LATIN
AMERICA HISTORY – CHE GUEVARA
Though communism may have lost its fire, he remains the potent
Though communism may have lost its fire, he remains the potent
symbol of
rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution
By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was
murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to
my generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world.
Like so many epics, the story of the obscure Argentine
doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the
emancipation of the poor of the earth began with a voyage. In 1956, along with
Fidel Castro and a handful of others, he had crossed the Caribbean in the
rickety yacht Granma on the mad mission of invading Cuba and overthrowing the dictator
Fulgencio Batista. Landing in a hostile swamp, losing most of their contingent,
the survivors fought their way to the Sierra Maestra. A bit over two years
later, after a guerrilla campaign in which Guevara displayed such outrageous
bravery and skill that he was named comandante, the insurgents entered Havana
and launched what was to become the first and only victorious socialist
revolution in the Americas. The images were thereafter invariably gigantic. Che
the titan standing up to the Yanquis, the world's dominant power. Che the moral
guru proclaiming that a New Man, no ego and all ferocious love for the other,
had to be forcibly created out of the ruins of the old one. Che the romantic
mysteriously leaving the revolution to continue, sick though he might be with
asthma, the struggle against oppression and tyranny.
His execution in Vallegrande at the age of 39 only
enhanced Guevara's mythical stature. That Christ-like figure laid out on a bed
of death with his uncanny eyes almost about to open; those fearless last words
("Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man") that somebody
invented or reported; the anonymous burial and the hacked-off hands, as if his
killers feared him more after he was dead than when he had been alive: all of
it is scalded into the mind and memory of those defiant times. He would
resurrect, young people shouted in the late '60s; I can remember fervently
proclaiming it in the streets of Santiago, Chile, while similar vows exploded across Latin America. !No lo vamos a olvidar! We won't let him
be forgotten.
More than 30 years have passed, and the dead hero has
indeed persisted in collective memory, but not exactly in the way the majority
of us would have anticipated. Che has become ubiquitous: his figure stares out
at us from coffee mugs and posters, jingles at the end of key rings and
jewelry, pops up in rock songs and operas and art shows. This apotheosis of his
image has been accompanied by a parallel disappearance of the real man,
swallowed by the myth. Most of those who idolize the incendiary guerrilla with
the star on his beret were born long after his demise and have only the
sketchiest knowledge of his goals or his life. Gone is the generous Che who
tended wounded enemy soldiers, gone is the vulnerable warrior who wanted to
curtail his love of life lest it make him less effective in combat and gone
also is the darker, more turbulent Che who signed orders to execute prisoners
in Cuban jails without a fair trial.
This erasure of complexity is the normal fate of any
icon. More paradoxical is that the humanity that worships Che has by and large
turned away from just about everything he believed in. The future he predicted
has not been kind to his ideals or his ideas. Back in the '60s, we presumed
that his self-immolation would be commemorated by social action, the
downtrodden rising against the system and creating — to use Che's own words —
two, three, many Vietnams. Thousands of luminous young men, particularly in Latin America, followed his example into the hills and
were slaughtered there or tortured to death in sad city cellars, never knowing
that their dreams of total liberation, like those of Che, would not come true.
If Vietnam
is being imitated today, it is primarily as a model for how a society forged in
insurrection now seeks to be actively integrated into the global market. Nor
has Guevara's uncompromising, unrealistic style of struggle, or his ethical
absolutism, prevailed. The major revolutions of the past quarter-century (South
Africa, Iran, the Philippines, Nicaragua), not to mention the peaceful
transitions to democracy in Latin America, East Asia and the communist world,
have all entailed negotiations with former adversaries, a give and take that
could not be farther from Che's unyielding demand for confrontation to the
death. Even someone like Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Chiapas
Maya revolt, whose charisma and moral stance remind us of Che's, does not
espouse his hero's economic or military theories.
How to understand, then, Che Guevara's pervasive
popularity, especially among the affluent young?
Perhaps in these orphaned times of incessantly
shifting identities and alliances, the fantasy of an adventurer who changed
countries and crossed borders and broke down limits without once betraying his
basic loyalties provides the restless youth of our era with an optimal
combination, grounding them in a fierce center of moral gravity while
simultaneously appealing to their contemporary nomadic impulse. To those who
will never follow in his footsteps, submerged as they are in a world of
cynicism, self-interest and frantic consumption, nothing could be more
vicariously gratifying than Che's disdain for material comfort and everyday
desires. One might suggest that it is Che's distance, the apparent
impossibility of duplicating his life anymore, that makes him so attractive.
And is not Che, with his hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, the perfect
postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious '60s, that disruptive past
confined to gesture and fashion? Is it conceivable that one of the only two
Latin Americans to make it onto TIME's 100 most important figures of the
century can be comfortably transmogrified into a symbol of rebellion precisely
because he is no longer dangerous?
I wouldn't be too sure. I suspect that the young of the
world grasp that the man whose poster beckons from their walls cannot be that
irrelevant, this secular saint ready to die because he could not tolerate a
world where los pobres de la tierra, the displaced and dislocated of history,
would be eternally relegated to its vast margins.
Even though I have come to be wary of dead heroes and
the overwhelming burden their martyrdom imposes on the living, I will allow
myself a prophecy. Or maybe it is a warning. More than 3 billion human beings
on this planet right now live on less than $2 a day. And every day that breaks,
40,000 children — more than one every second! — succumb to diseases linked to
chronic hunger. They are there, always there, the terrifying conditions of
injustice and inequality that led Che many decades ago to start his journey
toward that bullet and that photo awaiting him in Bolivia.
The powerful of the earth should take heed: deep
inside that T shirt where we have tried to trap him, the eyes of Che Guevara
are still burning with impatience.
Ariel Dorfman holds the Walter Hines Page Chair at Duke University.
His latest novel is The Nanny and the Iceberg
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