The Combatant

Prologue to the English Edition

“In this preface we will anticipate only the measure of our heresy; let us take the time and space necessary to argue it at length.”

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “La necesidad de este libro,” in Apuntes Críticos a la Economía Política, circa 1965–1966

In the social sciences, any serious and long-term research on a specific topic is always replete with vanishing points. An important part of the research’s central argument, a vanishing point is a concrete problem which at a given moment and under particular circumstances may become independent from that general argument. Becoming more and more complex, the vanishing point transforms into a new line of argument, different and autonomous from the one it sprang from.

Such is the case of the book the reader now holds in their hands. It was some years ago now that I first undertook the project of writing an intellectual anti-biography of Che Guevara. This anti-biography would for the first time be capable of recuperating Che’s dimensions (not yet seriously studied or analyzed) as a critical Marxist theorist of real global significance. Since then, my research has found its way down multiple far-ranging paths which encompass world history during the long twentieth century and the general history of Latin America in the same century, as well as the particular histories of the revolutionary movements and organizations of all of Latin America during that era.

←ix | x→These vast horizons progressively delimit the different contexts that frame and partly explain both the personal odyssey of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and his rich and complex intellectual journey. They clearly demonstrate the enormous intellectual stature which made Che the most important Latin American Marxist of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as one of the three most important Marxists in the world during the same period, alongside Frantz Fanon (the theorist of the Algerian and African revolutions) and Mao Zedong (the theorist of the Chinese, Asian, and world revolutions).