1960
Voluntary work
January 16th was the first day of “trabajo voluntario”. For Che it was an act of great ethical and social value – he believed that conscience development is achieved through work and setting an example of behavior. On 28th January, during the commemoration of the 107th anniversary of the birth of José Martí, the national hero, Guevara spoke of the man’s high moral value. “Of all Marti’s phrases, there is one I believe defines the spirit of the apostle more than any other. It says, ‘Every true man must feel on his own cheek every blow dealt against the cheek of another.’ […] our revolution is for the people and came about thanks to the efforts of the people; […] ‘I would like to cast my fate with the poor of the land,’ Martí used to say… And so we did, interpreting his words.”
The La Coubre explosion: sabotage
On 4th March the French cargo ship La Coubre, with a load of arms, exploded in the port of Havana. 101 people died and over 400 were injured. Cuba accused the CIA of placing explosives between the crates of grenades carried by the ship. The following day, during the funerals of the victims, the photographer Alberto Korda took a picture of Che. Published the year after on the Cuban daily newspaper “Revolución”, the image became the symbol of the “heroic guerilla fighter” and the icon of an age.
At the beginning of March Guevara met Jean-Paul Sartre, a French novelist, playwright and philosopher and one of the greatest representatives of the so-called “existentialism”, and his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most important writers of that movement. They met in Guevara’s office in the Banco Nacional de Cuba. The time was “normal” for Che’s working hours – midnight. Sartre said of him,
“I believe that the man was not only an intellectual […] but also the most complete human being of our age.”
On a mission in
the socialist area
On 14th October a presidential decree appointed Guevara as the head of an economic mission in countries of the socialist block. Between 22nd October and 22nd December Che visited Czechoslovakia, the USSR, China, North Korea, East Germany and Hungary, meeting the leading politicians – the Czechoslovakian president in Prague (Antonín Novotný), the vice-president of the Council of Ministers (Anastas Mikoyan) and the First Secretary of the Party (Nikita Khrushchev) in Moscow, the Premier of the People’s republic of China (Zhou Enlai) and the president of the Chinese Communist Party (Mao Tse-tung) in Beijing, the supreme leader of North Korea (marshal Kim Il-sung), and, in Budapest, the Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (János Kádár).
Birth of his daughter Aleida
While Guevara was away on his economic mission, his daughter Aleida was born on 24th November. In a card from Shanghai he ironically commented on his unfulfilled hopes for a son and wrote to his wife, “You really do everything to upset me. Anyway, a big kiss to both of you. And remember: what is done is done. Hugs. Che.”
and then