By Gaither Stewart

CC BY-NC-ND by drburtoni

The legendary Café de Flore in Paris, the natural meeting place of many intellectuals and political activists, was their café.

         A LABYRINTH OF MISUNDERSTANDING

The unequal relationship between fictional literature and psychoanalysis has always rankled literary critics whose task it is to clarify, interpret, classify, rank and, especially in cases of political literature, bad-faith critics grant themselves the right to brand and censor literature. While the responsibility of literary criticism often fails to perform positively (especially concerning the political novel), it is true that the entire realm of literature has consequently had to bow to the “scientific” authority of  psychoanalysis and its claims of dominion over the mysteries of the writer’s “unconscious”, whereby it interprets and informs what the writer, on the  deepest level, is really saying with his words crafted in such a manner as to create “literature” from what would otherwise be just texts of connected words.

Today, perhaps, due to a simultaneous tendency of literature and literary criticism to recognize the role of psychoanalysis and the tendency of psychoanalysis to step down a bit from its scientific pedestal from which, because of its “special knowledge”, it has claimed a monopoly in the realm of meaningful interpretation of the body of language that is literature. the two realms show signs of drawing closer together. 

Meanwhile, the poor lonely writer—you might sympathize—is still squashed between literary critique on the one hand and scientific interpretation on the other. Just imagine the situation from the writer’s point of view. The writer, who in a long, arduous and lonely act has created a story from scratch and composed a text that qualifies for the denomination of “literature”, hopes his genius has produced real art that will appeal to the formidable array facing him consisting of publisher, reader and critic.

On the completion of the work, the writer’s fundamental role ends. The good writer in fact steps aside. The rest is salesmanship and exposure. The responsible publisher who has hovered in the background thus far has nonetheless been performing multiple crucial tasks: at the very start he chose a text he believes will appeal to many readers, a text hopefully favorable to critics and to the media and if possible to academia as well.

Literary critics will then “translate”, approving or sacking the poor writer’s text for the public, judging it and explaining to readers what the writer says in his work. Up to this point the swimmers in the literary pond comprise elements directly involved in the production and dissemination of the final product.

It is here—not a specific point in time—that a fifth component enters the scene like an swashbuckling invader—the psychoanalyst—who will interpret the interpretations of the literary critics, delving into aspects of the facts, events, characters in the text and the persona of the author from which he or she draws conclusions from the “unconscious” (Freud) of the writer and his characters, conclusions capable of stunning and bewildering the poor unsuspecting creator who naively believed that only his genius had dreamed up and created the whole thing.

So how did he do it? As a rule, memory provides the material. Childhood, life experiences with other persons, and with the Other encountered in a full life. Day-dreams and fantasies, even those the writer is ashamed of (the use of which often results in the writer being considered naïve and childish) are treasure houses of material, also for the analyst.

Many writers use their dreams for ideas and inspiration in their literary creations. Years ago I underwent one year of therapy because of psychological problems resulting from the tragic loss of a loved one. My German therapist, a Freudian , prompted me to begin recording and making a “conscious” effort to remember parts of my rich and active dream life. Doing that I became aware of how difficult it is to recount even the most vivid dream about which I had even made notes during the night. That difficulty is well-known to creators of the arts. The gap between the vivid, significant dream and the ragged bits and pieces you succeed in assembling and reproducing is a veritable morass of memory and language capacity. The words you manage to save (or liberate, according to Freud) emerge vague, gray and dull, incommensurate with the original. It is the same as the difference between your real-life experiences, what you see or do in reality and the deficient and pale words you find to describe in a literary fashion that experience and what you really felt about the experience at the time.

Therefore, the materials, i.e. the emerging words the writer offers analysts, are simply too scant, too untrustworthy for analysis because deformed, distorted, perverted and corrupted in the reporting process, if not simply made up on the spur of the moment, so that the analyst searching for the thus far “inaccessible” in the unconscious mind of the subject is forced to accept as a given a false image of reality. As a result the analyst too must improvise.

