A Reader on Reading

And yet something of Che’s ideal survives beyond the political defeat, even in these days when greed has almost acquired the quality of a virtue and corporate ambition overrides mere social (let alone socialist) considerations. In part, he has become another colorful Latin American figure, like Emiliano Zapata or Pancho Villa, used to decorate T-shirts and shopping bags: in Bolivia, the National Tourist Board now conducts tours to the site of Che’s final campaign and the hospital where his body was displayed. But that is not all that remains. The face of Che — alive with his starred beret, or dead, staring as if his eyes could see into a point beyond our shoulder — still seems to encompass a vast and heroic view of men and women’s role in the world, a role that may seem to us today utterly beyond our capabilities or our interest.

No doubt he had the physique du rôle. Epic literature requires an iconography. Zorro and Robin Hood (via Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn) lent the live Che their features, and in the popular imagination he was a younger Don Quixote, a Latin American Garibaldi. Dead, as the nuns at the Vallegrande hospital noted when they surreptitiously snipped off locks of his hair to keep inside reliquaries, he resembled the deposed Christ, dark uniformed men surrounding him like Roman soldiers in modern costume. Up to a point, the dead face superseded the live one. A notorious passage in Fernando Solanas’s four-hour documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), which brilliantly chronicles Argentinean history from its earliest days to the death of Che, held the camera for several minutes on that lifeless face, forcing the audience to pay visual homage to the man who carried for us our urge for action in the face of injustice, who bore for us our bothersome agenbite of inwit. We stare at that face and wonder, At what point did he pass from lamenting the sorrows of this world, pitying the fate of the poor, and conversationally condemning the ruthless greed of those in power, to doing something about it, taking action against the unjust tide?

Perhaps it is possible to point to the moment in which the passage took place. On 22 January 1957, Che Guevara killed his first man. Che and his comrades were in the Cuban bush; it was midday. A soldier started shooting at them from a hut barely 70 feet from where they stood. Che fired two shots. At the second shot, the man fell. Until that moment, the earnest indignation at universal injustice had expressed itself in Byronic gestures, bad verse that Che wrote with echoes of nineteenth-century bombast, and the sort of academic prose known in Latin America as revolutionary, littered with the vocabulary of inaugural speeches and purple metaphors. After that first death something changed. Che, the ardent but conventional intellectual, became irrevocably a man of action, a destiny that had perhaps been his all along, even though everything in him seemed to conspire against his fulfilling it. Racked by asthma that made him stumble through long speeches, let alone long marches, conscious of the paradox of having been born into the class that benefited from the unfair system he had set out to challenge, moved suddenly to act rather than to reflect on the precise goals of his actions, Che assumed, with stubborn determination, the role of the romantic fighter-hero and became the figure whom my generation required in order to ease our conscience.

Thoreau declared that “action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.” Che (who, like all Argentinean intellectuals of his time, must have read “Civil Disobedience”) would have agreed with this paraphrase of Matthew 10:34–35.

The Blind Bookkeeper

I told them once, I told them twice:

They would not listen to advice.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6