[Reader-list] Che: The Ronald McDonald of Revolution

[Aashish Gupta]

http://www.worldhum.com/print/item/features/che-the-ronald-mcdonald-of-revolution-20090126/

Che: The Ronald McDonald of Revolution

Speaker's Corner: As a new Che biopic hits theaters, Rolf Potts
examines the clichés of the revolutionary's admirers and detractors


Visit the Museo de la Revolución in central Havana, and two things
about the museum's photo displays will immediately capture your
attention. First, it's clear that the battle to control Cuba in the
late 1950s was ultimately won by the cool guys. Young, bearded and
ruggedly handsome, the rebel warriors of Fidel Castro's 26th of July
Movement look like Beat hipsters and rock stars—Fidel tall and
imposing in his fatigues; Camillo Cienfuegos grinning under his broad-
brimmed cowboy hat; Ernesto "Che" Guevara looking smolderingly
photogenic in his black beret. By contrast, the U.S.-backed dictator
Fulgencio Batista and his cronies look bloated, balding and
unquestionably corrupt in their stubby neckties and damp armpits and
oversized paunches. Even without reading the captions, it's easy to
discern the heroes from the villains.

Look closer, however, and you'll notice that the triumphant photos of
Fidel and Che are faded and mildewed, their corners curled by age and
humidity. The photo captions are spelled out in a clunky die-cast
typeset that hasn't been used in a generation, and contain glowing
present-tense references to the magnanimity of the Soviet Union—a
country that hasn't existed since 1991. Despite the grungy glamour of
the young men who toppled a tyrant all those years ago, the
anachronism and decay of the museum's exhibits reveal just how tired
and toothless Cuba's revolutionary myths have become in Havana. In
many ways, the building is a museum of a museum—a yellowing relic of
how the communist regime chose to portray itself in the 1970s.

Step outside the Museo de la Revolución into the humid Havana air, and
the glamorous sheen of the bygone Cuban revolution seems to have been
distilled into a single image—Alberto Korda's famous 1960 photo of a
bearded Che Guevara looking steely and determined in his beret. In a
city where few buildings outside the restored Habana Vieja district
have seen a new coat of paint in half a century, freshly retouched
renderings of Che's mug adorn countless walls and billboards.
Moreover, in a country largely devoid of public advertising and
religious iconography, Guevara's ubiquitous image appears to fill the
role of both Jesus Christ and Ronald McDonald—a sainted martyr of
unwavering purity who also happens to promote a meticulously
standardized (if not particularly nutritious) political menu.

Study the life of Che Guevara and a complicated portrait emerges.
Raised by old-money bohemian parents in Argentina, young Ernesto
struggled with asthma, read voraciously, studied medicine and became
inspired to help the world's poor after vagabonding through the
Americas in his early 20s. Falling in with Fidel and Raul Castro in
Mexico, he played a heroic role in the Cuban insurgency that
eventually brought down one of the most spectacularly corrupt regimes
in the history of Latin America. As he worked with Fidel to
consolidate the revolution, Che displayed incredible physical and
intellectual energy, an unyielding (if rather creepy and totalitarian)
idealism and a consistent inability to see any project through to a
successful completion. Guevara's stint as minister of industry and
president of the national bank crippled the Cuban economy and resulted
in food rationing; his rigid Marxist-Leninist fantasies helped derail
the revolution's original democratic-socialist inclinations and led to
Cuba's dependence on the Soviet Union; his inability to recruit and
organize the very peasants he meant to liberate led to a series of
disastrous guerrilla adventures in Africa and Latin America,
ultimately resulting in his capture and execution in Bolivia.
Fortunately for his legacy, he left a beautiful corpse (quite
literally, as photographed by his killers), and he's been an icon of
revolutionary romanticism ever since.

Interestingly, Che's legacy inspires some of the least street-level
romanticism within the country he influenced the most. I recently
spent a month in Cuba, and—despite the surplus of government-issued
Che images along the avenues of Havana—I rarely met Cubans under the
age of 40 who regarded Guevara with anything other than ambivalence.
Whereas outsiders see Guevara as a symbol of rebellion, two
generations of Cuban children have been required to bleat "Seremos
como el Che!" ("We will be like Che!") at the outset of each school
day. Most people I spoke with were proud to be Cuban and could
intellectualize the historical merits of the revolution (and Guevara's
role in it), but they were less concerned with emulating Che than
navigating the absurd challenges of day-to-day life in a repressive,
dysfunctional gerontocracy.

