[NYTr] The Martyring of Che Guevara
 
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:51:10 -0500 (CDT)

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TruthDig - Oct 9, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071009_the_martyring_of_che_guevara/

The Martyring of Che Guevara

By Robert Scheer

The 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara elicited considerable
media attention, mostly about his iconic image captured on T-shirts
throughout the world. There were the standard snarky asides that many
young people wearing those T-shirts have scant notion of who Che was,
but the journalists reporting the story seemed equally ignorant. Little
was reported about Chebs life and what led him to shun the comforts of a
physicianbs lifestyle in Argentina to fight as a revolutionary in the
rugged terrains of Cuba, the Congo and, finally, Boliviabor why someone
who claimed to be obsessed with helping the worldbs poor was executed,
gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent.

One exception was the BBC, which bothered to send a reporter to Florida
to interview Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-born CIA agent who was part of
a team of CIA operatives and Bolivian soldiers who captured Che. bMr.
Rodriguez ordered the soldier who pulled the trigger to aim carefully,
to remain consistent with the Bolivian governmentbs story that Che had
been killed in action in a clash with the Bolivian army,b said the BBC
report. Chebs hands were then cut off and put in formaldehyde to
preserve his fingerprints.

In his interview with the BBC, Rodriguez claimed that the order to kill
Che came from the Bolivian government, and that he went along: bI could
have tried to falsify the command to the troops, and got Che to Panama
as the U.S. government said they wanted,b he recalled, but he didnbt.
Clearly, the U.S. government was not unhappy with Rodriguezbs role in
the bloody affair, for he went on, as he boasts, to train the
Nicaraguan Contras and advise the repressive Argentine military
government in the 1980s. He showed the BBC reporter his CIA medal for
exceptional service along with a picture of him with the first
President Bush in the White House. George H.W. Bush, it should be
remembered, had been the head of the CIA during some of the years that
Rodriguez worked there and was not put off by the manbs past deeds,
including his part in Chebs assassination.

So, whatbs the big deal? Che was a Cuban Communist, and itbs a good
thing that folks like Bush and Rodriguez were able to defeat him before
he spread his evil message furtherbright? False, on every count.

First off, he was either an Argentine Trotskyite or an anarchist, but
Che was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched, 
bureaucratized Cuban mold. Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba 
because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging 
bureaucracy. He was, like Trotsky in his dispute with Stalin, skeptical
that the kind of socialism that truly served the poor could survive in
just one country; hence, he died attempting to internationalize the
struggle.

It also turned out that killing Che was a big mistake, as his message
was spread more effectively by his execution than by his guerrilla
activities, which were, after he left Cuba, quite pathetic. This is the
case in Latin America, where political leaders he helped inspire are
faring better than those coddled by the CIA. Daniel Ortega, whom the
CIA worked so doggedly to overthrow, is the elected president of
Nicaragua. Almost all of Latin Americabs leaders are leftists, some
more moderate than Che (as in Brazil), and others as fiery as the
guerrilla (in Venezuela), but all determinedly independent of yanqui
control. Fortunately, they differ from Che in preferring the ballot to
the gun. But all recognize that poverty remains the regionbs No. 1
problem and that the free-market model imposed by the United States
hardly contains all the answers. Recall that the U.S. break with the
Cuban revolution came before Castrobs turn toward the Soviets, and that
it was over his nationalization of American-owned business assets in
Cuba ranging from Mafia-run casinos to the electric power grid.

These days, few politicians in the United States even seem to care
about the subversive Cuban influences in our own backyard that once
haunted them. The embargo on Cuba remains to mollify Floridabs aging
Cuban community, but whatbs important to Washington today is Mideast
oil, not protecting the peasants of Bolivia from the likes of Che
Guevara.

On Monday, Chebs death was marked, in the Bolivian village where he was 
killed, by Bolivian President Evo Morales, who proclaimed his movement
b100 percent Guevarist and socialist,b which hardly registers as a
propaganda success story for those favoring CIA assassinations. They
turned a failedband flawedbguerrilla fighter into an enduring symbol of
resistance to oppression.

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