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Contents
Epigraph
Che Guevara: Goodbye to All That
Orwell’s List
Orhan Pamuk: Mind the Gap
Bring on the Mud
Ohio’s Odd Numbers
On Becoming American
Mikhail Lermontov: A Doomed Young Man
Salman Rushdie: Hobbes in the Himalayas
My Red-State Odyssey
The Turkey Has Landed
Bah, Humbug
A. N. Wilson: Downhill All the Way
Ian Fleming: Bottoms Up
Power Suits
Blood for No Oil!
How Uninviting
Look Who’s Cutting and Running Now
Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview
Imperial Follies
Clive James: The Omnivore
Gertrude Bell: The Woman Who Made Iraq
Physician, Heal Thyself
Edmund Wilson: Literary Companion
On the Limits of Self-improvement, Part I: Of Vice and Men
On the Limits of Self-improvement, Part II: Vice and Versa
On the Limits of Self-improvement, Part III: Mission Accomplished
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Price of Freedom
Arthur Schlesinger: The Courtier
Paul Scott: Victoria’s Secret
The Case against Hillary Clinton
The Tall Tale of Tuzla
V. S. Naipaul: Cruel and Unusual
No Regrets
Barack Obama: Cool Cat
The Lovely Stones
Edward M. Kennedy: Redemption Song
Engaging with Iran Is Like Having Sex with Someone Who Hates You
Colin Powell: Powell Valediction
Shut Up about Armenians or We’ll Hurt Them Again
Hezbollah’s Progress
The Politicians We Deserve
Rosa Luxemburg: Red Rosa
Joan Didion: Blue Nights
The True Spirit of Christmas
Charles Dickens’s Inner Child
G. K. Chesterton: The Reactionary
The Importance of Being Orwell
What Is Patriotism?
About Christopher Hitchens
Index
One should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganizing it.
—from Letters to a Young Contrarian
Che Guevara: Goodbye to All That
Review of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, by Jon Lee Anderson, and The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America, by Ernesto Che Guevara, translated by Ann Wright
WHEN, SHORTLY AFTER the triumph of the Castro revolution, Ernesto Guevara took over the direction of the Cuban National Bank, it became his duty to sign the newly minted ten- and twenty-peso notes. This he did with a contemptuous flourish, scrawling the bold nom de guerre “Che” on both denominations. By that gesture, which made those bills a collectors’ item in some quarters of the left, he expressed an ambition to move beyond the money economy and what used to be termed “the cash nexus.” It was a stroke, at once Utopian and puritanical, that seemed to sum up his gift both for the improvised and the determined.
Revisiting Havana recently, for the purpose of making a BBC documentary on the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara’s murder, I discovered that there are now four legal currencies in circulation. The most proud and salient, of course, is the United States dollar. Nowhere outside the Panama Canal Zone has any Latin American economy capitulated so utterly to the usefulness of this green symbol. Once the preserve of the Cuban nomenklatura and of those with access to special diplomatic “dollar stores,” the money of Tío Sam is now the preferred streetwise mode of exchange, and also the essential legal tender in hotels and newly privatized restaurants. Next in importance is the special “INTUR” money, printed by the Cuban Ministry of Tourism for the exclusive use of foreign holidaymakers. Large tracts of Cuba, especially the Varadero beach section outside Havana, have been turned into reservations for this special breed of “internationalist.” Third comes the peso convertible, a piece of scrip with a value pegged to that of the dollar. And last we find the Cuban peso, a mode of exchange so humble that windshield washers at intersections, when handed a fistful, will wordlessly hand it back.
On this last currency appears the visage of Che Guevara. It certainly, if somewhat ironically, demonstrates the regime’s fealty to his carelessness about money. Meanwhile, under stylized poster portraits of the heroic comandante, and within sight of banners reading—rather gruesomely, perhaps—“Socialismo o Muerte,” the youth of Havana sell their lissome bodies as they did in the days of the Sam Giancana and George Raft dispensation. Junk tourist artifacts are sold from stalls outside Hemingway’s old Bodeguita. The talk among the liberal members of the writers’ union, as also among the American expatriate veterans, is all of the surge in street crime and delinquency. With unintentional comic effect, these conversations mimic their “deprived or depraved?” counterparts in Los Angeles and New York. Is it the lack of jobs and opportunities? Or could it be the decline in the moral basis of society? After all, it’s not that long since Martha Gellhorn instructed her readers that mugging in Havana was unknown. The old “moral versus material” debate continues in a ghostly form, as if there were a pentimento of Che concealed behind the partly gaudy and partly peeling façade.
Leaving Cuba and landing in Cancún, Mexico, I buy the Miami Herald and the New York Times. On the front page of the Herald is the news that Hector Silva, candidate of the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front, has been elected mayor of San Salvador. The paper mentions that many of Silva’s enthusiasts “still sport” lapel buttons bearing the likeness of Guevara. When I interviewed him in 1987, the brave and eloquent Señor Silva was a much likelier candidate for assassination than election.
