Great Postcolonial Epics:
Africa
Latin America
Derek Walcott Omeros, searching for a way to “enter that light beyond metaphor”[1]
Compare Che with American Teddy Roosevelt.
Both were born into wealthy well connected families which had the resources to fund higher education, Che at the University of Buenos Aires, TR at Harvard college. Both were sickly boys who struggled with debilitating asthma, but embraced an active life nonetheless. TR was interested in animals as a boy, Che was very fond of poetry. Both had fiery dispositions combined with an intuitive grasp of political showmanship which was not incompatible with full moral commitment to their moral choices for and against the United States. Both made journeys in the Americas largely determined by their starting point, geographically and spiritually. Starting in Argentina, Che went from South to North and back again while TR, starting in New York, went from East to West and back again. Both men were charismatic military and political leaders regarded by themselves and others as heroes. Both wrote autobiographies and travel books, explaining their journeys, geographical and political. Both dropped out of professional school, TR abandoned Columbia Law, but Che resumed his studies at the University of Buenos Aires and finished his MD. After his election victory to the New York state legislature, Roosevelt decided to drop out of law school, later saying, “I intended to be one of the governing class.”[2] TR was a “progressive” who blew up a number of political logjams in his career as a public figure right through to his Presidency; in TR’s case, Veblen was wrong, by “governing class” TR most certainly did not mean “leisure class”. He was indefatigable, relishing the joy of battle against entrenched evil, like corrupt cops or monopolist corporations. Che, the heroic revolutionary, had a deeply religious commitment to justice for the global South, a fearless and inspiring self sacrifice. What Santayana said of Don Quixote is true about Che, we laugh at his misadventures, not at his intent.
TR was so successful an American politician that he ended up on Mount Rushmore. Che was so successful a revolutionary that he moved from being a man to a symbol. The famous photo of Che that has become an icon for the left was not titled “Che Guevara” but “The Heroic Revolutionary”, the Hollywood handsome Revolutionary Everyman. Both men invaded Cuba, overthrew the government, believed themselves liberators, and intended to remake the world. Both men were larger than life avatars of their respective political traditions, for and against the US. Both men were flawed self creators who were committed to creating the world in their own image, which was as inspiring and flawed as they themselves were.
TR chose to work on creating a robust vitality by embracing strenuous exercise, particularly boxing, for which he was not naturally suited. His project of self creation through service and political activity reveals him as an prime example of the kind of able leader the US at its best could still produce in the early twentieth century, who was comparable to the greatest American political figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the death of his first wife and mother just hours apart in 1884, TR was emotionally devastated. He tried immersing himself in politics but no distraction seemed sufficient so he left the comfort of Manhattan for the life of a cowboy herding cattle in North Dakota. A New York politician turned cowboy out west sounds like the premise of a comedy, but TR was no dandy and he accepted the strenuous demands of life in the west without complaint. He hunted grizzly bear because they were the most dangerous animals to be found. He developed a love for the land and the irreplaceable beauty of places like Yosemite. His time out west made TR a committed conservationist and determined steward of natural resources who would not tolerate shortsighted destruction or waste. As he rose in political life, his environmentalism emerged and became more conspicuous and demanding, at a time when such concerns were not popular, particularly within the Republican party. Although it is hard to imagine anything more archetypically American than TR the cowboy, he went further, buying two ranches plus a thousand head of cattle. Eventually he was also appointed sheriff so he pursued outlaws in the Badlands. Sheriff TR imposing law and order on the chaos of the American West was the main theme of his later work, The Winning of the West in four volumes, an apologia for Manifest Destiny and westward expansion published in 1889.
