Gone, but not (for me) forgotten: Che Guevara

Fifty-two years ago yesterday, on Oct. 9, 1967, at the age of 39, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was assassinated in the village of La Higuera, Bolivia, with assistance from the CIA, who for years had been looking to kill the charismatic revolutionary.

Loved by millions around the world, partly for his commitment to improving the lives of the downtrodden, Che had completed medical school in his native Argentina, and probably would’ve gone on to lead the comfortable life of a doctor if it hadn’t been for a motorcycle trip he made in 1952 with a classmate around S. America (memorialized in the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, starring the Mexican hottie Gael Garcia-Bernal). The nine-month trip opened his eyes for the first time to the depth of misery suffered by so many, and resulted in his decision to give up all that his parents had hoped for him, and work instead to foment world-wide, anti-capitalist revolution.

He had met Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1953, and in November of 1956, was one of 82 men who, in an old, leaky yacht named the Granma, set sail for Cuba, with the goal of overthrowing the government. Just over three years later, to everyone’s surprise, this is exactly what they did! They helped Cubans throw off the shackles of imperialism that had held them down for centuries, first under Spain’s tyranny, and then - for 61 years - under the strangle-hold of its big neighbor to the north, the United States.

It was during the fighting of the Spanish-American war that the yankees came for the first time to realize that Cubans were actually even darker than Spaniards, and so clearly incapable of governing themselves. Washington then reneged on its promises to support Cuban independence, just as it did with the Philippines (which, by the way, is where water-boarding by American troops was first widely used. American soldiers at the time laughingly called it the water-cure).

During the three-year struggle to free their country, Castro had promoted Che to commander of a second Army column. He was a daring and courageous fighter whose efforts helped to throw out, at the end of 1959, the corrupt US puppet and dictator Fulgencio Batista.

In spite of Washington’s best efforts over the ensuing decades, Cuba ever since has been an independent nation, certainly not without its faults, but free none the less from being told what to do, and as such, a poor example to the rest of the world of following orders from the White House.

Former CIA agent Philip Agee said of Guevara: “There was no person more feared by the Company (i.e., the CIA) than Che, because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America.”

For those wanting to learn more about the life of Che Guevara, there are a slew of films that have been made about his life. A good one I’ve seen recently is called El Che (2017), available on Netflix, in which “the Spanish-Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II embarks on a journey following in Guevara’s footsteps, revealing new information about the revolutionary”. Benicio del Toro dramatically re-creates the life and death of Che in a two-part, 2008 film directed by Steven Soderbergh; it's called Che, and you can view the trailer here.

 

REST in POWER and in PEACE, ERNESTO 'CHE' GUEVARA!

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Che, by the way, is an Argentine slang term meaning “hey” or “guy, pal”, a term he naturally used often among the Cubans he fought with in Guatemala, in 1953, which is also a great story, but alas, one for another time.