Che Guevara in Social Medicine and Human Health as Political Principle – Marginalian

“If the body is not the soul, what is the soul?” wrote Walt Whitman in his heroic revolt against Descartes' enduring tyranny, his dismissal of the body and contempt for the soul may be the most devastating intellectual move of modern times. A long time before we had evidence that the body is where we heal the trauma that occurs, that it is our most powerful tool for the mind and happiness, that “the mind tells what the nervous system knows,” Whitman served disabled soldiers as a Civil War nurse, knowing what we still have, in our age of undivided intelligence, we deny – that the values ​​of the body is the main of our war every war. and ideas are won or lost.

A century later and a hemisphere away, a young medical student rides his motorcycle to visit his home continent, an inhaler in his battered bag. on the way, Ernesto “Che” Guevara (May 14, 1928–October 9, 1967) dreamed of revolution on a global scale, the foundations of which – refusal to accept what is given, a defiant will to rule the possible – he had studied on a physical scale.

Born two months prematurely and almost immediately suffering from bronchial pneumonia, Ernestito was a sickly, chubby child who wore heavy glasses to correct his astigmatism and carried a heater at all times to reduce asthma attacks so bad that his mother taught him at home until the authorities wanted him to enroll in a public school. He did so, but his attendance record was punctuated by frequent absences caused by asthma, sometimes lasting for weeks, during which his mother continued to tutor him, teaching him French. Ever since he learned to read, books had comforted him during long and lonely nights, and now he was reading Baudelaire's poetry and Émile Zola's novels at first. But with each barbaric portal he entered another world, he experienced a free, unlimited mental stress, held captive by the limitations of the body.

Just as young Beethoven decided to be “destined for a throat” as he first heard, Ernesto took his destiny into his own hands. He fasted, he became interested in his daily food, he started swimming, he went outside, trying to find his limits, to push them, sometimes dangerously so that his friends had to carry him home panting. As a teenager, he joined a local rugby team coached by a young biochemistry and pharmacology student several years his senior, who became a close and beloved friend. During the break, Ernesto always turned his back to a simple post reading Freud and Faulkner, Dumas and Steinbeck, starting to think about what it means and what it takes to be free—thoughts that would deepen and become difficult ten years later as he saw hunger, poverty, and disease throughout South America from his motorcycle, thoughts that would lead him closer to the revolutionary political road. the power that keeps people uncomfortable.

In the summer of 1960, after supporting a major revolution and inspiring many, Che Guevara spoke to young doctors at the opening of a new training program at the Cuban Ministry of Public Health. Although a large part of his speech, aptly titled “Medicines of the Revolution,” deals with the specific conditions of Cuban society after the revolution, its explosion is a timeless insight into the deep meaning of life for any person and any community in any era.

Arguing that the revolution aims to create “a new type of man,” that this is “the greatest task of social medicine,” and that “social change requires equally profound changes in the mental structure of people,” he throws the gauntlet at Descartes with the notice that the body is part of the mind – of man and of people. Life, he says, is a personal responsibility with political power, which makes it a cooperative goal:

For someone to be a revolutionary doctor or a revolutionary at all, there must first be a revolution. The effort of an isolated individual, in all the purity of his ideals, is useless, and the desire to devote one's whole life to lofty ideals is useless if one works alone, alone, in some corner of America, fighting bad governments and social conditions that prevent progress.

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The fight against diseases should be based on the principle of creating a strong body – not to create a strong body through the work of a doctor on a weak body, but to create a strong body for the whole world of the collective, especially the whole social group.

He envisions the best achievement of a dynamic personal and social life:

One day medicine will have to be a science that works to prevent diseases, to guide the whole society in its medical obligations, and that intervention is only necessary in the most urgent cases to perform some surgery or to deal with something that is not moral in that new society that we are creating.

Paradoxically, this collective victory depends on individual responsibility, which (as Eleanor Roosevelt also knew) is the root of all social change:

As for all transformational activities, he is basically a necessary person. Change does not, as some say, equate to group will and collective action. Rather, it unleashes the individual talent. What the revolution does is direct that talent.

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If we know the direction we should go, the only thing left is to know the daily road and take it. No one can express that expansion; that stretch is an individual road; it is what he will do every day, what he will gain from his personal experience, and what he will give himself.