How does man react when he experiences the suffering of others for the first time?
“The person who wrote these notes passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again. The person who reorganizes and polishes them, me, is no longer, at least I am not the person I once was. All this wandering around ‘Our America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought.”
- Che
Ernesto Guevara was then a medical student from the Argentine middle class who had traveled through rural Latin America in his early twenties to visit a leper colony. He then returned back home to finish his degree and almost immediately, set off to visit more countries to provide assistance with his medical skills.
During his travels, he came in close contact with poverty, hunger, disease, “and with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued punishment cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child is an unimportant incident, as often happens among the hard-hit classes of our Latin American homeland.”
While in Guatemala, he witnessed the CIA sponsor to overthrow the democratically elected government that sought to bring some positive change, and he became profoundly radicalized. This led him to have what he believed was a very important realization— to be a revolutionary doctor, or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution.
Ernesto believed that saving lives required more than medicine. As he put it so poetically when giving a lecture to medical students in Cuba:
The battle against disease should be based on the principle of creating a robust body — not through a doctor’s artistic work on a weak organism — but creating a robust body through the work of the whole collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity.
The rest is history.
So, how does man react when he experiences the suffering of others for the first time?
It is not common for a young asthmatic doctor who grew up in luxury and kept journals to become a commander in a guerrilla army. Every shocking experience ought to produce, at the very least, a spark, which either dies or burns like wildfire.
This short piece does not seek to give a verdict on the life that Che lived, it is merely a reminder of how powerful of a stimulus experiencing oppression and suffering can be.
With everything that is currently going on, do we let this spark die or do we fuel it with empathy, enough to produce an impact across districts and countries?
Does it suffice us to be spectators or do we get moved to do something?
May Allah ease the suffering of the ummah, and forgive us for our inability to do more.