The Left's patron saint was a war criminal

Posted on Wed, Feb. 22, 2006

CHE GUEVARA
The Left's patron saint was a war criminal

BY MIGUEL A. BRETOS
miguelamerico@aol.com

Bolivia's Evo Morales solemnly invoked Ernesto ''Che'' Guevara, the
patron saint of Latin America's woolly Left, in his presidential
inauguration. An exhibit at New York's Center of Photography explores
Guevara's fascinating afterlife as a marketing tool for all kinds of
products, from watches to ice cream. Saint or gimmick, the durable
Argentine adventurer lives on. Like Mickey Mouse, he sells and gets no
royalties.

Guevara was slain in cold blood by the Bolivian army nearly 40 years
ago. He had infiltrated Bolivia to test his theory that a few foci
sustained by hard-core guerrillas would detonate the continental
Revolution. It didn't work.

Freddy Alborta, a photographer from La Paz, took remarkable pictures of
Guevara's corpse propped up on a laundry countertop. The intent may have
been forensic, but the outcome was mystical. The shirtless Guevara looks
like Jesus descended from the Cross or those images of the dead Christ
venerated on Good Friday. The martyr's image at the moment of his
sacrifice, seen by millions, opened the way to his apotheosis.

Venerated in Cuba

There are awesome relics, too. To preserve Guevara's fingerprints, his
killers cut off and pickled his hands. Mysteriously, they ended up in
Fidel Castro's Cuba, where they are venerated.

Guevara's definitive icon is a snapshot made by Cuban photographer
Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (Korda) at the funeral for the victims of La
Coubre, a munitions ship that blew up in Havana in 1960. It is one of
the greatest photographic portraits of all time. Alborta captured the
image of the martyr; Korda fixed that of the hero.

Guevara wears a beret with a little star. A cheap jacket zipped to the
collar lends him an aura of gravitas. He had a vague resemblance to
Cantinflas, the great Mexican comic, but he comes across here as the
ultimate comandante. Exhaustion lends him a sort of ascetic intensity.
The image is arresting. Against a red background, it becomes a banner.
Cut out in metal, it covers the fac¸ade of a tall building in Havana's
Revolution Square.

Korda subtly captured an unkempt quality about Guevara, which Cubans
call empercudido. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes and
skipped his shower. That may be the secret of his enduring appeal to
political teenagers everywhere.

Guevara's face has launched a billion T-shirts. Let Third World
demagogues deal with him as they will; consumer societies will morph his
empercudido look into trinkets or fashion for high profit.

Guevara-worship may be naive or opportunistic, but there is something
downright obscene in his promotion by capitalist commerce. Guevara
simply was not a nice fellow.

There is nothing benign about the real Guevara, pistol in hand, giving a
cold-blooded coup de grace to the Castro regime's enemies at La Cabaña
fortress. Or his bloody repression of anti-Castro peasants in the
Escambray mountains of central Cuba when the Castroite regime was 2
years old. Guevara's hands had much blood on them besides his own. In
real life, he was a war criminal.

Carrying a fool's errand

Guevara died a martyr's death while carrying out a fool's errand. He
came to believe his own mythmaking. Cuba was no Vietnam and Castro no
Ho-Chi-Minh. In Cuba, the corrupt and sloppy dictatorship of Fulgencio
Batista imploded when it lost the support of the United States in 1958.
Castro's genius lay in his ability to take control of the ensuing chaos;
Guevara, who was along for the ride, read a proletarian Iliad into what
was essentially a farce.

When he tried to replicate the Cuban outcome in Bolivia, revolutionary
peasants were nowhere in sight. Castro's promised support did not
materialize. The Bolivian military were supposed to join the people's
legions or cave in like Batista's, but they did not. So Guevara died a
delusional Argentine Robin Hood who, unlike his prototype, was not
nearly as smart as the sheriff of Nottingham.

Never mind -- pass the T-shirts.

Miguel A. Bretos is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/13929246.htm