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

258 reframing latin america
choice doesn’t seem to have been addressed either by him or by the man he
was trying to protect. (In Cairo, Jon Lee Anderson notes, Gamal Abdel Nasser
warned Che not to be militarily involved in Africa, because there he would
be “like Tarzan, a white man among blacks, leading and protecting them.”)
As things turned out, the Congo episode was a farce, so absurd that Cuban
authorities kept secret Che’s rueful draft for a book on it—until recently,
that is, when one of his new biographers, Paco Ignacio Taibo, was
able to study the original manuscript. Guevara was abandoned from the
beginning by Congolese military leaders, such as Laurent Kabila, who had
initially welcomed his offer of help. He was plagued by dysentery and was
subject to fi ts of uncontrollable anger, and emerged from seven months in
the jungle forty pounds lighter, sick, and severely depressed. If he had ever
considered a decision to cut bait and return to Cuba, that option was canceled
weeks before the Congo expedition’s rout. On Oc to ber 5, 1965, Fidel
Castro, pressed on all sides to explain Che’s disappearance from Cuba and
unable to recognize that the African adventure was about to collapse, decided
to make public Che’s farewell letter to him: “I will say once again
that the only way that Cuba can be held responsible for my actions is in its
example. If my time should come under other skies, my last thought will be
for this people, and especially for you.”
Guevara was sitting in a miserable campsite on the shores of Lake Tanganyika,
bored, frustrated, and in mourning for his mother, when he was told
that Fidel had publicized the letter. The news hit him like an explosion.
“Shit-eaters!” he said, pacing back and forth in the mud. “They are imbeciles,
idiots.”
Guevara’s fi nal trek began at this moment, because once his farewell to
Fidel was made public, as Castañeda writes, “his bridges were effectively
burned. Given his temperament, there was now no way he could return to
Cuba, even temporarily. The idea of a public deception was unacceptable to
him: once he had said he was leaving, he could not go back.” He could not
bear to lose face.
A few months later, having taken full and bitter stock of his situation, he
made the decision to set up a guerrilla base—intended as a training camp,
really—in southern Bolivia, near the border with Argentina. From there, he
convinced himself, he would ultimately be able to spark the revolutionary
fl ame in Argentina and, from there, throughout the world.
He knew, of course, that his death would fan that fl ame. One wonders if
he had any sense in the fi nal awful weeks of how badly things would end,
not just for him but for everyone involved in the ubiquitous attempts at
armed radical revolution that followed upon his death. [. . .]