A modern saint and sinner
Oct 11th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Why the Che myth is bad for the left
AP
THE bearded face—eyes staring defiantly to infinity, the long wavy hair
beneath the beret stirred by the Caribbean breeze—has become one of the
world's most familiar images. Alberto Korda's photograph of Ernesto
"Che" Guevara may be waved aloft by anti-globalisation protesters but it
has spawned a global brand. It has adorned cigarettes, ice cream and a
bikini, and is tattooed on the bodies of footballers.
What explains the extraordinary appeal of Guevara, an Argentine who 40
years ago this week was captured and shot in Bolivia (see article)?
Partly the consistency with which he followed his own injunction that
"the duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution". A frail
asthmatic, he took up arms with Fidel Castro's guerrillas in Cuba's
Sierra Maestra. After their victory, Guevara would fight again in the
Congo as well as Bolivia. He fought dictators who were backed by the
United States in the name of anti-communism when the cold war was at its
hottest, and when Guevara's cry to create "two, three...many Vietnams"
resonated on university campuses across the world. His renewed
popularity in recent years owes much to a revival of anti-Americanism.
But it is semiotics, more than politics, that leads teenagers ignorant
of the Sierra Maestra to sport Che T-shirts. Korda's photograph
established Guevara as a universal symbol of romantic rebellion. It
helps, too, that he died young, at 39: as a member of the Cuban
gerontocracy he would hardly have become the James Dean of world
politics. A second picture, that of the bedraggled guerrilla's corpse,
staring wide-eyed at the camera, provides another clue. It resembles
Andrea Mantegna's portrait of the dead Christ. It fixes Guevara as a
modern saint, the man who risked his life twice in countries that were
not his own before giving it in a third, and whose invocation of the
"new man", driven by moral rather than material incentives, smacked of
St Ignatius Loyola more than Marx.
In Cuba, he is the patron saint: at school, every child must repeat each
morning, "We will be like Che." His supposed relics are the object of
official veneration. In 1997, when Cuba was reeling from the collapse of
its Soviet ally, Mr Castro organised the excavation of Guevara's
skeleton in Bolivia and its reburial in a mausoleum in Cuba. Except that
in the tradition of medieval saints, it probably isn't his body at all,
according to research by Bertrand de la Grange, a French journalist.
A fighter against freedom and democracy
The wider the cult spreads, the further it strays from the man. Rather
than a Christian romantic, Guevara was a ruthless and dogmatic Marxist,
who stood not for liberation but for a new tyranny. In the Sierra
Maestra, he shot those suspected of treachery; in victory, Mr Castro
placed him in charge of the firing squads that executed
"counter-revolutionaries"; as minister of industries, Guevara advocated
expropriation down to the last farm and shop. His exhortation to
guerrilla warfare, irrespective of political circumstance, lured
thousands of idealistic Latin Americans to their deaths, helped to
create brutal dictatorships and delayed the achievement of democracy.
Sadly, Guevara's example is invoked not just by teenagers but by some
Latin American governments. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez wants to create
the guevarista "new man" (see article), just when Cuba is having second
thoughts. As Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara's biographers, notes, Che's
lingering influence has retarded the emergence of a modern, democratic
left in parts of Latin America. Sadly, most of those who buy the T-shirt
neither know nor care.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9947002
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