When he came back east in the late 1880s TR was took a place on the US Civil Service Commission in Washington, where he worked diligently to dismantle the spoils system at the national level, rooting out such corruption as he could from within a centralized bureaucracy. However, he eventually decided in 1894 that he could do more good back home in Manhattan so he accepted the position of head of the New York City Police Commission when it was offered. He attacked the entrenched corruption of the New York police, which went to the highest levels within the department and the city government. He reorganized and imposed accountability on the leadership within the force for corrupt practices. At the same time he was an urban reformer concerned with the plight of the immigrant poor, because the huge numbers of wretchedly poor people in the ethnic slums of the city and the cultural pathologies that attended them were avoidable evils. TR regarded such a state of affairs was an intolerable standing disgrace, an indictment of the political elite which tolerated such evils, either due to corruption or incompetence or both. In1894 Jacob Riis, the muckraking reformer who wrote How the Other Half Lives met and began a collaboration with TR. Riis’ volume, complete with photographs, revealed the wretched living conditions and hidden misery of New York’s largely immigrant slums. Roosevelt was incensed at the extent and depth of the poverty borne by thousands of indigent immigrants. Riis acknowledged that TR had been of greater help than any other politician in addressing these problems, and TR, who was temperamentally given to seek clashes with opponents, also inevitably took on the criminal gangs which preyed on these poor immigrant communities because he was supervising the police force at the same time.
Intending to step up and enter national politics, TR joined the McKinley administration as assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1896 where he pressed hard to expand and modernize the Navy. The unique need of a continental sized power like the US for a two ocean navy made him feel acutely that a central American Canal, large enough for warships to move from the Atlantic to the Pacific as needed, was a strategic necessity. TR found it trying to obtain funding sufficient to his vision of a two ocean navy and at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, TR resigned his Washington post and organized a cavalry unit composed mainly of western cowboys called the Rough Riders. Roosevelt and the Rough Riders saw action and won acclaim from the press. This catalyzed TRs political elevation. He was elected Governor of New York state in 1898, became a popular national level political figure and was chosen as McKinley’s running mate in 1900. They won, though McKinley was known to refer to his Vice President as “that damned cowboy”. The next year when McKinley was assassinated, there was a cowboy in the White House. TR rose from assistant secretary of the navy in 1896 to president five years later, an astonishingly fast climb. No one was more up to the challenge than TR, at 42 years old, the youngest president in American history.
Roosevelt’s domestic program, called the “Square Deal” was meant to address the economic and political problems that harmed ordinary working Americans as byproducts of the rise of industrial capitalism. TR sought to protect consumers so he backed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which enabled government oversight over the food supply and began scientific regulation of the pharmaceutical industry. He also made the problems of oligopoly and price fixing by large corporations a top priority. TR made a distinction between large industrial concerns who engaged in market distorting, price rigging, anticompetitive practices and those that did not. Big was not necessarily bad according to TR, but such businesses required supervision by the federal government. Those “trusts” that did distort markets had to be broken up, and TR did so with relish as with the Sugar Trust, which controlled 98% of the market. TR also imposed new regulations on Railroads, because they had monopoly pricing power and they used it to squeeze those dependent upon rail to market their goods, particularly poor farmers. Since railroads are naturally shielded from competition (it makes little sense to lay parallel tracks) they had to be regulated as a public utility. The center of the Square Deal was conservation. The waste of precious, finite resources; a rapacious attitude toward exploiting the environment; a disregard for our obligations to posterity; all of these were anathema to TR and he helped bring these issues to the national political discussion.
TR was a great political improviser who understood the complexities of power and the simplicity of force. “Talk softly and carry a big stick” was a favorite motto, yet even where he had little political leverage, as in the coal strike of 1902 and the Russo-Japanese War peace talks, TR got excellent practical results. The Anthracite strike a year into his presidency is a good example, as TR had no constitutional authority to intervene in a private dispute between labor and owners. The practical danger was too great, because millions of people depended upon this coal to survive the winter. TR “invited”, which in this context means “summoned”, representatives from the mine owners and from the new union, the United Mine Workers, to the White House. The owners refused to recognize or negotiate with the UMW, an intended to bust the union with no change in wages. The UMW demanded recognition, plus a reduction in hours and a wage increase. TR refused to accept this impasse and demanded coal. This compulsory cooperation of labor and management overseen by the president is a characteristically twentieth century fix to problems unimagined in the nineteenth century US tradition of a minimalist state. TR threatened to send in the army to nationalize the mines and insure the flow of coal, since the owners threatened the public interest and the strikers had to go back to work without sabotage or violence. Roosevelt promised to set up Commission of Neutral Arbiters to investigate the conditions in the coal mines and report back proposing a solution. The UMW wanted a 20% wage increase and a reduction from a ten hour to an eight hour workday, the Commission recommended 10% and nine hours, which the mine owners consented to do. This has always been regarded a huge victory for the miners because the UMW had achieved de facto recognition as the bargaining representative of all coal miners and membership in the UMW soared. The country benefitted because a dangerous lack of fuel in the more northerly climates of the US was averted. The business community was put on notice that there was conduct the government would not tolerate.
