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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822377085 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Margaret Randall, born in New York in 1936, is a feminist poet, writer, photographer, and social activist. After living in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua since the 1960s, she attempted to return to the United States in 1984. Randall had inadvertently lost her U.S. citizenship when she acquired the citizenship of her Mexican husband in 1967. The U.S. government refused to reinstate her citizenship after finding opinions expressed in some of her books to be "against the good order and happiness of the United States." The Center for Constitutional Rights defended Randall, and many writers and others joined in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of her citizenship. She won her case in 1989. In 1990 she was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression. Randall is the author of more than eighty books, including the oral histories Cuban Women Now, Sandino's Daughters, and When I Look into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror, and Resistance. A documentary, The Unapologetic Life of Margaret Randall, was released in 2001. Randall lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Read an Excerpt
che on my mind
By margaret randall
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5592-2
CHAPTER 1
a death that leads us back to life
Ernesto Che Guevara occupies a place in our emotional iconography unsurpassed by anyone with the exception of Buddha, Mohammed, Marx, Mary, or Jesus of Nazareth. Still contemporary—his death at the age of thirty-nine isn't yet half a century behind us—he is a figure revered in equal measure by both convinced revolutionaries and apolitical youth at the farthest reaches of our planet. All see in him a symbol of nonconformity and resistance. And as with so many humans we've embalmed in myth, scholars and those who don't think past the image, devotees and detractors alike, tend to ignore a more nuanced view of the man.
I am old enough to remember the world in which he lived. I was part of that world, and it remains a part of me. This won't be a political or economic treatise, except where that sort of analysis strengthens my observations. It is a poet's reminiscence of an era and of the figure who best exemplifies that era. These musings may also help us rethink revolutionary change and see how a reexamination of history may point to more productive ways of achieving that change.
This is the story of how Che haunts me. I call it Che on My Mind, mimicking the old Hoagy Carmichael and Stewart Gorrell tune "Georgia on My Mind." It's that spirit and wandering rhythm I wish to evoke: moving in one direction and then another, exploring this texture or that, giving free rein to memory and to a consciousness Che helped to shape.
In these notes I want to remember that Guevara was first and foremost extraordinarily human. He felt the pain of others deeply and subverted every social hypocrisy, every greed-based corporate crime and mean-spirited exploitation. Without doubt, the quality he embodied that made him beloved by millions was his unerring capacity to be who he said he was. In Che, words and actions were one. What he did was consistent with what he said. In a world where corporate crime, governmental sleight of hand, and the deterioration of moral values are every day more evident and endemic, the man's principles shine.
Because the energy of his internationalism burns as hot now as when he was alive, Che's image moves beyond easy metaphor. His myth has remained alive in disparate cultures. That myth, however, has been woven by friend and foe alike. Che's image, words, values, intentions, successes, and failures have all been shaped to symbolize that which he most deeply abhorred as well as that for which he died.
The most famous image of Che in life, the photograph of him wearing a black beret with the single star and looking into the future, was snapped by chance on March 5, 1960. A Belgian freighter, Le Coubre, had exploded in the Havana harbor, killing eighty Cubans. Che appeared at the mass funeral, and when he stepped to the edge of the speaker's platform, Alberto "Korda" Díaz snapped two consecutive 35 mm frames. This iconic image has circled the globe; it has been featured on posters, clothing, and even in an advertisement for Smirnoff vodka.
Almost forty-five years after his assassination, some still remember his sacrifice with pride or nostalgia, others would say "Good riddance," and many more have only the vaguest notion of who he was—or no notion at all. Yet from the grotesquery of his severed hands, preserved in a Cuban crypt; through the hundreds of biographies, treatises, and poems written to or about him; to a million portraits spray-painted on walls and cheap T-shirts with his immediately recognizable visage sold in bazaars from Cairo to Siem Riep and Naples to his own Rosario, Argentina, Che is a name known in every language on earth.