Imagine then the difficulty for the writer of political fiction, whose only resource is some kind of compromise between what he feels he must say and the diluted expression of the idea. For, both critic and analyst will respond not with criticism or analysis of the literary text but with a rebuttal based on their own personal political ideas or opinions as to what the writer said or should have said, a criticism or analysis that will be more and more deformed as it passes down from hand to hand, as with, say, the philosophies of Marxism or, to cite the most deformed and maligned, Leninism.

To underline the manner in which scientific/academic analysis—because of the absence of authentic information—deforms and corrupts instead of clarifying the writer’s intentions, I will employ again the anecdote related by Socrates in The Republic about the difficulty of ever attaining real truth, which I used in my novel, Time of Exile. For me his metaphor of the three beds will always be emblematic of the problem of the degeneration from the ideal to the banal. According to the Socrates metaphor, the first bed, made by God, is the Platonic ideal; a carpenter then makes a second bed in imitation of that ideal bed; and the artist subsequently paints a third bed in imitation of the carpenter’s imitation of the ideal bed. Later imitators then capture less and less of the ideal. They might just barely graze the reality of a carpenter making a bed or of an artist painting a carpenter making a bed, but they can never attain the true ideal of the original creation.

MARXISM AND EXISTENTIALISM

These two philosophies provide a wealth of materials for the contemporary fiction writer, who, if the writer is honest, cannot even conceive of an authentic novel without them. Both Marxism and Existentialism are materialisms close to human existence. “Both reveal an area in which human consciousness is not ‘master in his own house.’” (Frederic Jameson, “Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject”, included in the anthology Literature and Psychoanalysis, Johns Hopkins Press, 1982).

The two philosophies present a number of common major themes: the relation of theory and practice; the resistance to false consciousness and the problem of its opposite; the role and the risk of the concept of the “midwife” of truth, whether analyst or vanguard party; the re-appropriation   of an alienated history and the function of the narrative; the question of desire and value and of the nature of “false desire”; the paradox of the end of the revolutionary process, which, like analysis, must surely be considered “interminable” rather than “terminable”. (A list composed by Jameson, who adds:) “It is therefore not surprising that these two nineteenth century philosophies should be the objects, at the present time and in the present intellectual atmosphere (Cold War), of similar attacks, which focus on their ‘naïve semanticism.’”

Jean-Paul Sartre in his Question de Mode sees Marxism as the dominant philosophy of his era (20^th century) and existentialism as a reinforcing element. He thought at one time that Marxism was corrupted by the Soviet Union and other Communists who abused the system of thought, making it a tool for policies of the USSR. 

According to Sartre’s form of Existentialism “existence precedes essence”. Existentialists from Soren Kierkegaard to the contemporaries Sartre and Albert Camus believed that philosophical thought begins with the living human subject. Its supreme values are freedom of the individual and authenticity. Other philosophies are too abstract, too remote from the human experience. For Sartre and Camus, for example, the existentialist attitude is one of disorientation in the face of a meaningless or absurd world.

For that reason Sartre in general has a low opinion of traditional ethics which he condemns as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses, thus again reinforcing Marxist thought. Nor is he enamored of Freud’s unconscious which he considers a scapegoat for the paradox of simultaneously knowing and not knowing (in the conscious and the unconscious minds) the same information.

I like to imagine Sartre and Camus sitting at their table in Café de Flore on Paris’ Boulevard St. Germain exchanging experiences and thoughts. In my imagination Sartre might say something like: “The bourgeoisie’s support for liberals has always been and always will be a great mystification to confuse the revolutionary. That is the reason for our mistrust of bien-pensant liberals, yesterday as today. The more liberals turn to the Right, the happier the bourgeoisie and the greater its support for ‘liberal’ causes. And therefore the marriage of (bourgeois) liberal democracy and market capitalism.”

And Camus might respond: “The gap between the people and what we call bourgeois capitalism is by definition unbridgeable. Meek protest does not count a whit. (Updating Camus several decades, I let him continue): “Though the ultimate tremendous effect on the American people of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is unimaginable, popular protest still goes unheeded. It is really quite simple: superpowers should never be confused with democracies.”

Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was recently published by Punto Press.

