Just a pretty face?
For 40 years he has been a sex symbol, heroic victim and the ultimate poster
boy of revolutionary chic. But behind the myth of Che Guevara lie darker
truths. On the eve of a new film, it is time to reassess the Sixties' most
enduring icon. By Sean O'Hagan of The Observer
On the outskirts of Vallegrande, a mountain village in Bolivia, there is a
single airstrip, little more than a long ribbon of rubble and dirt. It was
there, seven years ago, that a team of forensic scientists from Argentina and
Cuba began digging in search of the skeleton of a man with no hands. They found
it after a few days, buried alongside the bones of six others.
Thirty years after his death, the remains of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, whose hands
had been cut off following his execution by his Bolivian army captors, were
finally returned to Cuba, the homeland he adopted and helped remake in his
image. His final resting place is a mausoleum in the suburbs of the city of
Santa Clara, a site of almost religious significance to Cubans who lived though
the revolution of 1959. Vallegrande, where his corpse was put on public display
following his execution, remains much as it was, a forlorn place with little
trace of his presence save for the hawkers of cheap Che memorabilia who wait for
the tourist buses. On the wall of the town's public telephone office, someone
has written, 'Che - alive as they never wanted you to be'.
In the tumultuous year that followed Guevara's death, that sentiment was echoed
in the slogan 'Che lives!' which appeared on walls in Paris, Prague, Berkeley
and Belfast. During the political unrest of 1968, it became a clarion call for
what seemed like a spontaneous global insurrection and, for a brief moment, it
seemed like the old order - capitalism, the Cold War, conservatism, militarism -
might actually be replaced by something (though what exactly was never defined)
younger and freer. That something was symbolised by the doomed romantic figure
of Che Guevara, whose short life ended in a kind of martyrdom in the mountains
of Bolivia, where the CIA openly admitted their role in his capture.
'In a way, 1968 began in 1967 with the murder of Che,' says the author and
political journalist, Christopher Hitchens, who describes himself as 'a
recovering Marxist, not ashamed, not unbowed, but thoughtful'. Like many who
came of age politically in the late Sixties, Hitchens was in thrall to the
personality cult that attended Che. 'His death meant a lot to me, and countless
like me, at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us
bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant
to do - fought and died for his beliefs.'
Almost 40 years on, the wave of romantic revolutionary idealism Che helped
ignite seems as unreal as Alice's wonderland, and the Communist ideology that
inspired it dated and anachronistic. Che's defiant image may still hang in the
offices of Andy Gilchrist, leader of the Fire Brigades' Union, and Bob Crow of
the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union but, politically at least, it is a relic
of a bygone era, as arcane in its way as as those old ornate union banners.
Internationally, too, Guevara's ideological legacy is in tatters, his memory
kept alive only by the few remaining leftist guerrilla movements such as the
Zapatistas in Mexico, or the recently established People's Democratic Republic
of the Congo, whose guerrilla leader Che trained back in the Sixties.
In Cuba, Guevara remains a quasi- saintly figure, as well as a symbol of what
was, and what might have been, in Castro's now faltering state. Though it has
survived decades of sanctions and attempts to assassinate its leader, the
socialist republic of Cuba is now under threat from within: sex tourism and
Castro's treatment of dissidents and gays have long since sullied the idea of
equality that underpinned the revolution of 1959. And yet, the myth of Che
endures.
That myth has long since floated free of Cuba and its revolution, becoming an
amorphous entity that has little to do with Guevara's politics or the historical
context that produced him. In 1967, the same year that Che died, the radical
French activist Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle which, among other
things, predicted our current obsession with celebrity and event. 'All that was
once directly lived', wrote Debord, 'has become mere representation.' Nowhere is
this dictum more starkly illustrated than in the case of Che, who, in the four
decades since his death, has been used to sell everything from china mugs to
denim jeans, herbal tea to canned beer. There was, maybe still is, a brand of
soap powder bearing his name, along with the slogan 'Che washes whiter'. Today,
Che lives! all right, but not in the way he or his fellow revolutionaries could
ever have imagined in their worst nightmares. He has become a global brand.
