Nicaragua
Open Letter from Frei Betto to Che Guevara  Subject: Open Letter to "Che"
Date sent: Wed, 9 Jul 1997 16:36:45
The following, excerpted from an "Open Letter to Che" by Frei Betto, the
Brazilian Franciscan, was published in Spanish in a recent issue of El Nuevo Diario, the
Managua daily newspaper. The same issue carried news of the discovery in Vallegrande,
Bolivia, of the bones of Dr. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, in a common grave with the other
guerrillas murdered with him on Oct. 9, 1967, after their capture by Bolivian military
accompanied by the C.I.A. agent Felix Rodriguez. Identification of Che's remains was
facilitated by the absence of his hands, which had been cut off after his execution, for
fingerprint ID. The Bolivian Minister of the Interior at the time, Antonio Arguedas, a
secret sympathizer of the Cuban revolution, used Bolivian communist connections to smuggle
the hands to Cuba in 1968.
CARTA ABIERTA AL CHE. by Frei Betto.
Thirty years passed since the CIA murdered you in the forests of Bolivia. Radical
changes happened during this time. The Berlin wall fell and buried european socialism.
Many of us only now understand your boldness in pointing out (in 1965 in Algeria) the
cracks in the Kremlin's walls, which to us appeared so solid. History is a swift river
that spares no obstacles. European socialism tried to freeze the waters of the river with
bureaucracy, authoritarianism, the inability to extend to daily life the technological
advances begun by the space race, and above all, trying to dress up an "economistic
rationality" that never sank roots into the subjective education of its historical
subjects: the workers.
Who knows if the history of socialism would have been otherwise, today, if they had
listened to your words: "The state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these
mistakes takes place, we notice a diminishing collective enthusiasm as the result of a
quantitative diminishing of each one of the elements that forms it, and the work is
paralyzed, left reduced by what appears insignificant, but is really enormous. This is the
moment to rectify things."
Che, many of your fears are confirmed at length in these years and contributed to the
breaking up of our movements of liberation. We didn't listen to you sufficiently.
 (...) Some of us abandoned the love of the poor, who today are
multiplied in the Great Latinamerican Homeland, and in the world. Some have left off being
led by great feelings of love, to be absorbed in sterile partisan disputes and, at times,
making friends into enemies, and making real enemies into allies. Mined out for vanity,
for disputes over political space, they no longer carry hearts enflamed with ideals of
justice. They are left deaf to the cries of the people, and they lost the humilty of work
at the base and, now they are exchanging utopias for votes.
When love grows cold, enthusiasm weakens and dedication withdraws. The Cause, like
passion, disappears, as does fantasy from a pair of lovers who no longer love. That which
was "ours" echoes now as "mine", and the seductions of capitalism
weaken principles, transmute values, and if they still continue in the struggle, it is
because the esthetics of power exercise greater fascination than the ethics of service.
Your heart, Che, throbbed to the rhythm of all the oppressed and exploited peoples. You
wandered from Argentina to Guatemala, from Guatemala to Mexico, from Mexico to Cuba, from
Cuba to the Congo, from the Congo to Bolivia. You went out of yourself always, exalted by
the love that, in your life, was translated into liberation. This is why you could affirm,
with authority, that "One has to have a great dose of humanity, a great dose of the
feeling of justice and of truth not to fall into extreme dogmatism, into a cold
scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. Every day one has to struggle that this
love to a living humanity transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as
examples, as motivation."
How many times, Che, our dose of humanity dried itself up, calcified by dogmatisms that
filled us with certainty and left us empty of sensibility in the face of the drama of the
wretched of the earth! How many times our feelings of justice got lost in cold
scholasticism that offered relentless maxims and pronounced infamous judgments. How many
times our sense of truth crystallized itself in the exercise of authority, without
connecting ourselves to the longings of those who, with only a crust of bread, dream of
land, and of joy!
 (...) In spite of so many defeats and
mistakes, we have made important conquests in the space of these 30 years. Popular
movements have irrupted in all the continent. Today, in many countries, women are better
organized, as are campesinos, workers, the indigenous and the poor, and the theology of
liberation has been planted. We have learned important lessons from the urban guerrillas
of the seventies; from the brief popular initiative of Salvador Allende; from the
democratic government of Maurice Bishop, in Granada, massacred by troops of the United
States. From the rise and fall of the Sandinista revolution; from the struggle of the
people of El Salvador. In Brazil, the party of the the workers promoted, in a hundred
cities administered by militants, a "revolution of low intensity". In Guatemala,
the pressure of the indigenous people conquered significant space. In Mexico, the
Zapatistas of Chiapas stripped naked the politics of neoliberalism. There is much to do,
beloved Che. We still preserve with love your major heritage to us: the internationalist
spirit and the Cuban Revolution.
(...) From where you are, Che, bless us who take communion with your ideals and your
hopes. Bless also those that "married up" or who "bourgeoisied
themselves", or made of the struggle a profession for their own benefit. Bless those
who are ashamed to confess themselves leftists or declare themselves socialists. Bless
those political leaders that, once they were deprived of their offices, never again
visited a slum or helped with a mobilization. Bless those women who, in the home,
discovered their companions were different from what they showed themselves to be outside
the home, and also bless those men who struggle to conquer the machismo that dominates
them. Bless all of us who, in the face of misery, know that no other vocation remains to
us but to convert hearts and minds, to revolutionize societies and continents. Above all,
bless us that we, all our days, will be motivated by great feelings of love, so that we
can gather the fruit of the New Man and the New Woman.
Grant M. Gallup
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua, C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2-662165
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