Che Guavara...forty years on.

I would be very interested in informed views about the man and his achievements and legacy, if any.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa

The Killing Machine

Che Guevara, from communist firebrand to capitalist brand.

THE NEW REPUBLIC -- JULY 1 1 & 18, 2005

CThe Observer The Motorcycle Diaries so that Minà could produce his own documentary. Not to mention Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che on his youthful trip and advises documentarists, and now complains in Madrid, according to El País, over Rioja wine and duck magret, that the American embargo against Cuba makes it hard for him to collect royalties. To take the irony further: the building where Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, a splendid early twentiethcentury edifice at the corner of Urquiza and Entre Ríos Streets, was until recently occupied by the private pension fund AFJP Máxima, a child of Argentina's privatization of social security in the 1990s.

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Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, is the author of Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of Oppression (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

------------------------The Motorcycle Diaries"Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué," or "I have a Che T-shirt and I don't know why."

Consider some of the people who have recently brandished or invoked Guevara's likeness as a beacon of justice and rebellion against the abuse of power. In Lebanon, demonstrators protesting against Syria at the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri carried Che's image. Thierry Henry, a French soccer player who plays for Arsenal, in England, showed up at a major gala organized by FIFA, the world's soccer body, wearing a red and black Che Tfilm shirt. In a recent review in The New York Times of George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, Manohla Dargis noted that "the greatest shock here may be the transformation of a black zombie into a righteous revolutionary leader," and added,"I guess Che really does live, after all." The soccer hero Maradona showed off the emblematic Che tattoo on his right arm during a trip where he met Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In Stavropol, in southern Russia, protesters denouncing cash payments of welfare concessions took to the central square with Che flags. In San Francisco, City Lights Books, the legendary home of beat literature, treats visitors to a section devoted to Latin America in which half the shelves are taken up by Che books. José Luis Montoya, a Mexican police officer who battles drug crime in Mexicali, wears a Che sweatband because it makes him feel stronger. At the Dheisheh refugee camp on the West Bank, Che posters adorn a wall that pays tribute to the Intifada. A Sunday magazine devoted to social life in Sydney,Australia, lists the three dream guests at a dinner party: Alvar Aalto, Richard Branson, and Che Guevara. Leung Kwokhung, the rebel elected to Hong Kong's Legislative Council, defies Beijing by wearing a Che T-shirt. In Brazil, Frei Betto, President Lula da Silva's adviser in charge of the highprofile "Zero Hunger" program, says that "we should have paid less attention to Trotsky and much more to Che Guevara." And most famously, at this year's Academy Awards ceremony Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas performed the theme song from The Motorcycle Diaries, and Santana showed up wearing a Che T-shirt and a crucifix. The manifestations of the new cult of Che are everywhere. Once again the myth is firing up people whose causes for the most part represent the exact opposite of what Guevara was.

NGranma is captured in a phrase in a letter to his wife that he penned on January 28, 1957, not long after disembarking, which was published in her book Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestracasquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment.

But the "cold-blooded killing machine" did not show the full extent of his rigor until, immediately after the collapse of the Batista regime, Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison. (Castro had a clinically good eye for picking the right person to guard the revolution against infection.) San Carlos de La Cabaña was a stone fortress used to defend Havana against English pirates in the eighteenth century; later it became a military barracks. In a manner chillingly reminiscent of Lavrenti Beria, Guevara presided during the first half of 1959 over one of the darkest periods of the revolution. José Vilasuso, a lawyer and a professor at Universidad Interamericana de Bayamón in Puerto Rico, who belonged to the body in charge of the summary judicial process at La Cabaña, told me recently that

Che was in charge of the Comisión Depuradora.The process followed the law of the Sierra: there was a military court and Che's guidelines to us were that we should act with conviction, meaning that they were all murderers and the revolutionary way to proceed was to be implacable. My direct superior was Miguel Duque Estrada. My duty was to legalize the files before they were sent on to the Ministry. Executions took place from Monday to Friday, in the middle of the night, just after the sentence was given and automatically confirmed by the appellate body. On the most gruesome night I remember, seven men were executed.

Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who gave comfort to those sentenced to die and personally witnessed dozens of executions, spoke to me recently from his home in Puerto Rico.A former Catholic priest, now seventy-five, who describes himself as "closer to Leonardo Boff and Liberation Theology than to the former Cardinal Ratzinger," he recalls that

there were about eight hundred prisoners in a space fit for no more than three hundred: former Batista military and police personnel, some journalists, a few businessmen and merchants.The revolutionary tribunal was made of militiamen. Che Guevara presided over the appellate court. He never overturned a sentence. I would visit those on death row at the [i]galera de la muerte[/i]. A rumor went around that I hypnotized prisoners because many remained calm, so Che ordered that I be present at the executions. After I left in May, they executed many more, but I personally witnessed fifty-five executions. There was an American, Herman Marks, apparently a former convict. We called him "the butcher" because he enjoyed giving the order to shoot. I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners. I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge. Nor did Fidel, whom I visited. I became so traumatized that at the end of May 1959 I was ordered to leave the parish of Casa Blanca, where La Cabaña was located and where I had held Mass for three years. I went to Mexico for treatment.The day I left, Che told me we had both tried to bring one another to each other's side and had failed. His last words were:"When we take our masks off, we will be enemies."

