seremos como el Ché“When we think of Ché, we do not think fundamentally of his military virtues. No! Warfare is a means and not an end. Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution. The important thing is the revolutionary cause, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary objectives, revolutionary sentiments, and revolutionary virtues!
And it is in that field, in the field of ideas, in the field of sentiments, in the field of revolutionary virtues, in the field of intelligence, that – apart from his military virtues – we feel tremendous loss that his death means to the revolutionary movement.
Because Ché’s extraordinary character was made up of virtues that are rarely found together. He stood out as an unsurpassed man of action, but Ché was not only an unsurpassed man of action – he was a man of visionary intelligence and broad culture, a profound thinker. That is, in his person the man of ideas and the man of action were combined.
But it is not only that Ché possessed the double characteristic of the man of ideas – of profound ideas – and the man of action, but that Ché as a revolutionary united in himself the virtues that can be defined as the fullest expression of the virtues of a revolutionary: a man of total integrity, a man of supreme sense of honour, of absolute sincerity, a man of stoic and Spartan habits, a man in whose conduct not one stain can be found. He constituted, through his virtues, what can be called a truly model revolutionary.”
Fidel Castro
October 18, 1967
Ché Guevara was a unique man about whom much has been written and, in the coming weeks, much more will be as progressives around the world mark the 40th anniversary of his death at the hands of the Bolivian Army. Rather than add to that mass of well-deserved tributes we will let the man speak for himself –
We will also be adding hyperlinks to other tributes to Che over the coming weeks
