Che Guevara

**barbaro** · 06-03-2009, 11:15 PM

Lots of discussion about this person, Che Guevara. So here is a thread about his life, beliefs, and actions.

Below is the review of Che as a person and a little bit of a comment on the film.

Article below: comments? Opinions?

The Cult of Che Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries.

By Paul Berman
Friday, Sept. 24, 2004

Portrait of the insurgent as a young manThe cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination.

In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.

The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles' movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford's Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries.
Related in Slate
In August, Eric Umansky wrote a "Diary" of his reporting trip to Cuba.

A vagabond tour of South AmericaThe film follows the young Che and his friend Alberto Granado on a vagabond tour of South America in 1951-52—which Che described in a book published under the title Motorcycle Diaries, and Granado in a book of his own. Che was a medical student in those days, and Granado a biochemist, and in real life, as in the movie, the two men spent a few weeks toiling as volunteers in a Peruvian leper colony. These weeks at the leper colony constitute the dramatic core of the movie. The colony is tyrannized by nuns, who maintain a cruel social hierarchy between the staff and the patients. The nuns refuse to feed people who fail to attend mass. Young Che, in his insistent honesty, rebels against these strictures, and his rebellion is bracing to witness. You think you are observing a noble protest against the oppressive customs and authoritarian habits of an obscurantist Catholic Church at its most reactionary.

Yet the entire movie, in its concept and tone, exudes a Christological cult of martyrdom, a cult of adoration for the spiritually superior person who is veering toward death—precisely the kind of adoration that Latin America's Catholic Church promoted for several centuries, with miserable consequences. The rebellion against reactionary Catholicism in this movie is itself an expression of reactionary Catholicism. The traditional churches of Latin America are full of statues of gruesome bleeding saints. And the masochistic allure of those statues is precisely what you see in the movie's many depictions of young Che coughing out his lungs from asthma and testing himself by swimming in cold water—all of which is rendered beautiful and alluring by a sensual backdrop of grays and browns and greens, and the lovely gaunt cheeks of one actor after another, and the violent Andean landscapes.

The movie in its story line sticks fairly close to Che's diaries, with a few additions from other sources. The diaries tend to be haphazard and nonideological except for a very few passages. Che had not yet become an ideologue when he went on this trip. He reflected on the layered history of Latin America, and he expressed attitudes that managed to be pro-Indian and, at the same time, pro-conquistador. But the film is considerably more ideological, keen on expressing an "indigenist" attitude (to use the Latin-American Marxist term) of sympathy for the Indians and hostility to the conquistadors. Some Peruvian Marxist texts duly appear on the screen. I can imagine that Salles and his screenwriter, José Rivera, have been influenced more by Subcomandante Marcos and his "indigenist" rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, than by Che.

And yet, for all the ostensible indigenism in this movie, the pathos here has very little to do with the Indian past, or even with the New World. The pathos is Spanish, in the most archaic fashion—a pathos that combines the Catholic martyrdom of the Christlike scenes with the on-the-road spirit not of Jack Kerouac (as some people may imagine) but of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a tried-and-true formula in Spanish culture. (See Benito Pérez Galdós' classic 19th-century novel Nazarín.) If you were to compare Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries, with its pious tone, to the irrevent, humorous, ironic, libertarian films of Pedro Almodóvar, you could easily imagine that Salles' film comes from the long-ago past, perhaps from the dark reactionary times of Franco—and Almodóvar's movies come from the modern age that has rebelled against Franco.

The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.

These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. Václav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor. The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility—those days appear to be over.

I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?

As a protest against the ovation at Sundance, I would like to append one of Rivero's poems to my comment here. The police confiscated Rivero's books and papers at the time of his arrest, but the poet's wife, Blanca Reyes, was able to rescue the manuscript of a poem describing an earlier police raid on his home. Letras Libres published the poem in Mexico. I hope that Rivero will forgive me for my translation. I like this poem because it shows that the modern, Almodóvar-like qualities of impudence, wit, irreverence, irony, playfulness, and freedom, so badly missing from Salles' pious work of cinematic genuflection, are fully alive in Latin America, and can be found right now in a Cuban prison.

