Ernesto "Che" Guevara
...in and became a commander in the Rebel Army, the goals of the Revolution changed from one of deposing the Dictator Fulgencio Batista, to a broader based social and economic movement, which featured agrarian reform as one of its main tenants. A large part of the Guerilla forces led by Castro and Guevara, sometimes above 80 percent, were peasants, some dispossessed, all abused by feudal land arrangements of Cuba before the Revolution. Many of the campesinos worked day in and day out for just barely enough to support a family. Nearly all the peasants were diseased or malnourished. This fact led Castro and Guevara to understand the need for the Agrarian Reform program instituted soon after the Revolution was accomplished, while they were still fighting the Revolutionary War (Guevara, 102).
Che's agrarian program was simple. It was the Zapatista line of "Land for those who work it." This seemed simple to him and was justified by the reality of the countryside, where those who worked the land had nothing and it caused all sorts of problems. This line was subverted by leaders of the national movement which was supposedly coordinating activities with revolutionary aims throughout the country. In reality there were several factions within the national movement that were decidedly against each other, and in fact fought with each other and stole from each other, and there was, as was revealed after the Revolution ended indeed no harmony between those who had different agendas. By November 1958, Che's version of Agrarian Reform was being put into place in the "liberated zone" (the zone controlled by the Rebel Army), which included confiscation of land owned by those who sympathized with Batista, and a granting of land to all those who had worked it or paid rent on it for 2 years or more. This caused all sorts of problems among the revolution's "allies", who turned...
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