When a Hero Becomes an Embarassment

The movie Motorcycle Diaries could be taken many ways. Here is my take on this monumental man who ended his days as revolutionary martyr, an icon to Castro's failed global ambitions, a guerrilla revolutionary hunted unto death.

Guevara, the doctor child of priviledge came from the developed Europeanized side of southern Latin America, the Argentine, ventured north into the Chiliean, both lands of German immigration. the developed lands to the south of South America.

The more Europeanized Argentina from which Che came (as well as more Europeanized Chile) were later to be wracked by the brutal disappearances, Pinochet and all the rest, fascist style generals overturning their countrys' constitutions, cracking down on Marxism, partly in fear of Castro's influence. In both "civiliized" Chile and the Argentine almost "European style" fascist generals led inquisitions into the Left.

But that was twenty years later.

And as Guevara biked North in the early 50's , he biked deep from remnant Europe deep into the Third Word, leaving European "civilization" beyond, into the world of Indian mountain tribalism, dominated by Spanish elites, Peru and neighboring Bolivia, the area where banditry, rebellion, drug growing were to become the symptom of the incomplete subjugation of the highland, non-coastal Indian who once held such dominance in some of the world's greatest civilization. The Leper is a symbol of third world backwardness, treated, isolated in ambivalence by priests, doctors and nuns. While the big employers who sometimes exploited the Indians could often be from American corporate giants -- or American investment, ie Anaconda Copper.

It was in this "biking north into the Third World" which lay the origins of Guevaras's programs for global third world rebellion.

In uneasy alliance with Castro, he led the Cuban expeditionary forces in the far flung adventures both in northern Latin America and fighting the South Africans in Anglola Africa. This was the period when Castro sought to become a global power by providing Cuban soldiers in Soviet supported expeditionary campaigns.

Ultimately the Americans stepped up the pressure on Castro (and the Soviet Union) ---- and told him if you want to survive, distance yourself from Che and Che's activist support of Soviet supported "wars of liberation."

Under some accounts Castro did exactly that. And Che left for one last revolutionary foray into the Bolivian highlands -- to be hunted down by Bolivian commandos aided or led by the CIA.

With Guevara's passing, Castro had a revolutionary martyr to honor, but no longer the living irritant with America. Castro had now diassociated himself from a grand dream to lead a third world insurrection from the Americas to Africa. Oh, yes, he continued to defy America, but he had pulled in his horns a bit.

And so it came to pass that Guevara died, lived on a living legend, brought alive once again by Motorcycle Diaries.

No he was not the revolutionary Trotsky, ice picked by Stalin. But like Trotsky he became an embarassmnent to the real politik of the world. He, too, would be hunted down. His icepick, too, would come.