The Lack of Philosophical Knowledge in Che Guevara’s Pedagogy: Fetishizing Love for Justice and Rage against Imperialism at the Expense of Logos

Abstract

Most research on Ernesto “Che” Guevara has been concerned with emphasizing his ideological Marxist commitments and anti-imperial material objectives. These scholarly concerns usually constellate recycled subjective themes highlighting the revolutionary leader hating injustice, and loving justice, in tandem with the objective of eliminating imperialism and advancing a Third World project. In 2012, Che’s Apuntes filósoficos (Eng. Philosophical Notes) were published and highlighted that his exposure to philosophy regrettably occurred late in his life, and surprisingly, the difficulty he had in reading Marx and Hegel. The objective, therefore, of this multidisciplinary research navigating law, theology, philosophy, and politics is threefold. First, it alludes to and critiques the familiar pedagogy of Guevara emphasizing the importance of developing a “theory in action”, “learning through action”, being a “humanist”, and “leading by example”. Secondly, it considers the consequences of Che reifying emotion (eros) over reason (logos) thereby providing a possible answer to his “failed revolutionary story” in the Congo and Bolivia with his pedagogy involving an unstable compound mixing the emotion of compassion with rage thus clouding his reason. Finally, the third section highlights that we should not relegate emotion away from the sphere of political discourse, but rather harmonize it with reason to avoid chaotic and unpredictable errors based on subjective truths. Emphasizing the former at the expense of the latter—as maintained by a realist approach to International Relations and positivist jurisprudence accenting International Law—risks undermining scholarship challenging the immoral consequences arising from a naturalized assumption separating reason and revelation thus decriminalizing colonial practices characterizing the North and South.

People here [in Europe] are very preoccupied with questions—are you or are you not a Marxist? Are you a Marxist-Leninist? Just ask me, please, whether we are doing well in the field. Are we really liberating our people, the human beings in our country from all forms of oppression? Ask me simply this and draw your own conclusions.

—Amilcar Cabral

1. Introduction: The Familiar Revolutionary Pedagogy of Guevara—Learning-Training through Action, Humanist Individuality, and Leading by Example

In 1953—at the age of 25—Ernesto “Che” Guevara1 had already revealed an endearing pathos longing for improving the immoral plight of what he terms “our America” induced by an imperialist world system led by the United States of America. In a letter dated 4 May 1963—addressed to Guillermo Lorentzen—Guevara writing from Havana mentions that “I was born in Argentina, I fought in Cuba, and I began to be a revolutionary in Guatemala” [1] (p. 370). The chronicles noted in his diary—including two trips across South/Central America between December 1951 and December 19532—accent that the social morbidities he witnessed profoundly impacted his ontology and awakened him to the injustices instilled by (neo)-colonialism on local inhabitants [2]. Hilda Gadea—Guevara’s first wife whom he met in Guatemala—is remembered for having played a significant role in the development of his political consciousness and narrates in her memoirs entitled My life with Che that he contemplated traveling to work as a doctor in Africa but decided on revolutionary struggle because of how deeply troubled he was by the indigence he witnessed during his trip across the Americas [2,3]. Hilda mentions in her memoirs that she found a poem written by Ernesto dedicated to an elderly woman he treated while he was in Mexico in 1954 promising her that he will “fight for better world, for a better life for all the poor and exploited” [2,3]. He chronicles that the severity of the observed poverty, hunger, and disease which led a father to “accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident” convinced him that in order to help his patria he had to relinquish his medical vocation and become a revolutionary fighter with an objective seeking the unity and liberation of Latin-America since it faced a common enemy and a shared Hispanic heritage3 [4]. Furthermore, in 1954 he expressed to his mother in a letter that he respected the communists in Guatemala and that “sooner or later I will join the Party myself [5] (p. 88). Ernesto’s fate as a revolutionary fighter was decided when he witnessed in 1954 the overthrow of President Arbenz’s government in Guatemala by US-backed right-wing groups and when he met comandante Fidel Castro in July 1955 in Mexico. Guevara writes in his diary: “The person who wrote these notes passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again. The person who reorganized and polishes them, me, is no longer, at least I am not the person I once was. All this wandering around ‘Our America’ with a capital A has changed me more than I thought” [1] (p. 32).

The development of Ernesto Guevara’s revolutionary pedagogy—surprising as it might be to some—was not developed in Cuba, but rather, during his chronicled life-world experiences across the Americas. The praxis needed to engage in revolutionary struggle and guerrilla warfare, however, was put into practice in Cuba. In other words, Che’s revolutionary pedagogy—in difference to Amilcar Cabral—develops and grows, within and as a part of the “revolutionary struggles of the masses; it is not something that can be developed a priori and taken to the masses” [2] (p. 149) and [6]. While Guevara explicitly states in 1964, “I am not a teacher; I am just one of many men struggling today to build a new Cuba” [7] (p. 378), his praxis of revolutionary pedagogy does disclose that he considered himself as a trainer in revolutionary pedagogy. In fact, his writings, speeches, and guerrilla campaigns encapsulated a learning-training ethos in revolutionary social pedagogy. This is especially evident in that he describes both of his most important guerrilla projects—in the Congo and later in Bolivia—as “training missions” including a tenet affirming that “for the transition from capitalism to socialism to be successful there must be a qualitative transformation of human consciousness as a fundamental complement to the qualitative transformation of the economic foundations of a society” [2] (p. 150) and [8]. In Mexico—before the 26 July movement set sail on the granma to Cuba on 25 November 1956—Ernesto Guevara and his companeros were involved in military and political training. According to Alberto Bayo—the groups military trainer in Mexico—Ernesto Guevara, who was now nicknamed “Che”, “surpassed all the rest for his vast education and his dedication to study and observe…at the end of the course…he had the highest grade” [4] (p. 76). Similarly, Fidel Castro also observed that “Che’s political education was considerably advanced” [9] (p. 68).