Shot in the chest by an assassin in the 1912 Presidential campaign in Wisconsin, TR announced he has been shot, reporting it had been slowed by a long speech folded in his chest pocket and that while the bullet was in him at that moment, he would still give his speech, as he put it, “because it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose”. This is political showmanship of a high order, like President to be Andrew Jackson, refusing medical attention while on the dueling grounds so that his dying opponent would not have the satisfaction of knowing Jackson had taken a bullet in the chest. It is also slightly mad.
In his 1913 Autobiography, TR announces the political and moral views that he tried to realize, in the Forward:
Justice among the nations of mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be brought about only by those strong and daring men who with wisdom love peace, but who love righteousness more than peace. Facing the immense complexity of modern social and industrial conditions, there is need to use freely and unhesitatingly the collective power of all of us; and yet no exercise of collective power will ever avail if the average individual does not keep his or her sense of personal duty, initiative, and responsibility. There is need to develop all the virtues that have the state for their sphere of action; but these virtues are as dust in a windy street unless back of them lie the strong and tender virtues of a family life based on the love of the one man for the one woman and on their joyous and fearless acceptance of their common obligation to the children that are theirs. There must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight in the many-sided beauty of life. With soul of flame and temper of steel we must act as our coolest judgment bids us. We must exercise the largest charity towards the wrong-doer that is compatible with relentless war against the wrong-doing. We must be just to others, generous to others, and yet we must realize that it is a shameful and a wicked thing not to withstand oppression with high heart and ready hand. With gentleness and tenderness there must go dauntless bravery and grim acceptance of labor and hardship and peril. All for each, and each for all, is a good motto; but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain himself as not to be a burden to others. We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits the man with whom life has gone hard.[3]
The Progressive Era in America was primarily a change in the conception of the state from the minimal Jeffersonian state to the active, responsive, problem solving mechanism of TR and Wilson. With TR, the new activist American state of the Progressive era supplanted the minimalist Jeffersonian state of the nineteenth century. It was no longer the libertarian maxim, “he who governs best, governs least” but an imported German idea of a much extended state Bismarckian state that went beyond merely preventing force and fraud, into actively identifying and addressing social ills. Combined with the pragmatic strain in American philosophy such as Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, there was a new activism but also a new hybris as well. A new problem emerged in American politics in the early twentieth century, the new activist state took arms against problems both domestic and foreign. Liberal interventionism was more successful in domestic than in foreign policy, with the conspicuous exception of eugenics, which was a blight. Again and again in the early twentieth century the US intervened militarily in Latin America and the pace of intervention by American forces increased dramatically over the number of interventions in the nineteenth century. War in the Philippines was just another problem solving mechanism by a state that was much enlarged and more dangerous. Activism in domestic politics provided a logic for activism in international politics. In international relations, during the Progressive Era, the US government recognized the sovereignty of any local regime that ensured that United Fruit Company or Anaconda Copper or whatever, got paid; otherwise, the Marines go on vacation and Americans get a geography lesson.
TR was not an egalitarian, but he had genuine concern with the fate of poor and unfortunate who came to the US seeking a better life for themselves and their children. He felt responsible for the well being of everyone in the US without diminishing his commitment to fostering individual virtue and self reliance for this same population. The great problem, not at all unique to TR, is that his moral concern and commitment to justice dropped off sharply beyond those he considered his own people. He regarded the Spanish-American War as a “splendid little war”, which it was for him, but there were many people for whom it was neither splendid nor little. TR thought it a strategic necessity to take over the Panama Canal project from the French, which they had abandoned on account of Yellow Fever, and finish it. What is now Panama was previously the northernmost province of Columbia. TR offered the Colombian government ten million dollars and agreed to buy out the French investors for up to forty million dollars. The Colombian government was uneasy, because Yanquis had been interested in such a project as far back as the time of Bolivar, who distrusted the Americans and refused any deal. The Columbian government replied to TR’s offer with a counteroffer ten times larger. They did not grasp that like the Godfather, TR was making them “an offer they could not refuse.”
