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 PERIODICO ESTUDIANTIL DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE CAROLINA DEL SUR. THE GAMECOCK http://www.dailygamecock.com/news/2005/04/19/Viewpoints/Commentary.Wearing.Your.Ignorance.On.A.Sleeve-929330.shtml?page=1 Commentary: Wearing your ignorance on a sleeve By Alex Harper
Che Chic It’s très disgusting. http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/nordlinger/nordlinger200501050715.asp EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the December 31, 2004, issue of National Review. It sometimes seems that Che Guevara is pictured on more items than Mickey Mouse. I'm talking about shirts and the like (but mainly shirts). One artist had the inspiration to combine the two: He put Mickey's ears on Guevara. Guevara's fans must not like it much. The world is awash in Che paraphernalia, and this is an ongoing offense to truth, reason, and justice (a fine trio). Cuban Americans tend to be flummoxed by this phenomenon, and so do others who are decent and aware. There is a backlash against Che glorification, but it is tiny compared with the phenomenon itself. To turn the tide against Guevara would take massive reeducation — a term the old Communist would very much appreciate. You find his items in the most surprising places. Or maybe they are not so surprising. The New York Public Library has a gift shop, and until just the other day, it sold a Guevara watch. The article featured Che's face and the word "REVOLUTION." The ad copy went like this: "Revolution is a permanent state with this clever watch, featuring the classic romantic image of Che Guevara, around which the word 'revolution' — revolves." Clever, indeed. That one of the world's most prestigious libraries should have peddled an item puffing a brutal henchman was not big news, but some Cuban Americans, and a few others, reacted. On learning of the watch, many sent letters to the library, imploring its officials to come to their senses. One Cuban American — trying to play on longstanding American sensibilities — wrote, "Would you sell watches with the images of the Grand Dragon of the KKK?" It was also pointed out that Communist Cuba, which Guevara did a great deal to found and shape, is especially hard on librarians. The independent-library movement has been brutally repressed, and some of the most inspiring political prisoners stem from that movement. Yet there is virtually no solidarity between Free World librarians and Cuba's librarians, or would-be librarians. A year ago, the civil libertarian Nat Hentoff "renounced" — his word — the award given him by the American Library Association, because the ALA cold-shoulders the Cubans, preferring to stick with the loved "socialist" tyrant, Castro. In any event, the New York Public Library withdrew the watch just before Christmas, offering no statement. The fog of time and the strength of anti-anti-Communism have obscured the real Che. Who was he? He was an Argentinian revolutionary who served as Castro's primary thug. He was especially infamous for presiding over summary executions at La Cabaña, the fortress that was his abattoir. He liked to administer the coup de grâce, the bullet to the back of the neck. And he loved to parade people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which so many innocents were killed. Furthermore, he established the labor-camp system in which countless citizens — dissidents, democrats, artists, homosexuals — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag. A Cuban-American writer, Humberto Fontova, described Guevara as "a combination of Beria and Himmler." Anthony Daniels once quipped, "The difference between [Guevara] and Pol Pot was that [the former] never studied in Paris." And yet, he is celebrated by "liberals," this most illiberal of men. As Paul Berman summed up recently in Slate, "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." Those who know, or care about, the truth concerning Guevara are often tempted to despair. The website of our own National Institutes of Health describes him this way: an "Argentine physician and freedom fighter." Guevara was a physician roughly like Mrs. Ceausescu was a chemist. As for freedom fighter . . . again, the temptation to despair is great. And yet, Cuban Americans and their friends do not succumb altogether, as we have seen in the New York Public Library episode. Here is another episode: Not long ago, Burlington Coat Factory — a giant clothing retailer — ran a television ad featuring a teenager in a Guevara shirt. The ad was called — get this — "Values." Anti-Communists organized boycotts, picketing, and letter-writing, and the company withdrew the shirt — but not before calling the activists "provocateurs," "fanatics," and "extremists." (The company should get with it: The preferred Castroite term for democrats and human-rights advocates is gusanos, or "worms.") Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a store called La La Ling sells a Guevara shirt for babies — actually, a "onesie." The ad text is as follows: "Featured in Time Magazine's holiday web shopping guide, 'Viva la revolution [sic]!' Now even the smallest rebel can express himself in these awesome baby onesies. This classic Che Guevara icon is also available on a long-sleeve tee in kids' sizes . . . Long live the rebel in all of us . . . there's no cooler iconic image than Che!" Who could argue with that? Despite protests, the store has hung tough. Its owner told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "[The onesie] is one of our top sellers. The Che image is just trendy right now. . . . I don't think people are buying the shirt necessarily because of his exact politics. I have a baby store, and in my eyes it's just a T-shirt." DEGREES OF GUILT Some key questions are encapsulated right there. It seems obvious that some people know what they're celebrating and some do not. Growing up in Ann Arbor, Mich., I saw Che's face quite a bit, and, for the most part, those people knew what they were doing: They liked what he stood for. Other people are totally ignorant. Still others are perhaps semi-ignorant, wanting merely to express outrage or defiance, or to advertise their nonconformity. (Actually, in Ann Arbor, to wear Che was to conform.) The comedienne Margaret Cho pictured herself in a Guevara pose for a "Cho Revolution" tour. The boxer Mike Tyson, when he was feeling particularly aggrieved, had Guevara tattooed to his torso. The 'awesome baby onesie' And last summer, you could find Che at the Minnesota State Fair: He was portrayed in seeds. (You mean, you've never heard of seed art?) One of the most nauseating recent celebrations of Guevara took the form of a movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, whose executive producer was Robert Redford (one of the most dedicated Castro apologists in Hollywood, which is saying something). The movie received a standing ovation at the Sundance Festival. About this obnoxious hagiography and whitewash, I will confine myself to quoting Tony Daniels: "It is as if someone were to make a film about Adolf Hitler by portraying him as a vegetarian who loved animals and was against unemployment. This would be true, but rather beside the point." There is another movie coming out about Guevara, directed by Steven Soderbergh. We can guess at its contents by the publicity material: "He fought for the people." Sure he did. A prominent Cuban American recently lunched with a famous and powerful actor to discuss a movie that tells the truth about Guevara. The actor was entirely sympathetic, but said it simply could not be done — Hollywood would not permit it. Beyond the occasional protest or boycott, there is some of that Guevara backlash: in the form of T-shirts, or counter-T-shirts, if you like. (Yes, anti-Communism is countercultural, in a sense.) One shirt shows Guevara with a diagonal line drawn through him and the words, "Commies Aren't Cool." Another has Guevara in crosshairs (violent — too Che-like). Still another has the statement — underneath the image — "I have no idea who this is"! A fourth shirt is an exercise in camp, festooning Guevara in rhinestones and calling him "Liberache" (linking him to the late, flamboyant pianist). A far more serious shirt is purveyed by the Center for a Free Cuba, in Washington, D.C. It does many things, one of which is to put "Cuba Libre" in Guevara's hair, and another of which is to list Cuban political prisoners on the back, complete with the lengths of their sentences. In France, the remarkable group Reporters Without Borders took an image well known in that country: that of a policeman wielding a truncheon and a shield. But it put Guevara's face in place of the policeman's and cried, "Welcome to Cuba, the world's biggest prison for journalists." A woman named Diane D"az LÛpez objected: She is the daughter of "Korda," the late Cuban photographer who snapped the "iconic image" of Che. She seems to be a bitter-end Marxist. She took Reporters Without Borders to court, and won — they had to abandon that particular tactic. SADDENING AND MADDENING There are some who will always have romantic feelings about Guevara, and the Cuban revolution. For this type, Guevara was a true man, not a namby-pamby liberal, but hardcore — pure in his willingness to do the necessary. An anti-Communist of my acquaintance asked a friend of his why she admired Guevara. She answered, "He never sold out." Frank CalzÛn, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, says, "Yes, Guevara was 'courageous' and 'committed.' So are many bank robbers." In the run-up to the Iraq War, I asked Bernard Kouchner — the great French humanitarian and politician — why so many of his countrymen seemed enthusiastic about Saddam Hussein. He said their enthusiasm for Saddam was akin to their attachment to Che: It was a way of expressing anti-Americanism (in brief), the facts about the two men aside. But facts are not unimportant to Cuban Americans. Imagine being one of them and seeing celebratory images of Guevara all around you. Imagine — even further — being the son or daughter of someone whom Guevara personally executed. There are such people in the United States. Or imagine — further yet — being a Cuban political prisoner, and knowing that masses in free countries were wearing Che on their chests. If you talk to Cuban Americans about how they feel, they will first mention Hitler and the Nazis: No one would sell or sport items celebrating those beasts; what's the difference, other than scale? Otto Reich is a Cuban American who has thought keenly about all this. He has been an official under the last three Republican presidents, and he was a refugee from the island; his father had been a refugee from Nazi Austria. Says Reich, "The first reaction [on seeing a piece of Che-wear] is revulsion. The second is more like pity, because these people have no idea what they're doing." Ronald Radosh has written about a democracy activist in Hong Kong. In his innocence, this fellow — Leung Kwok-hung, nicknamed "Long Hair" — goes around in a Guevara T-shirt. As Radosh points out, Guevara would be appalled at this use of his image, and would "favor [Long Hair's] immediate imprisonment as a