celebrated on the North side. He decides that he has to celebrate it with the patients and not finding a boat, just swims across the Amazon fighting bouts of asthma, and lands in the arms of his loving patients. It was then he knew where he belonged. The journey went on, after hugs and an emotional good bye, but something changed inside him that day. 

That journey brought Ernesto in close contact with poverty, hunger, disease, injustice and inequality. He witnessed the inability of a father to treat a child because of lack of money and was pained by stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment that led the same father to accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident. It was this journey that convinced him that in order to help these people, he needed to leave the realm of medicine, and consider the political arena of armed struggle. And this journey eventually kick started the journey of Che who would go on to change the way the world viewed Latin America. From that moment onward, every man or woman who trembled with indignation at injustice became his comrade!