Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

the socialist utopia 253
And he was a fanatic, consumed by restlessness and a frighteningly abstract
hatred, who in the end recognized only one moral value as supreme: the
willingness to be slaughtered for a cause.
Another astonishing fact is that so many members of my generation,
who were just coming of age at the time of his death, wanted to be like him,
and to obey him, even while we knew so little about him. It was only after
he was hunted down by Bolivian army forces, on Oc to ber 8, 1967, and the
unforgettable picture of his corpse—emaciated torso, tousled hair, and liquid,
vacant eyes—was displayed on the front pages of newspapers around
the world that Che became familiar to young people. It was in death that he
became known [. . .].
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born in Argentina in 1928, the son of
an intellectually curious, high-strung mother and a debonair, womanizing
father who ran through his wife’s fortune and never quite managed to get
any of his own business schemes off the ground. The couple fought constantly,
and the father slept sometimes on the living-room sofa, sometimes
in another house. At the age of two, Ernestito, the fi rstborn and favorite
of the Guevaras’s children (they had fi ve), developed asthma, and for long
stretches throughout his childhood he was bedridden. Spurred on by his
mother, Celia, he became a precocious and methodical reader and a stoic
patient. As with Teddy Roosevelt, physical hardship and endurance became
a habit, and Ernesto seems never to have succumbed to the invalid’s temptation
to engage in complaint and self-indulgence.
In adolescence, and at least partly as a response to his handicap, Ernesto
emerged as a full-fl edged macho, having his way with the family maids
(once literally behind the back of his favorite and very straitlaced aunt, who
was then sitting primly at the dining-room table); refusing at the age of fi fteen
to attend a protest demonstration because he did not have a revolver;
making it a point of pride never to bathe. (His upper-middle-class schoolmates
remember his nickname, Chancho, or Pig, not so much because it
was ugly as because he was so proud of it.) Before his machismo destroyed
him, it served him well: it tempered his will and spurred him to become
an athlete—one who, despite the crippling asthma, always made a point of
outracing, outkicking, and outhiking his less exigent peers. (Machismo also
gave him style: in the midst of his physical exploits, he would stop and suck
on his inhaler for a few moments, or give himself a quick adrenaline injection
through his clothes, and then return to the fi eld.)
At twenty-two, when he was studying medicine in Buenos Aires, he discovered
that the life of a wanderer suited him. Interrupting his studies, he
left home and motorbiked alone through northern Argentina. The following