While most literature on Ernesto Guevara is attentive to analysing his political stance (i.e., Marxist-Leninist), and guerrilla warfare strategy (i.e., foco), there exists a dearth in knowledge production seeking to deconstruct his ontological contributions to revolutionary pedagogy identified through his self-training and self-practice seeking social change [2]. For instance, Peter McLaren’s work entitled Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution situates Guevara within a “theoretical and ideological battle between Marxism and postmodernism in academic educational circles in the US”, thereby focusing on how Marxist ideology influenced the development of Che’s revolutionary pedagogy rather than engaging in a particularly “thorough examination of the pedagogy of Che” that developed through practice [2] (p. 153, emphases added) and [10]. The work of Lidia Tuner Marti—published in Spanish in 1999 and later in English in 2014—entitled Notes on Ernesto Che Guevara’s Ideas on Pedagogy is by far the most detailed account emphasizing the qualities and values outlined by Che as requisites for building—in his words—el hombre nuevo (Eng. the new man) characterizing a nueva sociedad (Eng. new society). Her work is especially important for the analysis extended in this section since Turner outlines that Che’s revolutionary theory developed through practice is a flexible (non-dogmatic) ideological pedagogy. This is a vital point to keep in mind when we seek to assess his revolutionary struggle “in action” while learning its limits during both pedagogical training missions in the Congo and Bolivia. Motivated thus, the remainder of this section is interested in familiarizing the reader with Dr. Guevara’s revolutionary pedagogy by navigating three inter-related components: learning-training through action, humanist individuality, and finally, leading by example.

A pedagogical principle in Guevara’s revolutionary praxis accentuates learning and training through action by maintaining an authentic dialogue with the masses which endeavours to reflect the endogenous needs of the struggling society. When the 26 July movement consolidated itself in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba, a co-learning experience developed with the workers which was also channeled to the peasants. According to Che, the “guerrilla learned from the workers…we learned the value of organization, while again we taught the value of rebellion” [7] (p. 233). To embody such valuable pedagogical principle, Holst asserts that his pedagogy affirmed that the “best school of revolution was the revolutionary process itself” [2] (p. 157). As a guerrilla trainer, Guevara believed that learning in action facilitates the process of learning by stating “never try to teach a people that through education alone…they can conquer their rights. Teach them, first and foremost, to conquer their rights. When they have a government that represents them, they will learn everything taught to them, and even more: they will themselves become teachers of everyone without the slightest effort” [7] (p. 63). For instance, when the Congolese revolutionary movement requested military training and assistance from the Cuban government, Che’s revolutionary praxis stipulated that “training on the ground in the Congo” would be more “effective than in the more artificial context of Cuba” [2] (p. 158) since he had already learned in Cuba that political and military leaders “will learn the art of war during the course of war itself. There exists neither trade nor profession that can be learned from the books alone. In this case, the struggle itself is the great teacher” [11] (p. 75). Similarly, in the context of the Congolese propre, Guevara mentions that “a good battlefield instructor does more for the revolution than one who teaches a large number of raw recruits in a context of peace…a revolutionary soldier cannot be formed in an academy but only in warfare” [12] (p. 2,7).

Guevara’s pedagogical principle identified in his praxis as humanist individuality is primarily concerned with fostering social change and social organization that develop conditions freeing the subject from any (neo)-colonial structure. Since hunger, subjugation, and oppression were—according to Che—universal in the Third World, he identifies two key subjective factors that “complement each other and deepen during the struggle: consciousness of the necessity of change and confidence in the possibility of this revolutionary change” [7] (p. 75 emphases added). These subjective conditions are symbiotic with Che’s insistence that the possibility of revolutionary success is learned through action in tandem with the powerful inter-related pedagogical principle of leading by example identified in the ‘guerrilla in action’ [2]. Thus, the process of “creating subjective conditions as an educational process resulting from the struggle itself” is a praxis in humanist individuality [2] (p. 160). Guevara mentions during his campaign in the Congo that the “main function of guerrilla warfare is to educate the masses in their possibilities of victory, by showing them, at the same time, the possibility of a new future and the necessity of changes to achieve that future in the process of the armed struggle of all the people” [12] (p. 241). Furthermore, his role as a pedagogue instilling the principle of humanist individuality seeking to battle ignorance was influenced by Jose Marti’s principle of “literacy without borders” which ensured that guerrilla fighters who were educated expanded literacy skills to increase consciousness in their surrounding communities [13]. Developing the subjective conditions leading to the transformation of consciousness which in turn leads to the emergence of el hombre nuevo is a task that can only be achieved if it is accompanied by a translation in people’s social relations and values. This is a requisite that is articulated by Che during his stay in Mexico when he says, “I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves” [14]. Additionally, when he says that the guerrilla soldiers in Cuba “learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth” [7] (p. 115). In his view, the reform of individual consciousness would result in a new man that was capable of overcoming egotism, selfishness, and the urge to place the individual over the collective which he thought was characteristic of capitalist societies valuing the material over the moral (i.e., an individualistic ontology) [15,16,17]. According to Che, capitalist individualistic societies are accented by false humanism with an ethos characteristic of a “contest among wolves” where the success of an individual is at the cost or fall of others [18]. Overcoming individualism through the transformation of consciousness is a pedagogical process that is captured by Che’s revolutionary praxis when he mentions that “very profound social change also demands very profound changes in the mentality of the people. Individualism as such, as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment must disappear in Cuba. Changing the manner of thinking requires profound internal changes” [7] (p. 115).

Therefore, it is not surprising that Guevara believed that “one of the great techniques” in transforming consciousness is “leading by example” [11] (p. 102) which according to him fostered a bond between the “individual and the masses” [11] (p. 102). Because he held multiple positions in the government, he refused all salary increases and only accepted his salary as a commander [19]. He took the task of leading by example to the “humanist extreme” by “refusing privileges and offering to do the hardest task” and also working endless hours at his ministry job, in construction, and even cutting sugar cane [2] (pp. 163, 165). When it was brought to his attention that his family was receiving higher food rations because of his leadership positions—while workers and guerrilla fighters were complaining about their limited food supplies—he urged the government to immediately reduce the quantity to what everyone else received [2,19]. It is no wonder that guerrilla fighter Tomas Alba stated that “Che was loved, in spite of being stern and demanding. We would give our life for him” [20]. While numerous events emphasizing Guevara training guerrilla fighters and workers in humanist individuality and leading by example to transform consciousness exists it suffices to mention two cases. Firstly, it was adjudicated that captured enemy soldiers are to be medicated and cared for as if they were part of the “revolutionary process” [2]. Secondly, Joel Iglesias recounts in his diary when he was wounded in battle that Che brought admiration from his adversaries: “Che ran out to me” he says, “defying the bullets, threw me over his shoulder, and got me out of there. The guards didn’t dare fire at him…later they told me he made a great impression on them when they saw him run out with his pistol stuck in his belt, ignoring the danger, they didn’t dare shoot” [21].