The front page of the New York Times reports from Zaire, and carries the claim of Laurent-Désiré Kabila that his rebel forces will be in the capital city by June. The paper’s correspondent, citing the inevitable “Western diplomatic sources,” quotes them as saying that they will be surprised if it takes as long as that. One of Guevara’s first acts, after the overthrow of Batista, was to extend hospitality and training to the embryonic forces of the Sandinista and Farabundo Martí fronts. And one of his last acts, before embarking for Bolivia, was to spend some time on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, attempting to put a little fiber and fervor into the demoralized anti-Mobutu guerrillas. (At this time, he formed a rather low opinion of M. Kabila, whose base and whose tactics were too tribal, who demonstrated a tendency toward megalomania, and who maltreated deserters and prisoners.) Still, Mobutu had been the jewel in the CIA’s African crown. So perhaps not all the historical ironies turn out to be at Guevara’s expense.
The superficial account of Che’s significance is narrated chiefly in symbols and icons. Some of these constitute a boutique version: Antonio Banderas plays a sort of generic Che in the movie rendition of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. As photographed by Alberto Korda with an expression of untamable defiance, Che became the poster boy of the vaguely “revolutionary” generation of the 1960s. (And of that generation’s nemesis: the Olivetti conglomerate once used a Che poster in a recruiting advertisement with the caption “We would have hired him.”) The Cuba
n government recently took legal steps to stop a popular European beer being named after its most popular martyr.
Much of the attraction of the cult has to do with the grace of an early and romantic death. George Orwell once observed that if Napoléon Bonaparte had been cut down by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, he would have been remembered as the greatest general since Alexander. And not only did Guevara die before his ideals did, he died in such a manner as to inspire something akin to superstition. He rode among the poor of the altiplano on a donkey. He repeatedly foresaw and predicted the circumstances of his own death. He was spurned and betrayed by those he claimed to set free. He was by calling a healer of the sick. The photographs of his corpse, bearded and half-naked and lacerated, make an irresistible comparison with paintings of the deposition from Calvary. There is a mystery about his last resting place. Alleged relics are in circulation. There have even been sightings. . . .
The CIA and its Bolivian military allies chopped off Guevara’s hands in order to make a positive fingerprint comparison with records in Argentina: the preserved hands were later returned to Cuba by a defector from La Paz. We may be grateful that the Castro regime did not choose to set up an exhibit of mummification on the model of Lenin’s tomb. Though I did discover, during my researches in Havana, that the pictures of Guevara’s dead body have never been shown in Cuba. “The Cuban people,” I was solemnly told at the national film archive, “are used to seeing Che Guevara alive.” And so they do, night after night on their screens—cutting cane as a “volunteer,” greeting parties of schoolchildren, orating at the United Nations or the Alliance for Progress, posing in a clearing in the Sierra Maestra or the Bolivian uplands.
One of the special dramas of the Latin American region is that of the desaparecido, or “disappeared person.” From Buenos Aires to Guatemala City, there are still committees of black-draped madres who demand to know the whereabouts of their sons and daughters. And there are also “truth commissions” which have come up with the most harrowing evidence of what did happen. Che Guevara is the most famous “disappeared person” in the hemisphere. When Jon Lee Anderson, the author of this intelligent and intriguing biography, published his findings last year on the probable burial site of Guevara’s remains (still undetermined, but very probably underneath the runway of a military airport at Vallegrande in Bolivia), he had the incidental effect of igniting a movement of relatives of the desaparecidos in Bolivia itself.
Another way of describing, and incidentally of de-trivializing, the legacy of Guevara is to place him as a founding figure of “magical realism.” In his Motorcycle Diaries, an account of a continental road trip he took as a young medical student in the early 1950s, we read in Guevara’s own youthful prose about his fact-finding tour of the leper colonies of Latin America. He celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday at one such colony in the Peruvian Amazon. The patients threw him a party at the conclusion of which, flown with locally distilled pisco, he made a speech and said:
The division of America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race with remarkable ethnographic similarities, from Mexico down to the Magellan Straits. And so, in an attempt to break free from all narrow-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United America.
As he later described the same occasion in a letter home to his mother:
Alberto, who sees himself as Peron’s natural heir, delivered such an impressive demagogic speech that our well-wishers were consumed with laughter. . . . An accordion player with no fingers on his right hand used little sticks tied to his wrist, the singer was blind and almost all the others were hideously deformed, due to the nervous form of the disease which is very common in this area. With the light from lamps and lanterns reflected in the river, it was like a scene from a horror film. The place is very lovely. . . .
The boy “Che” drunkenly spouting pan-Americanism to an audience of isolated lepers in a remote jungle—here is a scene that Werner Herzog might hesitate to script, or Gabriel García Márquez to devise. (Márquez once said in the hearing of a friend of mine that in order to write about Guevara he would need a thousand years or a million pages. His nonfiction “Operation Carlotta,” a straightforwardly not to say panegyrically Fidelist account of the Cuban expedition to Angola, does deal briefly with Guevara’s earlier foray into the Congo.) But writers as diverse as Julio Cortázar and Nicolás GuillénI have taken Guevara as an inspiration, and indeed one of his more lasting memorials may be in the regional literary imagination.
