Keeping Che Alive -- With Capitalism
Ten years ago, in Havana, while researching a biography of Che Guevara, I asked his widow, Aleida March de Guevara, how she felt about communist Cuba's rampant merchandising of her late husband. I pointed out how, in the tourist shops around the island, there were T-shirts, coconut shells and key rings with Che's iconic image on them, all sold for Yankee dollars. Wasn't this a betrayal of everything that Che, the ultimate Marxist revolutionary, had stood for?
Aleida shifted uncomfortably in her seat and replied defensively that she did her best to keep the Che products from becoming too vulgar. Che's face would never be seen, for instance, on an ashtray. And she told me she had recently intervened to stop a British entrepreneur from continuing production of a beer called Che Fruta. "Che didn't even drink alcohol," she added indignantly.
As the widow of Cuba's ultimate revolutionary martyr, consecrated officially by Fidel Castro's regime as a kind of latter-day saint to the cause of global socialism, Aleida was in the uncomfortable position of trying to safeguard his real-life legacy while simultaneously propagating his mythologized persona. At that time, Cuba was extremely hard pressed economically and struggling desperately to find ways to bring in hard currency. Castro had recently given the go-ahead to limited foreign investment in Cuba, allowed the U.S. dollar as legal tender and announced that tourism would replace sugar as the island's economic backbone.
Paraphrasing Castro's rationales for his abandonment of Cuba's socialist economy, Aleida explained that in order to "safeguard" Cuban socialism, the country had to adapt to changed circumstances: "If we can get Che's ideas across to a youngster from el capitalismo [Cuba's official euphemism for most of the rest of the world] because he wants to wear a T-shirt with Che's face on it, so be it."
As part of her effort to revitalize Che's legacy, Aleida had authorized the publication of "The Motorcycle Diaries." It was one of several previously unpublished personal journals Che left with her when, in 1965, he left Cuba to lead guerrilla insurgencies elsewhere -- first in the Congo and then in Bolivia, where, in 1967, he was tracked down and killed. "The Motorcycle Diaries" (which director Walter Salles has made into a film, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and opening this week) is an account of young Argentine-born Ernesto Guevara's on-the-road motorcycle journey through Latin America in the early 1950s with his friend, Alberto Granado.
