Tuesday, February 10, 2009

An Ed—Edop: The Lessons Of CHE Some Recent Resurrected Thoughts Concerns And Discussion. Resistance, Rebellion Revolt, Revolution And Honesty.


An Ed—Edop: The Lessons Of CHE Some Recent Resurrected Thoughts Concerns And Discussion. Resistance, Rebellion Revolt, Revolution And Honesty.

 

 

We seem to seek “pop culture offerings”  that we hope bear a heavy dose of the truth…they seldom deliver…the romanticized myths of any time period , denial and people tend to obscure or at least blur the truth by either accident or design. 

 

The two part epic CHE Guevara film is such a piece and serves as the backdrop to this morning’s thesis.

 

There are six of us in my Computer Café Room This Morning.  The Coffee is my blend: equal parts of:   Starbuck’s Guatemala Casi Cielo , Caribou Coffee Mahogany , and for my tastes the finest Sumatra available in America:  Villa Rey -Café De Sumatra

 

It may be a bit early but the Cigar Aficionado in the group has supplied us with a Padron Series 1964 cigar a piece.  He’s an attorney and can afford them, and he does.  I guess he wants the atmosphere of a Camus French Café and the long gone Joya De Nicaragua cigar of that day.  I still have nine packed away for special occasions. 

Revolt, resistance, rebellion and revolution are common topics of this gathering as we all share the common view of humanity and current events that things are slipping away in this world of timidity, impotence and denial. 

 

We don’t, in all candor, hold out very much hope that tragic events are going to be averted. 

 

With Rush Limbaugh beating the drum of right wing extremism with growing daily credibility among that ilk, Palin still be touted as a serious contender in 2012, Republicans slipping away into the Klan in response to the party’s new Chair, Dobbs ready to take up an Alamo type stance on the border and House and Senate Republicans having made it abundantly clear that their first mission is to protect the asses of the gone Bush Administration, their second to wreck the Obama administration and their priority the continued advance of neocon positions and the continued carpet bagging of our treasury for the right wing corporate/financial capitalist who have toppled the house of cards that they have fashioned; what in the hell does any intelligent thinking person perceive as the outcome of  the brew of social ferment boiling away?

 

I know many are a bit tired of my Existential Jeffersonian observations of the human condition and human nature/inclinations and where this is all heading, but all I can say is that I’ve been here before, and this time it is worse, during the Vietnam era when we just missed the big “R”evolution.  But this time like a great tectonic shock the forces are pent up and building and the stresses are accumulating at an increasingly rapid pace.  Something is going to give!  And when it does it won’t be pretty. It will make my seminal life experience: the Kent State tragedy… pale. 

 

And that is where our conversation has centered this morning ala our conversation regarding the two part epic CHE big screen offering…the truths unspoken and the myths perpetuated.  We Americans tend to glorify, revere Revolutionaries, especially our own and those whose violence in the name of righteous causes and principles have been perpetrated on any soil other than our own. 

 

But let me make my very first point in that regard.  Just look at the photo/graphic header to this post.  The photograph is by the Cuban Photographer (Alberto Diaz Gutierrez ) Alberto “Korda” Diaz.  It is the most reproduced photographic image in history!  What does that tell you? 

 

The film is raising a great deal of renewed debate, protests, titillated excitement among Gueveraphiles and has even earned the talented Del Toro the Best Actor award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.  Book sales of CHE related books and local library check outs are at a peak.  I find that interesting in that this film is so long that most will and/or have ignored it, but worth of mouth on the street and discussion flourishes...and at a time like this; that is an important symptom, yes, I said symptom!

 

Our discussion here this morning has been much like we have heard elsewhere.  It has not been a movie review and this conversation commentary will not be a movie review.  The conversations have been about the themes of resistance, rebellion revolt, revolution and the question of just how much are people going to take before it breaks, and the nature of those event and the men and women who become central to those events, the reality of those events.  Because there is one truism I can share with you; a Revolution is a War... no better or worse than any other war despite how history define a revolution in terms of altruistic principles and popular change.  

 

There are always a sufficient number of grave markers by which to remember a Revolution and a lot of myths shrouding the truth of events, and yes even motives.  The historian is often confronted with the challenge of separating truth from fiction and reality from nationalist or cultural myth.  That is perhaps understandable when one accepts the fact that history often does not provide either an easy read or a happy ending and that characters and players upon the stage that one wants desperately to like, are often in serious part, despicable.