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SNIDE STILETTO AT THE READY:

Denigrating what is noble and true by presenting it with the poison of suspicion is a specialty of corporate media assets, and editors in charge of headlines are not only good at it, but always on the job. While the text itself of this article seems to be neutral, not loaded with anti-soviet bias, the title chosen by the Guardian editors betrays their true feelings. The notion that the Soviet Union “capitalized” on America’s racism is a devious assertion casting doubt on the USSR’s genuine feelings about racism, and suggesting that the Communist leadership only thought of racism and other American capitalist flaws as mere convenient tools in a rhetorical contest, oratory without conviction. “Too good to be true,” anticommunist observers seem to be saying. “No one is that noble.” Sure enough, in a world still almost entirely dominated by the capitalist West and its invidious value system privileging individualism at the expense of human solidarity, it’s logical to think that way. Unpleasant, ungrateful and stupid people abound. Criminals and ignoble people are practically the norm. Thus conditioned by their invisible ideology, in which dog eat dog is the only and central reality, bathed in an instinctive cynicism and elitism, bourgeois critics tend to despise presentations of a better future as exercises in crass naiveté or worse, scams. It isn’t surprising they often strike a pose of thinly-veiled revulsion at what they term “Socialist art,”  and worse, “Communist propaganda.” They fashionably “recoil” at the display of what they label “crude propaganda”, assuming that less crude propaganda, the smooth brand prevalent in the West, by their own admission more effective, is somehow morally better for the masses. That is a indeed a huge contradiction, for why is a better sort of liar a morally superior liar? Apparently such minor matters never bothered the professional apologists for world capitalism much. Self-inflicted blindness about the system’s pervasive evils is the essential requisite for Western ideological apparatchiks. And those who actively defend this nefarious social order go far.—PG 

By STEVE ROSE, the Guardian (UK)

Racial harmony in a Marxist utopia: how the Soviet Union capitalised on US discrimination – in pictures

Posters from the 1930s designed to attract Africans and African-Americans to the charms of communism highlight a fascinating, almost forgotten history

This poster from 1957, shows a multicultural group exploring Moscow sights. Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/ Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

‘Workers from all countries and oppressed colonies raise the banner of Lenin!”; “All hail the world October revolution!” extol the slogans. But what makes these 1930s Soviet propaganda posters different is the inclusion of African people, marching arm-in-arm with other races towards a Marxist utopia. At the time, few Russians would have seen a black person in the flesh, including the artists who created these images.

Fiks in front of Chagall

The posters are included in the new exhibition Things Fall Apart, at Calvert 22 in London. It examines the connections between Africans and the Soviet Union, and it’s a fascinating, almost forgotten history. Africans and African-Americans did indeed come to the Soviet Union, even in the 1930s, says Russian-born, New York-resident artist Yevgeniy Fiks. Having scoured the mass of Soviet propaganda images, Fiks has brought together about 200 images to create the Wayland Rudd Archive. It is named after an African-American actor who, frustrated by the racism of the US entertainment industry, emigrated to Moscow in 1932. He lived and worked there until his death 20 years later. Had he seen this year’s all-white Oscar nominations, Rudd might have felt he made the right move.

Soviet poster from 1920. Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

“African-American intellectuals were seduced by Soviet ideology,” says Fiks. “Their experience on the ground, how life was structured in the US, proved this ideology right.” Black people were still disempowered, exploited and discriminated against in the US. As the posters suggested, those who came to Moscow really were treated as equals, says Fiks. A few dozen chose to stay.

Soviet poster from 1948. The captions read ‘Under capitalism’ and ‘Under socialism’. Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

The Soviet Union made great capital out of US racism at the time, regularly bringing up the issue on the international stage. One poster in the exhibition juxtaposes a shackled, bloodied black man beneath the Statue of Liberty with an image of a cheery rainbow nation. The respective captions read “Under capitalism” and “Under socialism”. Undoubtedly, this contributed to the civil rights movement. The American Communist party was the first fully racially integrated political party in the US.

‘Do not extinguish the dawn of freedom!’ says this African-solidarity effort from 1967. Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

A second wave of Africans came to the Soviet Union in the late 50s and early 60s, from the “oppressed colonies”. Again, the continued presence of European colonial powers in postwar Africa played into Soviet propagandist hands. As well as providing military and diplomatic support to countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Egypt and Congo, the Soviet Union brought African students to study at Moscow’s new Patrice Lumumba University.