The late Alberto Korda - whose iconic photograph of the bearded and long-haired
Che wearing a beret with a red star may be the most appropriated image ever -
won a moral victory of sorts when he successfully sued a British advertising
agency for using it in an ad for Smirnoff vodka. The appropriation, though, is
unstoppable, and radical chic was elevated to a new level of absurdity when
Madonna recently dressed up as Che for the cover of her single 'American Life'.
As I write, Korda's image is being debunked in the poster for Politics, Ricky
Gervais's stand-up show, which sees the creator of The Office sporting a beret,
beard, fatigues and fake tan. Had he wanted a real one, he could have booked a
holiday with 'Che Trails', which offers trips to Cuba where you can 'follow in
the footsteps of the famous revolutionary'.
'Ironically, Che's life has been emptied of the meaning he would have wanted it
to have,' asserts Jorge Castañeda, author of Compañero: The Life and Death of
Che Guevara . 'Whatever the left might think, he has long since ceased to be an
ideological and political figure.' Castañeda insists, though, that Che still
possesses 'an extraordinary relevance. He's a symbol of a time when people died
heroically for what they believed in. People don't do that any more.'
Hitchens, too, believes that Che endures not because of how he lived, but how he
died. 'He belongs more to the romantic tradition than the revolutionary one. To
endure as a romantic icon, one must not just die young, but die hopelessly. Che
fulfils both criteria. When one thinks of Che as a hero, it is more in terms of
Byron than Marx.'
The myth of Che the romantic hero is about to enter a new phase with the release
of The Motorcycle Diaries , a rose-tinted road movie based on the book the
pre-revolutionary Ernesto Guevara wrote about his journey across Latin America
in the company of his best friend, Alberto Granado. Directed by Walter Salles,
who made Central Station and produced City of God, it comes trailing critical
plaudits from this year's Cannes film festival. If, as the historian Robert
Conquest once claimed, the cult of Che among the young is based on 'one of the
unfortunate afflictions to which the human mind is prone... adolescent
revolutionary romanticism', Salles should have a sure-fire hit on his hands. The
presence of Hollywood's hippest heartthrob, Gael García Bernal - star of Amores
Perros and Almodóvar's Bad Education - in the lead role will ensure that an
impressionable new generation will discover Che, albeit as a tousled, sun-kissed
loveable rogue on a road trip to political epiphany.
'The Che of The Motorcycle Diaries is more akin to Jack Kerouac or Neal Casady
than Marx or Lenin,' says the film's producer, and former head of FilmFour, Paul
Webster. 'He was naturally drawn to the peripatetic lifestyle that defined the
Fifties and Sixties, that sense of constant motion and adventure that began with
the Beats. Walter's film gives you a glimpse of the young, idealistic Ernesto
Guevara before he became Che, the legend.' Webster wouldn't have been so keen to
finance a film about the young Fidel Castro, then? 'No. There is no myth around
Castro. Che was young and beautiful, and that, as much as all that happened
later, is what underpins the myth. Paul Newman once said, "If I'd been born
with brown eyes, I wouldn't be a film star." Well, if Che hadn't been born
so good-looking, he wouldn't be a mythical revolutionary.'
At least two other films about Guevara are currently in development, one
directed by Steven Soderbergh, and rumoured to star Benicio del Toro, the other
a vehicle for Antonio Banderas, who has already played Che in Evita. Hollywood
has flirted with the notion of the romantic revolutionary before, most notably
in Spike Lee's flawed bio-pic Malcolm X and in Neil Jordan's confused portrait
of Irish Republican Michael Collins. The late Marlon Brando made a less than
convincing Zapata in Viva Zapata! in 1952. More recently, Oliver Stone made a
controversial hagiographic documentary about Fidel Castro. Its release was put
on hold when, in April, Castro executed three Cubans who had hijacked the ferry,
and sentenced 78 dissident writers to 28 years in prison.
Unlike Salles, Soderbergh will have to tackle the contradictions of Che's
revolutionary life, and show the ruthless guerrilla leader as well as the
romantic pin-up. With all Hollywood's powers of persuasion, it is difficult to
see post-9/11 US audiences taking to a gun-toting Communist guerrilla fighter
preaching anti-American, anti-capitalist rhetoric, and calling for 'a dozen
Vietnams'.