counterrevolutionary, if not his quick execution by firing squad." And I heard from an acquaintance in Japan, who teaches at an American school: "Imagine my shock when I saw a four-year-old student of mine come to class last week wearing a brand-name sweatshirt with that image of Che superimposed on an American flag. He's a great kid, and he obviously had no idea what it was, but just being in the same room as that shirt made me uneasy. Heck, just knowing the fact that that shirt exists in a size that fits four-year-olds made me uneasy." Obviously, my acquaintance had never seen the onesie. A final story: A few weeks ago, the Hartford Courant ran a photo of a Trinity College freshman who was protesting the execution of a serial killer. He carried a sign that said, "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?" — and he was wearing a Che Guevara hat! Talk about sending mixed messages. Some people take comfort in the fact that Guevara, the Communist who wanted to destroy everything capitalist, has become a commodity. But that comfort is cold — because the unending glorification of this henchman is, yes, an offense to truth, reason, and justice. Think of those who might take his place on those shirts — for instance, Oscar El"as Biscet, one of Castro's longtime prisoners. He is a democrat, a physician — a true one — and an Afro-Cuban (for those who care). He has declared his heroes and models to be Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Not only does he deserve celebration, he could use the publicity — but nothing. Part of the Guevara cult, no doubt, has to do with pulchritude (although I suppose Biscet is good-looking enough, despite years of sadistic abuse). More than one anti-Communist has lamented that Che's cheekbones have caused millions of hearts to flutter, and millions of consciences to crater. Tony Daniels quotes an awed British journalist who met Guevara at the Soviet embassy in Havana in 1963: "He was incredibly beautiful." Poor Stalin, so stumpy and pockmarked. He could have been a star. Guevara has a little competition, however, in that some American celebrities have been seen with Subcomandante Marcos T-shirts. Who is Subcomandante Marcos? The Mexican Che, roughly, although it seems unlikely that he will ever overtake Guevara, whose perpetual exaltation is one of the most heartbreaking and infuriating phenomena of the modern age. Source: National Review Martori:
Che
shows the way http://www.statepress.com/issues/2005/03/21/opinions/692441
por Humberto Fontova "SENTENCE first--VERDICT afterwards." said the Queen. "Nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. (From Alice In Wonderland) They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium when he concocted Alice In Wonderland. A place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterwards, where people who protest the madness are sentenced to death themselves -- what lunacy! If only Carroll had lived a bit longer. If only he'd visited Cuba in 1959 when every paper from the New York Times to the London Observer-- when every pundit from Walter Lippman to Ed Murrow --when every author from Jean Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer--when every TV host from Jack Paar to Ed Sullivan were touting the judicial outrages, mass larceny, and firing-squad orgies instituted by Fidel and Che as the most glorious events since VJ day. "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon! (The Wall)" To be fair, Ed Sullivan later recanted. He saw through the murderous farce, and was not above a public act of contrition. Indeed two years later he featured several recently-liberated Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters--some hobbling on crutches, others missing limbs-- on his show for a fund raising where he declared them heroes and led the thunderous applause himself. I sure miss Ed Sullivan. This from last week's AP: "At The Sundance Film Festival Robert Redford's film on Che Guevara "The Motorcycle Diaries" received a standing ovation." They say this was the only film so raptly received. For the first year of Castro's glorious revolution Che Guevara was his main executioner--a combination Beria and Himmler, with a major exception: Che's slaughter of (bound and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine) exceeded Heinrich Himmler's pre-war slaughter of Germans, to scale that is. Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before WWII. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than 20 thousand political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night Of The Long Knives." The famous Kristallnacht that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1959. Within three months in power Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. One defector claims Che signed 500 death warrants, another says over 600. