 INSIGHT -- reflections from the struggleBelow is an open letter from Frei Betto, the Brazilian Franciscan liberation theologian, to Che Guevara on the 30th anniversary of his death and the discovery of his remains in Bolivia. Translated by Grant M. Gallup of Casa Ave Marķa in Managua, this is another effort in this web site to offer insights into the struggles communities and peoples face to insure human rights and justice in the face of growing economic, political and social oppression. |
| Nicaragua Open Letter from Frei Betto to Che Guevara
The following, excerpted from an "Open Letter to Che" by Frei Betto, the Brazilian Franciscan, was published in Spanish in a recent issue of El Nuevo Diario, the Managua daily newspaper. The same issue carried news of the discovery in Vallegrande, Bolivia, of the bones of Dr. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, in a common grave with the other guerrillas murdered with him on Oct. 9, 1967, after their capture by Bolivian military accompanied by the C.I.A. agent Felix Rodriguez. Identification of Che's remains was facilitated by the absence of his hands, which had been cut off after his execution, for fingerprint ID. The Bolivian Minister of the Interior at the time, Antonio Arguedas, a secret sympathizer of the Cuban revolution, used Bolivian communist connections to smuggle the hands to Cuba in 1968. ______ CARTA ABIERTA AL CHE. by Frei Betto. Thirty years passed since the CIA murdered you in the forests of Bolivia. Radical changes happened during this time. The Berlin wall fell and buried european socialism. Many of us only now understand your boldness in pointing out (in 1965 in Algeria) the cracks in the Kremlin's walls, which to us appeared so solid. History is a swift river that spares no obstacles. European socialism tried to freeze the waters of the river with bureaucracy, authoritarianism, the inability to extend to daily life the technological advances begun by the space race, and above all, trying to dress up an "economistic rationality" that never sank roots into the subjective education of its historical subjects: the workers. Who knows if the history of socialism would have been otherwise, today, if they had listened to your words: "The state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes takes place, we notice a diminishing collective enthusiasm as the result of a quantitative diminishing of each one of the elements that forms it, and the work is paralyzed, left reduced by what appears insignificant, but is really enormous. This is the moment to rectify things." Che, many of your fears are confirmed at length in these years and contributed to the breaking up of our movements of liberation. We didn't listen to you sufficiently.
When love grows cold, enthusiasm weakens and dedication withdraws. The Cause, like passion, disappears, as does fantasy from a pair of lovers who no longer love. That which was "ours" echoes now as "mine", and the seductions of capitalism weaken principles, transmute values, and if they still continue in the struggle, it is because the esthetics of power exercise greater fascination than the ethics of service. Your heart, Che, throbbed to the rhythm of all the oppressed and exploited peoples. You wandered from Argentina to Guatemala, from Guatemala to Mexico, from Mexico to Cuba, from Cuba to the Congo, from the Congo to Bolivia. You went out of yourself always, exalted by the love that, in your life, was translated into liberation. This is why you could affirm, with authority, that "One has to have a great dose of humanity, a great dose of the feeling of justice and of truth not to fall into extreme dogmatism, into a cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as motivation." How many times, Che, our dose of humanity dried itself up, calcified by dogmatisms that filled us with certainty and left us empty of sensibility in the face of the drama of the wretched of the earth! How many times our feelings of justice got lost in cold scholasticism that offered relentless maxims and pronounced infamous judgments. How many times our sense of truth crystallized itself in the exercise of authority, without connecting ourselves to the longings of those who, with only a crust of bread, dream of land, and of joy! (...) From where you are, Che, bless us who take communion with your ideals and your hopes. Bless also those that "married up" or who "bourgeoisied themselves", or made of the struggle a profession for their own benefit. Bless those who are ashamed to confess themselves leftists or declare themselves socialists. Bless those political leaders that, once they were deprived of their offices, never again visited a slum or helped with a mobilization. Bless those women who, in the home, discovered their companions were different from what they showed themselves to be outside the home, and also bless those men who struggle to conquer the machismo that dominates them. Bless all of us who, in the face of misery, know that no other vocation remains to us but to convert hearts and minds, to revolutionize societies and continents. Above all, bless us that we, all our days, will be motivated by great feelings of love, so that we can gather the fruit of the New Man and the New Woman.
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Subject: Open Letter to "Che" 
(...) Some of us abandoned the love of the poor, who today are
multiplied in the Great Latinamerican Homeland, and in the world.
Some have left off being led by great feelings of love, to be
absorbed in sterile partisan disputes and, at times, making friends
into enemies, and making real enemies into allies. Mined out for
vanity, for disputes over political space, they no longer carry
hearts enflamed with ideals of justice. They are left deaf to the
cries of the people, and they lost the humilty of work at the base
and, now they are exchanging utopias for votes.
(...) In spite of so many defeats and mistakes, we have made
important conquests in the space of these 30 years. Popular
movements have irrupted in all the continent. Today, in many
countries, women are better organized, as are campesinos, workers,
the indigenous and the poor, and the theology of liberation has been
planted. We have learned important lessons from the urban guerrillas
of the seventies; from the brief popular initiative of Salvador
Allende; from the democratic government of Maurice Bishop, in
Granada, massacred by troops of the United States. From the rise and
fall of the Sandinista revolution; from the struggle of the people of
El Salvador. In Brazil, the party of the the workers promoted, in a
hundred cities administered by militants, a "revolution of low
intensity". In Guatemala, the pressure of the indigenous people
conquered significant space. In Mexico, the Zapatistas of Chiapas
stripped naked the politics of neoliberalism. There is much to do,
beloved Che. We still preserve with love your major heritage to us:
the internationalist spirit and the Cuban Revolution.