While it is true that Guevara did lead by example as highlighted in the Cuban setting, he fundamentally misinterpreted the Cuban victory especially since he sought to internationalize its process by disregarding the particularities of different revolutionary settings. He contended that the whole revolutionary effort in Cuba revealed the success of his learning-by-doing approach by educating the peasantry and increasing their revolutionary consciousness, training the peasants to be disciplined, bolstering their confidence, and finally, engaging in transforming their society. In fact, however, the defeat of the Batista regime in Cuba was not primarily linked to Guevara’s revolutionary pedagogy but was rather the kicking in of a severely rotten door. Therefore, while this section analyzed the familiar (recycled) pedagogy of Ernesto Guevara, the following section will distance itself from the tendency of writers to mythologize the trainer in guerrilla fighting by fusing the man with Christian iconography thereby transforming him into a Christ-like-figure identified as Chesucristo devoid of any faults [22]. The moral issue with mythologizing Ernesto Guevara as the “most complete human of our time”—as claimed by the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre—is the loss of any critical analysis seeking to deconstruct the merits of Ernesto’s main revolutionary principle claiming that reformed consciousness—required for revolutionary success—is exclusively developed during the struggle for freedom. The following section, therefore, is interested precisely in moving beyond Che’s heroic, but ultimately, fatalistic revolutionary ideology fetishizing the materialistic idea of justice and freedom at any cost in tandem with the pathos of hate since exporting the “Cuban road to liberation” internationally failed—outstandingly—in the Congo and in Bolivia.

2. Guevara’s Fatalistic Bond between Rage and Love—A Passionate (Emotional) Theory Disregarding Logos?

In January 1966, the Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America was held in Havana. Most dogmatic Marxists claim that the most memorable moment of the conference was the content of Ernesto Guevara’s letter which he sent following his failed mission in the Congo pleading the guests to export the Cuban path of liberation inter-continentally by creating a “Second or a Third Vietnam” as a “battle cry against imperialism” using foco as a warfare strategy. It was however beyond a doubt the infamous speech of Amilcar Cabral—the revolutionary teacher and pedagogue of Guinea-Bissau—that moved the audience. Che’s teacher—Fidel Castro—mentioned in response to Cabral’s speech entitled “Weapon of Theory” that he is “…one of the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, Comrade Amilcar Cabral…instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and the success of his struggle for liberation” [23]. Cabral emphasized the importance of developing a theory that leads the revolution, to refrain from shouting insults against imperialism since imperialism is not simply located geographically in the “First World”, and that there is not a “one size fits all” path to liberation since such belief reveals we have not overcome the “struggle against our own weaknesses”. Cabral [24]—by balancing logos and pathos—claims that:

One form of struggle which we consider to be fundamental has not been explicitly mentioned in this programme…We refer here to the struggle against our own weaknesses…our experience has shown us that in the general framework of daily struggle this battle against ourselves—no matter what difficulties the enemy may create—is the most difficult of all…This battle is the expression of the internal contradictions in the economic, social, cultural (and therefore historical) reality of each of our countries. We are convinced that any national or social revolution which is not based on knowledge of this fundamental reality runs grave risk of being condemned to failure…To those who see in it a theoretical character, we would recall that every practice produces a theory, and that if it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.

Cabral never categorized himself as a dogmatic ideologue since he believed that it would limit learning from practice thereby requiring theoretical and pedagogical alterations based on different socio-cultural analyses. He rather emphasized during a meeting in London in 1971 that “People here [in Europe] are very preoccupied with questions—are you or are you not a Marxist? Are you a Marxist-Leninist? Just ask me, please, whether we are… liberating our people, the human beings in our country from all forms of oppression?”. Guevara, on the other hand, identified Marxism—or more specifically the Cuban experience—as the only road to liberation locally and internationally—regardless of the social structure and historical development of the colonized country. He says, “The laws of Marxism are present in the event of the Cuban Revolution, independently of whether its leaders profess or fully know those laws from a theoretical point of view” [7] (p. 123). Thus, according to Che, and from an epistemological and ontological perspective, “reality itself is revolutionary” [2] (p. 159), and while he does mention that “Marxism [is] only a guide to action” [25] (p. 346) and cautioned that “mechanical thinking drawn from dogma” should be “avoided at all costs” [2] (p. 159); in practice—as manifest in his failed campaigns in the Congo and Bolivia—he not only failed to learn from practice—since he considered Cuba’s revolutionary theory as the sole path to liberation—but he also disregarded the advice given to him by local leaders who were familiar with the socio-economic structures, culture, and history of the region. He says in relation to the importance of theory—in contrast to Cabral—developed during liberation, “we began drawing theoretical conclusions in the heat of these events to create our own body ideas…We are in a state of continual motion, and theory moves more slowly” [26] (p. 413).

While he did not learn from his failed practices—as will be elaborated below in his campaign in the Congo—he did admit failure which is indicative of an unwavering moral character that is principled and genuinely prioritized humanist individuality. It also, however, highlights that his revolutionary theory is guided by an episteme emphasising an erotic jurisprudence rather than a balance between eros and logos which according to Cabral is symptomatic of a character that has yet to struggle against their own weaknesses. Congo declared its independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960 and was followed by the election of the exemplary prime minister Patrice Lumumba. The election of Lumumba led to the mutiny of the Congolese army, the secession of the country’s mineral rich province of Katanga under Moise Tshombe—who allied with mercenary groups and their leader Mike Hoare developing the “Congo National Army”–, the return of Belgian troops, and finally, the arrival of UN peace-keeping forces to protect the territorial integrity of the Congo [14,27]. By 17 January 1961, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with the backing of the US, Belgium, and several anti-leftist groups in the Congo, and the death by plane crash of the respected United Nations secretary general—Dag Hammarskjold—led to several provinces in the Congo declaring “self-governance”. By 1964 the Congo was effectively divided between the Kwilu rebellion with support from Belgium, the US, and local Congolese leaders – including Joseph Vubu, Cyrille Adoula, Moise Tshombe, and Joseph Mobuto – controlling the western part of the country, and on the other hand, the Simba “Lumumbists” rebellion which controlled the eastern side of the country and was led by Gaston Soumialot, Christophe Gbenye, and Lauren Kabila—amongst others—with support from the Soviet Union and China.