Link & Entire: Should we love Che Guevara? - By Paul Berman - Slate Magazine

**Boon Mee** · 06-03-2009, 11:44 PM

That asshole has been discussed, disected etc. ad nauseum, M/M!
WTF! You bored or something???

**helge** · 07-03-2009, 12:11 AM

Never really made my mind up about Che.

But I guess if Boon Mee hates him, he can't be that bad

**Boon Mee** · 07-03-2009, 12:25 AM

Originally Posted by helge

Never really made my mind up about Che.

But I guess if Boon Mee hates him, he can't be that bad

Gimme a break!

Do an objective search of Che Guevara's past to see what a low-life POS this guy was...

**Mr Earl** · 07-03-2009, 04:56 AM

But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination.

Anyone who idolizes this guy is a moron.

**barbaro** · 07-03-2009, 06:21 AM

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

That asshole has been discussed, disected etc. ad nauseum, M/M!
WTF! You bored or something???

Not bored. I don't recall Che being discussed, much here. I think Che was very over-rated. He was not a good organizer, and as the article states he had authoritarian tendencies. He also believed that if you blew things up and killed lots of people (civilians) it would spark revolution, and uprising. How wrong he was.

**helge** · 07-03-2009, 09:04 AM

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Originally Posted by helge

Never really made my mind up about Che.

But I guess if Boon Mee hates him, he can't be that bad

Gimme a break!

Do an objective search of Che Guevara's past to see what a low-life POS this guy was...

Ok, you can have your break.
How was I to know, that this is your objective day of the month ?

He probably did lead some firingsquads, and shame on him for doing that.
I guess he wasn't idolized for that. even though it doesn't seems to hold someone back from voting for people with exellent execution records.

Maybe it was appealing that he had guts, and was willing to die for, what he believed in.
Look up the word 'guts'. I'll give you a hint.
It's nothing to do with sending someone else out to carpetbombing from 3 miles high.

But thats you americans in a nutshell, isn't it ?
You are scared little people

**helge** · 07-03-2009, 09:10 AM

Originally Posted by Milkman

He also believed that if you blew things up and killed lots of people (civilians) it would spark revolution, and uprising. How wrong he was.

You mean like false flag?
Where did he do that`?

**sabang** · 07-03-2009, 10:03 AM

The cult of Che' is well overrated, probably because of something as venal as his magnetism, sex appeal. Castro disassociated from him because he was too radical.

He is in many ways a strange character. A bourgeoise white man, a doctor from an affluent family who radically took up the cause of the indigenous Indians in Sth America- quite possibly the most downtrodden people on earth, bar the Palestinians. His answers were no better than the oppressors, maybe worse. His impact was negligible- until Andy Warhol.

He's just a pop icon, a symbol of defiance. But really, you can thank Warhol for that.

**Boon Mee** · 07-03-2009, 02:48 PM

Originally Posted by helge

You are scared little people

Right...we're so "scared" you'd be speaking Jap and or German today w/out us!

**Sir Burr** · 07-03-2009, 03:03 PM

Originally Posted by sabang

His impact was negligible- until Andy Warhol.

He's just a pop icon, a symbol of defiance. But really, you can thank Warhol for that.

Warhol had nothing to do with it.
The iconic image was drawn by Jim FitzPatrick based on a photograph taken by Alberto Korda in 1960.

**panama hat** · 09-03-2009, 10:00 PM

Originally Posted by helge

Never really made my mind up about Che.

But I guess if Boon Mee hates him, he can't be that bad

Why not start by calling him, as he was, a mass-murderer . . . sports stadiums anyone?

**attaboy** · 10-03-2009, 02:08 AM

The bullet didn't catch up to him fast enough.

**Escapeeeeeee** · 10-03-2009, 03:02 AM

What a rubbish idea to start a thread on one of the most pathetic charectors of the 20th Century.