Soviet poster from 1967. Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

Some of them chose to remain in Moscow; others went on to high office in African governments.

Looking at today’s Russia, that post-racial idealism is difficult to locate – judging by recent reports of football racism and a Duma MP’s comparisons of Barack Obama to a monkey. Could it be that these posters – and the state-enforced anti-racism behind them – papered over the cracks of Russia’s underlying race problems? Or could it be that racism has risen anew as a consequence of the individualist post-Soviet landscape? Maybe it’s capitalism’s fault after all.

Soviet poster from 1969. The slogan reads: ‘In unity, strength!’ Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

‘For the solidarity of women of the world!’ says this poster from 1973. Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

‘All hail the world October revolution!’ – a poster from 1933. Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

‘I’ll never forget a friend, if I befriend him in Moscow!’ claims this poster from 1964. Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

Soviet poster from 1932, reads: ‘Workers from all countries and oppressed colonies raise the banner of Lenin.’ Photograph: Wayland Rudd Archive/Yevgeniy Fiks/Flint

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Revolutionary Pen

=By= Gaither Stewart

The short biography: Ernesto Guevara was born in Rosario in western Argentina on June 14, 1928 of well-to-do, leftwing parents, the oldest of five children, He died in the Bolivian village of La Higuera on October 9, 1967 at the age of 39. His family moved to Buenos Aires when he was 17. He learned chess from his father of Irish heritage, read from the family of library of 3000 books and was home-schooled by his radical mother. He read Pablo Neruda, John (I want to do the world some good) Keats, Walt Whitman, Jack London, Federico Lorca, Faulkner, Gide, Camus, Sartre, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Marx, Engels, Lenin and many Latin American writers. He studied medicine and motorcycled through much of Latin America. He studied Marxism also while in the youth brigades in Guatemala during the Jacobo Arbenz leftwing government before it was crushed by a CIA-organized coup d’état. In 1955 he joined Fidel Castro in Mexico where the Cubans began calling him el Che because of his constant use of the common Argentinean interjection, Che, that means something like Hey! Or, Eh? Argentineans use the interjection so often that other Latin Americans sometimes use the word for a man from Argentina. In effect, “Che” Guevara came to imply also something like “our comrade from Argentina.”. Despite their contrasting personalities he and Fidel formed a “revolutionary friendship to change the world”, which expressed their common desire. He sailed with the Castro brothers and Cienfuegos on the Granma to Cuba where they overthrew the corrupt Batista regime—the four who made the Cuban Revolution. Twelve years later, as a commander of the guerrilla movement in Bolivia, he was wounded, captured and executed by a Bolivian soldier on orders from the CIA.

CHE GUEVARA – A HERO OF OUR TIMES?

Some accommodating persons believe that there are more heroes in life than we imagine. Sophistic claim! Which I doubt. It depends on what qualities constitute a hero, which in my opinion include a consistent state of bravery, dedication and above all commitment to an ideal to which the person gives his or her life.

Superhuman requirements. Perhaps the real hero is still a figure of myth as in the ancient Greeks when the heroic was divine and there was no clear distinction between super humans and the gods.

More reductively we should speak of the heroic actions of which people are capable at certain moments, under particular emergency conditions. Heroic acts may be spontaneous and instinctive, or acts of desperation triggered by fear, or a one-time display of human decency or duty to dive into a raging river to save the life of a child. However, as often the case, the heroic action may be an ego-driven and temporary urge to perform an act of bravado, a pose for show. Sorry for that! In a way I hate that affirmation.

But then some solace! For there are those precious few persons so obsessed by a positive idea that they dedicate their entire (often) short lives to one idea in the most heroic of fashions. Lenin is an example: his life was the Russian Revolution … and he changed the world. Ernesto Guevara’s obsession was world revolution against imperialism. Neither family—parents, wives and children—nor even the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro succeeded in deviating el Che, the man from Argentina, from that one objective: revolution against imperialism.

So the real HERO does not exist only in myth.