TR was not interested in haggling. Instead he offered support to rebels in Panama, who, supported by bribed Army units, declared themselves independent. They realized their new found freedom in accepting the American offer of ten million dollars that the Colombian government turned down. It is unlikely that the inhabitants of Panama had the same lively interest in America’s strategic problem of a two ocean navy that TR did but that did not matter because they were not asked. Once the new nation TR had conjured up agreed to the canal deal, he informed Congress of the fait accompli. TR was not even willing to consult with Congress on matters which were clearly within its constitutional purview. TR was a knight-errant who was a law unto himself who refused to obtain the advise and consent of the Senate, much less from those who suffered as a result of his jingoism. TR later bragged, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.”[4] This is true. It contains an exceptional efficacy and dazzling self assurance. However, TR exhibited repeatedly the arrogance of power, undiluted, which becomes more seductive and thus more dangerous with each successful escapade. No man or nation, however noble, can be a law unto themselves.
One of the interesting facts about the US/Canada relationship is the asymmetry of concern; Canadians officials think about the US far more than the American officials think about Canada. Much the same is true for the relation between America and everything south of the Rio Grande, including the Caribbean. With the important exception of Mexico, it is generally the case that citizens of other South American nations have a far keener interest in what the US does and does not do than US citizens or policymakers have in the politics of Latin America. Mexico, the great exception, is an ongoing political disaster that the US made. The source of all other issues between Mexico and the US is the insatiable American demand for narcotics, not the suppliers, which brings in so much cash that the cartels have corrupted the Mexican and American police and government. Of course, this makes Latin America fertile ground in which conspiracy theories grow, reading the tealeaves, sifting for clues as to what crafty secret threat American action or inaction portends. This makes insufficient allowance for the much greater American interest in big threats but also it underestimates human stupidity, which is far more prevalent than any official history is authorized to admit. It is a worrisome fact that while there is more stupidity than malice and in history, stupidity and dumb luck can be just as lethal as in in the murder of Archduke Ferdinand and the Tonkin Gulf Incident. America’s first tier worries are east/west superpower problems with the Old World and global terrorism. Geography influences history in that thinking in the US is oriented east/west, while the thinking of the rest of the hemisphere is oriented north/south. Che Guevara, a north/south thinker par excellence, provides an apt foil for Teddy Roosevelt.
As a young man, Che and a buddy went “on the road” with motorcycles riding north from Argentina to encounter the precarious human condition first hand. The religious nature of Che’s pilgrimage toward Heaven is evident in both the structure and in the content of his epic journey, where, as for Werther, life became art became religion. Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, and his Memoirs of the Cuban Revolutionary War form an as yet underappreciated heroic postcolonial epic. Che was the most Christian of pseudo-atheist heroes, despite all protestations to the contrary, he wanted to be a Communist Saint and he was deeply Catholic with a red veneer. He believed in sin and suffering. He found it to be ubiquitous and he was right. Augustine is at least as important as Marx in understanding Che and Dante is more important than either. Che documented his epic life in great detail: First he visited Hell (but of course on earth), examining its various levels. The extended time that Che and his pal ended up spending in a leper colony in some Godforsaken backwater in Amazonia and then among the poor and ill treated in capital cities and the desperate shantytowns strewn across the landscape was a descent into capitalist hell. The Motorcycle Diaries is a new Inferno which shows that the compassion that drove Che to medical school and then to attend to lepers, transmuted into revolutionary violence, death and destruction in the service of love. The descent into Hell is capped off with a visit to the bottom of Hell, the Heart of Darkness, the United States. Fortunately, since evil is homogeneous, all he needed to know about the US was contained in a couple of neighborhoods in Miami, where the wickedness of Capitalism ruled undisguised. He had seen enough exploitation. He now understood America and he now understood what was to be done. In his Memoirs of the Cuban Revolutionary War he finished his Odyssey.