It was Algeria and Egypt4 who first announced that they would aid the Simba rebellion and called on other countries to help. Already, Che had claimed that Lumumba’s murder should be a “lesson for all of us” [16] (p. 86) and gave a remarkable speech at the UN general assembly in December 1964 in which he mentioned the “tragic case of the Congo” by denouncing the unacceptable intervention by Western powers who defend “Belgian paratroopers transport[ed] by US aircraft” taking off from British bases [14,27]. This was followed by Guevara touring African states—by early 1965—where in Tanzania he met Laurent Kabila who requested help to maintain what was left of the liberated area in the east and southeast of the Congo; in Cairo he met Gaston Soumaliot who requested fighters and monetary aid for Stanleyville front in the Congo; and finally, in Brazzaville he met Agostinho Neto who requested the Cubans to provide support for the Angolan liberation army known as the MPLA. Following his meetings, he met with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo—whom he had fraternal relations with since 1959—to discuss his plan to export the Cuban path of liberation against anti-Simba fighters using Marxist ideology and foco guerrilla strategy. Nasser cautioned him of the danger of “romanticism” by urging him “not to become another Tarzan…it can’t be done” [27]. According to Seddon [27], “Guevara was excited by what these men told him about the potential for an effective liberation struggle”. This is attested in that in 1965 he had seen Fidel Castro for the last time in Havana and gave him his farewell letter—read to the public in October 1965—in which he relinquished his Cuban citizenship, all of his ministerial positions, and felt no longer obligated to the Cuban revolution but to the path of “guerrilla internationalism” [14,27]. He says, “other nations of the world summon my modest efforts of assistance. I can do that which is denied you due to your responsibility as the head of Cuba, and the time has come for us to part.” [28]. In April 1965, Guevara with a dozen Cuban fighters travelled by road to the lakeside town of Kigoma, Tanzania and by 24 April 1965 they had arrived in the Congo to begin—along with their Congolese compatriots—exploring the prospects of liberation by assessing the terrain including the strengths and weaknesses of their allies and enemies [29]. Since Guevara had limited knowledge of the local language—Swahili—he was assigned during the campaign a teenage interpreter by the name Freddy Ilanga who admired his principle of leading by example by being hard working, but more importantly, showed the same respect to “black” people as he did to the “white man” especially since Guevara was one of the few “white” guerrilla fighters [29,30].

During the campaign in the Congo—which only lasted 7 months and ended in November 1965—Guevara realized that his “allies had a low moral” and their leaders—for instance Kabila— “spent days drinking and then had huge meals without disguising what they were up to from the people around them. They used up petrol on pointless expeditions” [14,27]. When Guevara realized the poor example of Kabila as a leader and how it was affecting the moral of Cubans and Congolese alike, he stated that “nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour” [29]. For instance, during an attack—instructed by Kabila—on a garrison at Bendera which was defending a hydro-electric plant, it was only Cubans who fought with most Rwandese running away, and Congolese refusing to fight [29] (p. 149)5. The operation was considered as a disaster by Guevara with several Cuban casualties; however, his adversary Mike Hoare was highly impressed and noted in his memoirs that “observers had noticed a subtle change in the type of resistance which the rebels were offering the Leopoldville government…The change coincided with the arrival in the area of a contingent of Cuban advisers specially trained in the arts of guerrilla warfare” [27]. While there were small military successes, overall, the Congolese campaign according to Che was a complete “failure” with the Cubans becoming “Congolized” leading to “decomposition” and the overall retrogression of the campaign. According to Che [29] (pp. 1–2, emphases added):

This is the story of a failure…Victory is a great source of positive experiences, but so is defeat, especially in light of the extraordinary circumstances that surrounded these events…this is the story of a decomposition. When we arrived on Congolese soil, the revolution had stalled; later, events took place that would mean its definitive retrogression…The aspect that interests us here is not the story of the decomposition of the Congolese revolution…it is the process of the collapse of our own fighting morale…It is essential to analyze in depth the problems that arise and find a solution. A good instructor on the battlefield does more for the revolution than the teacher of considerable numbers of raw recruits in peacetime, but the characteristics of this instructor, the catalyst in the training of future revolutionary technical cadres, should be studied carefully…The idea that guided us was to ensure that men experienced in Cuba’s liberation struggle and the subsequent battles against reaction fought alongside men without experience. We aimed to bring about what we called the ‘Cubanization’ of the Congolese…the effect was the exact opposite… there was a ‘Congolization’ of the Cubans. ‘Congolization’ refers to habits and attitudes toward the revolution that were typical of the Congolese soldiers at that time. This does not reflect a derogatory opinion of the Congolese people, but it does reflect such a view of the soldiers of those days.

All of the Cubans had become ill at different junctures during their arrival with Guevara himself having suffered asthma attacks, dysentery, and malaria [14,29]. The success of the campaign continued to retrogress especially when considering the political climate before Che arrived in the Congo and following the rapid political developments that arose across the continent. Differences between the various rebel factions and their leaders seemed to be coming to a head, and most regional African leaders either reduced their commitment to the Congolese rebellion or suffered a coup d’état. In relation to Congolese rebel groups, Guevara’s says “the human element failed…there is no will to fight. The rebel leaders are corrupt. In a word…there was nothing to do” [29] (p. 252). While it is beyond the scope of this article to mention all regional and international geo-political developments that influenced the failure of the campaign, it suffices to mention that on 1 November 1965 Che received an urgent message from the Tanzanian government headed by Julius Nyerere stating that they had decided to withdraw the support extended because of the internal division and contest between leadership within the Congo; Algerian President Ben Bella—one of Che’s main supporters—was overthrown; Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah was removed from power while on a visit to China early in 1966; and Mehdi Ben Baraka—one of the main organizers of the Tricontinental conference in 1966 Havana—was kidnapped and disappeared in 1965. In fact, even though the Soviet leadership thought that there was a “romantic aura around him” [31] (p. 27), Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s former adviser—Feder Burlatsky—stated that “we disliked Che’s position. He became an example for adventurers, [and this] could have provoked a confrontation between the USSR and the US” [14] (p. 581). These political developments signalled a change in the method of engaging imperialism and implementing the Third world project locally and internationally with the OAU enabling a more conservative alliance to emerge across the continent seeking a political solution to the development of underdevelopment thus marking a turning point in the late (post)-colonial history of the African continent.