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega who knew Che as early as 1954 writes in his book "Yo Soy El Che!" that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book "Che Guevara: A Biography," Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering "several thousand" executions during the first few years of the Castro regime. So the scope of the mass-murder is unclear. So the exact number of widows and orphans is in dispute. So the number of gagged and blindfolded men who Che sent--without trails-- to be bound to a stake, and blown apart by bullets, runs from the hundreds to the thousands. But the mass-executioner gets a standing ovation by the same people in the U.S who oppose capitol punishment! ...Is there a psychiatrist in the house?! The first three months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the New York Times admits it. The preceding "trials" shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades. Ask Barry Farber. He was there. But vengeance--much less, justice-- had nothing to do with this bloodbath. Che's murderous method in La Cabana fortress in 1959 was exactly Stalin murderous method in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Like Stalin's massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest, like Stalin's Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier , Che's firing squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise that served their purpose ideally. His bloodbath decapitated-- literally and figuratively--the first ranks of Cuba's Contras. Five years earlier, while a communist hobo in Guatemala, Che had seen the Guatemalan officer corps rise against the Red regime of Jacobo Arbenz and send him hightailing to Czechoslovakia. . Che didn't want a repeat in Cuba. Equally important, his massacre cowed and terrorized. These were all public trials. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with the coup de grace from a massive .45 slug fired at five paces, were public too. Guevara made it a policy for his men to parade the families and friends of the executed before the blood, bone and brain-spattered paredon ("The Wall," and Pink Floyd had nothing to do with this one). The Red Terror had come to Cuba. "We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable....we will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood! Let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible." This from Felix Dzerzhinsky the head of the Soviet Cheka in 1918. "Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!" This from Che Guevara's very Motorcycle Diaries--the very diaries just made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford--again, the only film to get that whooping' 'hollerin, standing ovation at last month's Sundance Film Festival. Seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries form his touching film. The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" never reached Guevara's nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged and blindfolded men. He was a true Chekist, "always interrogate your prisoners at night" Che commanded his prosecutorial goons. "A man is easier to cow at night, his mental resistance is always lower." Che specialized in psychological torture. Many prisoners were yanked out of their cell, bound, blindfolded and stood against The Wall. The seconds ticked off. The condemned could hear the rifle bolts snapping.....finally -----FUEGO!! BLAM!!--but the shots were blanks. In his book, Tocayo, Cuban freedom-fighter Tony Navarro describes how he watched a man returned to his cell after such and ordeal. He'd left bravely, grim faced as he shook hands with his fellow condemned. He came back mentally shattered, curling up in a corner of the squalid cell for days. A real cut-up, this Che Guevara. And now the same crowd moaning and wailing about the judicial rights of Guantanamo prisoners give this sadist a standing ovation and adorn themselves with his t-shirt!...Again, is there a Psychiatrist in the house?! Che made Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen look like Oliver Wendell Holmes. His models were Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin. The Cheka came to Cuba with Guevara. But in actual combat, his imbecilities defy belief. Compared to Che "The Lionhearted" Guevara, Groucho Marx in Duck Soup comes across like Hannibal. His performance during the the Bay of Pigs invasion says it all. The invasion plan included a CIA squad dispatching three rowboats off the coast of western Cuba (350 miles from the true invasion site) loaded with time-release roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors and a tape recording of battle. The wily Che immedeatly deciphered the imperialist scheme! That little feint three hundred miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse! The REAL invasion was coming here in Pinar Del Rio! Che stormed over with several thousand troops dug in, locked, loaded and waited for the "yankee/ mercenary" attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs and mirrors did their stuff just offshore. Three days later the (literal) smoke and mirror show expended itself and Che's men marched back to Havana. Not surprisingly, the masterful Comandante had managed to wound himself in this heated battle against a tape recorder. The bullet pierced Che's chin and excited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post April '61 pictures of the gallant Che (the picture we see on posters and T-shirts was shot a year earlier.) Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante,a Fidelista at the time, speculates the wound may have come from a botched suicide attempt. "No way!" Say Che hagiographers, John Lee Anderson, Carlos Castaneda and Paco Taibo. They insist it was an accident, Che's own pistol going off just under his face. Fine, Che groupies. Maybe you're right? Maybe we're being unduly harsh on the man? Maybe the humiliation of being tricked into missing the major battle against imperialist mercenaries by an amplified tape recording and a few roman candles wasn't enough to prompt suicide? Instead the sight of the bottle rocket's red glare and the sound of tape-recorded bombs bursting in air roused Che to a Pattonesque fury. He drew his pistol and prepared to lead the charge against the Yankee juggernaut. "Arriba muchachos!" he bellowed as his men sprung from their trenches with bayonets