6/30/08

Che comes home
Published:Jun 29, 2008


A hero to us: Hernandez Rosa, a Cuban train driver in his 70s


Brother in arms: A man hangs an Argentinian flag around the neck of a statue of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, as the statue is carried in a truck to the harbour in Buenos Aires on May 27 2008

Today many Cubans refuse to breach the subject of his ruthless side as a prison commander.

Despite his iconic status, Che Guevara has yet to be honoured in the country of his birth, Argentina. A new statue in his hometown could be about to change that, writes Stuart Graham.

A train driver repairing a steam engine at a railway station in the town Trinidad, at the southern end of Cuba, hears the name Che Guevara and immediately pushes his spanner aside.

"Who mentioned Che?" Hernandez Rosa, a man in his 70s, asks.

"A South African? Did you know Che was the one of the first Cubans to fight in Africa?"

Rosa recalls serving in the military in the 1960s when soldiers were being recruited in 1965 to join Guevara on a mission to spark a communist revolution in Congo.

"The military wanted the black soldiers so that they would not appear as though they were from the outside," he says.

"They did not want it known that there were Cubans in Africa at that time. So it was impossible for me to join because I am a white Cuban."

Hernandez's wistful reaction to Guevara is a typical one in Cuba. Across the island Guevara's image adorns walls, bands in music halls play folk songs in his memory and book stores sell comics about him.

It is a stark contrast to his birth country, Argentina, where only recently a statue was erected to mark his 80th birthday on June 14.

The 4m high bronze statue of a bearded Guevara in military fatigues was erected in his birth town of Rosario, a drive of four hours north from Buenos Aires. The unveiling ceremony, attended by his daughter, Aleida Guevara, was given scant attention by the local media. Some Argentinians see the statue merely as an attempt to attract tourists to Rosario, which until now has not had any proper memorial for Guevara.

"Most Argentinians are not very interested in Che," says Carolina Gattei, a master's student in Latin American studies at the University of Buenos Aires.

"It's just the minority leftist groups and the communist organisations that follow him. Before the statue there was hardly anything about Che in Rosario," she says, adding that the grey building where Guevara was born at 480 Entre Rios street is an insurance company with no memorial to Guevara at all.

Gattei says on a recent trip to Cuba, she was regularly taken in by the locals when they found out she was Argentinian and "from the land of Che". "People were very warm ... They all wanted to talk about Che. It's not like that in Argentina."

Guevara, the eldest of five children, had a happy middle-class childhood in Alta Gracia, a town in the foothills of the Andes a few hours north of Rosario. His parents had moved there when he was four to help him cope with his asthma.

He was a popular boy who played rugby, chess and read the novels of Jack London.

Guevara's adult years were anything but normal. By the time he was executed in Bolivia, aged 39, he had done enough to be regarded by Time magazine as one of the 100 icons of the 20thcentury.

Guevara's travels started while he was studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires in 1951, when he and his friend, Alberto Granado, travelled through South America on a Norton 500 motorcycle. On the way they witnessed the poverty in which many South Americans lived. Guevara's journal of the trip, The Motorcycle Diaries, was made into a film in 2004. Guevara completed his medical studies in 1953 and headed north to Central America. He received his nickname "Che", which in Argentina means "pal" or "mate", while helping two Venezuelan malaria specialists at a local hospital.

In Mexico in 1955 he joined former Cuban president Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement. In November the next year Guevara and Castro were part of a group of 82 rebels who crossed the Caribbean to Cuba on the cabin cruiser "Granma" to start a communist revolution against the dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Guevara showed such bravery and resourcefulness in the early days of the revolution that Castro promoted him to commander. On December 28 1958 he led a column that ambushed an arms train in the town of Santa Clara that had been sent to reinforce Batista's soldiers. The capture of the train was a decisive victory for the revolutionaries. Batista fled Cuba on New Year's Day 1959 and the rebels marched into Havana.

Guevara also gained a reputation for ruthlessness during the revolution. In the book Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, author Jon Lee Anderson claims that Guevara did not hesitate to execute the men he believed to be spies .

After the revolution was won, Castro proclaimed Guevara "a Cuban citizen by birth" and placed him in charge of dispensing justice to Batista loyalists at the La Cabaña Fortress that overlooks the port of Havana. Several hundred prisoners are reported to have been executed under his watch at La Cabana.

Today many Cubans simply refuse to breach the subject of Guevara's ruthless side. There is no mention of the executions at the La Cabana museum or any other museum in Cuba. For Cubans such as Yamilet Ruiz, who runs a guesthouse in the town of Baracoa on the southeastern tip of Cuba, Guevara is a saint. Ruiz remembers hearing Guevara speak when he opened a chocolate factory in the town in 1963.

"All of the women were in love with Che," she says . "A large crowd had come to see him on the day he opened the factory. After he spoke there were snacks and drinks for the dignitaries, but then Che asked where the food was for the people.

"He said, 'how you can bring food, but none for the people'. He made sure [everybody] had something first. Then he ate. That is was what the Cuban revolution was about."

After the revolution Castro appointed Guevara as his minister of industries and as the head of Cuba's central bank. By 1965, Guevara had grown tired of life as a politician. He resigned from Castro's cabinet, saying he wanted to spread the communist ideas of the revolution.

His first project was to ignite a communist revolution in Congo, where Patrice Lumumba, the country's first democratically elected prime minister, had been assassinated. Congo was being ruled by Joseph-Desire Mobutu, who had assumed power in a United States- backed coup in 1960.

Guevara's plan was to teach guerrilla tactics and communist ideology to the Simba fighters in the Congo's Fizi Baraka mountains. In April 1965, he and a platoon of about 100 African Cubans entered Congo.

There were problems from the start. Communication between the Spanish-speaking Cubans and the Congolese was a constant hindrance. A notebook belonging to Guevara on display at a museum in Santa Clara shows how he attempted to learn the language of the Congolese by making lists of words in Spanish with their Congolese equivalents.

One of Guevara's allies in the Congo was a local guerrilla leader, Laurent-Desire Kabila, then 26, who would oust Mobutu from power in 1997. Guevara, however, thought very little of Kabila.

"Nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour," he wrote in The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo.

In the end the seven-month long mission was a "disaster". "This is the history of a failure," Guevara wrote, listing incompetence and infighting among local Congolese forces as reasons for the failure.

Guevara went to Bolivia in 1966, where he aimed to ignite a revolution . W ith the help of the CIA, the Bolivian military captured Guevara in broad daylight in a gorge in southeast Boliva on October 8 1967.

He was executed outside of the schoolhouse in the town of La Higuera the next day. His body was flown to the closest major town, Vallegrande, and shown to the press on a cement laundry tub at the local hospital the next day.

Julio Morales, a Cuban in his 60s who fought against the former SADF in Angola, has volunteered to oversee the construction of a mausoleum for Guevara. "Che is an important symbol for the Cuban revolution," says Morales . "If his image is kept alive, the ideals of the revolution will live on. "

In Trinidad, Rosa lifts his spanner and prepares to return to work. He says the reason Che is loved in Cuba is because he lived by his ideals , which included fighting injustice, non-materialism, hard work and study. "Che wanted Cubans to volunteer, so he went into the fields and worked himself . He lived by according to what he said. In the end he was prepared to die for what he believed in. That is why he is a hero to us."





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