View Full Version : Die!
NousDefionsDoc
09-24-2004, 06:08
Make it stop! (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=589&e=5&u=/ap/20040924/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/film_che_s_legacy)
"We will be like Che," uniformed boys and girls recite each school day when pledging to be "pioneers for communism."
Oh, but the Pledge of Allegiance is a bad thing...
brownapple
09-24-2004, 08:41
"We will be like Che,"
What? Dead?
Producer Robert Redford traveled to Cuba in January to privately screen the film for Guevara's widow, Aleida March, and other close relatives.
Isn't that illegal for Americans?
rubberneck
09-24-2004, 10:43
Why does history ignore the role of US Forces in Che's death? I have never understood that. I have even read some work by US historians that neglect to mention US involvement.
I saw a Che calender for 2005 in my local booksellers the other day.
Why does history ignore the role of US Forces in Che's death? I have never understood that. I have even read some work by US historians that neglect to mention US involvement.
Because "it didn't happen"!! After Col. Rheault's "lynching", a law was passed forbiding state sponsored assinations.
:D
So, NDD Does this mean you want me to return the tickets you had me Buy for Motorcycle Diaries (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318462/) ?
(Returning to my fortified position)
NousDefionsDoc
09-24-2004, 12:53
I saw a Che calender for 2005 in my local booksellers the other day.
How many copies did you buy?
I'm also sure that the 13 yo kid that comes in here to buy Soft Air BS with his Mom in their H2 Suv really understands and supports the "Cause" that that Bearded fella on his T shirt was always yapping about. :rolleyes:
"Producer Robert Redford traveled to Cuba in January to privately screen the film for Guevara's widow, Aleida March, and other close relatives."
Robert Redford is such a swell guy for doing that.
I'm just glad Che drove a Norton and not some fantastic piece of American steel like...a Harley. :p
Doc
Airbornelawyer
09-24-2004, 15:14
Producer Robert Redford traveled to Cuba in January to privately screen the film for Guevara's widow, Aleida March, and other close relatives.
Isn't that illegal for Americans?
In most cases, yes. There are a number of exemptions, such as for journalists and humanitarian work, but I don't see Redford's actions fitting any of them. The Cuba sanctions regime, including travel rules, is described here: http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sanctions/t11cuba.pdf
In most cases, yes. There are a number of exemptions, such as for journalists and humanitarian work, but I don't see Redford's actions fitting any of them. The Cuba sanctions regime, including travel rules, is described here: http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sanctions/t11cuba.pdf
Thanks!
Martin
How many copies did you buy?
Three. One is up for grabs.
Airbornelawyer
09-27-2004, 15:45
Paul Berman, himself very far to the left but not blind to totalitarianism in all its guises, wrote about the Che cult in Slate. Somehow I doubt most Slate readers are going to be swayed.
The Cult of Che: Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries. (http://slate.msn.com/id/2107100/)
The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. 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 hardline 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. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.
Airbornelawyer
09-27-2004, 15:46
The rest of the review:
The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. 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. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries.
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 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 Christlike 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.
The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now 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.
These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. Václav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has 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.
I 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?
As a protest against the ovation at Sundance, I would like to append one of Rivero's poems to my comment here. The police confiscated Rivero's books and papers at the time of his arrest, but the poet's wife, Blanca Reyes, was able to rescue the manuscript of a poem describing an earlier police raid on his home. Letras Libres published the poem in Mexico. I hope that Rivero will forgive me for my translation. I like this poem because it shows that the modern, Almodóvar-like qualities of impudence, wit, irreverence, irony, playfulness, and freedom, so badly missing from Salles' pious work of cinematic genuflection, are fully alive in Latin America, and can be found right now in a Cuban prison.
Search Order
by Raúl Rivero
What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?
What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I've written
the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"?
What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?
How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?
Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?
Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.
They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
"Castles with music box. I won't let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie."
A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.
Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
—the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.
The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. 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 hardline 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. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.