How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo offers a figure of some two hundred, similar to that given by Armando Lago, a retired economics professor who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-year study on executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Che ceased to be in charge of La Cabaña). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of "over 500." According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara's biographers, a Basque Catholic sympathetic to the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team in charge of the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia, told me that he confronted Che after his capture about "the two thousand or so" executions for which he was responsible during his lifetime. "He said they were all CIA agents and did not address the figure," Rodríguez recalls. The higher figures may include executions that took place in the months after Che ceased to be in charge of the prison.

Which brings us back to Carlos Santana and his chic Che gear. In an open letter published in El Nuevo Herald CshariaCImproper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.

So TIME magazine may have been less than accurate in August 1960 when it described the revolution's division of labor with a cover story featuring Che Guevara as the "brain" and Fidel Castro as the "heart" and Raúl Castro as the "fist." But the perception reflected Guevara's crucial role in turning Cuba into a bastion of totalitarianism. Che was a somewhat unlikely candidate for ideological purity, given his bohemian spirit, but during the years of training in Mexico and in the ensuing period of armed struggle in Cuba he emerged as the communist ideologue infatuated with the Soviet Union, much to the discomfort of Castro and others who were essentially opportunists using whatever means were necessary to gain power. When the would-be revolutionaries were arrested in Mexico in 1956, Guevara was the only one who admitted that he was a communist and was studying Russian. (He spoke openly about his relationship with Nikolai Leonov from the Soviet Embassy.) During the armed struggle in Cuba, he forged a strong alliance with the Popular Socialist Party (the island's Communist Party) and with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, a key player in the conversion of Castro's regime to communism.

This fanatical disposition made Che into a linchpin of the "Sovietization" of the revolution that had repeatedly boasted about its independent character. Very soon after the barbudos THGuerrilla Warfare teaches that popular forces can beat an army, that it is not necessary to wait for the right conditions because an insurrectional foco (or small group of revolutionaries) can bring them about, and that the fight must primarily take place in the countryside. (In his prescription for guerrilla warfare, he also reserves for women the roles of cooks and nurses.) However, Batista's army was not an army, but a corrupt bunch of thugs with no motivation and not much organization; and guerrilla focos, with the exception of Nicaragua, all ended up in ashes for the foquistas; and Latin America has turned 70 percent urban in these last four decades. In this regard, too, Che Guevara was a callous fool.

IBases y puntos de partida para la organización de la República Argentina, was the foundation of the Constitution of 1853 that limited government, opened trade, encouraged immigration, and secured property rights, thereby inaugurating a seventy-year period of astonishing prosperity. He did not meddle in the affairs of other nations, opposing his country's war against Paraguay. His likeness does not adorn Mike Tyson's abdomen.

I see his legacy being almost exclusively based on that extremely well-done bit of graphic artistry and his execution.

He never actually did anything worthy of his iconic status and was little more than a wandering youth searching for a cause. But what he wanted to do resonates to this day in revolutionary leftist youth.

But that's par for the course. Many revolutionary icons did little other than die unjustly.

I thought he had some real success as a commander?

I do find myself wondering if this apparent hunger for young and beautiful martyrs fills a basic human need, since it exists in mythology, religions, political ideology (which so resembles religion in many ways) and popular culture...

The world Che grew up in was far different from the world we at our computers live in. For one, the United States government viewed the lands to the south as an exclusive preserve, where they could coerce and manipulate the people and their governments at will - by armed force and assassinations, if necessary. Only right wing toady dictatorship governments seemed to survive for long. The government that Che helped Castro supplant was at least as corrupt as is Castro's. But, the US govt. turned a blind eye, as it would have done Castro, had he not confiscated American business property and announced himself as a Communist. Guevera thought Bolivia was ripe to become another Cuba type of land, and he sought to make it so. He saw the yoke of America as an evil to be defeated all over latin America. I read a book or two by him, in those days, and I still think of him as no worse than his enemies.

No worse than his enemies is right, perhaps. But 'just as bad' is perhaps also right.

dagmaraka wrote:

No worse than his enemies is right, perhaps. But 'just as bad' is perhaps also right.

Really? Can you expand on this? Do you mean ideologically? Bodycount?

edgar said it - short and to the point :

Quote:

The world Che grew up in was far different from the world we at our computers live in.

hamburger wrote:

edgar said it - short and to the point :

Quote:

The world Che grew up in was far different from the world we at our computers live in.

That hardly relativates the violence - dogmatic, ruthless and often futile violence - that he inflicted on scores of people, though. The world may have been a different place, but people then were no less hurt by torture and political terror than they are now. And they resented it no less either.

It may seem easy to moralise about human rights from behind our computers in our prosperous countries, yes. But it is no less easy to casually relativate the terror that came with revolutions there as, you know, par for course for those countries, in those times, from behind our computers in our prosperous countries. I doubt its victims were as lacsidaisical* about it.

That was the mistake made by a few too many contemporary fellow-travellers of the Russian and Chinese revolutions too. News of terror sown by insurgent revolutionaries, or of the violent state clampdowns once they were in power, was too often relativated in terms like, you cant make an omelette without breaking eggs, or: you have to see it in the context of that country, with its violent history. All very easily said for a Communist intellectual from his Berlin, London or New York study.


*(Someone tell me how to spell that..)

dagmaraka wrote:

No worse than his enemies is right, perhaps. But 'just as bad' is perhaps also right.

Really? Can you expand on this? Do you mean ideologically? Bodycount?