Redeemers (44 page)

It was only when the drunken Bolivian sergeant assigned to kill him entered the hut that Che was sure of his coming death. And whatever the exact details of Che's last moments may be, even his archenemy Rodríguez affirms that Che “conducted himself with respect to the very end.” As he had written to his mother, during one of his first trips abroad after the victory of the Cuban revolution, “I feel . . . an absolute fatalistic sense of my mission, which frees me of all fear.” Perhaps, when the bullets ended Raging Serna's final charge, he may have felt, at least for an instant, that he was embodying a line of the Cuban national anthem: to die (beautifully) for the (universal socialist) fatherland is to live.

 

VIII

And Che would live on. Trivially, as a widely marketed image in objects that range from the vulgar to the devotional: cups, T-shirts, posters, tattoos (on Mike Tyson's abdomen, on the right arm of Diego Maradona), and, more seriously, as a visual icon for decades of rebellious (and revolutionary) young men and women in Latin America and many other areas.

But deeper resonances and reasons exist for the continuing afterlife of Che Guevara. There is an aspect to his life—the wanderings, the abandonments, the final, unexpected martyrdom, the almost insensate commitment to personal courage—that appeals to a wider range of people than those who fully share his politics or his cultural background. In a balanced and wide-ranging book,
Che's Afterlife
, Michael Casey interviews Che's illegitimate son (though not accepted as such by most of the Guevaras), the well-regarded Cuban poet Omar Pérez, apparently born of Che's brief affair with a beautiful twenty-year-old woman immediately before his departure for Africa and eventually Bolivia and death. It was a pregnancy Che would never even know about. Pérez resembles his presumptive father physically and in his personal independence, which earned him a year in a Cuban labor camp picking tomatoes as the government's response to a display of artistic and intellectual dissidence. He was twenty-five when his mother revealed his real father to him and among his preoccupations have come a search for psychological linkage with Guevara and a strong personal interest in Buddhism. In his interview with Casey, Omar Pérez comments on a major feature of Che's life and lingering image, seen from two different but complementary angles:

 

Why do people always leave? We all leave at a certain time. We leave our wives; we leave our children; we leave our job for a better job or a worse job . . . We abandon everything for something new. We trade religions, beliefs—political, ideological—so it is not something that you can say is a characteristic of a person or persons or a historical trait. This is a human trait, to abandon things for something else.

 

Himself abandoned by Che Guevara (though, in his case, Che never knew of Omar's impending existence), the Cuban poet recognizes and accepts this “human trait,” which of course, at the personal level, often inflicts emotional and material pain on those who have been left behind, but he also tries to place Che's continual moving on in a broader and deeper context, the idea of nonattachment (present in Christian tradition but far more emphasized and explored in Buddhism and other forms of Indian religion and speculation):

 

What in fact is the ultimate point of attachment? . . . when you go through life . . . and you have already said good-bye to your family a few times, like my father did . . . maybe then, when you are in the middle of nowhere, like in the middle of the Congo, or Bolivia, maybe then you discover some other kind of attachment. And that attachment is far more resilient, far more resistant than love for women or for drink or success or whatever. What is this thing? . . . It has to do with the real essence of ourselves, because what we are trying to attach to there is that which we think we really are. It's nothing less than that.

 

The freedom to move on, to search for the ultimate (as seen by the individual), to disdain mere material achievement and pleasure (though he was no conventional ascetic) is a feature of Che's life that attracts and likely will continue to attract the sympathies of those who are or would like to be “seekers after truth.” Certainly with Che Guevara it was a freedom enchained within his willed and abstractly accepted principles, and his goal was a utopian Marxist revolution accompanied by a moral “transfiguration” of human beings that, to him, was an ultimate and (in his belief) achievable condition. And yet the final, clumsily misbegotten chapter of his life was not only an extended Calvary but, in the eyes of many, progress on a “path,” the search of a spiritual (but armed) warrior for his portion of enlightenment.

It was not long before the story of Guevara's final hours became a kind of sacred history for people of various inclinations on the left who in some measure agreed with his revolutionary ideas, and especially for those who shared the same temptation toward the absolute in hatred and in faith, the same almost religious devotion to violence and death. And throughout the 1970s and into the '80s, the long-standing quarrel raged again between two shadows from the past: the oppressive and omnipresent giant to the north and the self-protective and proud culture to the south. In the fiercely fought and ferociously repressed guerrilla war against “imperialism and its allies” in the countries of Latin America, Guevara was the patron saint of the movement, the armed prophet, the model of these modern revolutionaries.

Jorge Castañeda was one of those many thousands: a militant radical who trained in Cuba. In
Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War
(published in 1994), he wrote:

 

Che represents the heroism and nobility of myriad middle-class Latin Americans who rose up in the best way they could find, against a status quo they eventually discovered to be unlivable . . . He will endure as a symbol, not of revolution or guerrilla warfare, but of the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, of indifference.

 

Three years later, in his analytical biography of Che (1997), Castañeda said:

 

Che endowed two generations of young people with the tools of that faith, and the fervor of that conviction. But he must also be held responsible for the wasted blood and lives that decimated those generations . . . His death allowed him to sidestep a question he could never have answered: why so many university students from the region's emerging middle classes sallied forth so innocently to their slaughter.

 

How to explain the shift in Castañeda's perspective? His dilemma was shared by many young men (and some women) of the Latin American middle class who believed in good faith that the solution of the problems of Latin America was to be found in redemption through arms, not by way of politics. Many, like Castañeda, contemplating in memory all the death and destruction, would turn again to the electoral process. The paradox of the guerrilla movement was that it was not a rebellion of oppressed peasants but of the educated middle class. It was a guerrilla movement born in the universities and led by the educated. (The writer Gabriel Zaid, in his article about El Salvador, was the first to note this fundamental characteristic of the Central American guerrilla movements, which he dubbed a
guerrilla universitaria
.) Che himself was one of these university-trained revolutionaries but he was also far more, both in his life and in his afterlife.