Hollywood's sudden renewed interest in Che - he was lionised once before in a
best-forgotten 1969 epic Che!, starring Omar Sharif opposite Jack Palance as a
fiendish Fidel - backs up Hitchens's view that while Guevara's ideological
cachet may be at an all time low, his status as both sex symbol and heroic
victim is undiminished. Once dubbed 'the poster boy for the revolution' by the
right, Che was transformed into a global pin-up at the very moment of his
greatest triumph, when Korda, a fledgling fashion photographer, snapped him
standing beside Castro on a balcony in Havana on 5 March 1960.
'Finding Che in his lens,' writes Jon Lee Anderson, in Che Guevara: A
Revolutionary Life , 'Korda focused and was stunned by the expression on Che's
face. It was one of absolute implacability. He snapped and the photo soon went
around the world, eventually becoming the famous poster that would adorn so many
college bedrooms. In it, Che appears as the ultimate revolutionary icon, his
eyes staring boldly into the future, his expression a virile embodiment of
outrage at social injustice.'
The die was cast. By 1970, that defiant image had become, as the British pop
artist Peter Blake later put it, 'one of the great icons of the 20th century',
appearing on T-shirts, badges and postcards, a secular version of the holy
pictures and relics of Catholic saints. The same image was silk-screened by Andy
Warhol, and took its place alongside Marilyn Monroe and James Dean in the
iconography of Pop Art. The transformation from symbol of violent revolution to
emblem of Sixties cool was complete, and Che has remained more Lennon than Lenin
ever since.
'The image of Che was just so right for the time,' says liberal American writer
Lawrence Osborne, whose critique of Guevara appeared recently in the New York
Observer. 'Che was the revolutionary as rock star. Korda, as a fashion
photographer, sensed that instinctively, and caught it. Before then, the Nazis
were the only political movement to understand the power of glamour and sexual
charisma, and exploit it. The Communists never got it. Then you have the Cuban
revolution, and into this void come these macho guys with their straggly hair
and beards and big-dick glamour, and suddenly Norman Mailer and all the radi cal
chic crowd are creaming their jeans. Che had them in the palm of his hand, and
he knew it. What he didn't know, of course, was how much that image would define
him.'
Osborne sees Che's iconographic status as being maintained in part by 'the
absence of questioning voices addressing the darker side of the man and his
ideology'. In Guevara's political writing he detects a 'puritanical zeal and
pure and undisguised hatred' that, in places, becomes almost pathological. 'This
was a guy who preached hatred, who wrote speeches that were almost
proto-fascist,' he says, quoting a speech that ends, 'Relentless hatred of the
enemy impels us over and over, and transforms us into effective and selective
violent cold killing machines.'
Osborne points to the contradiction between the Che who spouted such rhetoric,
and the Che who has been elevated to the level of secular saint. 'The right got
it wrong when they called him a poster boy for the revolution. Che was much more
than that - he was a steely, driven, ruthless leader. He may have been an
idealist, but he was also someone unafraid to get his hands dirty in pursuit of
an ideal. His contradictions define him more than anything else'.
From the start, Ernesto Guevara - the nickname Che came later from his habit of
referring to everyone as che, or 'pal' - was a magnetic and strong-willed
presence. Born in 1928, to aristocratic but radical parents in Rosaria,
Argentina, he was the first of five children. His character was forged in part
by the chronic asthma that would dog him until his death.
'His battle with asthma had much to do with what he became,' says Castañeda.
'As a child he grew used to resisting and overcoming a terrible illness through
sheer will, and came to the conclusion early on that every problem could be
solved or defeated through sheer will, even America, even global capitalism.
That, in a way, was his strength and his downfall.'
Che's mother, Celia, from whom he inherited his indomitable spirit, and with
whom he corresponded throughout his life, inculcated in him a free spirit and a
passionate hatred of the Peronist right in Argentina. With her encouragement, he
studied medicine in Buenos Aires, interrupting his education to undertake the
motorcycle trip that politicised him.