The way he acquired that name is worth a few lines. In Ernesto Guevara's country of origin the brief syllable is broadly applied to all young males, much the same way Buddy or Dude or some other generic might be used in English. As a young man in Argentina, Guevara was Ernesto or Ernestito: the oldest son whose name echoed his father's. Occasionally and at different periods during his childhood or adolescence, he responded to a variety of nicknames. It wasn't until he arrived in Mexico and joined Fidel Castro and his group of Cuban exiles that he became Che: the Argentine. Meeting the man who would lead him to his destiny gave him the sobriquet that stuck, the one that would be inscribed in history. So Che denotes the foreign as well as the familiar. One of the twentieth century's most unique personalities assumed the commonest of verbal identities, one shared by hundreds of thousands in his native land. At the same time, once applied to him it took on a new and individualized meaning. In Che—the name as well as the man—the ordinary became extraordinary.
We may also coax out an additional layer of meaning from this name. Its Argentinean application to all males draws our attention to cultures—every culture I have known—in which the very terms dude, guy, buddy, man, bro, or their equivalents bring to mind a sort of macho stance, tolerated or even forgiven because "boys will be boys" and "men will be men." In English, all one has to do with the visual iconography is to remove the C; what remains is he: he, him, the male pronoun. We remain unconscious of the leap our eyes make as they subtract the initial letter. Implication lodges itself in our cells. It is through the multiple and contested narratives of public discourse that reality, thought, interpretation, and opinion constantly change, are made, unmade, and remade. It is in this context that the name Che carries a distinctly masculine tone, one I will return to as I ponder the place of both man and myth in twentieth-century popular consciousness.
I never met Ernesto Guevara, but every so often, with an insistence as physical as spiritual, his memory draws me to revisit his life, ponder the attraction he exerts long past death, and read anew his writings and what others continue to write about him. My sources are mostly secondary, my intuitions those of a poet. I am mesmerized not by the man's power, which I often find to be exaggerated or hotheaded, but by his continued capacity to empower. I am moved more by his consistency and great generosity of spirit than by his sometimes-questionable political strategy or tactics.
I remember the moment of his death as vividly as if it were yesterday. October 9, 1967. Mexico City. A single mother, I had brought my ten-month-old firstborn to live in that city at the beginning of the decade. Now I also had a Mexican husband and two daughters. South of the border had become my home. The news came, impossible to believe at first but quickly and devastatingly confirmed, that the man my generation was counting on to lead Latin America's great movement for social change was dead. Young and rebellious myself at the time, I joined others who flooded the streets that night to paint "Che Vive" (Che Lives) on walls that had borne witness to struggle from the time of the Spanish conquest.
Three weeks later I traveled to the tiny island of Janitzio on beautiful Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán. I was translating for a Canadian Film Board crew that was making a movie about Rufino Tamayo. It was Mexico's Day of the Dead, and a silent procession of indigenous men and women wound their way through narrow lanes to the island's cemetery at the top of the hill. These were Purépecha people, perhaps also Otomí and Nahua. On their shoulders they carried immense ofrendas, armatures of hardened bread dough adorned with painted flowers and birds. They would spend the night with their departed, picnicking at gravesides, drinking and praying.
At that moment Che's assassination at the hands of my own country's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stood in for every death I had known. Witnessing the rituals of these indigenous poor, I thought of the Bolivians of the Altiplano for whom Che fought and died. Cultural devastation. Resignation and rebellion. The ugly residue of conquest. Mexico's elaborate ritual and Che's final effort in Bolivia became inextricably linked in my consciousness. Today, when I think of one, the others float to the forefront of my memory.
It would be years before I could begin to piece together how Che Guevara died. Were he and his two comrades ambushed at Quebrada del Churro or Quebrada del Yuro? Ñancahuazú or Mauricio? Did an enemy bullet incapacitate his m2, or did that even make a difference? Was he so doubled over with asthma, hunger, and exhaustion that he was unable to resist? Another member of the guerrilla force, one of the few who survived, describes his leader as weighing ninety pounds on that last day. Another portrays him dragging his rifle in the mud, without the strength to lift it off the ground.