While living in Buenos Aires in 2007 I acquired a book by the Argentinean journalist, Julia Constenla, Che Guevara, la vida en juego (Che Guevara, Life At Stake). Moved by her first acquaintance with Ernesto Guevara that lasted several days at a conference of the Interamerican Economic and Social Council in Punta del Este, Uruguay in August of 1961 and a lifelong friendship with Ernesto’s mother, Celia, the Argentine writer offers new materials about the Latin American revolutionary’s extraordinary life. Her three hundred-page biography is illustrated with hundreds of photos, letters, papers and drawings, many of which had never before been published, of the man who became el Che. The documentation for the book plus videos were then shown in an exhibit in the Centro Cultural of the Buenos Aires barrio of Recoleta in 2007 near my residence.

There is Ernesto in the video and photographs, the newborn child in his mother’s arms in Rosario in 1928, his features already recognizable. There he is on his bike traveling through South America; there he is with wives and children, with his companions, then, there is a victorious Che in Cuba, a defeated Che in the Congo, riding on donkeys with his rifle in his arms, and there he is reading, writing, revolutionizing. And there he is, at the end, a prisoner, weak, dirty and wounded, in La Higuera, Bolivia. He is about to be executed. And then, there he is, Ernesto Guevara, el Che, dead.

Posters hanging on the walls of youth of the world testify that Ernesto Che Guevara is widely considered a hero of our times. A profound explanation of the universal appeal and impact of this single Argentinean is found in the words of Jean Paul Sartre that “Che Guevara was the most complete human being of our age.”

I have long wondered what took place in some brain cell of that young Argentinean, Ernesto, to transform him into the man of action who became the idol of generations of world youth. For if he had not become a revolutionary, he would most certainly become a great writer.

Let’s see: he arrived from the provinces to the metropolis of Buenos Aires, a handsome, smart young guy, both John Keats and Karl Marx in his head, who wanted to make good, to make a mark, to leave a footprint. He wanted to divest himself of everything provincial and to distinguish himself in the world at large. But such considerations are reductive, in fact not even applicable for a man who wanted the whole world.

From Buenos Aires he wandered off with a friend on their bikes and ended up in Guatemala at the time the small country was experimenting with Socialism under Jacobo Arbenz. And his life began to change.

Here I turn to Wikipedia for details: Elected President in 1950, Arbenz’s modest policies of land reform and other social measures like eliminating brutal labor practices, displeased the United Fruit Company and the U.S. government who considered it Communism. In 1952 President Truman approved a CIA plan to bring down the Arbenz government. The operation was aborted because it became too public.

Then President Eisenhower, elected that year on a platform of a harder line against Communism, authorized another CIA coup d’état (John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles in the lead) with an invasion, bombings of Guatemala City and psychological warfare. Arbenz resigned and the United Fruit Company and the CIA won. That coup reinforced Guevara’s anti-imperialistic instincts.

Those events had a galvanizing effect on the 22-year old Ernesto Guevara, prompting him to move up to Mexico City to the north where he joined up with Fidel Castro, only two years older than him.

Now Ernesto was helping to make a real revolution. He was one of its leaders. He walked the streets of Mexico City, a still rather provincial city, nothing like the Buenos Aires he had left, but it was another world capital to add to his “captured places”. A place to spend his personal ambition (he was still emerging from the distant provinces of Argentina) and at the same time to fight the Yankee imperialists.

The Cuban revolutionaries, Fidel and Raul Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos, took to calling him Che, the Argentinean comrade. He began smoking his symbolic cigar and adopted his famous beret with the red star. Perhaps he was still speaking in his Argentinean accent while learning the rapid fire Cuban of the revolutionaries; they were all heroic young men about to change the political landscape of all of Latin America.

In an article in the leftwing Buenos Aires daily, Pagina 12, Julia Constenla described her personal meetings with Ernesto Guevara across the Rio de la Plata in plush Punta Del Este in Uruguay where she was covering that conference organized by U.S. President Kennedy “to discipline the Latin American continent.” Though Cuba was not to have been invited, after complex diplomatic maneuvers, Che (by then a Cuban citizen) arrived to represent Cuba. Also Guevara’s parents came and they lived in the house of the journalist Constenla. There began her days together with Ernesto Guevara and his parents.

“I was not aware that I was involved in world history but only with one of the Barbudos of the Cuban Revolution. They had been in power two years in Cuba, Fidel and Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara. For days I had meals with Ernesto, interviewed him, conversed with him. He was very self-sure, with an extraordinary capacity to go straight to the point, had an acid irony, and was very seductive: when he entered the conference room everything centered on him.”

