revolutionindia
23rd October 2004, 05:33
This is an article I came across on the net
I am posting it here becasue there is a mention of che-lives.com in this article
If this has been posted before please delete it
The real Che
by Anthony Daniels
In the Prologue to his recent history of Cuba, Richard Gott, a British journalist of pronounced left-wing sympathies, remembers Ernesto Guevara’s arrival at a reception at the Soviet Embassy in Havana in 1963, at which he too was present: “Guevara strode in after midnight, accompanied by a small coterie of friends, bodyguards, and hangers-on, wearing his trademark black beret, and with his shirt open to the waist. He was incredibly beautiful.” There is no accounting for taste, of course, and I never had the advantage of seeing Guevara in the flesh. To my mind, however, his appearance in all post-revolutionary photographs of him, save the most famous one by Alberto Korda, is that of a man distinctly unwashed. No doubt this accounts for a proportion of his continuing popularity among youth.
Some purists, or rationalists, might object that one’s aesthetic response to Guevara is rather beside the point. The trouble with Hitler was not his absurd appearance, after all, or with Stalin his pockmarked complexion. And yet, if we analyze Guevara’s popular appeal more than a third of a century after his timely death, we can see that it is the result of aesthetic and emotional responses rather than rational reflection, responses that are now kept alive by a good dose of commercialism. On one website dedicated to his memory, for example (www.store.che-lives.com), I found twenty-seven different varieties of Guevara T-shirts for sale, including a distressed olive-green one, one with reflective ink, a black one with glitter, and a black one with red glow. New berets were also available, the site announced with an exclamation mark, as if we had all been anxiously waiting for them, as well as baseball and trucker hats, bandannas, keyrings, Zippo lighters, desk clocks, and brooches. In short, Guevara is not so much an historical figure as a tourist destination. And most tourists don’t read too deeply into the history of the places they are going to.
This frivolous attitude to Guevara started during his lifetime. Sartre said that Guevara was the most complete man of our time, and he, like Gott, had something like a religious experience on meeting him:
I heard the door close behind me and I lost, at once, all feeling of my tiredness and an idea of the time. In that office, night does not enter: in those men, in the best of them, they do not feel that sleeping is a natural necessity but a routine from which they have been liberated.
This, surely, would count as one of the three miracles required by the Catholic process of canonization, the abolition of sleep. St. Che of Cuba libre—it has quite a ring about it.
With few exceptions, the devotees of the cult of Guevara know little about him or what he actually stood for. This has always been the case. In 1968, only a year after Guevara’s death, a professor of international relations at San Francisco State University, John Gerassi, published a collection of Guevara’s speeches and essays, in whose introduction he relates the impact news of the death of Guevara had upon his students:
On October 9, 1967, the first news of Ernesto Che Guevara’s alleged death reached the United States… . I was approached by a nineteen-year-old coed. She had tears in her eyes and a “Make Love Not War” button on her breast. “You don’t really believe it, do you?” she asked. “I mean, he couldn’t really be dead, could he?” … [T]here were many liberals and many pacifists [in the class], in addition to the radicals. And yet to all … the news of Che’s possible death was very upsetting and very personal. Che had obviously caught their imagination. They respected and admired him. They knew very little about his life… . But they knew enough to know that he was an idealist… . Thus it became apparent to me, as we talked that day, that these liberal and pacifist students felt, incredibly, as if Che had died for them.
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. No doubt the students would angrily have disavowed any lingering influence of Christianity upon their thought.
The latest and propagandistically most powerful product of the Guevara cult is a film of Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries by the Brazilian director Walter Salles. It relies for its effect upon the fact that audiences will all know a minimum about Guevara: for example, that he was a social revolutionary who died in the jungles of Bolivia, and never made a penny for himself. But they will otherwise know little of his actual opinions or actions, and will not have read his tedious and inflexibly dogmatic speeches and writings. 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 again would be rather beside the point.
At the beginning of 1952, while still a medical student, Guevara set out with a companion to tour South America on a decrepit motorcycle. His companion was the Argentinian biochemist Alberto Granado, a few years his senior, who was later to settle in Cuba and also to try unsuccessfully to foment a guerrilla movement in his native Argentina, at Castro’s and Guevara’s instigation. The film is based on Guevara’s diaries, and also those of Granado, published in 1978 in Cuba under the title Con el Che por Sudamérica. A shot of Granado as he now is, at the very end of the film, portrays him as a wise, serene, and far-seeing old man. He acted as adviser to the film-makers throughout, so it is hardly surprising that the portrayal of the two voyagers is sympathetic.
It would be difficult to make a film in the landscapes of South America that was not visually appealing. Having travelled quite extensively there, I found myself at once seized by a desire to return to their awe-inspiring magnificence. The two principal actors in the film, the Mexican García Bernal and the Argentinian Rodrigo de la Serna (himself a second cousin of Guevara’s), play the two young men extremely well, within the limits of the schematic script.
The message of the film is very clear. Guevara is a large-hearted and charming young man of the Argentinian bourgeoisie whose youthful journey is a kind of éducation sentimentale. He is forced into his later activities by his deep feeling for the suffering, cruelty, and exploitation that he witnesses en route. There he rebelled; he could do no other.