 

The Revolutionary is no different from anyone else on several levels.  He or she is human and though we may want to idealize them, romanticize them they are in the end “warriors”, warriors albeit for causes and hopes most support and or cherish.  I am no longer interested in the debate of peaceful change versus revolutionary change.  When peaceful change fails; we get Revolutionary change at some point in time.  It is just that simple.

 

Jefferson understood that and eloquently stated the fact in Declaration of Independence and President John F. Kennedy defined and acknowledged the condition that provokes violent change when in his Address to the diplomatic corps of the Latin American Republics and Latin American diplomats at the White House on March 13 1962, the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress. 

 

President Kennedy urged wealthy Latin Americans to support the Alliance for Progress warning that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”  Oft quote with scant citation I have provided the link to the entirety of that address here. 

 

Revolutions are given to the same depravities and excesses of any war; they just have a different name.  We Americans dislike any attempt to mention or portrayal of our own Revolutionary War as anything but a pristine righteous just cause, honorably conducted on our side.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Many a “Loyalist” simply disappeared or they were found mysteriously shot or worse.  Man does not take up arms against his fellow beings without blood lust, depravity and perversion showing their ugly heads.  We have rules as to how wars are not to be conducted, as if it were some accepted human past time that requires a degree of regulation.

 

That is the back handed, sarcastic way of saying that we accept war as normal expression of our species’ inclinations. And thus we ought to honestly acknowledge the savagery and brutality that we condone and attempt to justify and dignify.

 

The French Revolution saw the gutters of Paris run red with the blood of the dead against the back drop of drum rolls and the icy thud of the guillotine…rather excessive.

 

In our morning discussion here we have taken the full measure of both sides of the Guevara Coin: The Folks Hero Guerilla Revolutionary and the murderous psychopath!

 

Those are, after all, the two schools of thought.

 

Our Age has given rise to The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara.  The present-day cult of CHE—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring a dreadful reality, a dreadful reality inherent in all wars regardless of their names or designations as Revolutions, and Walter Salles' movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford's Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press.

 

He has been erected into a symbol of freedom, a symbol of social justice and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries.  The French Cannes accolades should come as no surprise.  The French love anything CHE and have been among the leading commercializers of CHE right down to CHE Vodka and Cigarettes.  It should, however, be a wakeup call for Americans that we are second only to France and that the popularity of CHE and all cult-like trappings increase exponentially year by year in the young members of America’s counter culture.

 

All Revolutions; all Revolutionaries have a dark side; yes even our own American forefathers.  Revolution is not the entries of the innocent.  One does not shoot, bayonet, kill, maim, disfigure, dismember with an: “OH, excuse me; I’m sorry I had to do this in the name of liberty, freedom and justice.”  It is just not that simple.  Does that mean I detract from the accomplishments and contributions of our fore bearers?  Certainly not but I am not naive and in no way do I depict these men in my mind as totally altruistic heroes, heads wrapped in halos.  When a government becomes so unresponsive to those who are governed and empower it to act upon their behalf as to constitute repression as opposed to service; people will put an end to the dysfunctional condition.  That is as it always has been and will always be.  JFK had this to say of that equation: “"One man with a gun can control 100 without one."

 

The “Symbolic CHE” is the hand writing on the wall, the charismatic graffiti of  growing shadow resistance.  The fuse is burning and this government needs to be about the business of defusing the time bomb with real answers and solutions to the problems and desires that feeding the fires of discontent and social ferment.  The various divides in this nation are not being closed or healed with the words change and hope and only results, tangible, measurable change will do.  The time grows short is the hearts of those who harbor CHE. 

 

The dark side of CHE, the dark side of every Revolution is the murderous inherent murderous component.  A student of Revolutions; I will tell you that element is always there no matter how one attempts to explain or sanitize the aftermath…make no mistake about it. 

 

So let us focus, as we have done here today on that matter in the form of CHE as the example at hand.  If you do not accept the “mythical CHE” you are left with CHE, the grim psychotic executioner of the Cuban Revolution, the personal executioner of 14 prisoners and deserters, the signatory of countless firing squad death sentences…an image far removed from the romantic hero of resistance, revolt, rebellion and revolution.

 

For some there is a comfortable acceptance of the excesses of war and revolutions as simply a part of the human instinct and human experience, tragic as it may be; it is acceptable.  Murderous psychopaths and killing opportunists have their accepted roles in such affairs for many.  Such things are “normal” in wars and revolutions and only the losers will ever be prosecuted for their excesses or murdered at the hand of the state for their defeat.   