In The Motorcycle Diaries, he describes the exploitation and poverty he sees
everywhere, which he identifies as 'the living representation of the proletariat
in any part of the world'. By the book's end, his anger has turned to hatred. 'I
feel my nostrils dilate,' he writes, 'savouring the acrid smell of gunpowder and
blood, of the enemy's death.' Youthful posturing maybe but, as his later life
showed, Che had a cold-blooded streak as well as a love of battle.
In 1954, having seen the CIA-backed coup overthrow the socialist government in
Guatemala, Che fled to Mexico, where he met the exiled Fidel Castro, who was
plotting revolution against the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Che
immediately volunteered his services as a medical officer and, while training
with Castro's guerrillas in Mexico, married his first wife, Hilda Gadea. Their
daughter, Hildita, was just one year old when Che set sail for Cuba with Castro
and 80 other exiles, and began the guerrilla campaign against Batista.
Initially, the campaign was a catalogue of disasters but slowly the rebels
gained local support, often from peasants who realised it was more dangerous to
support Batista than Che. 'Denouncing us put them in danger,' he wrote in his
Cuban war diaries, 'since revolutionary justice was speedy.' In 1958, in a
battle that has now entered Cuban folklore, a few hundred rebels defeated 10,000
of Batista's men in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and Castro and Che's
impossible adventure sud denly turned into a real revolution. By the time they
took Havana in 1959, Che had taken up with the woman who would become his second
wife, 24-year-old Aleida March de la Torre. Politically, Aleida and Che were
incompatible as she belonged to an anti-Communist revolutionary faction that he
hated. But, as Jon Lee Anderson notes, 'When it came to women, especially
attractive women, Che tended to put his political philosophies on hold.'
In truth, though, the same kind of contradictions attended those politic
philosophies. Che was an inspiring leader but also a harsh and unbending
taskmaster, who meted out stern punishment. On his orders, several peasants were
executed for disloyalty, as were local bandits who preyed on the poor. Others,
often no more than boys, underwent mock executions. 'We blindfolded them,' he
wrote later, 'and subjected them to the anguish of a simulated firing squad.'
In his trenchant short study, Che Guevara, the British historian Andrew Sinclair
concludes that, during the guerrilla war, Che 'discovered a cold ruthlessness in
his nature. Spilling blood was necessary for the cause. Within two years, he
would order the death of several hundred Batista partisans at La Cabana, one of
the mass killings of the Cuban Revolution.' Later too, after the botched Bay of
Pigs invasion by anti-Communist Cuban exiles, all the survivors were summarily
shot.
In the halcyon post-revolution days, Che was made Governor of the National Bank,
his face appearing on the two peso note. Magnum photographer Rene Burri - he
took another defining photograph of Che, eyes blazing, cigar clamped in the side
of his mouth - tells this story about the haphazard creation of Castro's first
cabinet. 'One of Castro's aides asked, "Is there an economist in the
room?", and, to everyone's surprise, Che stuck up his hand. Because they
were all in awe of him, they voted him governor of the bank. It turns out Che
had misheard the question. He thought the guy had asked, "Is there a
Communist in the room?"'
Che did not last long in the post, and was soon made Minister for Industry, a
job that made him a nomadic ambassador for the revolution. During the Cuban
Missile Crisis in 1962 Che was more bullish even than Castro or Khrushchev,
seemingly unconcerned that the whole world was holding its breath over the
outcome. 'The worst thing I heard about him,' says Hitchens, 'is that he was in
favour of launching the missiles. That, for me, is a contradiction too far. You
can't be a great revolutionary who wants to free the world and be a guy who
wants to push the button. You can only be one or the other.'