On 20 November 1965, Guevara sounded the retreat and organised the crossing of Lake Tanganyika back into Tanzania. He wrote “All the Congolese leaders were in full retreat, the peasants had become increasingly hostile” [27]. He recognized that the continued presence of Cuban guerrillas was futile especially since the rebels were divided in their objectives and conceptualizations of a “struggle for liberation”. Ernesto mentions during an altercation with the rebel fighters:

I argued as forcefully as I could to the exasperated Freedom Fighters that a…soldier, especially a revolutionary soldier, cannot be trained in an academy. Only in war does he become a soldier…they argued that their respective peoples…would protest if any casualties were suffered not as a result of oppression in their own land, but from a war to liberate another country. I tried to show them that we were not talking about a struggle within fixed borders, but of a war against the common oppressor, present as much in Mozambique as in Malawi, Rhodesia or South Africa, the Congo or Angola. No one saw it this way [29] (p. 5).

The retreat took place 10 days before Joseph Mobuto—one of main backers of Lumumba’s execution—was installed as president. When it became apparent that the Congolese liberation movement was facing defeat Che reminded the Cuban fighters of the pedagogical principle of humanist individuality, leading by example, and crucially, that he realized that he lacked the necessary knowledge about Congolese culture which played a crucial role in the early failure of the campaign. He says,

Our experience must be transmitted in one form or another to the combatants; the urge to teach should be paramount—but not in a pedantic manner, looking down at those who don’t know, but with the human warmth that comes with shared learning…We have to learn about the Congo in order to bind ourselves to the Congolese compañeros; but we also have to learn the things we lack in general culture and even the art of warfare…I must apologize again for the superficiality of this analysis, which is based on fragmentary practical experience and poor general knowledge of the social question in the Congo [29] (pp. 68–69, 252).

Following the Congo campaign, Che remained covertly in the Cuban embassy in Dar-El-Salam, Tanzania to record his Congo Diary then retreated to Prague, Czechoslovakia where he began planning for his final campaign in Bolivia which began in October 1966. Before we deliberate our final analysis cautioning about romanticizing justice at the expense of reifying eros and not balancing it with logos, it is necessary to briefly note Che not learning from practice in the Congo—as made evident in his Bolivia campaign—even though he insisted in his Congo Diaries that it is vital to assess the “depths of problems”, “find a solution”, and “learn the culture” resulting in a campaign of liberation becoming a “story of failure”.

Before arriving in Bolivia, commandante Guevara met with Argentine president Juan Peron in Spain to discuss his plan seeking to export the Cuban revolutionary practice to Latin America. Peron informed Ricardo Rojo—known for his work entitled Mi Amigo El Che—following Che’s execution that “without what you tell us about [his] time in the Congo and many other circumstances, it would not be easy to understand that a man already seasoned and experienced in Guerrilla warfare found himself in such a precarious situation in Bolivia with regard to means and preparation”. Peron informed Rojo that he advised Che when he visited him Madrid in 1966 after he had left Prague—similarly to the Egyptian president Nasser—by saying “Excuse me, my commander, to be frank with you…you in Bolivia are not going to survive. Suspend that plan. Look for other variants…Do not commit suicide” [32]. Peron continues by informing Rojo that Guevara had “developed his tremendous operations, with no other means than his extraordinary personal courage and the firm decision to win that encouraged him as a man of a cause…such virtues are not enough. It is necessary, at least, to have something secure in terms of strength and means of subsisting in such an inhospitable environment” [32]. He concluded his discussion with Rojo by saying that “[Che] has [a] very interesting vision of things and of today’s world, but he participates in the idea of the ‘permanent revolution’ of the peoples, an immature utopian…I personally think he is a brilliant individual but on the wrong side. He has very interesting conversations…a very strong obsession with communism. He intends to gather forces from I don’t know where to ‘liberate’ our American peoples” [32]. Nevertheless, in Bolivia as in the Congo, several fighters deserted during the Long March which took place between 1 February and 20 March 1967 with Che realizing that his foco strategy failed to gain any support from the local campesino population. Che thought—as he did in the Congo—that leading by example would suffice for unity, however quite the contrary, “the hardships of the march increased stress and caused dissension and daily arguments between guerrillas” resulting in volunteers either being discharged and/or deserting during training [33] (pp. 58, 60). Moreover, Che clashed with local rebel leaders—especially the Bolivian Communist Party (BCP)—headed by Mario Monje because of their differing ideological and strategic views on how and who would lead the liberation process which led to the party providing minimal, if any support for Che’s mission, and this rift played a vital part in the missions’ failure [2,14,33].

A final comparison between both campaigns cautioning about the importance in learning the socio-cultural characteristics of a region and developing a theory that leads the struggle is noticing that Che and his guerrilla fighters mistakenly learned Quechua rather than Guarani as language to communicate with the surrounding Bolivians. While Quechua was the dominant Indian language spoken in the Bolivian highlands to the south and west, the local population in the Ñancahuazú region—where their foco base was located—spoke Guaraní which furthered social tension between the guerrilla fighters and the local population by seeing them as “foreigners” [14] and [33] (p. 56). Only three months after they had arrived—in late March 1967—the Bolivian government discovered the location of Che’s base thereby forcing them to begin their fight. Without having developed an esprit de corps among the fighters and local trust among the Bolivian population—including the virtual absence of internal and external support—the guerrilla cadre slowly dwindled in numbers, its morale receded, and more crucially, the local population turned against the guerrilla fighters. According to Che, the “peasants do not give us any help, and they are turning into informers” [34] (p. 86). While rifts between peasants, workers, and rebel commanders occurred in Cuba during the 26 July Movement, it was continuously mitigated by interventions and guidance by Castro. Even Castro—Che’s teacher—explained that “Guevara may have been too inflexible in his approach to the leadership of the Bolivian Communist Party” [35] (p. 302) and in another instance insisted that Guevara “too many risks, even having a tendency toward foolhardiness” [35] (p. 193). Guevara’s mission to Bolivia appears to have failed for some of the same reasons as the Congo mission [14,31]. Che repeated the tactic of “secretly entering another country as the head of a foreign military group without the approval of his presumed political allies” [31](p. 25). According to Anderson, “he neatly replicated his Congo chantaje [blackmail], once again appearing on alien turf without an invitation, convinced that the Bolivian Communist Party (BCP) leadership wouldn’t back out of the impending guerrilla war once he presented it with the fait accompli of his presence” [14] (p. 701). Anderson asserts that the difference in the case of Bolivia was that “this time his mistake would prove fatal” [14] (p. 701). While Che did fail in Bolivia, Dunkerley [36] mentions the impact of the failed political struggle by stating: “the tragic death of Che, after a doomed rural guerrilla campaign in eastern Bolivia, had a profound effect on the country’s politics. The fate of his imitators, and the eventual resurgence of more classical forms of mass struggle, has provided valuable lessons for…a second Bolivian revolution…through to the restoration of parliamentary democracy in 1982”.