 

I have a pedantic need to convey history, reveal it with truthful clarity and that includes the failures, weaknesses and penchants of our species.

 

CHE can be seen, read as a champion of the poor, the oppressed, the victimized and he can be seen clearly as a brutal warrior personality.  He was both as have been all generals and all revolutionaries.  They wear but different uniforms.

 

At the extreme end a portrait of CHE can be painted that depicts him as the equal of any of the Nazi madmen and the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara can be viewed as an episode in the moral callousness of our time and as a  totalitarian.

 

Some would argue that he achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But CHE was a mainstay of the hard-line pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won.

 

CHE presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination.

 

In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on.

 

He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own.

 

The film follows the young Che and his friend Alberto Granado on a vagabond tour of South America in 1951-52—which Che described in a book published under the title Motorcycle Diaries, and Granado in a book of his own. Che was a medical student in those days, and Granado a biochemist, and in real life, as in the movie, the two men spent a few weeks toiling as volunteers in a Peruvian leper colony. These weeks at the leper colony constitute the dramatic core of the movie. The colony is tyrannized by nuns, who maintain a cruel social hierarchy between the staff and the patients. The nuns refuse to feed people who fail to attend mass. Young Che, in his insistent honesty, rebels against these strictures, and his rebellion is bracing to witness. You think you are observing a noble protest against the oppressive customs and authoritarian habits of an obscurantist Catholic Church at its most reactionary.

 

Yet the entire movie, in its concept and tone, exudes a Christological cult of martyrdom, a cult of adoration for the spiritually superior person who is veering toward death—precisely the kind of adoration that Latin America's Catholic Church promoted for several centuries, with miserable consequences. The rebellion against reactionary Catholicism in this movie is itself an expression of reactionary Catholicism. The traditional churches of Latin America are full of statues of gruesome bleeding saints. And the masochistic allure of those statues is precisely what you see in the movie's many depictions of young Che coughing out his lungs from asthma and testing himself by swimming in cold water—all of which is rendered beautiful and alluring by a sensual backdrop of grays and browns and greens, and the lovely gaunt cheeks of one actor after another, and the violent Andean landscapes.

 

The film does, however, provide a vehicle to explore a more modern Cuba torn between her past, her traditional historical cultural urges and  the many would offer that the modern-day cult of CHE blinds us not just to the past but also to the present.

 

A tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.  The last vestiges of Castro’s Cuba and its instinctual reaction to the United States and all if its institutions and form of government…maybe…but.

 

These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world.

 

Václav Havel  organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, have rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor.

 

The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility—those days appear to be over.

 

We   wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?

 

Americans see only what the media wants us to see and it is a steady promotion for normalization of relations with our island neighbor, normalization meaning business, trade, tourism and gambling.  To be sure there are other good things happening in an evolving Cuba and the potential for positive change exists, but are we going to ignore all those who are abused and down trodden in the shadows of Cuba we choose not see?

 

But let me begin to close on the remarks and conversations of this day.  The movie in its story line sticks fairly close to Che's diaries, with a few additions from other sources. The diaries tend to be haphazard and nonideological except for a very few passages. CHE had not yet become an ideologue when he went on this trip.

 

He reflected on the layered history of Latin America, and he expressed attitudes that managed to be pro-Indian and, at the same time, pro-conquistador. But the film is considerably more ideological, keen on expressing an "indigenist" attitude (to use the Latin-American Marxist term) of sympathy for the Indians and hostility to the conquistadors. Some Peruvian Marxist texts duly appear on the screen. I can imagine that Salles and his screenwriter, José Rivera, have been influenced more by Subcomandante Marcos and his "indigenist" rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, than by CHE.

 

The film follows the young Che and his friend Alberto Granado on a vagabond tour of South America in 1951-52—which Che described in a book published under the title Motorcycle Diaries, and Granado in a book of his own. Che was a medical student in those days, and Granado a biochemist, and in real life, as in the movie, the two men spent a few weeks toiling as volunteers in a Peruvian leper colony. These weeks at the leper colony constitute the dramatic core of the movie. The colony is tyrannized by nuns, who maintain a cruel social hierarchy between the staff and the patients. The nuns refuse to feed people who fail to attend mass. Young Che, in his insistent honesty, rebels against these strictures, and his rebellion is bracing to witness. You think you are observing a noble protest against the oppressive customs and authoritarian habits of an obscurantist Catholic Church at its most reactionary.