 

IX

The Christian path to Calvary is another route toward understanding the guerrilla fighter who died at thirty-nine, helpless in the hands of his enemies. Five centuries of faith and iconography in Catholic Latin America have contributed to the martyrology of Che Guevara. Che was an atheist, but he was formed in a mental world constructed on the basis of the Christian vision of good, evil, salvation, and eternal condemnation. Régis Debray, who spent time with Che's guerrillas in Bolivia, wrote that “Che liked to compare himself to a Christian of the catacombs confronting the Roman Empire that is the USA,” images of course issuing from the deep substratum of Latin American life: the culture of Catholicism.

Immolation as the route to purification and redemption strikes a deep Christian (most especially Catholic) chord. And the association of Che's death with Christian martyrdom was intensified by a public relations error of the Bolivian military. Che's body was cleaned, shaved, and barbered (with the intention of masking the summary execution, since the official statement claimed he had died in battle). The result was the now famous photograph of a visibly still handsome Che, stripped to the waist, whose dead body resembled a Renaissance painting of the Lamentation over Christ, especially that of Andrea Mantegna. In the long and continuing afterlife of Che Guevara and his variously interpreted image, the aura of revolutionary martyrdom would combine with ancient and profound echoes of Christian sacrifice.

Within the Catholic faith, Che as icon functions for many like the effigy of a saint (whether the photo of his body after death or the serious face of the young comandante with tousled hair and a star on his beret, taken by the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda). If a saint dies as a martyr, his sacrifice recasts his entire life. It can offer salvation to others. The saint is depicted on a medal or as a picture small enough to be worn or carried in a purse or wallet. And he begins an afterlife different from what he actually lived, not Ernesto de la Serna but simply El Che. To die in pain and as a witness to one's faith is in itself an expiation of sin. For those who honor him, Che died for his belief in a just society, for human equality and the end of oppression. The objective facts in many ways refute that myth, but many would swear it is the truth.

In the spiritual life of Latin American Catholics, the iconography of the sacred is not part of a history course, nor is it a matter of specific reality but rather of transcendent
truth
, which does not require (and is perhaps contradicted by) any verifiable reality. In these countries, saints are not only moral examples. They intercede for you, they redeem you. The list of saints (the
santoral
) honored among the people includes figures never considered by the Vatican. Down the length and breadth of Latin America, one can meet with altars to actresses who died young, assassinated politicians, even figures like the Mexican Holy Death (la Santa Muerte), a skeletal figure who is the patron saint of drug dealers but also of many humble people in a country where a cult of death (often quite innocent) dates back to pre-Hispanic beliefs.

And even some of the guerrillas who followed the path of Che Guevara saw him explicitly as a saint and even as Christ. The poet Roque Dalton, who died at the hands of another guerrilla (Comandante Joaquín Villalobos) in the internecine quarrels within the Salvadoran Civil War, would write in his “Credo of El Che”:

 

El Che Jesus Christ

was taken prisoner

after finishing his Sermon on the Mount

(with a background of the rattling of machine guns) . . .

. . . there was no road left for Che

than being reborn

and keeping his place to the left of men

demanding that they quicken their pace

forever and ever

Amen.

 

The exemplary life of the new “El Che Jesus Christ” leads to his resurrection where he stands “to the left of men” and goads them into action, or (as in the poem of the Uruguayan Mario Benedetti, who was driven into exile by the Uruguayan military government of the 1970s and '80s) to feel shame at not being “like Che”:

 

comfort makes you ashamed

and the asthma of shame

when your commander is falling

machine-gunned

fabled

pure . . .

they say that they incinerated

all your vocation

less one finger

enough to point us the way

enough to accuse the monster and his burning embers

 

to squeeze the triggers again.

 

Emanating from the nature of his death, the intensity of his devotion to his personal faith (and the impact of two iconic photographs), the “Christ-like” afterlife of Che has moved peasants to prayer and (especially in the 1970s and '80s) the university-educated to revolutionary commitment. But a secular “Imitation of Christ” was not only a chosen route for many who tried to follow his example but also, in part, a feature of Che's own emotional-political life (and of the era in which he lived). He interpreted the experience of Cuban socialism as an act of sacrifice, both personal and national, on a journey toward Redemption:

 

In our country the individual knows that the glorious epoch in which he has come to live is one of sacrifice; he understands sacrifice. The first to understand this were those in the Sierra Maestra and wherever the struggle was being waged. Later we have understood it throughout Cuba. Cuba is the vanguard of America and must make sacrifices because it occupies the frontlines, because it points out the road to liberty for the Latin-American masses.

 

And then there are the notions of conversion and sacramental devotion. Che was convinced that the Cuban Revolution was a kind of “exemplary story,” which would inspire a conversion to revolution across the world, while he saw his own commitment to socialism as, in a sense, a revolutionary offering that had led him to abandon or totally subordinate personal and family attachments.

Even his emphasis on creating the “new man” connects with the Christian tradition, dating back at least to St. Paul. (Various formulations of this idea were central to the thought of the early twentieth-century Argentine thinkers Deodoro Roca and José Ingenieros, but they too were touched by the Catholic culture that surrounded them.) For St. Paul, the faith in Christ ultimately involved a radical change in human nature. In the society of the future, Che affirmed, “Men will have different characteristics.” Selfishness would be suppressed and the human being would achieve “the complete awareness of his social being, which is the same as his full realization as a human being, with all the chains of alienation shattered.”