gleaming and charged a tape recorder. With the amplified soundtrack from The Sands of Iwo Jima blaring in the background Che stood atop a the tank turret and turned to his men. "Let's wipe 'em out!" he yelled while waving his pistol overhead in the manner of Clevon Little in Blazing Saddles. Then he managed to shoot himself through the chin. Fine. I've called him cowardly. Yet, in all fairness, we don't know. For the simple reason that the century's most celebrated Guerrilla fighter, never fought in a guerrilla war, or anything even approximating one. The few puerile skirmishes again Batista's army in Cuba would have been shrugged off as a slow night by any Cripp or Blood. In Cuba Che couldn't fight anyone to fight against him. In the Congo he couldn't find any to fight with him. In Bolivia he finally started getting a tiny taste of both. In short order he was betrayed, brought to ground and routed. Sadly, Guevara's legacy of terror and torture persists to this day and throughout the world. I refer to the professors who assign his writings. I defy anyone to actually finish a Guevara book. I defy them to hack their way through the first five pages. Che's gibberish makes Babs Streisand sound like Cicero. He makes Hillary's ghostwriters read like Dave Barry. Beside him Al Gore and Hillary Rodham shine as the wackiest of cut-ups. Food, drink, good cheer, bonhomie, roistering, fellowship--Guevara recoiled from these like Dracula from a cross. He went through life with a perpetual scowl, like Bella Abzug....almost like Eleanor Clift. As a professional duty I tortured myself with Che Guevara's writings. I finished glassy-eyed, dazed, almost catatonic. Nothing written by a first year philosophy major (or a Total Quality Management guru) could be more banal, jargon-ridden, depressing or idiotic. A specimen: "The past makes itself felt not only in the individual consciousness--in which the residue of an education systematically oriented toward isolating the individual still weighs heavily--but also through the very character of this transition period in which commodity relations still persist although this is still a subjective aspiration, not yet systematized." Slap yourself and let's continue: "To the extent that we achieve concrete successes on a theoretical plane--or, vice versa, to the extent that we draw theoretical conclusions of a broad character on the basis of our concrete research--we will have made a valuable contribution to Marxism-Leninism, and to the cause of humanity." Splash some cold water on your face and stick with me for just a little more: "It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of management and production, and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that we see how closely interdependent these processes are and how their advancement is parallel. In this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being, which is equivalent to his full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken." Dude, this dork's image sells beer huggers and vodka!.... Again, is there a psychiatrist in the house?! Throughout his diaries Che whines about deserters from his "guerilla" (bored adolescents, petty crooks and winos playing army on week-end ) ranks. Can you BLAME them? Imagine sharing a campfire with some yo-yo droning on and on about "subjective aspirations not yet systematized," and "closely interdependent processes and total consciousness of social being,"--and one who reeked like a polecat. (foremost among the bourgeois debauchments disdained by Che were baths) These hapless "deserters" were hunted down like animals, trussed up and brought back to a dispassionate Che, who put a pistol to their heads and blew their skulls apart without a second thought.. After days spent listening to Che and smelling him, perhaps this meant relief. Nurse Rached, Doug Neidermeyer, Colonel Klink, Major Frank Burns--next to Guevara they're all the hardiest of partyers. Here's the guy who helped turn the Hemisphere's party capitol into a vast forced labor and prison camp-- into the place with the highest (youth) emigration and suicide rate in the Hemisphere, probably in the world. In 1961 Che even established a special concentration camp at Guanacahibes in extreme Western Cuba for, "delinquents." This "delinquency" involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect for authorities, laziness and playing loud music, And Che's image adorns Grunge bands, jet-set models and spring break revelers! Again, is there a psychiatrist in the house?! Who can blame Fidel for ducking into the nearest closet when this yo-yo came calling? Call Fidel everything in the book (as I have) but don't call him stupid. Guevara's inane twaddle must have driven him nuts. The one place where I can't fault Fidel, the one place I actually empathize with him, is in his craving to rid himself of this insufferable Argentine jackass. That the Bolivian mission was clearly suicidal was obvious to anyone with half a brain. Fidel and Raul weren't about to join him down there--you can bet your sweet bippy on that. But sure enough! Guevara saluted and was on his way post-haste. Two months later he was dead. Bingo! Fidel scored another bulls-eye. He rid himself of the Argentine nuisance and his glorious revolution had a young handsome martyr for the adulation of imbeciles worldwide. Nice work. Che Guevara was monumentally vain and epically stupid. He was shallow, boorish, cruel, and cowardly. He was a full of himself, a consummate fraud and an intellectual vacumn. He was intoxicated with a few vapid slogans, spoke in cliches and was a glutton for publicity. But ah!