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Remembering Che and the Guevaras
Commentary
By Marcelo Ballve, Pacific News Service
September 21, 2004 - My grandfather, before he died,
told me his own repertoire of stories about the Che Guevara he knew,
when Che was even younger than the twenty-something traveler portrayed
in the new film "The Motorcycle Diaries."
Many of my grandfather's stories had to do with Che's eccentric parents.
Even people with sketchy knowledge of Che's biography know he came from
Argentina's upper classes. That bit of biography accounts for one of the
clichés that have begun to cling to Che's popular image. When young
people the world over plaster Che's posters on university walls or wear
his face on their T-Shirts, they are often paying homage to an idol who
purged the baggage of his privileged upbringing to become a "pure
revolutionary."
But as New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson's biography has
documented, this notion, however convenient to the manufacture of the
Che myth, doesn't exactly fit. According to my grandfather's stories, it
may be that the revolutionary in Che owes as much to his parents as it
does to forging fires of history or experience.
My grandfather, the law professor Ángel B. Chávarri, was a contemporary
of Che's and their families became acquainted in the 1930s and 1940s in
Alta Gracia, a small resort town in Argentina's central sierras. My
great-grandfather had tuberculosis and was prescribed the healthy air
there. The Guevara family lived there to assuage Che's asthma. My
grandfather remembered Che as a "rambunctious rapscallion," a
grade-schooler who, despite his asthma, was notorious for his mischief.
Che's parents - who eloped and married against the wishes of their
families, with Che's mother already pregnant - were eccentrics, almost
misfits, and had a much more hardscrabble, idiosyncratic lifestyle than
your typical Buenos Aires aristocrats.
Che's mother for one, used a long cigarette holder, slicked her hair
back so that it stuck to her skull, wore un-ladylike trouser suits and
drove the family's dilapidated convertible herself through the town's
streets. For the time and place, her behavior was thoroughly
unconventional.
Che's father, who had a temper, was a cerebral dreamer who tried and
failed at various business schemes, including yacht-building. His
hobbies included graphology, the science of studying handwriting to
determine an individual's character.
Che's father applied his temper in an episode that is
still part of oral tradition around Alta Gracia. During World War II, a
group of Argentina's many Nazi sympathizers gathered regularly at a
hotel to hear broadcasts from Europe. Che's father was an ardent
aliadófilo, as partisans of the allies were known, and with friends
carried out a raid on the hotel. They scaled to the hotel's roof to
disable the radio antenna and then, for good measure, they slashed the
tires of the cars parked outside.
Despite his bravura, Che's father, like many dabblers, never found real
success, and the Guevaras weren't wealthy, whatever their pedigree. In
Alta Gracia, the man who delivered wood fuel for heating and cooking
refused to unload orders at the Guevara's place unless they paid him in
cash.
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Che happened to be born in Rosario, upriver from
Buenos Aires, because his parents stopped there hurrying back to the
capital from a yerba mate (a native plant taken as tea in South America)
plantation they tried unsuccessfully to run in Argentina's still wild
northern frontier. In his pursuit of the frontier lifestyle, Che's
father -Ernesto Guevara Lynch - was following in the footsteps of his
own adventurous grandparents, who lived in Gold Rush-era California.
Coincidentally, Che spent his first days of life in the same
Parisian-style apartment building where my mother was later born in
downtown Rosario. A few years ago, a handful of Cuban military officials
were there on a pilgrimage and rewarded my uncle - who still lived in
the building - with a box of Cuban cigars after he let them in and
showed them his own apartment.
"The Motorcycle Diaries" will not be the last rendering of Che designed
to appeal to romantic ideas of revolution; "Che," a film still in the
works and rumored to be starring Benicio del Toro, will likely pick up
where Brazilian director Walter Salles leaves off. "The Motorcycle
Diaries" was conceived by Salles as a kind of portrait of the
revolutionary as a young man.
"The Motorcyle Diaries" shows that the "real" Che wasn't just the
steely-eyed leftist icon in beret and olive uniform. Closely examined,
Che's background reveals an even deeper lesson for activists who wield
his image: sometimes models for rebellion are closer at hand than one
may imagine. Che's parents, down-on-their-luck aristocrats who refused
to bow to convention, in their own subtler ways, were revolutionaries of
a kind.
PNS editor Ballve (mballve@pacificnews.org) writes
often on South American issues.
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