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

256 reframing latin america
about guerrilla warfare in the process of overthrowing Batista amounted to
a prescription—a necessary remedy for every form of social disease. Another
fl aw was that he was inescapably committed to a certain defi nition of virility
and to the code of conduct it implied: a macho defi nition, not unusual
among Latin Americans of his generation. As a result, he found it unbearably
humiliating ever to lose face, back down, admit defeat. He could not
see that Sancho Panza might be as heroic as Quixote. And he was as blind to
nuances of character as he was tone-deaf: for all the painful insights into his
own nature that he reveals in his diaries, and for all his astute observations
in them on landscape, warfare, and political dynamics, there are no credible
portraits of his fellowmen. There are only revolutionaries, who are full of
virtue, and counterrevolutionaries, who are worthless.
The next chapter in Che’s life coincides with one of the century’s most
startling military triumphs. Having landed as disastrously as was to be expected
on Cuba’s shores, Che, Fidel Castro, Fidel’s brother Raúl Castro, and
a handful of others survived Batista’s ferocious assault and went on to forge
the beginnings of a revolutionary army in the Sierra Maestra. By 1958, Che’s
military intuition and daring, his organizational skills, and his outstanding
personal bravery had won him the undisputed title of Comandante and a
leading role in the revolution. Sharing his life with Cubans, who have always
held ablutions and nattiness to be almost supreme virtues, Guevara
still refused to bathe, or even tie his shoelaces, but now that he was Che,
his odorous aura was part of a mystique. He was roughing it in the great
outdoors, planning strategy with Fidel, sharing his camp cot with a stunning
mulata, risking his life and proving his manhood on a daily basis. His
days, as he narrates them in Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary
War (again, reworked pages from his diary turned into a book), read blissfully
like an adventure out of Boys’ Life. [. . .] Happiness and the desire for
it—“the need to live”—were, in a revolutionary, symptoms of weakness.
Che’s life following the revolution’s triumph was a slow accretion of
wreckage, and it is in the narration of this collapse that Compañero, Jorge
Castañeda’s beautiful and passionate biography, is most lucid. 15 We turn the
pages hoping that the trouble will end soon, that Guevara may be spared,
or spare himself, if not from failure, then from ludicrous defeat; if not from
hideous physical suffering, then from death; if not from death, then from
ignominy. But Castañeda is as unfl inching as his hero: he has searched CIA
records and the recollections of Guevara’s closest comrades in order to pry
away layers of after-the-fact justifi cations and embellishments of the Che
legend. In the process, he makes Ernesto Guevara understandable at last,
and his predicament deeply moving.