The journalist-writer says that by the mid-seventies, after Che’s death and the establishment of the dictatorship in Argentina, she realized he was one of the most important persons of the XX century. “He went down in history as the best our century could produce. In Mexico and in the mountains of Cuba, Ernesto became the famous Che.

“Before, he was a young Argentinean, brave, generous, intelligent and politicized, but not yet el Che. I see in him a level of commitment greater than I’ve ever known.” The video shown at the exhibit of him in Cuba shows a man constantly among the masses, talking, explaining, working. Electrifying speeches that many of us leftists dream of pronouncing ourselves. A man of the new state of Cuba who traveled to China and met with Mao Tse-Tung, met Nehru in India, Khruschev in the USSR.

“After his defeat in the Congo he could have returned to Cuba for a comfortable life of work and study; instead he chose to go to Bolivia. His level of commitment is incomparable. Therefore people who believe they are followers of Guevara because they have a poster of him sicken me.”

The Constenla biography denies the rumored rupture between Fidel and Che as the reason he went to Bolivia, labeling such charges as propaganda to denigrate the Cuban Revolution. She says that Che Guevara always recognized Fidel Castro as the chief. Castro on the other hand gave him the most important assignments. Though Castro did not agree with Che’s adventures in the Congo and Bolivia, he accepted his ideas.

Constenla also rejects the idea of Guevara’s suicide at the end: “He was in Bolivia to win or to die!” He lost. She recalled the strange coincidence that some eighteen people—Bolivians and others—involved in Che’s almost certain assassination died soon after in still unexplained circumstances.

Since Italy and Argentina are considered cousins because of the huge Italian immigration there, the Italian Left has strong feelings for the figure of Che Guevara. The Italian journalist Gianni Minà did a major interview with Castro back in 1987, which regularly resurfaces when news concerns Castro, especially since the Leader’s retirement.

In that long interview of many hours spread over several days Minà concentrated on the figure of Che Guevara and his revolutionary vocation. Castro stressed el Che’s altruism, his determination, his impulsiveness and his fear that the revolution in Latin America against imperialism would end like the others.

About Guevara the man, Castro recalled that when they were in Mexico together, Ernesto, despite his asthma, was determined to scale the gigantic Popocateptl peak near Mexico City. He never succeeded but he never gave up.

Che Guevara believed above all in the exportation of the revolution. And for him Bolivia was a stepping-stone back to his native Argentina. First Bolivia, then Argentina. As usual his foresight was striking. The explosive year of 1968 was just around the corner and Che Guevara was to be its symbol.

Now again today Leftists consider Bolivia a key to the future of a democratic Latin America. Readers might be aware that the socio-political movement of miners and peasants headed by Bolivian President Evo Morales emerged from the resistance that el Che had furthered forty years earlier.

Some political observers credit Che Guevara for transforming the Cuban nationalist Castro into the Latin American revolutionary he became. (Romantic thought!) Maybe it is true. For on every occasion Che’s slogan was ‘resistance to imperialism’. He must have hammered that idea into Castro’s head.

At the time of the great escalation in Vietnam in 1964-66, Guevara created the phrase of universal resistance: “Create two, three, many Vietnams,” a slogan that reverberated in Germany in the minds of the “terrorists” of the Red Army Faktion, and from there to the Red Brigades in Italy.

In his “Message to the Tricontinental,” the then newly formed Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a paper written before leaving Cuba for Bolivia, then published in April 1967 in the organization’s magazine Tricontinental, under the title “Create two, three…many Vietnams, that is the watchword,” Che wrote:

“How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe, with their quota of death and their immense tragedies, with their daily heroism, with their repeated blows against imperialism, forcing it to disperse its forces under the lash of the growing hatred of the peoples of the world!”

Che’s credo was, “Any nation’s victory against imperialism is our victory, as any defeat is also our defeat.”

Among Ernesto Guevara’s many epiphanies on the road to world revolution was that of “guerrilla warfare”. Resistance, resistance and again resistance. Guerrilla warfare was the shortcut to the victory of Socialism and the birth of the New Man. He must have first seen the light after the CIA crushed the Arbenz revolutionary government in Guatemala. Like Saul on the road to Tarsus, his eyes were opened and he became a revolutionary.

