state of nature

To mark what would have been Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s 90^th birthday we republish our 2010 interview with Jon Lee Anderson, author of the biography, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Bantam press, 1997).

Cihan Aksan: We could start with why you decided to write a biography of Che Guevara when you did.

Jon Lee Anderson: After reporting in Central America I had become fascinated with the idea of exploring and somehow chronicling the world of the revolutionary, of the insurgent world so to speak, which at the time took up a fairly hefty part of the globe. It wasn’t on the maps of the world, but I knew from Central America that there were in some cases generations-old insurgencies which were new human tribes in the making, and by dint of the fact that they had been there for so long, were creating their own social structures. They were clandestine societies. They were parts of nations that had been dispossessed, for better or worse, whatever the reasons, and this was a feature of the world in the latter stages of the Cold War, which had lasted a long time. So you had unreconciled conflicts, unresolved political and social situations right across the world.

At the time I set out to do this book, Guerrillas, in 1988, the Soviet Union was still in existence, and there were at least forty full fledged insurgencies in the world. You could travel around the world from one clandestine stop to another. You could almost circumnavigate the world through outlaw territories, so to speak, and so I set out to do that. I set out more or less to find out what the differences and similarities were between those people fighting in such insurgencies from different regions and different ideologies. That was really what I set out to do with Guerrillas. So I went from El Salvador, to Western Sahara and to Gaza, to Burma, to Afghanistan. I did this in the run-up to, and in the aftermath of, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the communist world. While I was doing this the world was changing dramatically. The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan while I was there, Tiananmen Square happened while I was in Burma, and Ceausescu fell just after I returned home from there, and so on. Everything began to happen. I was with the Salvadoran guerrillas when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 – I listened to it on Radio Havana up in the mountains. I noted all these big events that formally make up the history of that period, but I was with people whose lives were day-in and day-out the same as they had been for years, and for them it was still all about the need to survive and carry forward a struggle that had been in many cases forgotten by the world. And soon some of them would dry up as a result of what was happening, as their Cold War sponsors cut off their funding. They were obliged or were encouraged to sue for peace. READ MORE