 

Yet the entire movie, in its concept and tone, exudes a Christological cult of martyrdom, a cult of adoration for the spiritually superior person who is veering toward death—precisely the kind of adoration that Latin America's Catholic Church promoted for several centuries, with miserable consequences. The rebellion against reactionary Catholicism in this movie is itself an expression of reactionary Catholicism. The traditional churches of Latin America are full of statues of gruesome bleeding saints. And the masochistic allure of those statues is precisely what you see in the movie's many depictions of young Che coughing out his lungs from asthma and testing himself by swimming in cold water—all of which is rendered beautiful and alluring by a sensual backdrop of grays and browns and greens, and the lovely gaunt cheeks of one actor after another, and the violent Andean landscapes.

 

The film does, however, provide a vehicle to explore a more modern Cuba torn between her past, her traditional historical cultural urges and  the many would offer that the modern-day cult of CHE blinds us not just to the past but also to the present.

 

A tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.  The last vestiges of Castro’s Cuba and its instinctual reaction to the United States and all if its institutions and form of government…maybe…but.

 

These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world.

 

Václav Havel  organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, have rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor.

 

The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility—those days appear to be over.

 

We   wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?

 

Americans see only what the media wants us to see and it is a steady promotion for normalization of relations with our island neighbor, normalization meaning business, trade, tourism and gambling.  To be sure there are other good things happening in an evolving Cuba and the potential for positive change exists, but are we going to ignore all those who are abused and down trodden in the shadows of Cuba we choose not see?

 

But let me begin to close on the remarks and conversations of this day.  The movie in its story line sticks fairly close to Che's diaries, with a few additions from other sources. The diaries tend to be haphazard and nonideological except for a very few passages. CHE had not yet become an ideologue when he went on this trip.

 

He reflected on the layered history of Latin America, and he expressed attitudes that managed to be pro-Indian and, at the same time, pro-conquistador. But the film is considerably more ideological, keen on expressing an "indigenist" attitude (to use the Latin-American Marxist term) of sympathy for the Indians and hostility to the conquistadors. Some Peruvian Marxist texts duly appear on the screen. I can imagine that Salles and his screenwriter, José Rivera, have been influenced more by Subcomandante Marcos and his "indigenist" rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, than by CHE.

 

The movie in its story line sticks fairly close to Che's diaries, with a few additions from other sources. The diaries tend to be haphazard and nonideological except for a very few passages. Che had not yet become an ideologue when he went on this trip. He reflected on the layered history of Latin America, and he expressed attitudes that managed to be pro-Indian and, at the same time, pro-conquistador. But the film is considerably more ideological, keen on expressing an "indigenist" attitude (to use the Latin-American Marxist term) of sympathy for the Indians and hostility to the conquistadors. Some Peruvian Marxist texts duly appear on the screen. I can imagine that Salles and his screenwriter, José Rivera, have been influenced more by Subcomandante Marcos and his "indigenist" rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, than by Che.

 

And yet, for all the ostensible indigenism in this movie, the pathos here has very little to do with the Indian past, or even with the New World. The pathos is Spanish, in the most archaic fashion—a pathos that combines the Catholic martyrdom of the Christ like scenes with the on-the-road spirit not of Jack Kerouac (as some people may imagine) but of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a tried-and-true formula in Spanish culture. (See Benito Pérez Galdós' classic 19th-century novel Nazarín.) If you were to compare Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries, with its pious tone, to the irrevent, humorous, ironic, libertarian films of Pedro Almodóvar, you could easily imagine that Salles' film comes from the long-ago past, perhaps from the dark reactionary times of Franco—and Almodóvar's movies come from the modern age that has rebelled against Franco.

 

Let us be mindful also of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King as regards our place in the Revolutionary ferment of his years. In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." {applause} Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin {applause}, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.



A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. {applause}

 

Because we are what we are as a species I see no end to warfare in my lifetime; I see no end to Revolutions and I see no end to the excesses that each brings and I can only hope that where Revolution becomes the chosen path of a people that their leaders and heroes are mere mortals, who if not held accountable to their words can easily access their dark sides in the perversion of a cause thought righteous.

 

The movie paints predominantly with the brush of worship and in an act of denial never really touches the dark side pallet of CHE.  It is a part of his life and character that has much to teach in terms of lessons that ought not to be forgotten.  He will forever be a motivational hero to some and a despised killer to other.  That is the nature of things today.

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