A Personal Che from Around the World

Che Guevara has his mausoleum in Cuba after his bones, in an epic investigation and exhumation, were finally located in the airstrip at Vallegrande, Bolivia. Identified beyond the shadow of a doubt, they were returned (against much local protest) in 1997 to Cuba. The ceremonies of his return have been described as militaristic, but the mausoleum in Santa Clara where the bones reside is discreet, subterranean, and silent. This discretion is fitting for a man of legendary modesty, while, for all his years of effort to create a socialist Cuba from his positions as minister of various key government departments, the last year of his life, waging a forlorn guerrilla war in Bolivia with an international handful of comrades, may certainly be described as militaristic, guerrilla-style. His murder by a CIA-trained Bolivian soldier on orders from above (apparently from the Bolivian government) after his capture near the village of La Higuera is today regarded as a shameful crime. The semipublic exhibition of the body to journalists and photographers in Vallegrande immediately after the execution in October 1967 proved perfectly counterproductive: instead of proclaiming a victory of the Bolivian army over the world-famous “terrorist,” it laid the foundation for an enduring legend of a Christlike martyr. Most of the many films on Che, including Personal Che, focus on the tranquil corpse, the proud pointing fingers of the Bolivian officers, and the sacral reverence of the Vallegrandinos filing past and especially of the nurses who washed the “Christlike” (their word) body.

The display took place in the tiny laundry room of the hospital in Vallegrande, now an eloquent popular memorial, long consecrated locally, and a tourist attraction. In a great irony of history, the bigger, permanent victory turned out to be Che’s when the legend became myth and Che immortalized. The laundry room is a shrine marked by a dense palimpsest of hand-scrawled messages, the permanent, well-preserved manifestation of the love and homage paid to a sacred presence by pilgrims from all over the world in the years since 1967. This is indeed “Personal Che”—the title words of the film, inscribed at the opening as if as the latest addition to the forest of graffiti, with the credits likewise located as graffiti at the end.

The celebration (the word is appropriate) of the body found its nodal point in a photograph by the Bolivian Freddy Alborta, endlessly reproduced since and compared very early on, in an essay by the British critic John Berger, to Mantegna’s Dead Christ. (It is a pity that none of the many documentaries on Che include interviews with the reclusive novelist and critic; the present film does not use his essay or the famous Alborta photograph.) Independently of the Berger essay that they cannot have known, the Vallegrande hospital nurses spontaneously told reporters that they saw Jesus in the dead Che.

To complete or extend the perceived resemblance, especially as it affected Vallegrande and Bolivians, the film reports that Che, postmortem, works miracles among the local population, from simply bringing luck to a student facing exams to curing a sick cow. In my own book on the Christification of Che (Kunzle, 2016), I have compiled a collection of these miracles, some which are quite bizarre but none so much so as this (new) one from the film: Che helped out travelers on a car trip by letting his blood drip into a gas tank dangerously low on fuel. Another witness avers that he did not know Che ever carried a gun, only that he had a magical book from which he could recite some words in order to turn into a bird. These statements are extreme examples. Some of us who feel the legacy of Che in a more rational way—as the prophet of a better world brought about by social change rather than miracles—suspect that the more exotic miracles may have been invented. For most of us the slogan “Che vive” is meant, of course, metaphorically or mystically. Che serves more commonly in Bolivia and elsewhere—even on the ubiquitous T-shirts—as a luck charm, protector, or talisman. Strangely but significantly, for a long time some Cubans refused to believe that Che was indeed dead—this despite Fidel’s having immediately made public the dread fact. A taxi driver interviewed in the film had to be convinced by being shown magazine pictures, adding, “Well, you can kill the man but not the ideas.”

Personal Che aspires to show that Che has entered the collective hearts and actions of people from all over the world: Brazil, Colombia (homelands of the film’s authors), Italy, France, Hong Kong, and Lebanon. From the latter country we see bits of musical drama, in Arabic, from Hong Kong shots of angry street demonstrations against the Chinese government led by a Che-T-shirted young man, who also appears in what looks like a courtroom denouncing the lack of democracy.

The all-too-familiar, much-filmed commercialization of the Che image is not emphasized here and seems to float in and off a passionately engaged enthusiast and impersonator (literally: we see him being made up to resemble Che at the very beginning). This middle-aged man seems to run a shop selling Che T-shirts (or is it just his own collection, open to the public? His main business is as a car dealer). He is a man of some courage, for we see him again at the end confronting a bunch of Che-phobes, probably in Miami, where he is surrounded by anger and what looks like potential physical violence.

