[NYTr] Che's legacy looms larger than ever

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Los Angeles Times - October 8, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/search/la-fg-che8oct08,1,1392358,full.story


Che's legacy looms larger than ever

It's been 40 years since the militant revolutionary was executed in a
Bolivian schoolhouse. To leftist governments across Latin America, he's
still a beloved icon.

By Patrick J. McDonnell

LA HIGUERA, Bolivia--It was a long fight, but the Cubans have finally
conquered this forlorn Andean hamlet, four decades after Ernesto "Che"
Guevara was executed in the adobe schoolhouse here.

Cuban physicians provide healthcare, Cuban educators oversee literacy
classes, and the Cuban-donated library features Che-as-superhero comic
books. A monumental bust of the beret-topped revolutionary who helped
Fidel Castro seize power in Cuba dominates the central plaza.

"Great men like Che never die," said Ubanis Ramirez, one of hundreds of
Cuban doctors and teachers imported by leftist Bolivian President Evo
Morales, whose office features a likeness of Guevara crafted from coca
leaves. "His lesson is with us always."

Sympathizers from across the globe will make the trek to this remote
corner of Bolivia this week to mark the 40th anniversary of the capture
and killing of Guevara, militant leftist icon and global brand, the
radical chic face adorning countless T-shirts, posters, album covers
and tattoos.

Today, the ideological legacy of this peripatetic militant may loom
larger than ever in Latin America, abetted by the election of a "Pink
Tide" of leftist governments from Nicaragua to Argentina. Socialism is
in, the Cubans are on the march, and Che is the defiant embodiment of
it all.

To his critics, Guevara was a trigger-happy megalomaniac whose bloody
example led thousands to their deaths in futile uprisings that only
hardened military repression from Guatemala to Chile.

But to the legions of devotees who subscribe to his personality cult,
Guevara is forever the doomed idealist, the poetry- loving guerrillero
and "most complete human being of our age," in the words of Jean-Paul
Sartre.

"Our side is moving forward, and we don't have to go to the mountains
and fight like Che did anymore," said Osvaldo Peredo, who heads
Bolivia's Che Guevara Foundation and lost two brothers in guerrilla
wars, one fighting alongside Che.

Cuban doctors and petro- dollars from Hugo Chavez's Venezuela are the
new arsenal in a nonviolent insurrection that Guevara, committed to
armed struggle, could never have envisioned.

"Finally, Che's dream is coming true," said former Mexican Foreign
Minister Jorge Casteñeda, a Guevara biographer who casts Che more as
wayward fanatic than inspired visionary. "Cuba's export of revolution
is finally succeeding in many countries in Latin America, thanks to
Chavez and his oil."

A legendary guerrilla leader in the Cuban Revolution that ousted
dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Guevara stumbled in his 1960s
struggles. Virtually exiled from Cuba after differing with Castro and
Cuba's Soviet patrons, he suffered an ignominious defeat alongside
anti-U.S. rebels in Congo before meeting his demise in a secluded
Bolivian canyon at the end of a quixotic 11-month campaign.

But, 40 years later, Guevara has scored big in the contested
battleground of memory, emerging as a kind of secular saint,
freeze-framed at age 39 between the Summer of Love and the abyss of
1968. Hollywood sees box-office cachet in Che: Director Steven
Soderbergh is filming a new biopic starring Che look-alike Benicio Del
Toro.

"Today Che is associated in the collective conscience with values --
his ethics, his principles, his willingness to lose his life for an
ideal," biographer Pacho O'Donnell wrote recently in the Argentine
weekly Veintitres.

Guevara, a physician with no formal military training, was also
something else, critics say: prolific executioner, dogmatic
totalitarian and co-designer of the Cuban police state and
indoctrination apparatus.

His detractors contend that his short life may appear to his admirers
more James Dean than Chairman Mao, but his politics were more Comrade
Stalin than Mahatma Gandhi.

"What's left is a kind of idealistic, romantic aura," said Jorge
Lanata, an Argentine journalist who has written about Guevara. "It's
more culture than political."

Guevara, keen to ignite "many Vietnams," chose impoverished Bolivia in
part because of its proximity to his Argentine homeland, where he hoped
to jump-start an insurgency. Today's Cuban volunteers in Bolivia live
by the credo "Seremos como El Che! (We will be like Che!)" the
communist island's signature chant.

