Four things you need to know about Ernesto Guevara before watching Benicio del Toro as "Ché"
Last night I had the good fortune to see both "El Argentino" and "Guerrilla", the Benicio del Toro obsession directed by Steven Soderbergh and co-produced with Laura Bickford. I actually had a wonderful time sitting through the 4 1/2 hours of the movie but found myself bothered by some of the things that jumped at me for their absence.
It's probably why I found myself spending too much time on this preface.
So let's have it as a whole separate post because I believe there's quite a bit of background that is needed before going to see the movies.
Benicio cannot help but play Ché Guevara "larger than life"
Ché Guevara was a half an inch shy of being 6 feet tall. Due to his asthma he carried himself with a bit of a hunch that made him look much shorter than Fidel Castro who is a mountain of a man at 6'3".
The photograph I've appended to this section is the exception to the rule of most photos with Ché and Fidel together. Search for images under "Fidel and Che" and you will notice in most of the photographs this height difference was never, ever played up. Actually, in many photographs with Castro, Ché was always positioned to look the same height.
This is important because Benicio del Toro is 6'2" tall. To those of us who grew up with the vivid myths of "La Revolución Cubana" in América Latina (and yes, that includes Puerto Rico), Benicio by default is playing a Ché that is larger than life.
Guevara was a sexy motherfrucker --and Benicio was born to play him:
Over at the Internet Movie Database one commenter wrote : I wonder how iconic he would have become if he'd looked like Bob Hoskins or Danny De Vito. Truer words couldn't have been written.
I knew people who met Ché in the flesh and they'd all say that he had that "It factor" that celebrities are made of. Allegedly photography nor film did justice to Ché's incredibly good looks. He was a hunk with capital H and one who tried very hard to keep it in check.
Exactly like Benicio del Toro, by the way.
And just as with Benicio, the harder Ché tried fight his good looks and natural attractiveness, the more people swooned around him. Check out this interview on Oprah to see what I mean. Benicio is not even trying and even Oprah is losing her shit.
Fidel Castro knew this about El Ché and historical gossip has it that he hated that aspect of Ernesto Guevara. Whereas Ché would walk into a room and leave everybody breathless, Fidel had to work really hard at being liked. It wasn't that either weren't nerds. They were. Yet Ché was the incredibly good looking nerd.
And, mind you, Fidel Castro is known to be a flirt and a social butterfly. The thing is that he had to work hard at it whereas Ché's looks and natural charisma were the thing of legend --and when combined with his smile, the perfect weapon of mass seduction.
There's always Ché and Camilo ... and then Fidel :
The relationship between Ché Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos is also the thing of legend. They were so close that Ernesto ended up naming one of his sons Camilo. They were so close that it's known that this was another thing that Fidel hated about "el Argentino".
It's important to know that Fidel Castro had an ambivalent relationship with many of his cohorts but particularly with Ché and Camilo. They skyrocketed in glory inside and outside of Cuba as the faces of the moral, ethical and even aesthetic reasons for "La Revolución" whereas Castro was always looked at as the political mastermind ---and Fidel hated politicians. It's why he hated not being considered one of the cool guys when compared to Camilo and el Ché.
There are many speculations about whether Camilo Cienfuegos died in an airplane accident or whether his plane was disappeared with the help of Fidel. This is important to know because Guevara mourned his friend terribly. His mourning is considered the "trigger" for his own temporary disappearance and later re-emergence as the globe-trotting guerrillero that ends up betrayed by the very people he was supposed to liberate in Bolivia.
Ché was indeed a lover
This photo of Guevara's wedding with Aleida March is actually one of my most favorite photographs of el Ché. Look at that posture and that face : It tells you all what you need to know about the man being caught with his guard down by love.
In "Evocación", Aleida March talks about the oddly shy courtship they had right smack in the middle of the war against the Batista government. She describes a Ché who basically is desperately in love, having found his soul mate in a guerrillera.
It's a portrait that is at odds with the hero warrior and ruthless enforcer, but that is very telling of the man. He had 4 kids with Aleida but never neglected the daughter he had with his first wife Hilda Gadea. Actually, some of the most tender photographs of el Ché have him posing with ether his children or children from the places that knew him as "El Comandante". He was a loving daddy at heart.