In Mexico with thirty-six ragtag followers of Castro and an odd collection of firearms: pistols, shotguns, and rifles various calibers Che practiced with weapons. Che was a doctor, smart, loyal, charismatic and completely committed, so Castro wisely chose him as second in command. Then it’s off for a sea voyage in a leaky boat to Cuba to start the Revolution They are captured but then but improbably are freed, like Odysseus with Calypso. After experiencing so much suffering, Che was promoted to the new Cato in Purgatory, purifying sinners with just punishment during and after the Revolution.
Che’s moral killing in his Memoirs was a kind of political Kabuki theatre, stylized and punctiliously rigid about protocol. In his official autohagiography, he helped expedite uncontested Justice. When Che accused members of his own group, they were guilty and a revolutionary court, unimpeded by law, would then render summary judgment. The last act of condemned was always an operatic change of heart straight out of Billy Budd. The condemned traitors’ last act was always to spontaneously admit their heinous counter revolutionary betrayals and then to ostentatiously thank Che publicly, for the bullet that the Revolution was about to, quite properly, put into his brain. It was effusive and sentimental, like a retiree getting a gold watch at a retirement dinner.[5] The guilty accused restated how much he loved the Revolution. Then Che killed him, as Revolutionary Justice required, with a bullet to the brain. As Che said, the Revolutionary is driven by love, and this is true, but as Dante notes, all of our sins are love of the wrong things. Cromwell butchering Ireland was driven by gnostic Puritan love for Jesus. Love of stern inflexible Virtue was uppermost in Robespierre’s mind as he sent to the guillotine so many of his former friends who had fought and suffered for the revolutionary cause, but who, as a group, had all simultaneously become dangerous counterrevolutionaries. Lenin’s love for humanity and the future was so strong that he avowed a preference for mass starvation rather than allow a free market in grain, because he took the long view, and any evil, like the liquidation of the kulaks, can be justified if it is seen sub specie aeternitatus, as a necessary, temporary, bridge to Perfection. Pol Pot’s education at the Sorbonne imbued him with a love for those people of Cambodia that were uncontaminated by capitalism that was so great that he informed the exploitative quarter of the country’s population that “To keep you alive is no benefit, to kill you is no loss” and exterminated them systematically in the first two years of his regime. Love is more dangerous than people realize. The goal of uncontested justice requires an infinite series of bullets to the brain to realize. Disputes over justice are inevitable in a free society and they are not a defect.
Che was a genius. The Odysseus-like cleverness of Che is best seen in a suggestion Che made to Fidel when they were separating into two groups to conduct separate guerrilla strikes. This example of his cleverness shows the brilliance of the chess grandmaster or the most destructive of computer hackers. Che saw assumptions that many people had become unaware of, and he took advantage with pure destructive genius, a mental judo astonishing in its power and economy and intellectual leverage. Fidel intended to split the revolutionary forces and said that he would head the first brigade and that Che would command the second. Che stopped him and said, “No, I will command the fourth brigade”. Fidel didn’t get it, at least at first. Fidel would command brigade one, Che insisted would command brigade four, because he saw what everyone else assumed but forgot was an assumption. “You can’t have a brigade one and four without brigades two and three. That would be silly.” Yes, it would be silly. That is the amazingly deep point. Being silly might make a great deal of sense, and as Dada showed, nonsense can be meaningful, Che’s tiny piece of conceptual “malware”, deployed at exactly the right place and time, simultaneously cut the effective strength of Batista’s army in half, gained popular support for the rebels and hatred for the Batista regime plus decoyed the regime from the real revolutionary hit and run military actions. This asthmatic, intellectual, quixotic poet/doctor was a formidable warrior of the mind. His tactic, like the wooden horse of Odysseus, turned the tide of the Cuban Revolutionary War and was more important in winning the war than anything Fidel ever did or said.