• • •
If we take this as Anderson does—as a chronicle of a death foretold—then it may be related as an intelligible series of chapters and parables. First we have the rebel: the James Dean and Jack Kerouac type. The young “Che”—the nickname is distinctively Argentine and translates roughly as “copain,” or pal—came from an Irish-Spanish family of impoverished aristocrats with the patronymic of Lynch. He was always a charmer and a wit, and always a troublemaker and heartbreaker. His period of youthful sexual repression seems to have been short: an appealing candor about the physical and libidinous runs through all his writings as it does with very few professional revolutionaries. His family was anti-Nazi and anti-Peronist during a time when this could be perilous in Argentina.
Ernesto took an active if rather theatrical part in local youth and student activism, helping out refugees from Republican Spain and cheeking pro-Nazi teachers and professors. The boy is not yet the father to the man except in two respects: he does not dislike Peron as much as his family does, because Peron is at least a nationalist and a foe of the Yanqui. And he is gravely debilitated by asthma, an affliction which he refuses to allow to incapacitate him. The story of his body-building, sporting enthusiasm, and outdoor effort, all aimed at putting strength into a feeble frame, reminds one of nothing so much as (of all people) Theodore Roosevelt. From this derives an emphasis on “the will” which is essential to the story.
Parable two concerns his resolve to become a physician. Not only did this expose him to encounters with veteran socialist doctors, but it also gave him a firsthand experience of the misery of the region. The Motorcycle Diaries, which reinforce the Dean-Kerouac scapegrace image at one level, also contain some very moving and detailed accounts of this part of his education. A monograph could easily be written on the “radicalizing” effect of medical training on young idealists of the middle class. Guevara was much influenced, on his rattling around the southern cone, by an encounter with the Peruvian leprologist and Marxist Dr. Hugo Pesce. This man, the author of a book on Andean underdevelopment entitled Latitudes del Silencio, was the recipient ten years later of an inscribed copy of Guevara’s first book, Guerrilla Warfare. Clearly its author was interested in more than socialized medicine. (Another attentive reader of that first edition was President John F. Kennedy, who had it rapidly translated for him by the CIA and who then ordered the setting up of the “Special Forces”—materializing Régis Debray’s thesis that “the Revolution revolutionizes the Counter-Revolution.”)
• • •
Parable three brings us to the consummate internationalist. Of mixed nationality to begin with, Guevara married a Peruvian woman and took out Mexican citizenship for his children. He was awarded, and later renounced, Cuban nationality. He died in a country named for Simón Bolívar, and near a town named for one of Bolívar’s lieutenants. His favorite self-image was that of Don Quixote, the rootless wanderer and freelance righter of wrongs. “Once again,” as he wrote on quitting Cuba, “I feel Rosinante’s ribs creaking between my heels.” (It was Alasdair MacIntyre who first compared this observation to one made by Karl Marx, who drily noted that “knight errantry is not compatible with all forms of society.”) Indeed, Guevara came late to Marxism. For him, the great personal and political crux occurred as a result of his stay in Guatemala in 1954, where he was a direct witness to the ruthless and cynical destabilization of the Arbenz government by the CIA.
This story has b
een well told before, notably by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer in their book Bitter Fruit. Our knowledge of the coup, of the complicity of the United States, and of the hellish consequences for all Guatemalans but especially for the descendants of the Mayan indigenes, has recently been sharply enhanced by disclosures from the archive of the Central Intelligence Agency, and by the excavation of an archipelago of unofficial mass graves across the Guatemalan countryside.II In the Kinzer-Schlesinger narrative, Guevara rated only a glancing mention. Jon Lee Anderson has reconstructed his part in the events with punctilious detail.
Guevara arrived in Guatemala in December 1953, at the end of his long period of bumming around the continent. He decided to stay, and resolved to become more serious about himself, because he could scent both revolution and counterrevolution in the air. Nor were his instincts at fault. The election of the reformist Jacobo Arbenz had set in motion the two things that the reformists most feared—namely the rising expectations of the revolutionaries and the poor, and the direst forebodings on the part of the United States. (The febrile atmosphere of the place and the moment is well caught in Gore Vidal’s novel Dark Green, Bright Red.) Guevara decided to offer his credentials as a physician to the new regime, and hoped to be employed as a “barefoot doctor” among the peasants. Discouraged by the bureaucratic response to this proposal, he mingled at first rather ineffectually with the milieu of stateless rebels and revolutionaries who had converged on Guatemala City: the losers in the battles with Somoza and Trujillo and Batista. As he was arriving, Guevara had written home to say that:
Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated. In Guatemala I will perfect myself. . . .