A Che Not Printed on Money

A Che Not Printed on Money / Luis Felipe Rojas
Posted on October 10, 2013

I now see how an asthmatic who was too sick to travel became someone who
could kill and command his own army of troops. But twenty years would
have to pass before I would be able to write such a simple statement.
When you are six Februaries old and they force you to bring your hand up
to your forehead in a salute and say that you want to be like the
Argentinian Rambo… (the good guy), who killed Batista's henchmen (the
bad guys) and wanted all the countries of the third world (?????!!) to
be free, then you think, he is not only Rambo, he is Elpidio Valdés.*

The Che I learned about in school made his way through the intricate
byways of the Sierra Maestra, teaching his men how to read and use
rifles while "slapping around" the knuckle-heads and brown-nosers among
his troops. According to textbooks he was the one who captured Santa
Clara and organized the army of bearded men who entered Havana in 1959.
But then came the other Che, the one introduced to me through books
wrapped in newspapers by dissidents in the 1990s. In pamphlets and
newspaper articles the other Che (no longer a guerrilla hero) arranged
executions at La Cabaña, screwed over Virgilio Piñera and called forth a
river a blood in an attempt to overturn capitalism.

Five years ago I saw a photo of a bearded man dirtied from months spent
in the jungle. I was with Javier Palacios, the Peruvian nephew of a
former guerrilla army leader. The Peruvian man and his family want
nothing to do with the icon immortalized by Alberto Korda and his
camera. The stories they have heard about him are horrifying. They have
buried once and for all the idyll of internationalism manufactured in
the offices of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.

A guy who bullies, curses, walks around all day in a bad mood and years
later seizes on several Cuban families (almost all of them peasants)
with the story of doing away with imperialism…cannot be a nice guy. A
guy who did not sing, did not laugh and did not play a musical
instrument cannot be a nice guy. About five years ago a Spanish
newspaper published a photo of his corpse lying in a laundry in La
Higuera, Bolivia, all the veils fell away. The songs of adulation which
had been sung for decades, the sea of ink and even the famous letter of
farewell no longer mattered, even if you find out at the end of the
story that it was read ahead of time as an order to kill. To Cuban ears
it sounds like a settling of scores, like high-spirited taunting. Like
saying, "You can go straight to hell." As the saying goes, "He who lives
by the sword…"

*Translator's note: The hero of an animated television cartoon for
children from the 1970s and 1980s who fights in Cuba's 19th century
armed struggles for liberation.

8 October 2013

Source: "A Che Not Printed on Money / Luis Felipe Rojas | Translating
Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/a-che-not-printed-on-money-luis-felipe-rojas/