However, in Bolivia, as in the Congo, we notice Guevara not successfully “struggling against his own weaknesses” from a Cabrallian perspective. This is evident in his fatalistic, and more specifically, erotic sociological assumption claiming that culture would transform easily in a supposed “revolutionary setting”. As mentioned previously, in the Congo he and his guerrilla fighters became “Congolized” rather than remain “Cubanized”. Cultural transformation—as various revolutionary leaders learned in a variety of culturally diverse settings such as Russia, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, Venezuela, China, Vietnam, Bolivia, and Cambodia—is decidedly more difficult to engineer than is institutional transformation especially since culture is deeply resilient and resistant to engineered change. Deeply rooted and innately recalcitrant, culture changes on an evolutionary scale, not a revolutionary one. Therefore, Guevara’s efforts to create in the Congo and in Bolivia millions of selfless and wholly unmaterialistic individuals who would fetishize justice by working endlessly and unremittingly for moral rewards appears according to the branch of philosophy known as Ethics (i.e., moral philosophy)—concerned with defending concepts of right and wrong behavior—as wholly disconnected from the temporal world (Ar. Dunyā).

3. Guevara’s Pedagogy Fetishizing Injustice at the Expense of Reason: The Failure in Harmonizing Spirituality, Logos, and Eros

The (im)moral violence legalizing war—whether with an objective to liberate or colonize people—remains one of the central concepts in the discipline of International Relations (IR). Scholars adhering to a mainstream realpolitik approach to IR—including their jurisprudent (positivist) stance naturalizing a separation between morality and law or logos and eros6—have recently been increasingly challenged by critical scholars urging that we consider both symbiotically [37,38,39,40]. Neta Crawford argues that “emotions are constitutive of war and politics” [41] (p. xviii). Similarly, Ahall and Gregory claim that “we cannot make sense of war if we are unable or unwilling to pay attention to the sensual experiences of those affected” [39] (p. 2). This urgent reflection stresses the need to consider how the cognitive role emotion resulted in revolutionary struggles and figures—Che in our case—having difficulty achieving their aspired moral objective in neutralizing imperialism and implementing a Third world project. The mainstream positivist conceptualization of law relegates emotion away from the sphere of legal discourse on the ground that it is “chaotic, unpredictable, and can therefore too easily lead us into error” [37]. According to Rachel Moran [42] (p. 747), since law is “particularly artful at disguising its relationship to the capacity for love, hate, fear, sympathy, and all the other myriad feelings that make us human”, then it necessarily follows that we ought to consider how emotion plays in the cultural configuration of concepts such as justice and freedom and how their influence on whether revolutionary struggles succeed or fail [43].

In other words, and depending on the epistemology informing the scholar, emotion can either be perceived as merrily bodily physical sensations detached from the intellect, or expressions of our knowledge, ethics, and value systems when emotion is balanced with reason. Prioritizing emotion at the expense of logos to materialize our subjective value systems distracts us from our main objective and could lead us astray, while balancing emotion with reason can help us learn from our life-world experiences thereby fine-tuning our thinking thus making rational decisions [39,40,43]. That is, if we accept a cognitive view of emotions that is not a priori detached from reason, but rather a necessary human pathos aiding in making ethical choices, “then we are not threatened by an idea that emotions are, and should be, an integral part of public decision making” [37] (p. 55). It is, however, rightly argued by Tony Massaro [44,45] that “excessive passion” or “unguided emotion” blurs making reason-able decisions. In relation to “judging” legal and political cases, Nussbaum cautions that emotion must be based on evidence [46,47], and finally, when emotion is demanding “compulsory compassion”, “absolute justice”, or “restorative justice” by reifying eros at the expense logos then—in this case—emotion is categorically harmful and inappropriate [48]. Motivated thus, the subsequent analysis will inscribe Che’s reflections on emotions in the context of his particular subjective path conceptualizing a revolutionary struggle emphasizing the love for justice and hatred of injustice.

According to Cartesian Enlightenment epistemology, emotions are conceived as a “simple, non-cognitive phenomena, among the bodily perturbations that are considered unsound as a basis for passing moral judgements” [43] (p. 98). According to Cartesian philosophy characterizing positivist jurisprudence and the mainstream approach to IR, emotions are blind forces that cloud discernment in that it “regards passions as impressions imposed on the mind through its interaction with the body” [43] (p. 98). Similar to Descartes, Kant also adheres to positivist jurisprudence by mentioning that submitting to affect and passion highlights an “illness of the soul” that needs to be cured because it excludes “the dominion of reason” [49] (p. 192). In other words, legal positivism rejects emotional behaviour thriving both in politics and law since it rejects—according to ratiocinative scholars—the cognitive contextual element emotions play in normative deliberations [40,47,50]. Critical scholars seeking to balance between logos and eros emphasize that “emotions are linked to social and cultural paradigms that provide us foundations for knowing when they are properly felt and properly displayed…emotions give our world its peculiarly animated quality: they make it a source of fear, joy, outrage, disgust, and delight. They also de-animate the world by making it a cause for boredom and despair” [43] (p. 98). By reverting to the Ancients accenting classical antiquity—such as Aristotle—we can better comprehend the importance of balancing logos and eros thereby judging reason-ably. According to the Teacher, emotions are vital for judgement. He defines emotions as “all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure…anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites” [51] (p. 1378a). Emotions when balanced with reason, therefore, satisfy a cognitive precondition since without emotions we cannot be fully engaged in the world, and without an understanding of emotions, we do not know what it means to be engaged. Aristotle asks us to consider in Rhetorica the emotion of “anger…here we must discover what the state of mind of angry people is, who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and on what ground they get angry with them” [51] (p. 1378a). His account illustrates how rhetorical techniques inducing emotion require “an understanding of the behaviours that arouse them in order to effectively influence public beliefs”, for example, those of politicians or revolutionary figures [43] (p. 100). Aristotle’s most extensive treatment of emotion being found in Rhetorica (Eng. Rhetoric) rather than De Anima (Eng. psychology) is telling in that he considers emotions more than purely psychological states of arousal—contrary to Descartes and Kant—but playing a vital cognitive role in the interpretation and organization of social and cultural situations which our political life depends on.