**helge** · 10-03-2009, 03:27 AM

Originally Posted by panama hat

Why not start by calling him, as he was, a mass-murderer . . . sports stadiums anyone?

Sport-stadion ??
So who did he mass-murder ?

Originally Posted by attaboy

The bullet didn't catch up to him fast enough.

Originally Posted by Escapeeeeeee

What a rubbish idea to start a thread on one of the most pathetic charectors of the 20th Century.

**Boon Mee** · 10-03-2009, 03:43 AM

Originally Posted by helge

So who did he mass-murder ?

Do your homework or as they used to say back in the DOS days "RTFM"

**helge** · 10-03-2009, 03:50 AM

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Right...we're so "scared" you'd be speaking Jap and or German today w/out us!

Russian I reckon.

xià huài de（hán gōng jī xìng；shèn yòng）

**Loy Toy** · 10-03-2009, 03:56 AM

I always thought he was some Thai Tuk Tuk driver!

The Thai's seem to love him and have his image posted everywhere!

**helge** · 10-03-2009, 03:58 AM

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Originally Posted by helge

So who did he mass-murder ?

Do your homework or as they used to say back in the DOS days "RTFM"

It's not my postulate that he was a mass-murder, so why do I produce the evidence ?

Damn, you are sensitive about this fella.

He is, I reckn, no way near your SOB's in Central America at that time. Mass-murdering wise that is.
Or?

**helge** · 10-03-2009, 04:25 AM

Did my homework. Yes, he was no angel.

Here's your ammo Mr Mee
The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

**Rural Surin** · 10-03-2009, 08:33 AM

I've always been fascinated with his adventures and activities in Africa where he became caught up in the ongoing proxy wars.....

**Rural Surin** · 10-03-2009, 08:36 AM

Originally Posted by Loy Toy

I always thought he was some Thai Tuk Tuk driver!

The Thai's seem to love him and have his image posted everywhere!

I've a magnificent photo-poster of his last Bolivian days. Right next to Rama IV and the proverbial Buddha image.

**Rural Surin** · 10-03-2009, 08:38 AM

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Originally Posted by helge

So who did he mass-murder ?

Do your homework or as they used to say back in the DOS days "RTFM"

Are you attempting to distract us from the real historic mass-murderer, Booners? We know whom it is don't we...??

**barbaro** · 10-03-2009, 08:42 AM

Originally Posted by helge

Did my homework. Yes, he was no angel.

Here's your ammo Mr Mee
The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

Here are some excerpts. Thanks, helge:

It is customary for followers of a cult not to know the real life story of their hero, the historical truth. (Many Rastafarians would renounce Haile Selassie if they had any notion of who he really was.) It is not surprising that Guevara’s contemporary followers, his new post-communist admirers, also delude themselves by clinging to a myth—except the young Argentines who have come up with an expression that rhymes perfectly in Spanish: “Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué,” or “I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why.”

.....Land reform took land away from the rich, but gave it to the bureaucrats, not to the peasants. (The decree was written in Che’s house.)

Having failed as a hero of social justice, does Guevara deserve a place in the history books as a genius of guerrilla warfare? His greatest military achievement in the fight against Batista—taking the city of Santa Clara after ambushing a train with heavy reinforcements—is seriously disputed.

Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer’s viewfinder—and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O’Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan “Che washes whiter.”

Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses, such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a youth in fatigue pants wearing a Che T-shirt, or Flamingo’s Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the fury of local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: “I sell whatever people want to buy.” Revolutionaries join the merchandising frenzy, too—from “The Che Store,” catering to “all your revolutionary needs” on the Internet, to the Italian writer Gianni Minà, who sold Robert Redford the movie rights to Che’s diary of his juvenile trip around South America in 1952 in exchange for access to the shooting of the film 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 twentieth-century 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.

**Marmite the Dog** · 10-03-2009, 10:23 AM

Originally Posted by Loy Toy

The Thai's seem to love him

Can't get a bigger damnation than that.

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