One revolution, in this case, was not enough. Having played an instrumental role in the overthrow of the Batista regime in Cuba, Che soon set about to extend the revolution throughout the rest of Latin America. Within months of Fulgencio Batista's defeat in January 1959, Che had initiated a training program for revolutionary aspirants from elsewhere in the hemisphere so they could learn from the Cuban experience and return to their countries of origin to begin revolutions of their own. Within the next several years, this effort would send forth revolutionary hopefuls to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, all thought to satisfy the conditions for a successful revolutionary takeover.
Within 11 months of his arrival in La Paz, Che would be dead, executed at the hands of the Bolivian army. As Kierkegaard once observed, "The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins." So it was with Che. Although his revolutionary convictions inclined him toward tyranny, he died a martyr's death. As influential as he was in life, his influence and power over others increased dramatically after he was gone. Over the next three decades, he would be held up repeatedly as a model of fortitude, self-denial, and heroism, all of which were exemplified by the courage with which he faced his executioners.
His legend and its appeal were reinforced by the mysterious disappearance of his remains. After his death, his hands were cut off and preserved in formaldehyde to prove to his followers that he had been captured and killed. They were later smuggled out of Bolivia to Cuba. The rest of his remains simply vanished. According to one local legend, he had been reincarnated and would eventually return in another form to exact his revenge.
At least part of this mystery has now been solved. In late June 1997, near the remote Bolivian town of Vallegrande, Cuban and Argentinean forensic specialists uncovered the grave of seven individuals. One skeleton, partially covered by a decaying olive drab army jacket like the one worn by Che in the last photograph taken of him while he was alive, had no hands.The search for Che Guevara's remains had been spurred a year and a half before by the man who had been responsible for presiding over his secret burial, retired general Mario Vargas Salinas. Che and a number of his guerrilla fighters, he claimed, had been buried at night on the edge of a small airfield in Vallegrande. Eighteen months of searching had yielded a number of corpses, at least one of which had been identified as one of Che's men, but not the remains of Che himself. The discovery in June finally ended this search. Dental records and bone chips consistent with the pattern of gunshot wounds sustained in his execution confirmed that the skeletal remains were those of Che Guevara.
Che's homecoming, after three decades in the field, took place in July in a solemn ceremony presided over by an aging, gray-beamed Fidel Castro, who proclaimed 1997 to be "The Year of the Fallen Revolutionary." The event seemed designed both to honor his old companero as well as to breathe new life into what remains of the Cuban Revolution. But Che is also the object of a resurgence of interest after some two decades of neglect in both the United States and Europe.
In the immediate aftermath of his death, and into the 1970s, he was the darling of the New Left. His image could be found in campus dorm rooms across the United States, next to posters of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and other similar fallen heroes. With the eclipse of campus radicalism, the memory of Che declined. He is now reemerging, however, as a figure of pop culture. His image, as one commentator has noted, has been "recycled." His revolutionary life and death have given him market power, which is being used to sell everything from T-shirts, key chains, and compact discs to cigars and a new brand of beer.
Che Guevara has become many things to many people. Many of these things are clearly contradictory. In Cuba, he increasingly represents the memory of what might have been. Throughout the rest of Latin America, he continues to personify the spirit of national liberation. The power of his example and of his theory of insurrection have inspired thousands to follow in his footsteps to their deaths. The consequences of these efforts have shaped much of the political history of the hemisphere since the Cuban Revolution.
In the West, Che has long been a romantic symbol of personal rebellion and of the power of individual expression. It is this imagery that is now being packaged and sold so successfully. That Che would have used the royalties from any such commercial ventures to destroy the social and economic system that produced them seems not to matter to the consuming public in the least.
Che's continuing influence, at some level, appears paradoxical. He was, first and foremost, a "hands-on" professional revolutionary. As such, however, he left a mixed legacy. His theory of revolutionary warfare, which was highly influential, was flawed and arguably contributed to the defeat of scores of attempts throughout the hemisphere since 1959 to replicate the Cuban insurrection. His own efforts to employ his theories failed dramatically.
No comments:
Post a Comment