Rene Burri photographed Che in Havana in 1963, just months after the Cuban
missile crisis. Che was being interviewed by an American woman from Look
magazine. 'I was in his tiny office for three hours, the blinds closed
throughout, and Che was pacing the room like a caged tiger. The interview was
like a cockfight between Communism and capitalism, and he was strutting and
angry, hectoring this woman, and chomping on his cigar. Suddenly, he looked
straight at me and said, "So, you are with Magnum. If I catch up with your
friend Andy, I'll cut his throat", and he drew his finger slowly across his
throat.' Andy was Andrew St George, another Magnum photographer, who had
travelled with Che in the Sierra Maestra, and then later filed reports for
American intelligence. 'Che was fired up that day' says Burri, 'and he was maybe
a showman, but it scared the hell out of me. I knew then, this was a man who was
not cut out to be a politician, he was a soldier and a killer.'
By 1965, Burri had been proven right, and Che, fed up with the difficulties of
trying to make post-revolutionary Cuba work, left the island to pursue armed
struggle elsewhere, convinced that he could be the catalyst for countless
revolutions in Africa and Latin America.
'There is a sense, seldom articulated, that Che, for all his heroism and
romance, was a wild card, and that even Castro realised this relatively early
on,' says Lawrence Osborne. 'He had this Jack London-style attitude to
revolution as one great big unending adventure, but none of the political
maturity to deal with the practical realities of making the country work. He had
this Castilian Spanish upper-class guilt about the working class and peasants
that he never quite overcame. For all the noble impulses that drove him, and I
think there were many, Che's whole life could be read as a foredoomed attempt to
leave his own class.'
In 1965, Che's adventurism and ideological zealotry led him him to Africa, and
an unsuccessful attempt at revolution in the Congo. From there, he returned
briefly to Cuba, whence, increasingly estranged from Castro, he set off for
Bolivia to begin his last and final guerrilla war. Of all the books written by
Guevara, The Bolivian Diaries are the most powerful and affecting, not least
because the ideological demagoguery of old has disappeared, replaced by a more
stoical voice. It is a diary of struggle and hardship, of dismay and defeat, the
antithesis of The Motorcycle Diaries, and, of course, not a story that Hollywood
will ever tell.
He was captured at the Yuro Ravine in 1967 by troops loyal to military President
Barrientos. Over the phone from Mexico, Castañeda tells me that he is certain
Castro had a troop of men ready to go to Bolivia as soon as he heard that Che
was in danger, but that the Soviet deputy, Kosygin, just returned from
conciliatory talks with US President Johnson, overruled such an action. 'Johnson
made it clear to Kosygin that the Americans would countenance no attempts to
save Che.'
Could Castro have saved Che, but chose not to? 'I don't think it's that simple.
Real politics had intervened.But Castro always had the option to mount a rescue
mission even if it was by no way assured. Put it this way: there had been a
time, not long before, when he would have done it without question.'
The day after his capture, bedraggled and exhausted, Che was trussed up and
taken to a thatched school house in La Higuera, where he was shot four times by
a Bolivian volunteer called Mario Teran, who lives in hiding to this day. Che
was 39. His last words were, 'I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward,
you are only going to kill a man.'
But even his enemies knew that Che Guevara's legend would not die with him. To
leave the world in no doubt of his identity, his captors instructed some local
nuns to wash his face, tidy his bedraggled hair and beard, then photographed his
corpse. To their dismay, the image that was circulated throughout the world
recalled countless Renaissance paintings of the dead Christ taken down from the
cross - and so Che attained iconic status for the second time.
'The Christ-like image prevailed', wrote Jorge Castañeda in Compañero. 'It's
as if the dead Guevara looks on his killers and forgives them, and upon the
world, proclaiming that he who dies for an idea is beyond suffering.'
Of course it is this ultimate sacrifice that defines the romantic myth of Che
Guevara as much as his good looks or his revolutionary life. In death, he was
frozen forever, and spared the ignominy of a long decline. 'Che's iconic status
was assured because he failed,' says Hitchens, 'His story was one of defeat and
isolation, and that's why it is so seductive. Had he lived, the myth of Che
would have long since died.'
Jorge Castañeda agrees: 'What he shows us is that myths are bigger than mere
politics or ideology, are bigger even than the cruel drift of history.' Che
lives, then, and, as long as we do not look at his life too closely, will live
on as long as we need him to, and in whatever way we want him to. For him, one
suspects, that would have been the cruellest fate imaginable.
· The Motorcycle Diaries is released on 27 August.
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