Among the many obligatory talking heads, the doyen of Che biographers Jon Lee Anderson stands out, thoughtful as ever, seeing Che as a latter-day Robin Hood seizing that fleeting moment when you think you can change the world. Far from being played out, passé, says Anderson, he continues to represent a cross-cultural, cross-epochal defiance. The explanation, which needed emphasis here, lies in a fundamental change in the meaning of the Che myth, which has become integrated gradually but persistently since his death on the coattails, as it were, of his Christification. The broad frame of reference for the ubiquity of Che has moved away from the idea of armed revolution, and, in an age when it seems unlikely to succeed in any Guevarian sense, he has become a symbol of hope and striving for social justice, including and against what is increasingly recognized as the crying injustice everywhere, especially in the West.

“Today Che would be in Iraq,” says an expert on screen. Would he? If this means the launching of a Guevarist guerrilla war in Iraq, it would be as big a mistake as his real-end-of life Bolivian adventure, as the U.S. invasion of Iraq has shown. The mythification of Che has involved an extraordinary aggrandisement that transcends the concept of armed struggle. According to the poetry about him, Che is akin to God, everywhere. He is a self-created force of nature; he is Nature. His gun is replaced by natural symbols suggestive of peace, love, beauty, and transcendence—dove, flower, butterfly. The immense collection of Che iconography (probably the largest outside Cuba anywhere) held by the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles is evidence of this transcendence. The Che myth is embodied in a figure disarmed, as was the Jesus myth long ago.

The best-known Che image in Los Angeles is on the billboard by Mario Torero in the Estrada Courts housing complex in the city’s Boyle Heights area, where he cries, “YOU ARE NOT A MINORITY!” The billboard was vandalized at the time of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 and officially criticized as bad for the image of the city. It was then repainted with Che (whose skin was in reality Euro-Argentine white) given a darker hue. There is a long episode in the film in which the filmmakers and I, who had written about this image (Kunzle, 1997), engage a middle-aged Estrada Courts inhabitant who was passing by, an unemployed ex-prisoner with very low self-esteem who declared himself buoyed up by Che, confused and vague as he was about the historicity of the man. The surprising amount of footage given to this chance encounter testifies to the special sense of “Personal Che” that the film seeks out at every level of society.

But the enemies of Che are there, too, notably in CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, proudly in at the kill in La Higuera and confessed thief of Che souvenirs but opposed to the killing itself because the United States had wanted him kept alive for interrogation. While the left has appropriated Che, leaving his enemies to the righteous right, there are bizarre occasions when extreme rightists have adopted him: in Italy, for instance, where he is twinned with Mussolini and Gabriele Adinolfi, the terrorist, anti-Semite, and founder of the extraparliamentary Terza Posizione (on this see La Ferla, 2009). The film, however, does not go there. It was enough perhaps to show us where we would expect such aberrations: in Germany. We see that an unnamed German city is host to an anti-immigrant demonstration with the participation of (organized by?) young neo-Nazis, some of whom wear Che T-shirts. The filmmakers ask one participant what Che has to do with all this. ‘“Simple: both Che Guevara and Adolf Hitler were nationalists as well as revolutionaries, so we celebrate two great men, Hitler and Che.” (An association of Che with the swastika such as I have seen in a website entitled “Posters of Hitler and Swastika T-shirts Are All the Rage in Indonesia,” showing a shop with a poster of Hitler next to one of Che, was not possible because it is illegal in Germany to display Nazi insignia and portraits.)

Che may be celebrated in unlikely places. One would certainly not expect it in Iran, where in 2007 a conference was planned twinning Che and the Iranian national hero and revolutionary Mustafa Chamran. Che’s daughter Aleida had been invited but soon found herself, from the podium, having to contradict an Iranian speaker who claimed that Chamran and Che were united in their profound religious ideals. The conference broke up in disarray. The organizers might have known better had they seen a DVD I bought in a small bookstore near the university when I was in Tehran called Bye Ernesto, by the Iranian filmmaker Pooyan Shahrokhi, with subtitles in Arabic. Che’s embodiment of superior human values and ethics is emphasized without ever mentioning religion, and so it was at that time permissible to disseminate in Iran a DVD about a positive world figure who was demonstrably not inspired by religious ideals.

Films about Che are numerous and seen all over the world, including unlikely places such as Iran. It is hard to imagine a figure from recent history who has reached so many people on so many continents. Mohandas Gandhi, perhaps? Gandhi, like Jesus, has been twinned with Che, as on the cover of Der Spiegel (November 14, 2005), Germany’s Timelike magazine. Personal Che, however, is not just one more source of information about Che. It excels in demonstrating in vivid terms how diverse his influence is worldwide.