"All my life we communist pioneers pledged to be like Che," said Jose
Valledaris, 45, a Cuban engineer who was watering shrubbery inside the
Guevara mausoleum at a former military airstrip in nearby Vallegrande,
where the bodies of Guevara and six fellow combatants were dumped in a
ditch 40 years ago and buried. "Now I'm here, in the footsteps of Che."

A renovated laundry shack behind the nearby Señor de Malta Hospital has
become one of the most venerated stops on the "Che tour." It was here
that the triumphant Bolivian military displayed Guevara's body as a war
trophy atop a concrete washtub, and Freddy Alborta photographed the
Christ-like figure of the pale, posthumous Che, his eyes wide open --
an iconic image distributed worldwide. Che pilgrims scrawl memorial
graffiti on every available cranny.

"Man is nothing more than his ideas," someone wrote in French.

Another added in Italian: "He who speaks to the heart never dies."

Someone else in Spanish: "We await your orders, comandante!"

A decade ago, remains apparently belonging to the rebel were
disinterred and taken to Cuba, although questions remain about whether
the bones were Guevara's.

In an ironic twist, the press has reported that among the Bolivians
benefiting from eye surgery by Cuban doctors is none other than Mario
Teran, the Bolivian soldier who executed Guevara.

"Four decades after Mario Teran attempted to destroy a dream and an
idea, Che returns to win yet another battle," reported Granma, the
Cuban Communist Party newspaper. "Now an old man, Señor Teran can, once
again, appreciate the colors of the sky and the forest, enjoy the
smiles of his grandchildren and watch football games."

Here in La Higuera, Guevara's image is as ubiquitous as in any college
dormitory. Impoverished villagers hawk Che memorabilia and seek tips
via guide services or the repetition of dubious Che anecdotes.

Around here, there's no business like Che business.

"I don't know much about Che, but he attracts tourists, and that's a
good thing," said Limbert Arteaga, 29, mayor of the nearby town of
Pucara, who was overseeing a health fair featuring tuberculosis
screening by Cuban physicians. "I know he was a good man. He tried to
help others."

Some villagers are even willing, for a modest gratuity, to display
their home altars to Santo Ernesto, a sight that probably would have
appalled Guevara, an atheist.

"We ask Che that nothing bad will happen to us," said Manuel Cortez,
62, who lives a few yards from the schoolhouse where Guevara was
killed, now a museum. "We have faith in Che."

Today's Che lovefest is a marked departure from the state of affairs 40
years ago, when villagers expressed suspicion and mystification. In his
diary of the Bolivian campaign, Guevara writes that he was despondent
about the hostility of the locals he had come to liberate, so distinct
from the peasants of Cuba's Sierra Maestra.

"The campesino masses don't help us in anything and instead they betray
us," an exasperated Guevara wrote a week before he was killed.

By the time he and the bedraggled remnants of his guerrilla band
arrived here, hundreds of commandos trained by U.S. Green Berets were
hot on his trail. He was captured Oct. 8 after being wounded in the
foot during a firefight in a dense ravine known as El Churo, about two
miles away. He weighed about 100 pounds after months of privations. A
bullet had disabled his carbine and punched a hole in his trademark
beret.

"He was completely demoralized, nothing like the photo of the heroic
guerrilla," said retired Bolivian Gen. Gary Prado, the captain of the
squad that captured Guevara. "He was dying of hunger, dirty,
disheveled. It made you sorry to see him."

Contradicting the notion that Guevara vowed never to be captured alive,
Prado says the rebel willingly surrendered, seeming relieved. "I'm Che
Guevara and I'm worth more to you alive than dead," he told his
captors, according to Prado.

He was shackled and marched to the schoolhouse.

The next day, President Rene Barrientos, a U.S.-trained general,
decided Guevara would be summarily executed. The volunteer warrant
officer, Teran, fired the fatal shots sometime after 1 p.m., according
to accounts.

Guevara's widely reported but probably apocryphal last words: "Fire,
coward, it is a man you are going to kill!"

The autopsy cited eight bullet wounds, but none to the face that would
soon be flashed across the globe.

Ernesto Guevara, saint to some, devil to others, bohemian, adventurer
and implacable foe of capitalism, was dead. And the myth of the
immortal Che was born.