Maybe he left Cuba and a life of ease for Bolivia because his vision was broader in scope than that of Castro. In fact, he had never belonged exclusively to Cuba. From Guatemala to Mexico City, from Cuba to the Congo, East Europe, Asia, his vision became universal. In Algiers, nine years after the CIA coup in Guatemala, in his last recorded major speech he criticized the Soviet Union and socialists countries for doing too little to help developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa and for not supplying arms to the poor to rise up against their oppressors.

Shortly afterwards he left Cuba for Bolivia, where he died. Twelve, 12, only twelve fast years had passed since he experienced the CIA coup in Guatemala. That may have been the catalyst for his dedication to world revolution: he was a young leftwing university graduate looking for adventure before; he was a revolutionist afterwards.

Protest and resistance are major phenomena of the modern age, part of contemporary vocabulary. Though often linked together, they are not the same thing. In rich Europe and United States we are familiar with protest against injustice. Protest can be easy and immediately rewarding. But you can protest, then go back home to comfort and ease.

Resistance, as indicated by the dean of Argentine writers, Ernesto Sabato, against all-pervasive power, against the system that stands behind injustice, requires commitment. Resistance and commitment like Che Guevara’s are difficult, a hard way of life. His kind of resistance demands your life; its price is high.

Che Guevara was not a saint. He condemned to death traitors of the Cuban Revolution, according to his belief that in a revolution “you either win or you die.” And he allegedly once said that if the Soviet missiles installed in Cuba were under Cuban command they would have been directed to American cities.

True or not, that shows the stuff Ernesto Guevara was made of. And it underlines his belief in resistance and the revolution. Che Guevara did not become a model for the IRA in Ireland and other European leftwing terrorists as well as for Islamic fundamentalists because of saintliness. Revolution was not a tea party for el Che.

His real legacy was his own life. Most photographs of him show the man of action. Handsome like the photo above, intelligent, writer, doctor, political leader and revolutionary, traveling on his Homerian odyssey through all of Latin America and the Third World.

Movements of resistance, rebellion, revolt and revolution have always been rich in slogans and rituals and symbols that are more powerful and unifying than speeches: the red flag and the hammer and sickle mean resistance. A revolutionary movement needs symbols reflecting its ideology. The Cuban Revolution itself is such a symbol for resistance against imperialism everywhere. Che Guevara himself is a symbol. Since no movement is political without an ideology, we do not mistreat our symbols. They encourage the vanguard and work wonders on the people. The Internationale anthem stirs our emotions. Every society makes some objects sacred—totems, animal images, gods, holy books, flags, or even concepts such as freedom or democracy. Rituals bond members of the society. Symbols inspire devotion and loyalty among those who identify with them.

Ernesto’s beret with the red star and his eternal cigar gave vigor to the Cuban Revolution and linked it to world revolution.

As a result of my Buenos Aires experience and my love for Argentina’s great writers like Ernesto Sabato and Jorge Borges, I try to imagine what the conservative Borges might have said about his fellow countryman, Ernesto Guevara. He would have been curious and intrigued as he was about the Buenos Aires underworld but I wonder if the effete intellectual Borges would have been able to consider Che Guevara a hero of our times. …

Yet, yet, yet, just as I have wondered about Ernesto, who knows what ticked in that huge bourgeois brain of Borges. Both of them, at the end, had their sights set on Argentina and their ways might just have come together, arriving from totally different directions. I like to hope so.

Senior Editor Gaither Stewart based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

John V. Walsh

Matt Damon as the abandon but resourceful American hero.

“The Martian” is a very expensive piece of Hollywood trash, in short an international blockbuster.

But it has one revealing and interesting brief segment.  For those fortunate enough to have missed the movie, it recounts the survival and rescue of an American astronaut abandoned by accident on a mission to Mars.  It is an altogether predictable story of Yankee ingenuity and derring-do with nary a trace of the character development or the superb photography of its predecessor and inspiration, “Gravity. “

As the rescue operation proceeds the Americans find themselves short a rocket booster.  The obvious source for the needed spare would be Russia, but these are the days of compulsory Russia bashing and Putin hating.  To call on Russia would have sealed the fate of the pic as a disaster in the eyes of the critics and eliminated any chance for an Academy Award. 