The emotions that saturate Guevara’s pedagogy—love for justice and hatred for injustice—are partly comparable to Aristotle in that it is deeply committed to normative deliberations involving an awareness of injustices and oppression inflicted on subjects, for instance, situated in Africa or Latin-America. That is, and according to Romero [43] (p. 101), Che considers that “a person cannot be angry without being angry at something; fearful without being fearful of something; in love without being in love with somebody”. Guevara’s writings—alluded to in previous sections—being steeped with anecdotes highlighting the immoral relationships induced by a capitalist mode of production headed by an imperial master accentuate endless reasons to rebel that draw on “loving compassions towards the dispossessed as much as they do on indignation and rage against the alienation and exploitation of the poor majorities by capital-owning classes” [43] (p. 101). Ernesto’s chronicles whether before or after the Cuban revolution should be read as a complex rhetorical exercise that include beliefs that according to him are cognitive preconditions realizing a “just world” free of imperialism. He consistently persuades the reader to admit to the immorality of a liberal-capitalist hegemony in order to arouse the outrage that in turn “triggers the emotion that are required to further revolutionary action” [43] (p. 104). Ernesto’s rhetoric even before arriving to Cuba reveals his rage at the injustice he witnessed. In a passage encapsulating such rage he says “at the moment when the great guiding spirit slices humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people; and I know that…howling as a possessed man, I will assault the barricades or the trenches, I will stain my weapon in blood and, consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands” [52] (pp. 142–143). On 7 November 1966, Guevara began his Bolivian diary with the entry, “Today a new stage begins” [53] (p. 77). However, over a decade before the entry, he had passionately dreamt of this stage and contemplated its execution while he was fighting in Cuba. He says:

I’ve got a plan. If someday I have to carry the revolution to the continent [South America], I will set myself up in the selva at the frontier between Bolivia and Brazil. I know the spot pretty well because I was there as a doctor. From there it is possible to put pressure on three or four countries and, by taking advantage of the frontiers and the forests you can work things so as never to be caught [54] (p. 27).

Additionally, before Guevara left for the Congo, he wrote to his parents: “Once again I feel under my heels the ribs of Rocinante” (as cited in [27]). This portrait of Che—as a 20th century Don Quixote—setting out on his ancient horse to “revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world against all odds and despite a series of disastrous encounters survives with spirit undiminished until the very end” appeals to the romantic (erotic) jurisprudence in all those who engage in a particular theoretical conceptualization of revolutionary struggles [27,43].

Nussbaum [47] (p. 22) observes that “all political conceptions from the monarchical and the fascist to the libertarian, have a place for emotions in the public culture, supporting the stability of their characteristic principles…but specific [erotic] strategies depend on specific goals”. Che’s primary revolutionary political emotion stresses that to cultivate a revolution compassion is necessary since he believed that for “all great tasks, passion is needed, and Revolution needs passions and boldness in large doses, things we have as a human group” [43] (p. 105). Che’s compassion arose from his travels as a young man which “formed the basis for his determination to do everything he could about the ills and injustices that he saw the majority of humanity suffering” [31] (p. 30). The horror of Peruvian “social inequality, Bolivian demagoguery, the all-powerful Colombian military, the abuse of imperialist gangsters in Central America, the cardboard dictators who ordered tortures, the malnutrition, the hunger, the ignorance, the fear, were the real images that Che had recorded in his retina during his trips as a youth. From there came Che’s tenacity, his clear consciousness that the Latin American revolution was not only a moral necessity but one that could not be deferred” [19] (p. 612). Aristotle reminds us that compassion is an agonizing cognitive emotion that ascends when we internalize another person’s undeserved suffering and misfortune “which we might expect to befall ourselves, or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon” [51] (p. 1385a). That is, Che’s motor of revolution is based on an erotic jurisprudence; a kind of external materialistic love “that compels us to adopt the suffering that capitalism inflicts on other persons as if it were our own, thus granting individuals the imaginative and motivating engagement with others that makes sacrifice, social activism and revolution possible” [43] (p. 106).

However, Guevara’s “theory of revolution” passionately characterizing the Hombre Nuevo—as mentioned in previous sections—involved a degree of voluntarism that was to a considerable extent irrationally “internationalized” by clashing with different socio-cultural structures. Castaneda [55], Harris [31], and Anderson [14] argue that Che was unrealistic in his expectations about the successful prospects for launching international revolutions based on foco theory especially since he failed to consider the socio-economic structure and politics of the country “hosting” guerrilla fighters. Anderson and Castaneda also argue that Che expected too much of those around him even though he led by example. For example, when Soviet advisers encouraged the Cuban Ministry of Industries to emphasize sugar production, material incentives, and decentralized financial self-management at the production-enterprise level, Che considered it “a betrayal of the revolutionary regime’s commitment to industrialization and the replacement of capitalist material incentives with communist moral incentives” [31] (p. 28). According to Castaneda [55] (p. 389), “Just as he had at the Ministry of Industries, Guevara asked too much of the Revolution, the Cuban population, the island’s economy, and the USSR. In Bolivia [as in the Congo], his demands became increasingly exorbitant. His companions sought to humour him, attend to his needs, and fulfil his aspirations…[but] they were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the mission, especially when they were tacitly asked to share in the Christlike destiny which Che had pursued since his early youth”. He exemplified the principles of “individual sacrifice, honesty, dedication to cause, and personal conviction in his beliefs” [31] (p. 30). However, Che failed to realize the enormous task required to “alter the fundamental nature of others and get them to become ‘selfless communists’” [14] (p. 724). This fatal lack in understanding overlooks the importance of negotiation and persuasion thereby revealing Che’s exasperated pedagogy reifying emotion over reason since he internationalized a Cuban path to liberation at the expense of noticing the fragility of human will. In other words, Che’s revolutionary pedagogy involved an unstable compound mixing the emotion of compassion with rage [43].

