LEFTIST LATIN AMERICA: Che, Ain't He Grand?

Revolution, ain't it grand? The mystique surrounding Che Guevara almost makes it seem so. His impassioned visage adorns t-shirts and dorm-room posters, as if he were the lead singer of Led Zeppelin or a sweatshirt-wearing Belushi. Hell, the man even made death seem sexy. His last words before the C.I.A. killed him in 1968 in Bolivia were the daring, “I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man.”

Yet, to look seriously at the life of the communist revolutionary is to understand that militarized politics is anything but comfy. Revolution hurts.

Ernesto Guevara was born into money on May 14th, 1928 in the remote Argentine jungles outside Buenos Aires. As noted in John Lee Anderson’s wildly brilliant biography, “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,” an eerie foreshadowing came with the signing of his birth certificate. Because Che’s mother was three months pregnant when she married, his parents lied about the actual day their son was born. In Anderson’s words, “He must be one of the rare public figures of modern times whose life and death certificates are both falsified.”

It wasn’t until the young man, whose devilish good looks kept his time entertained by women, ventured by motorcycle around the continent did he have his first political inclinations. The countryside, especially the rampant poverty of the people and the treatment of indigenous peoples across the land, opened his eyes to a world structured along class divisions. Still very young, and avoiding his studies to become a doctor, Che made it for Mexico City, which in the 1950s was gorgeous and riding out the renaissance that had flooded the two decades prior.

That was where the mission of his life changed forever. Che took an unyielding interest in politics. He’d met Ñico López, a Cuban, during his travels in Guatemala, and then, by the workings of fate, serendipity, what have you, López and Che crossed paths again in Mexico City. Only now the stakes were higher. A Cuban dissident named Fidel Castro had been imprisoned, and his exiled followers had made their way to Mexico. And then Castro showed up.

“A political occurrence is having met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary, a young man, intelligent, very sure of himself and of extraordinary audacity; I think there is mutual sympathy between us,” Che wrote in his diary in the summer of 1955. Castro liaised with Soviet representatives. It had begun.

They plotted to oust Fulgencio Batista, the President of Cuba. (Fidel had already tried once, and failed.) Mexican authorities arrested them. Fidel bribed their way out of prison after 55 days. They amassed an army; recruits came from Cuba and the U.S. The struggle, in all its pain (very little, if any glory), was relentless.

The Cuban Revolution on New Year’s Eve, 1959, however, was glorious. Perhaps that enough lends life to millions of t-shirts and postcards fifty years later emblazoned with Che’s face. But what’s usually left out of the story are the months of trekking through the Cuban countryside, men falling to disease, horrendous living conditions, battles, with guns, where men were killed, enemy and their own, the horror and heartbreak of fallen brothers and the miasma of war.

It’s not glorious, it’s not grand – it’s miserable.

Even atop his successes, Che adhered to a strict regiment that ruled out excess. It was no harder to live a life without consuming all one can. In August of 1960, he graced the cover of Time magazine under the banner, “COMMUNISM’S WESTERN BEACHHEAD.” And as the fervor inside him for the Marxist utopia burned hotter, so did his dreams.

He would leave Cuba and ignite revolutions across the continent. He headed to Bolivia. His struggles were difficult. He faced defeats and troops whose morale had vanished faster than their rations. He wrote copiously, often documenting the challenges in front of him in excruciating detail. And then, as they were wont to do of those spreading the Communist doctrine, the C.I.A. captured and killed Che in Bolivia. From Anderson’s report of the last minutes in Bolivia:

“Then, as Che writhed on the ground, apparently biting one of his wrists in an effort to avoid crying out, Terán fired another burst. The fatal bullet entered Che’s thorax, filling his lungs with blood. On October 9, 1967, at the age of thirty-nine, Che Guevara was dead.”

It’s all in your definition of grand. And it’s slipshod to think that a life of revolution, no matter how beautiful the face, is to be celebrated unconditionally.

(Postcards photo from flickr and Time magazine cover from Wikipedia.)