Indeed, to get a sense for what it's like to be 18 and Cuban these
days, imagine going to a high school that won a miraculous and
inspiring football championship in 1959. The guy that quarterbacked
the team some 50 years ago is still wearing the same damned uniform—
only now he's the school principal, and he's decreed that all academic
subjects must be studied within the context of that bygone
championship game. Everyone at your school is now an honorary member
of the football team—though the stadium is condemned from years of
neglect, no actual games have been played in decades and anyone with
the temerity to point out this discrepancy is summarily sent to
detention. On most school days you're required to study your
principal's old pass-routes and blocking schemes and tell him how
ingenious he was to have devised them. All of which would seem insane
were it not for the fact that tourists from wealthier schools—schools
with actual, functioning football teams—are constantly visiting your
class to marvel over how wonderful it was that your team triumphed 50
years ago, and gush about how proud you must be to have such
innovative role models. In this context, it's easy to understand why
young Cubans are underwhelmed by the idea of Che: To them, he's just
another sepia portrait in the trophy case—handsome and intriguing,
perhaps, but hardly relevant or revolutionary.

Granted, it's not hard to find Che Guevara aficionados in Cuba—just
keep an eye out for anyone who has the option to leave the country at
their leisure. During my month in Havana, I met half a dozen Europeans
with Che tattoos on various body parts, no less than two Uruguayan
medical students who unironically wore black berets, and a woman from
Oregon who sported a homemade "Guerrillero Heroico" tank top and
insisted that the blame for contemporary Cuban misery could be traced
to the small-minded prejudices of red-state America. Whenever I
mentioned the more troubling aspects of Che's biography to these
folks, none of them seemed all that phased. Sure, Che might have
promoted his ideals through force and violence, they said, but
unwavering conviction and action are the only forces that can change a
complacent world. Sure, Che shrugged off torture and executions on his
watch, but he was at heart an inspiring humanitarian who ultimately
hoped to improve the lives of millions. Sure, Che tried to impose a
one-size-fits-all political vision on faraway cultures—but at least
that vision was just, and might well have worked had it been given a
chance to take hold.

This kind of rationalization sounded vaguely familiar at the time, and
it wasn't until I returned to the United States that I realized neo-
conservative apologists were using the exact same language and
reasoning to defend the foreign policy decisions of George W. Bush.

While it's doubtful that any filmmaker would endeavor to dramatize
Bush through the unvarnished lens of his political ideals, that's more
or less the treatment Guevara gets in "Che," Steven Soderbergh's four-
hour, two-part film biopic, screening in select theaters nationwide.
Soderbergh's project, which stars Academy Award-winner Benicio del
Toro, depicts Che's military accomplishments in Cuba as well as his
failed guerrilla insurgency in Bolivia. Though both installments of
the film are too grungy and impressionistic to spin Guevara as a
typecast Hollywood hero, the continual portrayal of Che sacrificing
and suffering for his ideals makes him come off like something more
fanciful—a warrior-humanist martyr, as comfortable tending to the sick
and illiterate as he is brandishing his rifle or facing certain death.
Guevara's less-than-saintly real-life exploits between his Cuba and
Bolivia campaigns (including but not limited to his role in executing
political prisoners in Havana, his callous mismanagement of the Cuban
economy and his military blunderings in the Congo) are conveniently
glossed over.

Omission or embellishment of context is, in fact, a central pillar of
the Che Guevara movie sub-genre (which goes all the way back to 1969's
"Che!"—which starred Omar Sharif and was directed by the same guy who
made "Soylent Green" and "Mandingo"). In the climactic scene of Walter
Salles' 2004 film "The Motorcycle Diaries," for instance, a young Che
played by Mexican heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal swims across a swollen
Amazon tributary as a display of solidarity with a group of
dispossessed Peruvian lepers. Read the actual diary on which the movie
was based, however, and it's apparent that Guevara's river-swim was an
apolitical test of his own aquatic skills—and, on saying goodbye to
the lepers, he glibly noted that they looked "like a scene from a
horror movie." Moreover, Guevara's unnerving sense of entitlement in
the pages of "The Motorcycle Diaries" (at one point young Ernesto
throws a sullen tantrum when a local shipping deputy won't comp his
riverboat fare) never makes the transition onto Salles' big-screen
version.

