“I feel sorry for the family of Che Guevara, people who knew him before he became a T-shirt.”
The quote belongs to Jeremy Hardy, a British comedian, and came to memory on Tuesday when I saw a few dozen teenagers march in Buenos Aires to commemorate the 40 anniversary of the death of the famed guerrilla fighter.
Nowhere in the world is the media approach to Che Guevara’s memory as complicated as in Argentina, his country of birth. In Cuba, the Castro-regime treats him like a state hero; in the anti-Castro-dominated Miami area he was no more than a bloodthirsty killer; in the rest of the world, the media, politically detached from his legacy by now, talk about him as a fascinating historical character, while millions of people consider his face an excellent image to wear on shirts, hats, pins and so forth.
The toughest problem with Guevara for most media outlets in this country is that what he stood for goes against their own ideologies. Also, not so long ago, he was a rather obscure character in whom the greater public had little interest.
Yet, the media need to talk about him when important anniversaries such as Tuesday’s come around because, thanks to his ever-growing popularity, he has become a marketing executive’s dream. Most newspapers and broadcasters find an easy way out: they depict him as an idealist, a romantic rich boy who abandoned the chance of a career in medicine to dedicate his life to helping the poor of Latin America (and Congo).
This approach allows the media to focus more on the Bolivian city where he was killed than on thorny issues such as the mass killings Cuban dissidents say he committed; it allows to retell the stories his wrote in his Motorcycle Diaries (the book that inspired the movie by Walter Salles) rather than analyse the stubbornness of a fighter who failed more than he succeeded as a leader of guerrilla warfare.
Guevara was not, however, a simple idealist. Quiet the opposite. He was a man of action and a dedicated student and analyst of politics and economics, who died fighting as he tried to attain his objective. He could never be accused of spending a life on an armchair dreaming of how to change the world, as idealists do. He went out to change it, whether or not you agree with what he wanted.
The soft-handed approach to the memory of Che Guevara was fuelled more than ever in recent days with the story that he serves as inspiration for the Pumas, the Argentinian national rugby team who are enjoying their best-ever run in a World Cup. The story started off with an interview (French) with Agustín Pichot, Pumas captain and poster boy, in the French newspaper Le Parisien. The interviewer was Jean Cormier, a Guevara biographer.
Pichot told Cormier he is proud Guevara was Argentinian and that he was a former rugby player (in junior teams). He said Guevara applied strategies he learnt from rugby to his guerrilla fighting and he called Guevara “Argentina’s most emblematic personality”.
Cormier’s story spread swiftly and was picked up, for example, by Britain’s Daily Telegraph and Guardian newspapers, by the Spanish sports daily As and by several Argentinian papers.
It is a wonderful colour story. After all, everybody wants a hero and everybody loves idealists, as long as we are not asked to follow them. The question that remains eternally unaddressed is what Guevara would think if he knew that the legacy of his ideas have come down to the headline-catching talk of a rich sportsman and the fashion trends of youngsters uninterested in undertaking world-changing crusades.
If wearing a Che Guevera shirt is okay, can I wear one displaying Pinochet, Stalin, or any other icon of my choice? The ultimate irony is the fact that rich capitalists are the ones donning these shirts. Go figure….
do not be too demanding of the young. perhaps, wearing the icon is the start of deeper undertanding and activism.
Alchemy
The Che was a controversial and gun carrying character who may have killed people, but I think that comparing him to Stalin and Pinochet it pushing it a bit too far. First because he was never a dictator, therefore did he not control the state. He was one of many who stood around the dictator, therefore it would be more accurate to compare him to Pinochet or Stalin’s ministers.
And, unlike Stalin, the government he belonged to in Cuba, of which he was an ideologist, did not pursue mass ethnic or religious cleansings, as far as I am aware.
I can understand comparing Pinochet to Fidel Castro (although I do not agree with it fully either), if you want, but I think that putting Guevara on the same level as the Chilean dictator is an easy simplification of the issues at hand.
All social armed struggles (be it a coup, a revolution or a fight against an oppressive, race-based regime) inevitably includes killings, that’s what the arms are there for. Not all armed fighters end up being Stalins, some are actual liberators – as South Africans can tell. Defenders of “El Che” will tell you he fought against an economic regime (extreme capitalism imposed by a few rich on hundreds of thousands of poor people) and left when he decided his mission was done. The argument around him should be whether that is true or not and whether fighting against an economic regime is valid or if fights can only be against political regimes.
Ebrahim. I’m not being demanding it’s just that I think carrying the icon, in most cases, is far from an understanding because of what I’ve seen happen to most people who have out grown the “Che-shirt” fad as they become older.
Well, let us examine one of Ches quotes shall we.
“We only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail. I believe that people who should go to jail should go to jail anyway.”
”
Che speaking on his policy of sending people who had committed no crime punishable by law to labour camps. Now you may compare Ches revolution to ours, but our revolutionaries sure as well didnt send the very people they are trying to liberate to labour camps or terrorise or kill them. Not to mention his racist undertones. Look at this.
“The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving”
I wonder why that was left out of the charming “motorcycle diaries”…
Alchimy, I had never seen that racist quote or any of the kind. Thanks for bringing it up. I am not an expert on Che and, therefore, I am not a defender either. I’m simply pointing out things I see among people who I believe know more or less the same as I do about him (and who I believe are the vast majority).
I am not comparing both situations either. South Africa had a liberation movement. Cuba had a revolution against an economic system. They cannot be compared. I just brought the subject out to mention the issues of weapons and the killings that inevitably come with them.
Rodrigo, I have seen the opposite experience in some people younger than I. I agree these are a few. But it is the few that inspires, and leave me hopeful.
Che was a sexy revolutionary, a brave guerrilla and luckily, he still inspires all kinds of people of all ages, he’s not just a marketer’s dream or an “excellent” image. You know, Orihuela, that he’s MUCH more than that. And he could write properly!!!!
The tragedy in all this is that those who ware his ugly mug in a T-shirt don’t know that Che was a racist homophobe who by his own admission took pleasure in killing. He was the Caribbean equivalent of the Taliban! Known to Cubans as the Butcher of “La Cabana”-a prison in Havana where he oversaw the execution of hundreds of Cubans. In all Che was responsible for the executions of over 14,000 people in the early sixties. When the Communists came to power in Cuba, Che did away with court trials and had thousands of Cubans executed in cold blood, while the world stood by and let it happened.
It’s sickening to see so many ignorant people the Hollywood elite included ware the face of a killer on a t-shirt, while his victims await justice.