This article by Che Guevara was published in Humanismo magazine (September-October 1959) after Che toured the Bandung Pact1 countries in 1959.
For Asians, to speak of our unredeemed Latin America is to speak of an ill-defined region about which they know as little as we do about that immense part of the world whose desire for freedom found its appropriate means of expression in the Bandung Pact.
In the past, they knew nothing about Latin America except, perhaps, that it was a huge sector of the world inhabited by dark-skinned natives with loincloths and spears, where someone named Christopher Columbus had arrived more or less at the same time that someone else named Vasco de Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and ushered in a terrible period in the cultural, economic and political life of those peoples—one that lasted for centuries.
Nothing specific has been added to that knowledge except for something called “the Cuban revolution,” which is practically an abstract concept for them. For that distant world, Cuba is an abstraction which stands for an awakening, the base from which that mythological being called Fidel Castro arose. Beards, long hair, olive-green uniforms and some mountains whose exact location is unknown, in a country about which they know only its name—and not all of them even know it’s an island—that is what the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro are. And those bearded men, “Castro’s men,” who come from an island that can’t even be found on the map, moved by the magical pull of a mythological being, stand for the new Latin America, which draws them from their knees—numbed from so much kneeling—to their feet.
Now, the other Latin America is disappearing—the one in which unknown men work in miserable conditions in tin mines, a material in the name of which the Indonesian tin miners are being exploited to death; the Latin America of great rubber plantations in the Amazon, where men plagued by malaria produce rubber further lowering the rubber workers’ wages in Indonesia, Ceylon and Malaya; the Latin America of fabulous oil deposits, because of which the workers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran earn less; the Latin America of cheap sugar, which means that Indian workers earn less for doing the same bestial work under the same inclement sun of the tropics. That Latin America is disappearing.
Different, and still surprised by their audacity in wanting to be free, the people of Africa and Asia are beginning to look beyond the seas. Doesn’t that other storehouse of grains and raw materials also have a culture inhibited by the colonial power and millions of people with the same simple, deep desires as the Africans and Asians? Doesn’t our brotherhood challenge the breadth of the seas, the barriers of different languages and the absence of cultural ties, to bring us together in an embrace of compañeros in struggle? Should we consider ourselves more the brothers of the Argentine workers, the Bolivian miners, the employees of the United Fruit Company and the Cuban sugarcane-cutters than of the proud descendants of Japanese samurai who are now Japanese workers? Rather than an isolated instance, does not Fidel Castro represent the vanguard of the Latin American peoples in their growing struggles for freedom? Isn’t he a man of flesh and blood? A Sukarno, a Nehru, a Nasser?
The people in the freed nations are becoming aware of the enormous hoax that was worked on them, in which they were convinced that they were racially “inferior.” They know they could be mistaken, too, in their assessment of peoples in other continents.
Cuba has been invited to send representatives to the new conference of Afro-Asian peoples. They will show the august meeting of their Afro-Asian brothers the truths and the pain of Latin America. Their participation is no happenstance event; it is the result of the historic convergence of all the oppressed peoples in this hour of liberation. They will go to say that it is true that Cuba exists and that Fidel Castro is a man, a popular hero, not a mythological abstraction. But they will also explain that Cuba is the first sign of Latin America’s awakening, not an isolated event.
When they tell of all the unknown heroes of the masses, all the nameless people who have died on the great battlefield of this region; when they speak of the Colombian “bandits” who fought in their homeland against the alliance of the cross and the sword; and when they speak of the Paraguayan mensús who, unwittingly representing the oil interests of Britain and the United States, fought against the Bolivian miners, each side killing off the other, they will see astonished looks—not the looks people have when they are told something that is unheard of, but looks showing that they are hearing a new account the development and consequences of which are identical to those of the old colonial story that they have experienced and suffered from over the course of centuries of ignominy.
Latin America is taking shape and acquiring a sense of itself. Latin America—represented by Cuba and Fidel Castro (a man who, with his guerrilla beard, personifies an entire region)—is becoming more real and alive. In the African and Asian imagination, it is populated with real men and women who are suffering and struggling for the same ideals they are.
With my new perspective, I see the full value of what I participated in, from the sublime moment when there were only 12 of us left, and I see that the small differences among us which were exaggerated have dissolved, showing the true importance of that Latin American people’s feat. With this perspective, I treasure the childlike, naive and spontaneous gesture of men from far-off lands who touch my beard and ask in foreign languages, “Fidel Castro?” adding, “Are you members of the guerrilla army that is leading the struggle for Latin America’s freedom? Are you, then, our allies from the other side of the ocean?” And I tell them, and all of the hundreds of millions of other Africans and Asians who, like them, are advancing toward freedom in this new and uncertain nuclear age, “Yes, we are.” I am another brother, one of the multitude of brothers in that part of the world who are waiting with infinite eagerness for the moment when we can consolidate the bloc that will destroy the anachronistic presence of colonial rule once and for all. […]
1. The Bandung Pact was the initial step toward the creation of the Movement of Nonaligned Countries.