BY CANUTE TANGWA (First published on 09/10/2007)
Ernesto “Che” Guevara is probably everybody’s revolutionary hero. He was our hero when as students thumbing through news magazines we set our eyes for the first time on this dashingly handsome-determined-angelic face with a well-fitting beret marked with a lone star. He looked boyishly uncouth but so attractive in his wavy dark hair and unkempt moustache.
Effigy galore: according to dependable sources, over 20 million people in the world, communists and non-communists, have T-shirts with the image of the Great Che. Without doubt, great revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao would wince.
Of heroes and icons, Ariel Dorfman in Time Magazine (1999) said of Guevara, “though communism has lost its fire, he remains the potent symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution”.
Guevara, a medical doctor, was a scion of a bourgeois Argentinian family. Like Lenin and Trotsky, he rebelled against his class and began a guerrilla war from Cuba in 1956 against thieving imperialists and their home-based compradors.
He was the champion of the downtrodden and an advocate for social justice. These he achieved through the argument of force in Cuba. Undeterred and restless, he believed that the Cuban revolutionary experience could be exported throughout Latin America and the world.
As a believer in several Vietnams, he parted ways with his alter ego Fidel Castro. He once crossed over to the Congo to lend a hand to the late Kabila père against the Mobutu led anti-Lumumba government in Kinshasa. He was disappointed but not discouraged. He pitched camp in Bolivia where he led a guerrilla war and was assassinated in Vallegrande in October 1967.
On the 47th anniversary of his death, Fidel Castro paid him a stellar tribute, “a flower torn up prematurely by the stem. I bow my head to pay tribute—with respect and gratitude—to the exceptional warrior”.
Indeed, as the world celebrates Guevara’s memory, there are hundreds and thousands who have no affection for him. As chief prosecutor of the Cabana prison in Havana in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution several innocent souls were sent to their death. In the bush, some of his contemporaries deplored his coldness, totalitarian nature and killer instinct. To relatives, friends and eyewitnesses, Che (his affectionate name which means, hey you) was the butcher of Cabana and the incarnation of the highhanded, totalitarian and undemocratic character of the Cuban revolution.
However, the icon, Guevara, lives on. Like all icons, he is steeped in myths and legends. All revolutions have their ugly sides. But as it is with Che, the way he died, Christ-like, young and defiant, the bad and the ugly were buried long ago in the mountains of Cuba and the jungles of Bolivia.
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