Was Ernesto Guevara Deserved Of His Iconic Status?
Aged twenty-four, Ernesto Guevara pens a regular letter home to Rosario, Argentina from his flat in Mexico. It concludes: “Things are moving with tremendous speed and no one can know, or predict, where or for what reason one will be next year”. This, perhaps, is one indication of the mans legendary appeal - not as a hero of socialism or political ideologist, but as a free-spirited and non-fictitious adventurer. After all, how many of us could end our letters with the same thrilling poignancy, at any age? Further still, how many of us manage to more then dream of exploring the sprawling sceneries of our home-land as Guevara did in 1951 (from Buenos Aires to Venezuela)? Those of us outside Cuba who accept the commercialization of Guevara’s legacy, in purchasing any of the posters, t-shirts or "Revolucion" Swatch watches his dashing image adorns, are unlikely to be linked by communist sympathy, revolutionary intention or anti-American sentiment. More likely, it will be a fondness for the broader ideals his face has came to encapsulate – equality, strength, moral perfection and endless self-improvement. It is no doubt that today, thirty-six years after his death, Che Guevara has became half political legend, half pop-culture commodity and a complete, world-wide icon. Yet Jean-Paul Sartre’s comment – that ‘his (Guevara’s) life is the story of our era’s most perfect man’ – fails to consider the scale of Guevara’s imperfections. Ernesto Guevara the neglectful family man, who became a Father on Valentines Day 1956 yet left by June to face likely death in the Cuban jungles. Ernesto Guevara the Latin-American, who believed women as intellectually inferior and homosexuals as despicable. Ernesto Guevara the militant, directly responsible for the execution of dozens of Batista loyalists and advocate of nuclear confrontation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Like the much used stencil of Guevara’s determined visage, the general perception of his life is flat and two-dimensional.
No where more so, it seems, then in the country richest in Guevara’s history, Cuba. An article printed July 21st 1997 in Newsweek, entitled ‘Return Of The Rebel’, explored Cuban society in the wake of the long-awaited discovery of Guevara’s skeleton in Bolivian town of Vallegrande. In it journalist Brook Lamer explains how ‘the Cuban Government played a pivotal role in creating the Che mystique, and it is not about to let its franchise slip away’. Understandable, viewing the twenty-two ton statue of Guevara that still rules over Santa Clara. In Cuba, Guevara remains imbedded in national pride and retains the mythology of a moral saint. This is an impression maintained through decades of censorship and flat denial of facts – something Lamer attributes to the reality that Cuba is “scrambling to stay afloat by abandoning many of the socialist principles Che held sacred”. Across Cuba, Guevara’s execution of Cuban defectors is unheard of, while shopping centers such as Havana's Palacio de Artesanias thrive by selling everything from Coke-a-Cola to Adidas clothing. ‘Return Of The Rebel’ questions not only whether Guevara deserves his iconic treatment, but what kind of icon he has actually become – one perpetuated at home by government propaganda, and across the wider-world by the adoption of his image to promote rock music and sell clothing. That, and the fact that “Che’s revolutionary ideals no longer pose much of a threat in the post-cold-war world” as “thirty years have tamed the anti-imperialist tiger and turned him into a rebel without claws”.
Still, it is easy to become over cynical when considering Guevara’s ironic transformation from socialist revolutionary to capitalist cash-cow. After all, no one can deny that Guevara himself would likely turn in his grave at the thought. From the earliest period of his adult life, Guevara displayed traits we rightly crave in our leading peers – human compassion, moral determination and acute belief in social equality. These beliefs were cemented long before his first encounter with Fidel Castro, largely during his 1950 trip through Northern Argentina and the more famous ‘motorcycle journey’ across much of Latin America – a trip undertaken, according to his Ernesto Guevara Lynch (Guevara’s Father), as an attempt to “really understand the needs of the poor, not as a tourist stopping to take pretty pictures, but in the way he did, by sharing the human suffering found at every bend in the road and looking for the causes of that misery”. To leave the comfort of a large, well-off upper middle-class background and embark on such a trip required more then the usual youthful thirst for travel, nor could it have been an attempt to impress university entry committees (he had already studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires) – it is not without credit then, to suggest that Guevara was a man of genuine sympathy and curiosity about the plight of the less fortunate of his generation. ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’, Guevara’s account of his South American trip, is loaded with tales of misadventure – the worst of which include enlisting as a fireman during an outbreak of fires in Chile, only to oversleep as a house burns to ashes in his absence. Yet in the background to these writings, there runs a steady line of observation and a simmering dismay over the social conditions he encounters. Exploring the ‘realms of Pachamama’, Guevara recalls meeting a tribe of Indians fascinated with “the wonderful ‘land of Peron’”, one of which “asked us for a copy of the Argentine Constitution with its declaration of rights for old people”, Guevara “promised enthusiastically to send him one”. A later retrospect of that experience begins to reveal Guevara’s strengthening political conviction – “The fate of these unhappy people is to vegetate in some obscure bureaucratic job and die…” he comments, in one of countless rants that seem to formulate his motives for wanting communist revolution through-out Latin America, a view supported in a review of the diaries by The Scotsman, which considered the journey “the formative influence on Che’s pan-Americanism and the development of his revolutionary consciousness”. In a time of growing political apathy, Ernesto Guevara leaving his comfortable life to tour the poverty line of his nation is an admirable act in its self – perhaps not worthy of creating an icon, but certainly providing a decent basis.
