Remembering Ernesto Che Guevara 50 years after his Assassination.
American filmmaker Oliver Stone visited Havana and other parts of Cuba in 2002 to shoot his epical and long documentary, ‘Comandante’, which was released to worldwide acclaim in 2003. The documentary was simple: an endless conversation with Fidel Castro, across Havana, till the finale when Castro himself comes to drop Stone and his crew to the airport.
In many senses, with struggling Cuba still under an infinite and brutal embargo by a hostile American establishment, Stone was openly cocking a snook at the mandarins in the White House, the CIA and the hate Castro brigades of immigrant Cubans in Miami and elsewhere. In another sense, he was not only showing his little finger upside down, he was basically doing ‘another kind of cinema’, so popular as a counter-narrative among a widesection of progressive filmmakers, actors and writers in Hollywood – from Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and Arthur Miller, to Susan Sarandon, Robert Redford, Sean Penn, Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney, among others. Indeed, to brand them all as ‘Leftists’ which the McCarthyist witch-hunt did (‘reds under the bed’), during the Cold War, is too simplistic a solution.
In one of the clips, Castro remembers, with stunning sadness, how ‘Ernesto’ Che Guevara walked out of a meeting with him, banging the door. He said, that he should have reconsidered, waited, given it another serious session of reflection. But Che walked out of Fidel’s life, and Cuba, and thereby, changed his life-destiny yet again, taking another zigzag, untraversed, difficult route on a difficult terrain, in eternal and untiring search for his idea of people’s revolution. This time, he went to the forests of Bolivia, where he was killed by the mercenaries of the CIA, his body lying on a slab in a shack in the forest, later hacked into many pieces, so that he could never be recognized, or glorified into the realm of martyrdom.
Castro remembers Che in the film with a fondness and a sadness which cannot be described by any text of cinema or literature. Clearly, the entire Cuba loves and remembers Che with that stated, nuanced and unrequited longing, admiration and respect, which is not even meant for the gods. And, why only Cuba, all over the world, from Bolivia to Congo to the most remote interiors of Kerala, you will find Che on the walls, his cut-out on the streets, and his quotes of revolutionary struggle and optimism written as graffiti across the lush green landscape. Indeed, on the 50th anniversary of Che’s death, or martyrdom, he has become larger than life yet again, even as Latin America and Cuba struggles to fight yet another major onslaught of ‘American imperialism’ under Donald Trump and his neo-con, right-wing racist establishment, and even as the ‘revolution of the bullet’ has decisively given way to the ‘revolution of the ballot’.
They can put him on the T-shirts and turn him into a fetish or a commodity. They can sell him as an object of appropriation of the consumer society, like a fizzy-drink bottle, or a flashy mobile. They can reduce him into a symbol of the market. And, yet, such is the incredible and deep enigma of Che Guevara, so intense and infinite is his romantic and radical charisma, so legendary and non-conformist is his life journey, that the time-tested dynamic capitalism just cannot consume and destroy him.
Across the many streams of resistance, romance and rebellion, the handsome, bearded face of Che, with his long, unruly hair, and his beret with a red star, will outshine and outlive all forms of manufactured propaganda against him and his comrades. He would remain the red star in the night sky, gleaming in the darkness, always, as he is, right now, across the luminescent hoardings across Havana.
In this non-sectarian and ‘globalised’ idea of revolution which transcends borders and barriers of geography, social formations and history in South America, Simon Bolivar still remains the original, ‘united’ revolutionary idol, beautifully immortalized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, that Che is from Argentina, like another genius and legend, ‘Hand of God’ Diego Maradona, his body full of Che tattoos, or the greatest living magician of football, Lionel Messi, is almost forgotten. This is because, like in the Spanish civil war against Franco’s dictatorship, documented in meticulous literary detail by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in a trilogy, people from across many different nationalities and nations joined the guerrilla struggle against the entrenched oppressive and exploitative oligarchies, banana republics, drug cartels and tinpot dictatorships, routinely propped up, backed and patronized by successive American regimes. Indeed, Castro’s best buddy, Marquez, who often gave his first, unedited manuscript to Castro for the first read, has written with great flourish about the plantations, the exploitation, the strikes, the massacres, and the long, armed rebellion by the great rebel, Aureliano Buendia, started from his magical hometown and imagined homeland, Macondo, in his epical classic: ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’.
Those who have seen the early journeys of Che and his friend in that famous movie called the ‘Motorcycle Diaries’, where he discovers South America’s incredible past narratives and its contemporary sorrows, as if it was always there in the open-to-sky courtyard of his political subconscious; and those who have followed his asthmatic, smoker’s journey first through the leprosy camps as an young idealistic doctor, and later as an armed revolutionary across the rugged terrain of Sierra Maestra during their hard expedition to Havana, they will be astounded by the relentless movement of this extraordinary man. Indeed, even as he restructured little Cuba as the industries minister after the revolution, and helped Fidel and others to redesign a new economy and social structure right in the backyard of the ‘mighty’ US which was out to destroy it (and allegedly assassinate Castro and Che), he chose to visit India and interacted with the farmers and freedom fighters. More so, he went to Congo in Africa to train revolutionaries, so that Africa could follow the trajectory of Latin America with its long history of slavery and oppression.
This is the anti-cathartic movement which led him to Bolivia and start another revolution, not content with the incredible victories in Cuba. Deep inside southern Bolivia’s La Higuera and Vallegrande, where he was murdered by the CIA, the culture industry of the American establishment has failed to eliminate his memory. It runs zigzag on the leaves, the bark of the trees, on the pebbles, stones and rivers, and village and forest bylanes, like a story without a beginning or an end.
Che came to Bolivia to begin another revolution. He arrived, in disguise, in La Paz in 1966.
Writes Claire Boobbyer, in a recent article in The Guardian (London): “Today, the room where the 39-year-old was killed on 9 October 1967, is decorated with pictures, messages, flags and, weirdly, driving licenses, by visitors who have paid homage to the Argentinian revolutionary. The chair, where it’s said Guevara was sitting when executed, is lost in the tableaux of eulogies and pictures pinned to the wall by Che’s admirers from around the world, who have made the pilgrimage to the village of La Higuera over the last 50 years (La Higuera Museum, 8am-noon, 2pm-6pm, admission £1)…
The Quebrada del Churo ravine is 3km north of La Higuera. There, we trekked down for an hour through gorse and banana palms under a blue sky to where Che’s men had hidden. Just beyond is a mosaic memorial and the fig tree the injured Che was hiding behind when apprehended by elite Bolivian troops. Roli (the local guide) scattered coca leaves at the site….
“I’m offering the coca to the spirit of Che to say thank you,” he said. “Che was unique; he was a failure but at least he tried. When I’m here I have a sense of injustice. It was 500 men against Che’s men.”