My Spanish teacher, an American who lived in Cuba during the sixties and later in other LATAM countries, claims that Raul Castro was in charge of the firing squads and that Guevara was a good, cordial guy.
What's the deal with the firing squads?
What would you reply with?
I only know what has been posted here and on SOCNET, plus the pages linked in concerned threads. I have a general picture, but that doesn't do much when she answers with specifics. I figure that I wouldn't need to dispell whatever good side he had, just show the dark one.
brownapple
09-28-2004, 06:05
You'll have to do a bit of research, but Gueverra oversaw a massacre during the Cuban Revolution. Can't blame it on Castro, he was nowhere in the AO.
rubberneck
09-28-2004, 06:45
Durning the Monday night pre-game show last night they interviewed Skins rb Clinton Portis and guess what he was wearing? I wonder if he realizes what Che was responsible for.....
NousDefionsDoc
09-28-2004, 09:16
A wounded enemy should be treated with care and respect unless his former life has made him liable to a death penalty, in which case he will be treated in accordance with his deserts.
They must distrust everyone, for the terrorized peasants in some cases will give them away to the repressive trooops in order to save themselves.
Thus when the armed vanguard of the people achieves power, both the imperialists and the national exploiting class will be liquidated at one stroke.
From Guerrilla Warfare by Guevara
Before departing he had to supervise, either at close quarters or from his window at La Cabana, the executions of Batista's collaborators. Justifiable as these* executions may have seemed at the time, they were carried out without any respect for due process. Estimates as to their exact number vary, especially for those executions carried out at La Cabana in the first days of the year. Cables from the United States Embassy, dated January 13 and 14, place the figure at 200.* Historians' and biographer's estimates range from 200 to 700 victims. Years later, Fidel Castro would place the number executed between 1959 and 1960 at 550. Some took place outside Havana: over 100 were ordered shot in Santiago by Raul Castro in early January.
...He had previously ordered dozens of executions, curiously abetted by Herman Marks, another "internationalist", a former convict from Milwaukee who had joined Che's ranks in the Escambray.
The 200 to 700 figure is cited by, among others, Father Inaki de Aspiazu, a Basque Catholic priest, who researched the matter in depth and from a stance sympathetic to the revolutionary regime.
Daniel James asserts that Guevara told Felix Rodriguez at La Higuera, on the eve of his execution, that Che himself had sent 1.500 enemies of the Revolution to their death. See Daniel James, Che Guevara (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), p.113
From The Life and Death of Che Guevara: Companero by Jorge G. Castaneda
NDD & Greenhat, thank you!
Greenhat, is it safe to presume that you meant those executions cited by NDD?
NousDefionsDoc
09-28-2004, 11:11
NDD & Greenhat, thank you!
Greenhat, is it safe to presume that you meant those executions cited by NDD?
Yes. Guevara was sent to La Cabaña by Castro. There is some conjecture as to why, as it was a lesser post. Some say it was because he was not Cuban. Others say it was because he had already decided to massacre those popel and needed some one with the revolutionary fervor to carry out the deed. Probably a combination of both. If he got too much grief over it, he could always blame it on an out of control foreigner or Che's fervor, discipline him and not taint the revolution. In addition, Castro was probably astute enough to recognize Che's romantic appeal and did not wish the competition - so he could always hold the act over his head as ammo if Castro needed it to remove a player such as Che.
brownapple
09-28-2004, 18:24
NDD is on target.
Achilles
09-28-2004, 18:45
I see many an idiot walking around campus with those damn Che T-shirts on. Sometimes I feel like calling them out on it, but I'd rather let them feel stupid about wearing that shirt later on when they stop smoking pot long enough to realize how meaningless their hippie-ness is.
Great, time to do some preparations then!
Muchas gracias!
Martin
Airbornelawyer
10-11-2004, 19:01
Maybe some of the guys that should be on T-shirts:
The Reaper
10-11-2004, 19:17
I like these shirts.
TR
Bravo1-3
10-11-2004, 23:49
And to complete the collection