Myths are social property. They exist to help us build utopias on a small scale, to create lives of saints, images, common references, styles of action and morals, in order to make these real. II Ernesto Guevara died thirty years ago. We know today that he was captured accidentally while he lay recovering from a wound to his right leg, his gun out of commission, accompanied by Willi Cubas.
who shouted at the soldiers that "This is
Che and you'd better treat him with
It has been told and retold how he was taken to the small hamlet of Higuera, locked up in a room attached to the local school, next to the dead bodies of his two comrades; how during a long afternoon and a longer night he spoke briefly with many soldiers, with the local teacher to whom he mentioned that a word on the blackboard was mis-spelled; how he was humiliated by a non-commissioned officer who tried to pull his beard and who he fended off with a kick.
We know that he spent the night in this room sitting on the ground and that the wife of the telegrapher offered him some soup, that he was given one of his pipes and that he took apart an Astorga cigarette
We know that on that morning of
October 8th, a CIA agent introduced himself to Che and that Che insulted him. We know that this agent, of Cuban origins, photographed Che's journal outside the house of the telegrapher and sent a coded message to Santa Cruz which was immediately transmitted to Washington. With little margin of error, we can reassemble the list of Bolivian generals who decided to kill him (Ovando, Torres, Lafuente, Belmonte Ardiles, Vásquez Sempertegui, Barrientos), and we even know the text of the message that gave Colonel Zenteno the order to murder him: "Greet papa."
We have eyewitness accounts for each hour Che spent in that room, dozens of telegrams and radiograms sent from Higuera, about conversations, about how Che looked; we even know the photo that Rodriguez, the Cuban from the CIA took of him the morning of October 9th - a mane of matted hair, a sort of bitter desolation on his face, his beard dirty, his eyes shrunken by exhaustion and fatigue); we even know the reactions of the White House, the intelligence memorandums of the CIA, Ambassador Henderson's reports, the notes he sent Lyndon Johnson.
We know the name of sergeant Mario Terán and why and how, around noon that morning of October 9th, 1967, he entered the school and discharged a machine-gun round in answer to the phrase that almost thirty years later we attribute to Che: "Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill
("When I arrived, Che was sitting on the bench. Seeing me he said: you've come to kill me. I didn't dare fire and the man said to me then: Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man'. So I stepped backwards, towards the doorsill, I closed my eyes and I fired the first round. Che fell on the floor, his legs broken, he was crumpled up and began to lose a lot of blood. I recovered my spirits and fired the second round which hit him in one arm, the shoulder, and the heart.")
We know that they promised Terán a watch and a trip to West Point as a reward for the execution, promises they never
Ill Today they still tell in Cochabamba, in Bolivia, how "at night, Che Guevara, with Coco Peredo at his side, rides by on horseback, on big mules, on gigantic mules. Mauser in hand. all the way past
Peñones, Arenales and Lajas, Los Sitanos,
Loma Larga and Piraymirí, up to Valle
A teenage friend of mine tells me that he has placed a poster of Che in the bathroom of his house so that his father, who is a Deputy of a reactionary party in Mexico, will see Che in the morning when he shaves, and cut himself.
Travelling through the mountainous Mexican region of Guerrero a year ago, I saw hundreds of images of Che painted on white houses all along the road. Underneath each was the cryptic notation /xl. A friend told me that it was a message for the police: "For each policeman executed " Peasant killed, a
There had been many massacres in the region and there was an atmosphere of high social tension. It would explode later. Che became involved, even as a cartoon character carrying a terrible message. IV It is indisputable that his image is associated with the idea of rebellion, but it goes much further than that. In these days of political travesty, where principles become diluted, where everything depends on what is possible, compromise, and realpolitik, Che embodies the perseverance of ideas, real, stubborn opinions, the simple, just idea that politics is nothing more than distilled ethics. Che is also style, irreverence, and detachment in the face of power, the sustained struggle against bureaucracy. Che is a sense of irony about oneself and a brutal demand on the self; never to demand from another what one is not ready to do oneself. It's a message of outrageous egalitarianism, quasi-monastic, respect for the outcast, the dignity of the sacrifice. V I grew up in a generation which covered romanticism in a layer of rationalism - varnishing, without ever trying to eliminate it. A generation which saw a
Neanderthal Marxism impose ideas like
"demystification", and proscribe words like "adventurer" and "vagabond"
I am perfectly aware that demystifying
Che, re-humanising him in a literary sense
(the only sense i know) and minutely detailing his history, all contributes to a remythification, and I haven't avoided it. I believe in the right to myths.
I also know that talking about Che helps us to reclaim other political rights:
the right to romanticism, to adventure, and to a vagabond sense. I believe that it is time to reclaim them, in their best sense, their ultimate sense in which we all demand that we see the world through the eyes of "others", those who have no rights and who suffer abuse their whole lives; to take the part of people on the margins, the disinherited, the lepers, the poor, the miserable, the least of the least. *