Che Guevara died; his portrait was on the cover of Life magazine. There are few faces as intimidating as the faces of this man. In one position or another, in an act or another, in this or that country, as a secret that can’t stay anymore, it reveals the very picture of desolation. Sorry for the confidence, but I have come to him from the most puerile land from the less epic situations. If you want to say something, what do the faces of Che tell you? Where to, for example, he was looking that 1960 afternoon when Korda took him unawares and fiercely embedded it in all the flags and all the sweaters in the world?
The events of La Coubre complement the dramatic overtones that stem from his face, and make us forget something. Che looked at social injustices, certainly, but with the side to look at the essential injustice. Che watched the corpses, rabid sea of Cubans, the recoilless fait accompli , the man involved in the dizzying swirl of history, the passage of time , victims as a cause , but also as a chance, and so , without we never noticed , immanence comes because war does not look with gravity or closeness of statesmen , but with gravity or closeness of poets. Che was Che , and was also Byron .
That oblique condition is not exactly what now comprises the eternal rebel in incendiary adolescents in contemporary decaffeinated barricades. The heroes are at two grave risks, always present. First, the fact of surviving his own heroism. Second, the failure to survive it. First, the fact that they become myths while still alive. Second, the fact that they do it after death. All myths are bad archetypes of earlier myths, which, in turn, were reproduced on the myth of Prometheus, so fallacious.
Great men are not great men. Their intimate acts are common. Their public events and historical events as well. But neither they are simple subjects. (Do not let them, students, to fool you with any of these farces.) Che travels the continent on a bike, and did not suspect, as young as he was, that trip was a recoilless trip, a journey without end. Firstly, go around Latin America is a natural action that many others have done before and after.
Che will never know he will end up in Mexico and, though he had thought about it long night, do not know either how he ends up in the Sierra Maestra, and later in Havana, and then at the UN, and later in the Congo, and Eastern Europe, and again in Havana, and almost finally in Bolivia, and finally death, and death is the symbol. Just as others enter the arena of crime, or diplomacy, or boredom, sometime Che Guevara entered the arena of the epics. A ring, essentially equal to the other. If crime changes the life of a few , diplomacy anyone’s life , and personal life boredom , epics change the lives of millions of people , and that is, seen well , the only difference, purely quantitative .
However, there is another distinctive feature: the poetic feature. It is not defined in the facts but in thought. Not defined when he boards the Granma, but the decision to board the Granma. Not defined in going to Bolivia, but convinced that it is essential to go to Bolivia, and that this is just what counts for the rest. That is, a body and an ideal (we all have an ideal, whatever low). May your individual actions have a collective purpose is the true distinction of these men. Understanding the fate of humanity as their destination. Or give it, in short, that explanation.
What makes a hero is the completely willingness to take on endeavors that exceed the physical limits of normal subjects. What makes them normal subjects is that despite subordinating reality to wishes un-heard of for the rest , they cannot do anything but start revolutions from scratch, step by step, almost unconsciously, with the same common and unexplained sequence of someone when starts a book, or planning a robbery, or finishes a house. At what right time heroes become heroes? In none. There isn’t despite heroic dates, right times. The heroes become heroes when they are explained poetically. What, then, is more epic than a poet? But also, what is more absurd?
Che’s murder marks the end of an era, and continues to be an act performed by a predatory junior , a trigger pulled by a nobody . When ideas are turned into myths, always so hard, and not the facts, as usual distorted, then we will fully understand this apparent contradiction. Public rhetoric establishes a false order, full of inaccuracies and alarmingly empty of bright details. Minimum Three small scenes make for me the rest of the life of Che to acquire connotations they allegedly asked it to have. All three are in the final months of his life.
The first when he tells Aleida March, before leaving for Bolivia, that’s all he can leave her, all intimately his. What? A tape of his voice, where she hears a poem by Neruda, Vallejo and another. Consider everything that Che lived, think of the man who has been turning in all that has traveled and all international politics has. And then think about how all intimately his are these verses written by others, by now written by anyone. The second is in Bolivia, during the guerrilla times, when he goes away and climbs a tree and steals time to review a book.
And the third scene that does not appear anywhere , and it is not the biblical photography in Life magazine are those final seconds in which Che lies moored on a dirt floor , presumably of an adobe house , dirty , bearded, in the heart of the South American jungle , definitely utopias scattered on the floor, seconds that the world has left him alone, seconds that does not receive the applause of the General Assembly , seconds during which no progress by any city with his face on any flag, seconds that no one comes and pays a few bucks and says do me the favor of having Che Guevara tattooed , seconds that thins considerably, but he does not suffer hunger , seconds that appears and disappears , seconds that dream , seconds that becomes intermittent and hard as a rock , seconds that not even find his bones , seconds that his guerrilla no longer exists, seconds that he thinks of Rosario or his children or, as he said , in Cuba , even though we do not know if he really said that, seconds that e knows he will die at the hands of vulgar soldier and knows well that there is no escape.
None of these things I have learned from free devotional speakers. Che is the only dead that does not seem dead, but it hurts as though he is just ended.
Author
Carlos M. Álvarez