At the moment of his capture did Che really say, "Don't shoot. I am Che Guevara: more useful to you alive than dead"? What of the mysterious young teacher some say brought him a last meal she'd cooked herself? Most men in that remote village oscillated between reactions of brutality and fear. A woman alone brought the doomed man sustenance and a few friendly words. What can we infer from this gender disparity among the villagers' responses when the mysterious enemy combatant suddenly appeared in their midst? The men were soldiers, firmly under the command of their superiors. Their meager paychecks demanded obedience to a chain of command. A few risked a human gesture; most mimicked a conqueror's stance. The lone woman was a teacher. In addition to her more compassionate instinct, she was probably also somewhat better educated than her neighbors.
What of the conversation Che—a teacher to the end—is rumored to have had with one of the young Bolivian soldiers guarding him, about a misspelled word on a piece of paper? And after his captors took him, wounded and with hands and feet bound, to the small schoolhouse at La Higuera, were his last words really "Shoot, coward, you are only killing a man"? All these incidents or presumed incidents, all these real or embroidered quotes, have been passed down from witnesses to friends or acquaintances as well as wending their way into the writing of utterly removed scribes, each with a particular interest to defend.
We do know that in the final effort to capture Guevara and the remaining rebels in his emaciated force, an extraordinarily cruel offensive was launched. Che was severely asthmatic, and for months all asthma medication and cortisone were removed from every hospital, pharmacy, and clinic over a vast area to prevent the possibility of the guerrillas attacking a dispensary and getting their hands on the precious remedies. Many of the Bolivian troops were replaced by US Rangers. The enemy outnumbered the guerrillas approximately three thousand to one. A handful of exhausted, hungry, sick revolutionaries were surrounded by battalions of well-trained well-armed soldiers with a single objective: to do away with the man who struck such fear in imperialism's heart.
Some of those soldiers treated their famous prisoner with respect; others taunted or battered him. One stole his last possessions—a dead combatant's watch he had promised to deliver to the man's family, his pipe, money, maps, a single hardboiled egg, and of course his diary.
Among those present was an official who called himself Capitán Ramos. This was Félix Rodríguez of the CIA. He subjected Guevara to a belittling interrogation, then took him outside the schoolhouse and propped him up so he could get someone to snap his picture with the guerrilla leader. Only after he had this personal memento did he order one of his underlings to carry out the execution that had already been decided at Langley and approved by Bolivian president René Barrientos. In subsequent years Rodríguez would repeat in self-serving detail his story of those moments with Che, embellishing it at every telling.
With their prize prey dead, the Bolivian military staged the tableaux that imprinted itself upon a world in shock. A couple dozen members of the press were taken to the small hospital in the nearby town of Vallegrande, where the laundry room had hastily been conditioned to display Bolivia's trophy of unequal war. There they were permitted to observe the bodies of Che and the other two guerrillas, Willy and El Chino, captured and executed with him. Guevara's body was elevated, presented front and center, those of his two companions crumpled on the floor. Bolivian news photographer Freddy Alborta defied orders not to climb up onto the table that held the legendary guerrilla, and took a series of photographs that would become important icons, not only in keeping Che's memory alive but also in shaping that memory into the future.
Those images immediately evoke the crucified Christ taken down from the cross. They show a man displayed on a cement slab, his head and torso slightly raised, long hair disheveled, naked from the waist up, torn pants and an artfully arranged jacket hiding his wounds. His lips are slightly parted—almost a faint smile—and his eyes open as if fixed on a future only he can see, one in which redemption for the world's disenfranchised is assured. On a stretcher placed over the slab-like trough, he seems to be floating, but in what? Surely not in the sordid ambience of that hastily set stage. In fact, Che had already begun to float in our collective consciousness. Death deepened and fixed forever the values he stood for in life. The message depicted in those photographic images transcends every vain hope of finality launched by Guevara's enemies. You can't kill transcendence.
Standing around the sad bier are the soldiers who participated in the hero's capture and execution. Some are young Indians, the very people whose lives Che hoped to change. Alborta's photograph would evoke comparisons both to Andrea Mantegna's Dead Christ and Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. In the latter, the doctor commands the attention of his students much as the high-ranking military officer in the photograph does of his troops. In both, underlings follow the gaze of the man in charge. There is always one set of eyes looking somewhere else, though. In the photographic image, while the officer points to Che's wounds, undoubtedly trying to convince the press that they all resulted from combat, one officer's gaze wanders to something going on beyond the picture plane. When searching such images for meaning, it's always a good idea to follow the wandering gaze.
