While eating breakfast in the cafeteria, I opened the A-2 page of Monday’s (Jan. 31, 2005) Tribune Review and almost jumped out of my seat. Above the title “Activists hail ‘boss’ Chavez at forum,” there was a picture of Venezuelan “president” Hugo Chavez (geez, if that isn’t enough to make a person squirm) with a T-shirt bearing the picture of Che Guevara. The first thing that came to my mind was, “Holy shnikes! These people are obsessed!!”
During the time I spent in Mexico (a total of almost four months during the spring semester of 2004), I saw pictures of Che all over the place. Che is a cult icon down there, and his ideas and practices (I believe) are known as guevarismo. Whereas only one “kiosk” in Cuernavaca’s mercado (“market”) sold T-shirts with the Soviet Union hammer and sickle (which made me feel “sickle” after seeing them), most of the clothing kiosks sold tees of Che, or tees with a big star (for those who don’t know much about communism, the star is considered the international symbol of communism), or tees with a big star and “CUBA” underneath/above them. (I still shudder when I remember passing by that particular area of the mercado.) But Che, the Latino revolutionary martyr, was everywhere in the country. At all the mercados I stopped at in the cities and towns I visited, Che was a recurring theme, and a constant reminder that, unlike what a lot of “historically-challenged” people believe, socialism/Marxism/communism is still quite popular in Latin America and wasn’t eradicated with the fall of the Soviet Union…In Mexico, it was pretty common to see people walking down the street with a T-shirt or a purse with Che on it. (Heck, when I came back to the States, I saw a guy with a picture of Che tattooed on his bicep). I guess the saddest thing was that during my whole stay in Mexico, all I knew about the guy was that he was a revolutionary and that he was killed. (Yeah, I know, shame on me, the Soviet and communist history student.) I didn’t even know what country he was from/worked in – I heard a variety of places: Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, South America in general. After seeing Che again, I thought, “It’s about time I got a straight story on him," so I went directly to the Internet. (The following was taken from the Encyclopedia of Marxism from Marxists.org.)
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Guevara, Che (1928-1967)
Argentinian doctor; joined Castro in Mexico in 1954; a leader of the 1956-59 Cuban Revolution. Che served as president of Cuba's national bank and as Cuba's minister of industry in the period immediately following the Cuban Revolution.
Towards the end of his formal affiliation with the Cuban government, Che came to implicitly criticize Soviet bureacracy. His positions put him at odds with the party line of the Cuban CP and this ultimately led to his resignation and his return to revolutionary work abroad.
During Che's subsequent revolutionary campaigns, he wrote his Message to the Tricontinental (1967) in which he openly criticized the Soviet Union; claiming that the Northern hemisphere of the world, both the Soviet Union and the US, exploited the Southern hemisphere of the world. He strongly supported the Vietnamese Revolution, and urged his comrades in South America to create "many vietnams".
In 1965 Che left Cuba to set up guerrilla forces first in the Congo and then later in Bolivia, where he was ultimately captured and killed in October 1967. Accounts of his execution have varied over the years, but many contemprary accounts indicate some degree of collaboration between Bolivia's government troops and the United States CIA.
Guevara developed a theory of primacy of military struggle, in particular concept of guerilla foquismo. Many of Che's theories regarding guerilla tactics are articulated in his 1961 work "Guerilla Warfare."
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That lays to rest the basic mystery of “Who is Che Guevara?” So, if you happen to see a picture of a Latin guy with curly hair, thick eyebrows, and a mustache, wearing a beret with a star on it – That’s him.
Posted by EmilyKasky at February 5, 2005 09:42 PM