I was just reading that John McCain and his Republican friends are trying to tar Barack Obama with being "soft" on Cuba. Well, it's about time someone was, if it means a more realistic perspective.
Just after I read that, I came upon this article, the main one in the Community and Culture section of today's "Diario de Xalapa." It is an article describing an interview with Che Guevara's daughter who gave a presentation about the new book her mother, Aleida March, has written about Che, her father. It is called "Evocación." It will appear shortly in the U.S. in English and in Spanish and is already being offered on Amazon. I’ve taken the liberty of translating the article for you below. It’s probably not quite like an article on Che that would appear in the U.S.
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Tokyo, Japan. – Aleida Guevara, daughter of the legendary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, presented the book “Evocation,” written by her mother, Aleida March, at the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo. In the book, her mother tells of her experiences with her husband, a “complete” human being.
“Reading the first version of the book was a very powerful experience because all my life I had asked my mother to tell me these things, but she never would, and I didn’t know why,” explained Aleida Guevara to the audience that filled the hall at the Cervantes center.
Aleida, a child of the second marriage of Che with Aleida March with whom he had three other children, said that when she read the book written by her mother, she understood “the intense pain” her mother felt and why she couldn’t speak “without breaking the dike that held back the memories.”
For that reason, and because she “always had great respect for my father,” Guevara explained, her mother wrote this book forty years after the death of Ernesto Guevara.
“Little by little, time showed her it was necessary to do it because, if she didn’t, people would be able to recount things that weren’t actually true,” she added.
She suggested that her mother was the best person to write this book since it was she who best knew him as a full man.
Among the episodes in the book, Aleida highlighted the “honesty” of her mother in revealing that she began a relationship with her father without being married to him, and that she emphasized the moment in which Che asked her mother’s help and understanding so that he could continue fighting.
My father was very much a complete man, extraordinary, a man who know that some things were more important than others, said Guevara, visibly moved at remembering when Che abandoned his family to follow his ideals, when she was four years old.
She also described her mother as a “cavalry sergeant” who “ordered everyone around” and emphasized that the effort that she made so that her children would be revolutionaries at the same time formed them professionally.
“If we are this way today, it is because she guided us. She is the foundation of the family. She can be very critical, but you can always count on her. It is life's gift to be the daughter of someone who was loved and loved so intensely,” she pointed out.
Equally, she revealed that “her mother’s tongue has caused problems for her because she is very frank, she says what she thinks, and she would never be a good diplomat.
Regarding Cuba’s ex-president Fidel Castro, she indicated that the book offers a hymn of thanks to the sensitivity and solidarity he showed towards her family.
According to Guevara, her “uncle Fidel” was the driving force behind the awaited and delayed honeymoon which her parents enjoyed in the Congo.
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Jim took the photo of the photo of Che Guevara at the top of the post in Chavarrillo, a pueblo I've written about before. I mentioned then that it is an ejido, a collective, living on jointly shared land. The Cuban Revolution for many in Chavarrillo remains an historic and heroic event. Here is a link in Spanish from Chavarrillo about their history.Che Guevara met Fidel Castro in Mexico.
It should be remembered that Fulgencia Batista, whom Castro overthrew, himself came to power through a coup.
Mexico was the first country to recognize Fidel's government.
It seems to me that Mexicans don't react with rage to labels and to symbols the way folks in the U.S. do. It sometimes seems that folks in the U.S. feel that expressions of rage somehow legitimize their perspectives. Sometimes Americans seem to equate a calm demeanor and approach with wimpiness. I think it is rage that makes real perspective and real discussion impossible.
We have two sets of friends who recently traveled to Cuba from Mexico as tourists. They reported that they found it an interesting and complicated place, a pretty poor one. None of our friends either fell in love with it or hated it. All felt the presence of dictatorship, none felt it made life impossible, though in some ways it did make it quite difficult. There are all kinds of odd restrictions on life, some resulting from the poverty that grew by leaps and bounds after the Soviet Union fell and Cuba was cut off from their assistance. For instance, our friends reported that people can only obtain very exact amounts of food. Generally it seems that it is frightened, unfree governments that try to prevent access to other countries.According to our friends, Europe is starting to make not just tourist but economic connections. The U.S., by its policies and actions, begs to miss out.
Aleida Guevara, Che's daughter, is a pediatrician today in
Havana. She appeared in Michael Moore’s
movie, “Sicko” though I didn’t know about it at the time. Here is a link
to an op-ed piece she wrote in the NY Times concerning her experience with Motorcycle Diaries.
Here is a link to an article in the Guardian she wrote concerning George W. Bush and U.S. policies vs. her own understanding of how we should view the world.
Wikipedia has a very good article on Che Guevara here.