This tiny Machiavellian masterpiece was Stuxnet before the digital age. When they were among people that they did not trust, Che and Fidel could let slip important information about the location and vulnerabilities of brigade three or two, neither of which existed. Half of Batista’s armed forces were tasked with finding and destroying imaginary targets, the military felt the heat from the dictator, so they begin to buy information from pseudo informed spies and brutalize the population to locate the rebels. Of course, brutality against the population in general created hatred for the regime and support for the rebels and if the soldiers were cruel enough, as they leaned on the population, they began getting, first a little, then a lot, of information about where brigades three and two were last night or would be three days hence. Military officers that could not produce results were sacked and their replacements knew they had to produce bodies to keep their promotions and predictably, they did.
The more unreliable the information, the more violence against the local sympathizers who hid and supported brigades two and three became necessary, the more the peasants showed their political bona fides to the soldiers by voluntarily offering information about the guerillas, insisting that they had seen brigades two and three in the mountains two days ago and they were now equipped with landmines, artillery pieces and nuclear submarines. As the violence from the soldiers rose, eventually rural people began proactively accusing other peasants to avoid suspicion themselves. Che’s brilliance lay in spiritual judo of the highest order, taking advantage of an opponent’s vices to use their own injustice against them. Moreover, this tactic allowed Fidel and Che to send messengers to each other using messengers that they suspected to be spies, who would arrive with the secret information about the third brigade from Che or Fidel himself, and be sent far away, to the other side of Cuba to take a message to the leader of brigade number two about the rendezvous point with brigade three on the nights when Che and Fidel intended to strike somewhere else. Che accomplished all this by changing one word, “second”, to another, “fourth”. The smart and nimble can defeat the strong and confident.
The rebel side won the Cuban Revolution and in a comic interlude, Che was made minister of the economy. There has not been a man less interested in money since Christ Himself, so Fidel put him in charge of organizing banks, allocating capital, setting prices and wages, imposing taxes, controlling the currency, supervising import and export and restraining multinational corporations and confiscating their soon to be nationalized investments. It requires a degree of optimism that can only be described as revolutionary for Fidel to anticipate that Che’s economic interventions would produce prosperity.
Thereafter, Che began to teach all nations, starting with Angola and Bolivia, that they must repent because judgment is nigh and the end of the evil capitalist world is at hand. He sought martyrdom and found it. The tradition of Christian eschatology, dating back before the gospels were even written, is so evident in his thinking that it separated Che from his more prudent, less apocalyptic, less overtly religious Communist allies. Che later told a reporter from an English Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker, that during the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis, he intended to respond to American (Hell, the Source of Evil) brinksmanship by going beyond the brink. Che said that he had then and still did now advocate launching a nuclear first strike on the cities of the US eastern seaboard and would that he have launched if the missiles had been under his control rather than that of the Russians.[6] He avowed that MAD, the mutually assured destruction that would have left no living thing on Cuba (or Russia), was a price he was willing to pay for the final victory of the people’s revolution over capitalism. Che sought a nuclear Armageddon that Khrushchev must have thought completely daft, failing to note that Che’s kingdom was not of this world and that Paradise is worth any sacrifice. Che was a True Believer. Fidel himself must have been very uneasy about Che. He soon equipped him to lead guerilla insurgencies thousands of miles away from the Caribbean. Dictators generally find that saints who are not distant in time are best kept distant in space.
Times change. Today the CCP is the most conspicuous index of how twentieth century Marxism has not aged gracefully in theory or in practice in the twenty first century. Today Alibaba.com, China’s main internet marketplace, advertised 115 different products using Che’s Heroic Revolutionary photograph, including not just T shirts but also: commemorative motorcycle helmets, bracelets, license plates, candles, electric guitar speed knobs, humidors, camo baseball caps, keychains, beltbuckles, polyester shower curtains, beach towels and refrigerator magnets, among many other things, all available at wholesale prices. The Communist hero has become a capitalist commodity. Courtesy of the largest “Communist” party on the planet, it only takes a few clicks to get a good deal on Che Guevara beach towels and fridge magnets.
NEED PIX
[1] Derek Walcott, Omeros, New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1990
[2] Brands, TR: The Last Romantic, New York, Basic Books, 1998, 126
[3] Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography,
[4] Find cite
[5] Che Guevara, Memoirs of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Ocean Press, Melbourne Australia, 2006, 57.
[6] Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara; A Revolutionary Life, New York, Grove Press, 1997 545.