--he DID come out nice in a couple of publicity photos, high cheekbones and all! And we wonder why he's a hit in Hollywood? Este y otros excelentes artículos del mismo AUTOR aparecen en la REVISTA GUARACABUYA con dirección electrónica de: http://www.amigospais-guaracabuya.org CHE GUEVARA: A KILLER SOLD AS A CULT FIGURE All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor. RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2005, AND THEREAFTER CHE GUEVARA: A KILLER SOLD AS A CULT FIGURE by Miguel Perez In the category of "things that are upside-down in this world," please file the new popularity of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The guerrilla leader now promoted as a cult figure was nothing more than a cold-blooded killer when he ran Fidel Castro's firing squads after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Yet we see his image more often nowadays, especially on T-shirts worn by young Americans who don't even know what the bearded, beret-wearing Guevara really stood for. Perhaps some are inspired by the portrayal of a young and idealistic Guevara in the film, "The Motorcycle Diaries," which follows Guevara's journey around South America in his pre-revolution years. But long before the film was released last year, Guevara's image had already been turned into a profit-making cultural icon -- one that is used by those who wish to make a political point, express rebellion or simply make a fashion statement. Many young people wear them simply because "they look cool." Others have a more romantic view of the Argentine-born rebel. They idealize him as a revolutionary who gave his life trying to free the people of the Americas from the injustices caused by American imperialism. But it is said that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, and that phrase couldn't be better illustrated than with the man who literally wrote the book on "Guerrilla Warfare." To those who know Guevara's dark side, especially Cuban-Americans, his image evokes many unpleasant emotions -- anger, anxiety, frustration, helplessness. Those who lost a friend or relative to Guevara's firing squads are often offended by the commercialization of his image. Spirited arguments have been known to erupt between Cuban-Americans and other Latinos either wearing or selling garments with the image of Guevara, who was killed while trying to start a revolution in Bolivia in 1967. "Ask Jewish Americans how they would feel if they saw someone wearing a Hitler T-shirt," a Cuban friend told me recently. "Offended, right? Enraged! That's exactly how we feel about Che Guevara shirts." Some arguments have nearly turned into fistfights, as Cuban-Americans plead with shopkeepers not to sell Guevara merchandize. And when they insist on making a profit out of a killer, some Cubans have bought the shirts only to set them on fire in protests outside the stores. In the predominantly Cuban neighborhoods of South Florida and Northern New Jersey, countless are the anecdotes about La Cabana, the prison where Guevara commanded the execution of dozens of "enemies of the revolution" during the first few months of 1959. Many are the stories of mothers who pleaded for the lives of their condemned sons, only to have Guevara speed up their execution in retaliation. Many are the tales of the times he tested people's character by making them watch an execution. At the headquarters of anti-Castro organizations, where the walls are often covered with photos of Cubans executed by Guevara's goons, Cuban-Americans say there is something wrong with a society that glorifies those who preach hatred as Guevara did, a society that turns killers into cult figures. Yet in liberal circles, especially in Hollywood and many American universities, the dark side of Guevara is never placed under the spotlight. You only see the romanticized image -- even on the chest of guitarist Carlos Santana when he performed the theme song from "The Motorcycle Diaries" two months ago at the Academy Awards. Santana was not only wearing a Guevara shirt, he was brandishing a large crucifix on a chain that hung from his neck. That show provoked another famous musician to respond. "I can't find all the words to express my indignation over your irresponsible attitude," wrote jazz saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, a Cuban-American, in an open letter to Santana. "To juxtapose Christ with Che Guevara is like entering a synagogue with a swastika hanging from your neck," D'Rivera added. "It's also a harsh blow in the face of that Cuban youth from the '60s, who had to go into hiding to listen to your albums which the revolution, and the troglodyte Argentinian and his cohorts, dubbed as 'imperialist music' (i.e., rock & roll)." Calling Guevara "The Butcher of the Cabana," D'Rivera told Santana the story of his cousin Bebo, who was imprisoned there just for being a Christian. "He recounts to me on occasion," D'Rivera wrote, "always with infinite bitterness, how he could hear, from his cell, in the early hours of dawn, the executions without prior trials or process of law, of the many who died shouting, "Long Live Christ the King!" Yet to some naive Americans, the man who ordered those executions and who enjoyed watching them is a Christ-like icon, a symbol of the struggle for justice for the poor and downtrodden. File it under "things that are upside-down in this world." To find out more about Miguel Perez, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC. Originally Published on Wednesday April 27, 2005 ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA, HABANA 1959  |
