Sinclair Viva Che!

The Strange Death and Life of Che Guevara
1. Auflage 2006
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5648-2
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

The biography of Che Gevara.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sinclair, Andrew

Leseproben

Contributions in Tribute to
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara

The baas thinks

When it comes

Napalm tanks

Wire dum-dums

Shrapnel whips

Electric shocks

Booby traps

Will block us

The baas thinks

Flesh and blood

Sinew flanks

Black and red

Shall not stand

The war machine

The steel wind

The iron whine

Che, now our fingers are propellors

Cities burn where our minds were numb

Our arms are the barrels of mortars

Our heads are fused like a bomb

You have turned our tribes to brigades

We flow remorseless where rivers ran

Our loins are the seed of grenades

Our ribs are the armoury of man

After you, we will never yield

We have one thing to give you, a life

And the bullet shall break on our shield

And the vulture shall fall on our knife

The baas fears

When it comes

We’ll wash our spears

In blood and bones

But Che knows

It comes soon . . .

The white night grows . . .

See the black moon!

J.A. (South Africa)

What I felt, as a human being, on hearing of Che’s death, was influenced by the experience of some years in socialist countries of Eastern Europe. In the People’s Poland, for instance, where flats may be got in reasonable time only by paying in dollars, where I have heard of prosperous Party members being bribed for a place in a sanatorium, and where everything stagnates, there is a good deal of noble talk, on all the media, about revolutionary heroes, and this – if nothing else – has killed my romanticism.

I have never been to Latin America, but I have read, in books by moderate writers, of a feudalism ranging from an outdated paternalism to a reign of terror. I have heard of wooden ploughs dodging round boulders on semi-barren hillsides and hunger allayed by manioc and bad coffee. In London I have mixed with irresponsible sons of the big landowners.

The revolution I really believe in is non-violent, but obviously to dictate non-violence to classes or races in a desperate plight is outrageously silly. I admire not only Che’s courage and skill but his insistence that without a firm moral basis there can be no real revolution. Che’s revolution won’t triumph easily; his enemies have also studied his book and developed devastating tactics of counterinsurgency. But it will triumph in the end, and I hope for the emergence in Latin America of free, healthy, vivid societies without that canker of so many ‘socialist’ countries, a selfish élite of old ex-partisans and young technologists.

JOHN ADLARD (England)

To the Memory of Che

beneath the white map

or chaos

of the stars

the moon floats

he stands barefoot

on the cracked

warm earth

nightbirds shriek

swoop

his mineral sweat

makes luminous

his fear

he waits to kill

a tank

with an old gun

that his father

killed rabbits with

and a broken-

bladed knife

but no tank appears

so at dawn he turns

to go and two

soldiers

shoot him twice

walk away

not talking

buttoning

their pistol holsters

and when the sun

makes salt

from his sweat

and he lies dying

in the flat field

nursing his

torn belly

he tries to say

LYMAN ANDREWS (USA)

Here we are

appalled

outraged

even though this death is

one of the foreseeable absurdities

I’m ashamed to look at

the paintings

the armchairs

the carpets

to take a bottle out of the refrigerator

to tap out the three universal letters of your name

in the rigid machine

that never

never had

so pale a ribbon

Shame to feel the cold

and get near the stove as usual

to be hungry and eat

such a simple thing

to turn on the gramophone and listen in silence

to a Mozart quartet most of all

Shame on the comfort

shame on the asthma

when you comandante are falling

riddled

fabulous

brilliant

our conscience is full of holes

I hear that they burnt you

with what fire

are they going to burn the good

the glad tidings

the inexorable tenderness

that you brought with you and left behind

with your cough

and your earthenware cup

I hear that they burnt

all your vocation

minus a finger

enough to point out the way to us

and to accuse the monster who defiled you

and to tighten other fingers on the trigger

and so here we are

appalled

outraged

Sure that in time the leaden

amazement

will wear off

but the rage will remain

and its contours grow sharper

you are dead

you are living

you are falling

you are a cloud

you are the rain

you are a star

Where are you

if you are

if you are arriving

take off a moment at last

to breathe peacefully

to fill your lungs with sky

where are you

if you are

if you are arriving

it will be a pity if God does not exist

but there will be others

there are sure to be others

fit to welcome you

comandante.

MARIO BENEDETTI (Uruguay)

On Tuesday 10 October, 1967, a photograph was transmitted to the world to prove that Guevara had been killed the previous Sunday in a clash between two companies of the Bolivian army and a guerrilla force on the north side of the Rio Grande river near a jungle village called Higueras. (Later this village received the proclaimed reward for the capture of Guevara.) The photograph of the corpse was taken in a stable in the small town of Vallegrande. The body was placed on a stretcher and the stretcher was placed on top of a cement trough.

During the preceding two years ‘Che’ Guevara had become legendary. Nobody knew for certain where he was. There was no incontestable evidence of anyone having seen him. But his presence was constantly assumed and invoked. At the head of his last statement – sent from a guerrilla base ‘somewhere in the world’ to the Tri-continental Solidarity Organisation in Havana – he quoted a line from the 19th century revolutionary Cuban poet José Martí: ‘Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.’ It was as though in his own declared light Guevara had become invisible and ubiquitous.

Now he is dead. The chances of his survival were in inverse ratio to the force of the legend. The legend had to be nailed. ‘If,’ said the New York Times, ‘Ernesto Che Guevara was really killed in Bolivia, as now seems probable, a myth as well as a man has been laid to rest.’

We do not know the circumstances of his death. One can gain some idea of the mentality of those into whose hands he fell by their treatment of his body after his death. First they hid it. Then they displayed it. Then they buried it in an anonymous grave in an unknown place. Then they disinterred it. Then they burnt it. But before burning it, they cut off the fingers for later identification. This might suggest that they had serious doubts whether it was really Guevara whom they had killed. Equally it can suggest that they had no doubts, but feared his corpse. I tend to believe the latter.

The purpose of the radio photograph of 10 October was to put an end to a legend. Yet on many who saw it, its effect may have been very different. What is its meaning? What, precisely and unmysteriously, does the photograph mean now? I can but cautiously analyse it as regards myself.

There is a resemblance between the photograph and Rembrandt’s painting of The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp. The immaculately dressed Bolivian colonel has taken the professor’s place. The two figures on his left stare at the cadaver with the same intense but impersonal interest as the two nearest doctors on the professor’s left. It is true that there are more figures in the Rembrandt – as there were certainly more men, unphotographed, in the stable at Vallegrande. But the placing of the corpse in relation to the figures above it, and in the corpse the sense of global stillness – these are very similar.

Nor should this be surprising, for the function of the two pictures is similar: both are concerned with showing a corpse being formally and objectively examined. More than that, both are concerned with making an example of the dead: one for the advancement of medicine, the other as a political warning. Thousands of photographs are taken of the dead and the massacred. But the occasions are seldom formal ones of demonstration. Doctor Tulp is demonstrating the ligaments of the arm, and what he says applies to the normal arm of every man. The colonel is demonstrating the final fate – as decreed by ‘divine providence’- of a notorious guerrilla leader, and what he says is meant to apply to every guerrilla on the continent.

I was also reminded of another image: Mantegna’s painting of the dead Christ, now in the Brera at Milan. The body is seen from the same height, but from the feet instead of from the side. The hands are in identical positions, the fingers curving in the same gesture. The drapery over the lower part of the body is creased and formed in the same manner as the blood-sodden, unbuttoned, olive-green trousers on Guevara. The head is raised at the same angle. The mouth is slack of expression in the same way. Christ’s eyes have been shut, for there are two mourners beside him. Guevara’s eyes...