[NYTr] 6 Questions on Che's Legacy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Harpers - Sep 30, 2007
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001318

Six Questions for Greg Grandin on Che’s Legacy

by Bernie Becker

Forty years ago this month, Che Guevara was captured and executed as he
tried to lead a guerilla insurrection deep in the Bolivian jungle.
Despite questions about his sometimes violent tactics and effectiveness
as a revolutionary leader, Che remains an iconic symbol—even though
he’s now been dead longer than he was alive. Che’s popularity in this
country might stem more from how he looks on album covers and T-shirts
than from his ideas or actions, but in Latin America, Che is remembered
for his willingness to stand up to the United States. Greg Grandin, a
history professor at New York University, is the author of several
books on American influence in Latin America, most recently last year’s
Empire’s Workshop.

1. How is Che currently viewed in Latin America and how different is
his image there than it is here?

There are those in the U.S. who see Che as a generic symbol of
rebellion against power and some who even think seriously about his
political legacy, but he is more readily available as a pop and
commercial icon. His image has been co-opted, following in the
tradition of Warhol’s silk-screened Mao. In Latin America, some of this
banalization exists, but the popularity and understanding of Che goes
well beyond that. I was living in Guatemala a decade ago when peace
accords ended that country’s 36-year civil war, in which hundreds of
thousands of civilians died. Suddenly Che’s image was everywhere. One
street vendor told me that during the first three months after the war
ended she sold more images of Che than she did of pop stars or the
Virgin Mary. So Che–who was no fan of free speech–became a symbol of
exactly that in a country long repressed. Throughout the region, Che
remains a multifaceted symbol of reform, embodying anything from
anti-imperialist resistance to revolutionary purity. And of course it
doesn’t hurt that he is so good looking—I.F. Stone said that he was the
first man he had ever met who he thought not just handsome but
beautiful. In recent years, a number of admirers have been elected
leaders of a number of countries: Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s
Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and
Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner all have embraced Che. Even more cautious
reformers like Brazil’s Lula feel compelled to pay homage to his legacy.

2. How has his image evolved over the last four decades in Latin
America?

His popularity has increased since his death. When he was alive, the
Cuban Revolution, of which he was one of the most visible spokesmen,
represented a divide between Latin America’s old, reformist, Communist
Party Left, and a new, insurgent left. Today, those debates are largely
the stuff of history and his appeal is practically universal save among
the most hidebound. Look at Bolivia to get a sense of just how much his
reputation has evolved–it was there, in the remote village called La
Higuera, that Bolivian forces, aided by CIA agents, executed Che. His
Bolivian expedition was a complete failure and his capture had much to
do with the fact that he didn’t receive much support from either the
Bolivian Communist Party nor from peasants. But today Che’s image is
everywhere in Bolivia and he is particularly esteemed by that country’s
powerful peasant and indigenous movement. President Morales is reported
to keep a picture of him in his wallet and just last year, upon winning
the presidency, he participated in an unofficial inauguration, where he
claimed Che as a patron saint of indigenous rights, saying, “The
struggle that Che Guevara left uncompleted, we shall complete.”

3. What do you say to those who object to this canonization of Che,
claiming that he’s nothing more than a totalitarian murderer?

I’d say tell it to the millions of Latin Americans, many of them at the
margins of society, fighting for a just, truly democratic world, who
still find inspiration in his struggle and image. To them, there is no
confusion. Do our political commissars, always on the hunt for any
whiff of residual sympathy for the militant New Left, really want to
dismiss those people out of hand as irrelevant or misguided? Over the
last two decades, social movements inspired by Che have fought against
free-market orthodoxy. Those movements are bearers of the
social-democratic tradition and are seeking to advance democracy.

4. The vision Che had for Cuba and the Third World in general did not
develop. How does that effect his legacy?

You could argue that the failure of the Cuban model has actually
benefited Che’s legacy, which has evolved from the specific political
project he was associated with. Forty years ago. Che died trying to
export the armed tactics of the Cuban Revolution elsewhere. There were
many reasons why the Left by that time had embraced violent
insurrection as a strategy, not the least of which was the refusal of
the region’s elites, fortified with support from Washington, to give up
even the slightest of its privileges. Since then, the Latin American
Left has evolved. Today it is profoundly peaceful and democratic,
despite having adopted an icon of insurrection as its talisman.

5. What are some of the common misperceptions about Che in the United
States?

My guess is that the American public knows very little about Che. If
they saw the movie Motorcycle Diaries, they may have learned that he
was Argentine, not Cuban. But few know that just after that tour around
Latin America, where he first began to develop a pan-American
consciousness, he wound up in Guatemala, a country that at the time was
undergoing a profound democratic revolution. Che practiced social
medicine in the country’s rural highlands, ministering to the country’s
most marginal. He was in Guatemala during the CIA’s 1954 coup that
ended that country’s democracy, and he saw firsthand the U.S. role in
restoring a regime that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of
its citizens. He always cited his experience in Guatemala as a turning
point. Prior to the coup, the Latin American left, including Communist
groups, still believed it was possible to work with a country’s
national bourgeois to achieve social democratic reform. Afterwards, it
was increasingly difficult to do so. Che himself would go on to taunt
the United States, saying “Cuba will not be another Guatemala” to
justify the restrictions of civil liberties in Cuba, since it was
through the subversion of the press, the Church, and independent
political parties that the CIA did its work in Guatemala, and
subsequently elsewhere.

6. How have American policies in Latin America following Che’s death
impacted his image in the region? 

Che was executed in 1967, and some of the worst interventions by
Washington in Latin America were still to come. Most people are aware
of the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile
in 1973 and Reagan’s wars in Central America in the 1980s. Less known
is U.S. involvement in, or at least sanctioning of, coups in Uruguay in
1973 and Argentina in 1976. Following the demise of the Soviet Union,
Washington moved away from its reliance on repressive Latin American
proxies, banking instead on its ability to project its power through
elections and economic pressure. This worked throughout the 1990s, as
heavily indebted countries governed by centrists submitted to the
command of the IMF. Over the past few years, roughly since Chávez’s
landslide victory in 1998, the system has started to break down. The
“Washington consensus,” as this set of policies came to be called,
proved an absolute disaster. Between 1980 and 2000, in per capita
terms, the region grew cumulatively by only 9 per cent. Compare that
with the 82 per cent expansion of the previous two decades, and add to
it the financial crises that have rolled across Mexico, Brazil,
Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina over the past 15 years,
sweeping away accumulated savings, destroying the middle class, and
wrecking the agricultural sector, and you will get a sense of why Evo
Morales is calling for the completion of Che’s struggle.