By OP Rana (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-11-09 07:08

His Christ-like vision of beautiful death foisted his image on the world's retina forever. But the cult around him began even before he died.

But what actually was he? A mythic doctor who traveled the length of Latin America? A guerrilla fighter? Comrade-in-arms of Fidel Castro? A revolutionary who tried to liberate the world from the shackles of imperialism?

Ernesto Che Guevara was all that and much more. Even an author like Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said it would take "a thousand years and a million pages to write Che's biography".

The CIA agents and then-Bolivian president Rene Barrientos' soldiers may have killed him in cold blood in La Higuera's mud-floored school 40 years ago, but they couldn't kill his spirit. He has lived on - in the dreams of visionaries, in the fight of the oppressed, in the hearts of the revolutionaries, in the struggles of man.

Such has been the aura of the eternal revolutionary that even the forces of today's merciless market have used his image to their advantage.

He's all over the place: on T-shirts, music CDs, biographies and other books, films, tourism brochures, beer and vodka bottles. He has been a hero to millions for decades. Even Time magazine couldn't help naming him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, saying: "Though communism may have lost its fire, he remains the potent symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution."

So what led The Independent, of London, to publish an "account" by a Cuban exile and former CIA agent of Che's last moments? Was it to exonerate the CIA of Che's murder since it's no longer possible to wipe him from people's memories? Is Cuban dissident Felix Rodrigues being used by the CIA now to put the blame squarely on Barrientos' and his government's shoulders? It seems so. And there are reasons for that.

It was 10 years ago when the rough and cold ground of Vallegrande in Bolivia finally gave up the handless body of Che to an Argentine-Bolivian-Cuban team of forensic scientists. It didn't take much time after that for companies (and countries) across the globe to cash in anew on the youth icon's popularity.

Not surprisingly, Bolivia, where Che was brutally shot, also jumped on the bandwagon. The country has since undergone many changes, especially with the charismatic Evo Morales at its helm.

Just after the Argentina-born revolutionary's 30th death anniversary, a London brewer came up with a Che beer. But thanks to objections from Castro and his government, Che was spared being swilled.

A couple of years later, Alberto Korda, the Cuban photographer who shot Che in the famous black beret emblazoned with a red star at a funeral in Havana in 1960, protested strongly against a Smirnoff advertisement using Che's image. Korda wanted the photograph to help overthrow elitist governments and repressive regimes. He must have died a contented man, for Smirnoff was forced to withdraw the advert later.

But there was no stopping publishers from making hay. The Motrocycle Diaries, which until a few years ago was a collector's dream, was all over the place.

It opened the floodgates for books by and about Che. "'Easy Rider' meets 'Das Kapital'" is how Fourth Estate of London marketed the book, with Che on the cover sipping a drink under his La Pedoroso II - the motorcycle he rode from Argentina to Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela with his biochemist friend Alberto Granado in 1951-52. Back on the Road, The African Dream and Bolivian Diary are Che's other jottings that have minted money for the publishers.

The hullabaloo may seem to be a money-spinning belly dance. But there is method, a scheme, to the madness. Some of the books and films that have hit the market are undoubtedly genuine exercises in excavating facts for posterity. But along with books such as Jon Lee Anderson Grove's Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life came Jorge Castaneda's Companero - The Life and Death of Che Guevara.

Garcia Marquez may be the greatest author alive but he needs a "thousand years and a million pages to write Che's biography". Not Castaneda. He is perhaps the most prolific socialist writer in South America and has written for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times as well as Time and Newsweek magazines. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and other Ivy League schools.

Che challenged not only imperialism, but also the laws that govern it. He sought the erstwhile Soviet Union's help to fight capitalism, but to his bitter disappointment realized that the then Moscow government, too, was exploiting, in its own way, other, smaller socialist countries.

Castaneda is a historian and has a convincing style that has earned him a faithful following among readers. And that's exactly where he shows his true colors: He writes that Che was killed because Castro began seeing him as a liability, and more than the CIA bullets it was the Cuban leader's betrayal that killed him.

Apart from the obvious lack of motive, what makes Castaneda's remark unconvincing, to say the least, is his contention in his previous book, The Unarmed Utopia.

In it, he tried to make the claim that the days of armed struggle in the Americas was over. But then, in a slap on his face, came Zapatista leader Marcos' declaration of an uprising in southern Mexico on the very morning his book was released. And over the next few years, more than half of South America bid goodbye to corrupt capitalist governments. But Castaneda was rewarded with the post of Mexico's secretary of foreign affairs (from 2000 to 2003).

And now comes the Cuban exile and ex-CIA agent's slur on the courage and revolutionary zeal of Che Guevara. What people like Castaneda and Felix Rodrigues don't realize is a live fly can never match a dead revolutionary.

Which brings us to Lu Xun, who writes in his essay, "Fighters and Flies": "When a fighter has fallen in battle, the first thing flies notice is his blemishes and wounds. They suck them, humming, very pleased to think that they are greater heroes than the fallen fighter.

"And since the fighter is dead and does not drive them away, the flies buzz even more loudly, and imagine they are making immortal music, since they are so much more whole and perfect than he is. Yet the fighter for all his blemishes is a fighter, while the most whole and perfect flies are only flies."

Though Lu Xun was referring to Sun Yat-sen and the martyrs of the 1911 Revolution as the fighters, and the hirelings of the reactionaries as the flies, the same has been and forever will be true of the Che Guevaras and the hirelings of repressive regimes across the world.

The author is a senior editor at China Daily

(China Daily 11/09/2007 page11)