Over the next years and decades many artists would produce new paintings alluding to that dramatic scene at Vallegrande. Stories of the historic day proliferated, grew, were authenticated, or simply became parts of a legend in flux. Villagers are said to have cut clumps of bloody hair to keep as relics or talismans. Candles were lit in many village homes. The people who were unable to rally around Che and his guerrilla force in life felt his power in death. Almost half a century later, impoverished residents of the area still refer to the pale Argentinean as a saint and pray to him for miracles in their hard lives.
Returning from myth to the real history of what led up to the foregoing tragedy, one must ask why a distinctively white Argentinean chose an eminently indigenous region of Bolivia as the place in which to initiate the twentieth-century continental liberation of Latin America. Porteños—the Europeanized, quick-witted, and ironic natives of Uruguay and Argentina's La Plata River basin—are viewed with distrust by the Indians of the Andes. A long-nurtured and well-founded response to racism undoubtedly played a role in the local peasants' inability to trust or support the foreigners. Che might have been more at home in northern Argentina, an area topographically similar to parts of Bolivia and with the dense vegetation so conducive to unconventional warfare. His eventual goal included the liberation of his own country, so he would also have been geographically closer to that goal. Perhaps the failure of an earlier guerrilla attempt at Salta made him reluctant to try there again so soon.
John Berger, Jean Franco, Mariano Mesman, Leandro Katz, and many others have written about the historic moment of Che's death and its cultural as well as political significance. In addition to Alborta's famous photograph, other iconic images, such as the Korda portrait and René Burri's photo of the revolutionary with his head thrown back behind a long cigar, have been reproduced by the millions—in books and magazines, on clothing and posters and coffee mugs. Thousands of poets all over the world have captured the man in verse or used his life as a point of departure for broader-ranging poems. Musical compositions, theater pieces, dance numbers, and films continue their parade of tribute or offense. For the superstitious, for progressives, for detractors, and for those disappearing few who knew the man, Che lives. Myth, religiosity, song, poetry, and art all see to that.
Here, then, is my contribution to that literature.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from che on my mind by margaret randall. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix1. A Death That Leads Us Back to Life 1
2. In Cuba, Where Our Lives Came Together in the Everyday 11
3. Multiple Prisms 19
4. Conflicting Versions 29
5. "Socialism and Man in Cuba" 35
6. Tender Heart and Rigorous Moral Code 43
7. Empowerment of the Erotic 51
8. How the Man Was Made 59
9. Che and Fidel 67
10. Che and Haydée 75
11. Exercising Power, Exercising Solidarity 87
12. The Question without an Answer 95
13. War and Peace 99
14. Revolution and Religion 115
15. Che's Legacy for Today's Activists 125
16. Poetry Closes the Circle and Opens Infinite Circles 133
Notes 139
Bibliography 147
What People are Saying About This
"Thoughtfully exploring the complex and contested record of the life and work of Che Guevara, Margaret Randall—with, as she says, 'the intuition of a poet'—presents a compelling personal meditation on a figure who has inspired legions of people, young and old, throughout the world who seek to struggle for a more just and decent human existence."
"In Che on My Mind, the poet Margaret Randall, who was one of the founders of the influential sixties bilingual journal El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn), assesses Che Guevara's enduring influence while confronting her own doubts and uncertainties over his justification of violence and armed struggle. She asks whether we can admire Guevara's commitment and generosity of spirit and still disagree with war as a strategy. Acknowledging that her own attitudes to Che have changed with age, her book is a frank assessment of Che's failures of judgment as well as of his charisma, and of his contradictory status as both saint and cowboy."
"In Che on My Mind, the poet Margaret Randall, who was one of the founders of the influential sixties bilingual journal El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn), assesses Che Guevara's enduring influence while confronting her own doubts and uncertainties over his justification of violence and armed struggle. She asks whether we can admire Guevara's commitment and generosity of spirit and still disagree with war as a strategy. Acknowledging that her own attitudes to Che have changed with age, her book is a frank assessment of Che's failures of judgment as well as of his charisma, and of his contradictory status as both saint and cowboy."