Tempting as it may be to attribute Che's popular appeal to the
reductionist tropes of photography and cinema, however, I'd wager his
enduring potency goes beyond mere imagery. Of the many books that have
been released or reprinted to coincide with the release of
Soderbergh's movie, Humberto Fontova's "Exposing the Real Che Guevara"
is perhaps the most telling. Published by Penguin's politically
conservative Sentinel imprint, "Exposing the Real Che Guevara" is
meant to be a polemic against Guevara's T-shirt-certified mythology—
but in function it does a lot to show how Che's reputation actually
benefits from the myopic fury (and misguided political influence) of
those who hate him the most.

Taken in selective doses, Fontova's book does punch some well-placed
holes in Che's presumed humanism and military competence. The problem
is that each argument invariably meanders off into subject matter that
has little to do with the book's premise. A chapter that starts out as
an indictment of Guevara's battlefield acumen ultimately turns into a
tribute to the Cuban-exile fighters who stormed the Bay of Pigs in
1961; a chapter meant to debunk Che's intellectual proclivities
wanders off into a jeremiad on behalf of the Cuban-exiles who lost
their art collections after the revolution. In places, Fontova's books
seems less an indictment of Guevara than the New York Times (which
gave positive coverage to Che and Fidel in the months before they
toppled Batista) or John F. Kennedy (who scuttled U.S. military
support when the Bay of Pigs invasion went sour).

Ultimately, "Exposing the Real Che Guevara" is less about Che Guevara
than the "King Lear"-style resentments of the Cuban-Americans who hate
him—and the effectiveness of its argument suffers as a result. In two
lengthy chapters detailing Guevara's bloodthirsty stint as commander
of Havana's La Cabaña Fortress prison, Fontova veers into abstraction
by continually comparing Che and Fidel's tyranny to that of Hitler and
Stalin instead of contemporary Latin American dictators like Somoza or
Trujillo. The most damning comparison might well have been to draw
parallels to the brutal repression of Batista himself—the very tyrant
Che helped depose—but this would have been too awkward a juxtaposition
for the Cuban exiles the author seems anxious to venerate. This gives
the book a slightly schizophrenic tone, from which it never fully
departs. At one point, Fontova convincingly argues that Guevara wanted
the all-encompassing U.S. economic embargo that strains Cuban-American
relations to this day. So why not ruin Che's master plan by lifting
the embargo and flooding Cuba with American investment, trade and
tourism? Fontova's answer is incoherent: "Libertarian-free-market
ideologues got it wrong," he writes. "They insisted that with the
lifting of the embargo, capitalists would sneak in and eventually
blindside Castro. All the proof was to the contrary. Capitalism didn't
sweep Castro away or even co-opt him. He swept it away."

Such an inane suspension of logic and chronology would be easier to
dismiss if it didn't mirror 50 years of American foreign policy toward
Cuba. There is no doubt that Cuban exiles suffered when Fidel and Che
took power all those years ago, but basing present-day policy
decisions on 1959-vintage revenge fantasies is not only ineffective
(as Castro's lengthy reign has illustrated)—it's bad for the image and
national interests of a country that already has a less-than-honorable
track record in Latin America. Che Guevara's radicalization is
famously tied to America's moral hypocrisy in the region (specifically
the CIA-sponsored 1954 coup in Guatemala, when Eisenhower chose the
corporate interests of United Fruit Company over the authority of a
democratically elected government)—and his revolutionary legacy will
likely remain strong so long as the U.S. government flouts
international law with the Helms-Burton Act, permits prisoner abuse in
Guantánamo and punishes Cuba for the same set of political
circumstances it tolerates in China and Vietnam.

In recent years many people have pointed out how Che Guevara may
someday be remembered as a capitalist brand as much as a communist
firebrand. Those affronted by the intolerant extremes of Che's Marxism
can take comfort in the fact that his visage is now used to sell T-
shirts, belt buckles, Taco Bell gorditas, bikinis and "Cherry Guevara"
ice cream sandwiches ("the revolutionary struggle of the cherries ...
trapped between two layers of chocolate").

This in itself is a telling contradiction. But so long as U.S.-Cuba
policy remains as warped and dated as the photos in Havana's Museo de
la Revolución, Che Guevara will continue to thrive as a catchall
symbol of the American government's own tendency to contradict itself.
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