So in the script the Yanks at NASA respond to a surprise offer by the CNSA (China National Space Agency) for a booster, a top secret one at that.  Now that’s generosity!  It would have been possible to script a private rocket company as savior or perhaps even the Europeans or Indians or Japanese.  Why China? To boot, the Chinese are portrayed as compassionate and humane.  There is even a quick scene of thousands of Chinese gathered together in Beijing to cheer the effort.  The two Chinese in charge of the rocket loan are CNSA’s Chief Scientist, a confident, attractive and obviously powerful middle aged man, played by Hong Kong’s durable Eddy Koh, and his top deputy played by the stunningly beautiful singer-actress from the mainland, Chen Shu.  These two are the most elegant, handsome characters in the movie by far.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy such kind treatment of the competitor most feared by the U.S. ruling elite? My suspicion was that it had something to do with the fact that China’s movie market is now the second largest in the world after the joint U.S.-Canada market and on its way to becoming number one.  Movie theaters are springing up all over the mainland with new viewers in the millions.  And with their ever rising standard of living, more Chinese can afford to go out to a movie rather than stay at home to watch a pirated DVD as in the past.  To market the movie successfully in China, a little kowtowing was in order.  Chinese are not likely to see a movie that portrays them as the Yellow Peril.  And in the end money talks, in this case the almighty renminbi. 

With this in mind I wrote to friends in Beijing.  And yes, “The Martian” is a great commercial success there. There are only two other movies in mainland theaters that have earned more revenue, and they are both Chinese. 

The box office numbers are revealing for this behemoth produced at a cost of $108 million.  As of January 1, “The Martian” had grossed $225 million in North America, $100 million in China and $370 million in 88 other countries.   On opening night in North America it appeared in 3831 theaters and in China on 4848 screens. 

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ow consider the limits that China’s burgeoning movie market puts on the demonization of China so necessary for Hillary’s (and Obama’s) Asian pivot.  How can you have a confrontation with people that millions here have seen portrayed so sympathetically?   What will Americans believe, the fiction of Hollywood or the fictions of their government?  In fact the movie is almost an advertisement for the Chinese worldview of win-win relations among nations and major powers, as opposed to the confrontational, hegemonic view of the U.S.  That advert really puts a crimp in the pivot.

So there is a contest afoot here.  Will the architects of the pivot prevail or will Hollywood?   The same question comes up with all sorts of commercial interests.  “The Martian” provides just one illustration of it.  Can the neocons and the “humanitarian imperialists” huddled in Washington, in Thinktankland and in the editorial and “reportorial” offices of the “press” stand up to these commercial interests?  Let’s hope not.  Our survival may depend on it.

Despite the low quality of the movie, Hollywood has done its bit for peace, albeit motivated by a yen for the yuan.  In fact it is the best job since the superb antiwar allegory for the invasion of Iraq, “Avatar.”  So let us cheer for the movie’s message and not be too fussy about the motivations.  Or to quote Chairman Mao, “Good can come out of Bad.”

Postscript.  After writing the above I happened to come across this article from China Daily.  Here is a quote:

“Sci-fi thriller “The Martian” is the latest U.S. movie to win success in China, partly by including crowd-pleasing elements for locals.  Hollywood has been setting scenes in the Middle Kingdom since 2006 when Tom Cruise did a bungee jump from the Shanghai Bank of China Tower in “Mission Impossible III,” but the money making potential in the booming Chinese film market is encouraging Western filmmakers to portray China in a more and more flattering light.  Echoing the plot of the 2013 hit “Gravity,” “The Martian” sees the Chinese space agency play a key role in helping get Matt Damon home from Mars.”

The Chinese know quite well what Hollywood is up to.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com     

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This is the only film ever directed by Marlon Brando, a great actor and sincere humanitarian, which certainly shows he had plenty of talent in that area, too. It’s quite unusual in some regards, including the location, near the sea, instead of the Southwest deserts. Over the years it’s (deservedly) become something of a cult classic.

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