41st death anniversary today:

Che: A lesson of love

Malani GOVINNAGE

In the new Government formed in Cuba after the Revolution, Commander Ernesto Che Guevara was the Minister of Economic Affairs. Once he received a complimentary copy of a medical journal published by the Psychiatric hospital in Cuba.

It was 1964, the year named as the Year of Economy in the country. And, Minister of Economic Affairs was a qualified medical professional as well.

His letter to the Director of the hospital acknowledging the journal is interesting. He writes: "I acknowledge receipt of the journal. Although I am very short of time, the topics look interesting and I will try to read it.

I am curious about something else: How can 6,300 copies of a specialised journal be published when there are not even that many doctors in Cuba?

Something keeps gnawing away at my mind and it is driving me to the verge of a neuro-economic psychosis: Are the rats using the journal to deepen their understanding of psychiatry or to satisfy their stomachs? Or perhaps each patient has a copy of the publication at his bedside...

Seriously the journal is good; the size of the run is intolerable. Believe me, because madmen always tell the truth."

This is only one of thousands of examples one would come across when looking into Che's fine, refined ways of handling the matters of governance, whether it is health economy or any other subject of polity.

He was a man ahead of his time; a combination of love for the proletariat all over the world and a crusader of anti-imperialism.

Many factors which are contradictory to his ideology have thrived all over the world to reduce him to a mere trademark; images of his bearded beret capped, face is used to sell hundreds of artifacts mainly via internet. T-shirts, tank tops for women, jackets baseball caps, military wear, backpacks and courier bags, belt buckles, clocks, collector pins cups. flasks, glasses, key chains .wallets, postcards and posters are some of them.

The idea of revolution is big business. So are Che's image and his ideas. Books on him with flashy pictures on cover and song CDs have created a big market for those traders who capitalise on the warped misguided rebellious sentiments of the young.

Last year, a three-inch long lock of thick black hair snipped from the Guerilla was sold in an auction in the USA.The lock of hair was sold for$ 100,000. The bidder who won the offer was a book-store owner.

Inspiration

Che is very much alive and is a source of inspiration for many people around the world. His image is very much alive, is held sacred, a beacon of hope of a society where love and respect for each individual in society would prevail.

This hope of a small fraction of individuals in Latin America was symbolised in the form of a four metre high bronze statue, which was placed on the base of a monument at a large plaza in the city of Rosario, Argentina, Ernesto Che Guevara's native city, on June 14 this year in commemoration of his 80th birth anniversary.

The statue symbolises Che's profound ideas open to a free and just world; the statue was made from a collection of bronze keys from more than 14.000 people in Latin America and several other countries.

Che who was born in Argentina, taught himself the essentials of a just society, which he believed to be the hallmark of humanity by travelling throughout Latin America.

Then it was a continent stricken by poverty and oppression. Then he joined in the Cuban Revolution; and helped in building a new Cuba.

Not long after, renouncing his prestigious positions in the Cuban government he embarked on the mission of his dream; building a united Latin America which would be from the oppression of imperialism.

A dream so vast and much ahead of time and, he was somewhat alone amidst that vast dream.

Soon after the Cuban Revolution, Che saw the need of an independent news agency for Latin America and neighbouring Caribbean islands. In 1959, Havana based Prensa Latina News Agency was founded with the initiative of Ernesto Che Guevara.The Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez who was then a journalist, Rodolfo Walsh a writer who was hounded and killed on a street of Buenos Aires, and a couple of other Latin American writers were the founding members of the Agency.

Legacy of Che

Rodolfo Walsh writing on Che's death in 1967 states thus: "For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for us. It is impossible for me to think about Guevara, during this gloomy spring in Buenos Aires without thinking of Hemingway, Camillo, Masseti, Fabricio Ojeda, of all those marvellous people from Havana, or who passed through Havana in 59 and 60...The nostalgia is encoded in a rosary of the dead and it seems a bit shameful to be sitting here in front of the typewriter, even knowing that this is a kind of misfortune that serves a purpose".:

As Rodolfo predicted, the misfortune has served a purpose.It has helped remain the legacy of Che, inspiring generation after generation. Walsh ends this sad note on Che's death thus: "The CIA agent who according to Reuters, elbowed and ribbed a hundred journalists in Vallegrande (the Bolivian village where Che was killed) who were trying to see the body, said one sentence in English"All right. Get the hell out of here".

The phrase

This phrase with its cachet, its imprint, its criminal mark remains to be taken up by history. And its necessary rejoinder: sooner or later, someone will get the hell out of this continent. It won't be the memory of Che, which is now spilling across a hundred cities, making it felt by those who did not know him".

This lyric from a CD consisting creations of the rebel leader, which was launched by a cultural centre in Havana sums up a fraction of much needed political ideology and philosophy of life for the 21st century.

Said Guevara. the beautiful

Upon seeing Africa cry:

In the thieving empire

Never should we trust

And, Che the legend said,

As if planting a flower

The good revolutionary

Is only moved by love.

Said Guevara,

the human being,

No intellectual

Should be on the payroll

Of official thought.

It must make one sad

and cold

To be an artificial man,

Head without a freewill,

Conditioned heart.

Some people, especially the youth in several parts of the world misinterpreting and gauging incorrectly his revolutionary political ideology have made thwarted attempts to correct the Existing systems. It was an age the revolutionary fervour in youth could easily be ignited.

Nations in Latin America which were under the yoke of colonial regimes were enjoying their freshly won freedoms not without many imperialist interferences; some were still struggling for their independence. Vietnam made a big impact on them.

Even today, those who wish a change in their systems of governance have not understood Che's political ideology; or something which Che had in abundance is missing in their thinking; that is the element of love for the common man.