According to the Teacher, anger arises from perceived injustice but necessitates being balanced with reason. Similarly, Aquinas regards anger as an emotion that is ancillary to the virtuous practice of justice because it arises when we are victim of injury. Both philosophers, however, caution against immoderate anger which leads to a person “taking a partial, distorted view of a particular situation” [56] (p. 47). Furthermore, Seneca—the great stoic philosopher—in his chapter On Anger in Moral Essays cautions that rage is a “hideous and frenzied madness that raves with lust for weapons, blood, and punishment, giving no thought to itself if only it can hurt another” [57] (pp. 2–3). Che’s revolutionary missions in the Congo and Bolivia being a “story of failure” are therefore linked to his emotions clouding his judgement since he attempted to “tighten the bond between love and anger in order to emotionally extend and intensify the scope and influence of socialist revolution” internationally without developing a theory of revolution considering the endogenous socio-cultural setting [43] (p. 109, emphases added). Nowhere is this tightening more apparent than in his essay entitled “Socialism and Man in Cuba” written in early 1965 while he was traveling in Africa. In the essay, Che deliberates his revolutionary eros which according to him is indispensable to attain justice. He says, “Let me say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching” [18] (pp. 398–400, emphases added).

The potential conflict arising from such unstable combination—as highlighted in the Congo and Bolivia—is given credence when we remember Che’s remarks on hatred being a requisite for revolutionary agency during his mission in Bolivia in April 1967. He says in a message to the Tricontinental Conference:

Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selection and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus, a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy [58].

In the most recent compendium of Che Guevara’s thoughts published in 2012 entitled Apuntes filósoficos (Eng. Philosophical notes), he admits—following his failure in the Congo and while he was in Tanzania and Prague—that “I buried my nose in philosophy books, which is something I’d been meaning to do for a long time. And I came across the first difficulty: there is nothing published on the subject in Cuba, if we exclude those long, dull Soviet tracts that have the drawback of not letting you think, as the party already did the thinking for you and all you must do is digest it” [59]. Some of the notes reveal a collection of acid and mocking comments of the classic works of Marxist-Leninism which he considered “unorthodox and revisionist”. He says, “the second difficulty and not the least importance one, was my unfamiliarity with the philosophical language (I struggled with the master Hegel and in the first round he knocked me out twice” [59]. Che’s self-criticism is important to highlight since his materialistic obsession with loving justice and hating injustice leads to a sort of dangerous fetishization where he notes in letters released in 1968 “even if it costs millions of atomic victims, because this is a death struggle between two systems…we cannot think of anything but the victory of socialism, or its retreat under the nuclear victory of the imperialist aggressions” [43] (p. 110). This excerpt of Che is reminiscent of Immanuel Kant’s famous maxim in Perpetual Peace where he says, “let justice rule on earth, even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it”. A critical question arising from a pedagogy balancing between reason and emotion is: should we aspire to such erotic jurisprudence seeking to overcome human suffering caused by injustice even at the cost of millions of people? Young Che’s diagnosis of the suffering caused by imperialism and its individualist mode of production is accurate, however, tightening the bond between rage and passion blurred his reason. Had Young Che become Old Che, it seems that he would have experienced metanoia; that is, a reorientation of the nous (Eng. mind) that includes a fundamental transformation in one’s outlook of the world, and more importantly, a change in how the mind loves others. Would he have aligned with Martin Luther King’s sermon delivered in 1961 at the Detroit Council of Churches urging activists and revolutionaries to “love their enemy and pray for them” or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ethics in Crime and Punishment stating that if someone forces freedom and justice violently—by assuming both objectives in absolute terms—then you essentially loose the moral value of both?

4. Conclusions

If we are conscious of the need to balance emotion and reason, only then will we be aware that suggesting the development of one, two, or three Vietnams or using an atomic bomb as a means to liberation and freedom is undeniably the antithesis of love. That is, we should mourn the lives of all those who have perished by fetishizing Marxist conceptual ideas assuming absolute justice and freedom as attainable ideals in the physical world since rigid ideological materialism has clearly not conquered injustice and inequality. Most dogmatic Marxists and critical theorists (i.e., nominalists, existentialists, and post-modernists) are morally geo-centric in that they put the immanent world at the center of their scholarly work. Or more precisely, they are ego-centric by exclusively transposing subjective materialist ideologies to analyze questions that clearly demand going-beyond the corporeal. The moral issue with Guevara’s revolutionary pedagogy is that it is simply immanent (i.e., ideological) rather than transcendent (i.e., spiritual). That is, his ontology rejects objective morality by making emotions take precedent over reason thus revealing that his revolutionary pedagogy is based on subjective truths rather than objective Truth. The aforementioned sections cautioned about emotionally charged beliefs and their consequences assuming absolute freedom and justice as possible in the material world. It also sought to (re)emphasize objective morality; the belief that in the physical world absolute justice should not be fetishized since scholars and practitioners of philosophy understand the power of compassion and forgiveness by being mindful that in the material world absolute freedom and justice cannot be a telos. In other words, balancing reason and emotion would therefore prohibit—from an objective moral standpoint—love for your companion and enemy being conditional on “ideological sameness”.

Che’s revolutionary pedagogy lacking “love of wisdom” (i.e., philosophia) meant that it “naturally” blurred the line between rage and compassion, and more seriously, assumed that inequality and injustice is not the nature of the physical world. While there are victims of oppression, it is unwise to self-victimize, but rather, balancing reason and emotion would suggest self-criticism, compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude—a philosophical virtue. While mitigating injustices is necessary, continuous ingratitude and an obsession for earthly justice is an upstream road to discontentment since it assumes that humans are of the world and not in the world; with the former assuming that the physical world is the final destination, and the latter assuming that the physical world is a transition stage [40]. Considering that the current zeitgeist is characterized by millions of youth in the Global North and Global South having an ontology based on a (post-modern) “spirit of feelings” (i.e., subjective truths), it becomes all the more imperative to critique the pedagogy of Che and convert the pathos of hatred into friendship, to emphasize prayer instead of vengeance, and finally, agape instead of eros, thus committing ourselves in defending the dignity of all human beings across the world irrespective of religion, ideology, and race.