And then, there's poems like the one he wrote to Aleida, as a last good-bye on his way to Bolivia:
Adios, mi única, no tiembles ante el hambre de los lobos
ni en el frío estepario de la ausencia
del lado del corazón te llevo
y juntos seguiremos hasta que la ruta se esfume.
Y agregaría que mi soledad se llenará de tus recuerdos.
Amaré en silencio.
(Nota bene : The following is my quick translation.)
Good bye, my one and only,
do not tremble before the hunger of wolves
nor in the siberian cold of my absence;
for right next to my heart I will take you with me
and together we will continue until the end of the road.
And let me add that my loneliness will be filled with my memories of you.
In silence, I will love.
You know the measure of a man by the way he loves his woman and cares for his children. The tender hugging, the kiss on the neck, the voracious looks, everything adds a whole different dimension to a man. Especially with men who like Guevara, lived to be a "man's man". It's important to know how "a man loves woman" because it gives us a different side to the kind of guy for whom virility was taken to be an expression of their commitment to the revolution and for whom machismo was a natural by-product of a soul constantly at war.
These are the things you need to remember about El Ché because, unfortunately, they're little specs of insight that flash through the screen in "El Argentino" and "Guerrilla" but are never fully realized. A pity, because that's the Ché a lot of us were eager to see Benicio bring to life on the big screen.
And yet, they are films you must absolutely see. My review is next with the whys.
Evidence?
I am no fan of communism (I see not one communist nation appealing, whether Soviet, Chinese or North Korean version, any more than I find the perfect libertarian nations like Somalia appealing). So I differ with Guevara there. I am an FDR style capitalist myself.
But what "mass murder" are you referring to? I can find only two possible bases for your accusation: Guevara was known to execute deserters during the Cuban revolution, and his role as commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison where executions took place. I would perhaps call him oppressive in these, but not sure "mass murder" is accurate unless you also consider the death penalty in the US to be "mass murder." I don't know about the judicial process, if any, used in executing deserters. But here is what wiki has to say about Guevara's role in the La Cabaña Fortress prison:
During the rebellion against Batista's dictatorship, the general command of the rebel army, led by Fidel Castro, introduced into the liberated territories the 19th-century penal law commonly known as the Ley de la Sierra.[50] This law included the death penalty for extremely serious crimes, whether perpetrated by the dictatorship or by supporters of the revolution. In 1959, the revolutionary government extended its application to the whole of the republic and to war criminals captured and tried after the revolution. According to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, this latter extension supported by the majority of the population, followed the same procedure as those in the Nuremberg Trials held by the Allies after World War II.[51] To implement this plan, Castro named Guevara commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison, for a five-month tenure (January 2 through June 12, 1959).[52] Guevara was charged with purging the Batista army and consolidating victory by exacting "revolutionary justice" against traitors, chivatos, and Batista's war criminals.[53] Serving in the post as commander of La Cabaña, Guevara reviewed the appeals of those convicted during the revolutionary tribunal process.[54] On some occasions the penalty delivered by the tribunal was death by firing squad.[55] Raúl Gómez Treto, senior legal advisor to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, considered removing restrictions on the death penalty to be justified in order to prevent citizens themselves from taking justice into their own hands.[56] With 20,000 Cubans estimated to have been murdered at the hands of Batista's accomplices,[57] and a survey at the time showing 93% public approval for the tribunal process,[58] the newly empowered Cuban government along with Guevara concurred. Although the exact numbers differ, it is estimated that several hundred people were executed during this time.[59]
I am not in a position to judge their process, but if it really was based on the Nuremberg trials and was used mainly to prosecute those Batista loyalists who were responsible for 20,000 deaths (now THAT is mass murder), then it sounds like it has at least as much, if not more, claim to being due process than our actions in Guantanamo.
So are you talking about some other aspect of Guevara's career? Because if you are referring to these incidents, it seems you are also condemning a great deal of what the US does as "mass murder" because we ran the Nuremberg trials and we also have a death penalty. Again, I am not really a fan of communism and Che Guevara's popularity on the left seemed a bit cultish to me, so I am not defending him. But your statement seems overblown.
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At least he didn't have the pretense of "defending democracy"
Like the mass murderers known as George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzáles.
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Che
What is it about a mass-murdering communist that you find so attractive?