All from this morning's Washington Post.
All editorials and commentary from Sunday's Washington Post
IN LIFE, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was, after his success in helping Fidel Castro make the Cuban revolution, a failure. The other would-be revolutions embraced by this Argentine-born ideologue crumbled. But in death he blossomed as a symbol of youthful daring and utopian aspiration in a global movement -- communism -- that came to be completely discredited yet survives in Cuba and a few other countries and in the minds of a diaspora of incurable romantics and unrepentant commissars. Some of his remains, found in a secret Bolivian grave and returned to Cuba last July, are at the center of Havana's current commemoration of the "30th Anniversary of the Death in Combat of the Heroic Guerrilla and His Comrades."
A country chooses its own heroes. Yet it was not "Cuba," in the sense of an entity representing an inarguably valid popular will, that installed Che Guevara in his adopted country's pantheon. It was a self-appointed Marxist elite, which first found a use for him as a guerrilla leader making and exporting revolution and then found further use for him as a fixture of state propaganda. For that latter role, he had just the right attributes, being glamorous, audacious, given to spouting idealistic slogans, self-sacrificing, young (39 when he died in 1967) and -- perhaps best of all -- dead and hence no threat to the ruling circles.
He was also something else: a killer who executed "traitors" in his own ranks and boasted of winning peasant support by "planned terror," a believer "in the revolution" who gave a gloss of intellectuality and social justice to the pursuit of single-party power, and a man who hated his political enemies and thereby felt empowered to destroy them. It seems a just irony that this man who claimed to be "with the people" finally was turned in to the Bolivian army by the very peasants in whose name he was attempting a revolution.
All this might be no more than a historical footnote but for the fact that the Cuban regime Che Guevara served is still in power and still using him for its own anti-democratic ends. Indeed, his simultaneous success as a contemporary pop icon seems to be bestowing on him a good deal more than the fabled 15 minutes in the public eye. A pity, then, that he is not seem more widely and clearly for what he was: not the Marxist Robin Hood of myth but someone who did his country, and not only his country, much harm.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company