Father of a thousand beards
Richard West
The Argentine cult of the tragic victim may have begun in 1935 with the death in a plane crash of Carlos Gardel, the tango composer whose mournful songs spread the cult round the world. It flourished again after the death from cancer of Eva Peron, first at home, then wherever they cried for Argentina. When I first went to Buenos Aires in 1965, the bar girls were sobbing and tending candles beneath the photographs of John F. Kennedy, the most recent tragic victim. Many years later I noticed a similar cult in a different form in Guatemala, where one weekly newspaper was given over to photographs of the latest corpses, most of them punctured by bullets.
The 30th anniversary of the death of the Argentine gunman, Ernesto `Che' Guevara, has brought a biography by the Mexican Jorge Castaneda, as well as a paperback of the vast, comprehensive study by John Lee Anderson. Even before he was photographed for the last time, stretched out on the slab in Bolivia, Che had become the face that launched a thousand beards. `Premature death, negating life's promise, became a leitmotif of the era,' Castaneda reminds us.
Starting with James Dean in the mid-Fifties, Lennie Bruce in the mid-Sixties, and then the icons of the decade, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, but also Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the Kennedys. Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries became a road book, Jack Kerouac in the Amazon, Easy Rider in the Andes.
Castaneda explains that the Che cult lingers on in the Chapas region of Mexico, where Subcommandante Marcos, 'the media-friendly leader of the Zapatista uprising, still calls for equality, solidarity, individual and collective liberation'. Those of us who have never been Che admirers will note with approval only his brave defence of smokers' liberation. He not only loved the weed but recommended that all guerrillas should carry a pipe in the jungle in order to use up cigarette ends and cigar butts, when there was no plug tobacco. Two of our modern Ches, the pipe-sucking Gerry Adams and the cigar-smoking Car- los, 'the Jackal', carry on the tradition. The Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the last of the fun revolutionaries to have held power, were not so. broad-minded. When the late Peter Kemp was reporting there for The Specta- tor, he blithely lit up his pipe in the main hotel of Managua, where foreign friends of the Revolution gathered when they could skive off picking coffee. Since Peter was getting deaf, he could not hear these young Swedes and Americans voicing their view that people who smoked in public should be shot, so I told them to show more respect for a man who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, not mentioning that he had been on the Franco side.
Castaneda gives only a thinned-down . account of Guevara's Marxist opinions and revolutionary derring-do, for which anyone who is interested may stick with Anderson. However, as Castaneda justly remarks:
Che's ideas, his life and opus . . belong to the past. The Cuban Revolution — his great- est triumph and truest success — is now dis- integrating, and lingers on thanks only to a wholesale rejection of Guevara's ideological heritage.
His heritage lingers on also in the firing squads in which he so gaily took part, and in the concentration camps he helped to established. Even one of Che's natural chil- dren has suffered in Cuba's gulag.
Guevara's misdeeds were not confined to Latin America. These books remind us that he was also involved for years in Rwanda and what are again the two Congo republics, his revolutionary propaganda serving only to stir up ancient tribal hatreds. Just as Havana was once the chief entrepot for the transatlantic slave trade, so it became in the 20th century a prime exporter of misery back to Africa.
Castaneda, as a Mexican, is well aware of why Cubans and other Latin Americans resented Guevara's very Argentine cocki- ness, as well as his Peronista leanings. He may also be miffed that Che in his journeys by motorbike along the Andes mountains ignored the 'beauties of Mexico that have bewitched so many travellers'. He tells us enough about Che's relationship with his adored mother and feckless father for us to draw our own conclusions, Freudian or otherwise. He even ventures a thought on how rugby football may have turned Che into a revolutionary Commandante:
The position of half-scrum [sic] held for Ernesto the great advantage of being more static and strategic, less mobile and tactical, without running from one end of the field to another.
This position at scrum-half also allowed Che to run off field for an injection of adrenalin against his chronic asthma, a sub- ject that Castaneda tackles at length.
Castaneda relates a childhood anecdote that seems to foretell Che's rejection and then betrayal by the Bolivian peasants. When he tried to stop his playmates teasing the 'Man of Dogs', a legless beggar, 'the Man of Dogs mocked him, his icy stare filled with an ageless, irreparable class hatred'.
Guevara's charm, if he really had any, does not come across in these new biographies nor in his recently published Motorcycle Diaries, in which he appears as conceited and callous. I can, however, vouch for the charm of the man who later ordered Guevara's capture and execution, the Bolivian, General Barrientos. A jocular thug, he had already survived several bul- lets in revolution rather than war and might have ended, like Che, on a slab in a military morgue.
To bitch, what's a misogynist?'
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