Actually, in his book Granado lets slip that the pair of them are rebellious by temperament. For some reason other than a knowledge of sociological conditions prevailing in South America, they were born not to conform to the bourgeois mores of their environment. After visiting a doctor friend in a small provincial town in Argentina:
More............(full article click below)
Link to the article (http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/oct04/che.htm)
I am posting it here becasue there is a mention of che-lives.com in this article
If this has been posted before please delete it
The real Che
by Anthony Daniels
In the Prologue to his recent history of Cuba, Richard Gott, a British journalist of pronounced left-wing sympathies, remembers Ernesto Guevara’s arrival at a reception at the Soviet Embassy in Havana in 1963, at which he too was present: “Guevara strode in after midnight, accompanied by a small coterie of friends, bodyguards, and hangers-on, wearing his trademark black beret, and with his shirt open to the waist. He was incredibly beautiful.” There is no accounting for taste, of course, and I never had the advantage of seeing Guevara in the flesh. To my mind, however, his appearance in all post-revolutionary photographs of him, save the most famous one by Alberto Korda, is that of a man distinctly unwashed. No doubt this accounts for a proportion of his continuing popularity among youth.
Some purists, or rationalists, might object that one’s aesthetic response to Guevara is rather beside the point. The trouble with Hitler was not his absurd appearance, after all, or with Stalin his pockmarked complexion. And yet, if we analyze Guevara’s popular appeal more than a third of a century after his timely death, we can see that it is the result of aesthetic and emotional responses rather than rational reflection, responses that are now kept alive by a good dose of commercialism. On one website dedicated to his memory, for example (www.store.che-lives.com), I found twenty-seven different varieties of Guevara T-shirts for sale, including a distressed olive-green one, one with reflective ink, a black one with glitter, and a black one with red glow. New berets were also available, the site announced with an exclamation mark, as if we had all been anxiously waiting for them, as well as baseball and trucker hats, bandannas, keyrings, Zippo lighters, desk clocks, and brooches. In short, Guevara is not so much an historical figure as a tourist destination. And most tourists don’t read too deeply into the history of the places they are going to.
This frivolous attitude to Guevara started during his lifetime. Sartre said that Guevara was the most complete man of our time, and he, like Gott, had something like a religious experience on meeting him:
I heard the door close behind me and I lost, at once, all feeling of my tiredness and an idea of the time. In that office, night does not enter: in those men, in the best of them, they do not feel that sleeping is a natural necessity but a routine from which they have been liberated.
This, surely, would count as one of the three miracles required by the Catholic process of canonization, the abolition of sleep. St. Che of Cuba libre—it has quite a ring about it.
With few exceptions, the devotees of the cult of Guevara know little about him or what he actually stood for. This has always been the case. In 1968, only a year after Guevara’s death, a professor of international relations at San Francisco State University, John Gerassi, published a collection of Guevara’s speeches and essays, in whose introduction he relates the impact news of the death of Guevara had upon his students:
On October 9, 1967, the first news of Ernesto Che Guevara’s alleged death reached the United States… . I was approached by a nineteen-year-old coed. She had tears in her eyes and a “Make Love Not War” button on her breast. “You don’t really believe it, do you?” she asked. “I mean, he couldn’t really be dead, could he?” … [T]here were many liberals and many pacifists [in the class], in addition to the radicals. And yet to all … the news of Che’s possible death was very upsetting and very personal. Che had obviously caught their imagination. They respected and admired him. They knew very little about his life… . But they knew enough to know that he was an idealist… . Thus it became apparent to me, as we talked that day, that these liberal and pacifist students felt, incredibly, as if Che had died for them.
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. No doubt the students would angrily have disavowed any lingering influence of Christianity upon their thought.
The latest and propagandistically most powerful product of the Guevara cult is a film of Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries by the Brazilian director Walter Salles. It relies for its effect upon the fact that audiences will all know a minimum about Guevara: for example, that he was a social revolutionary who died in the jungles of Bolivia, and never made a penny for himself. But they will otherwise know little of his actual opinions or actions, and will not have read his tedious and inflexibly dogmatic speeches and writings. 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 again would be rather beside the point.
At the beginning of 1952, while still a medical student, Guevara set out with a companion to tour South America on a decrepit motorcycle. His companion was the Argentinian biochemist Alberto Granado, a few years his senior, who was later to settle in Cuba and also to try unsuccessfully to foment a guerrilla movement in his native Argentina, at Castro’s and Guevara’s instigation. The film is based on Guevara’s diaries, and also those of Granado, published in 1978 in Cuba under the title Con el Che por Sudamérica. A shot of Granado as he now is, at the very end of the film, portrays him as a wise, serene, and far-seeing old man. He acted as adviser to the film-makers throughout, so it is hardly surprising that the portrayal of the two voyagers is sympathetic.
It would be difficult to make a film in the landscapes of South America that was not visually appealing. Having travelled quite extensively there, I found myself at once seized by a desire to return to their awe-inspiring magnificence. The two principal actors in the film, the Mexican García Bernal and the Argentinian Rodrigo de la Serna (himself a second cousin of Guevara’s), play the two young men extremely well, within the limits of the schematic script.
The message of the film is very clear. Guevara is a large-hearted and charming young man of the Argentinian bourgeoisie whose youthful journey is a kind of éducation sentimentale. He is forced into his later activities by his deep feeling for the suffering, cruelty, and exploitation that he witnesses en route. There he rebelled; he could do no other.
Actually, in his book Granado lets slip that the pair of them are rebellious by temperament. For some reason other than a knowledge of sociological conditions prevailing in South America, they were born not to conform to the bourgeois mores of their environment. After visiting a doctor friend in a small provincial town in Argentina:
More............(full article click below)
Link to the article (http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/oct04/che.htm)