"The Human Cry from Santa Cruz" — Review of "The Bolivian Diary"

Author: Anna Pawłowska. Source: Sztandar Młodych, no. 24, 1970. Date of publication: 29 January 1970.

From the autumn of 1967 onward, at street demonstrations, in brightly-lit university lecture halls in various countries and on various continents — almost simultaneously — the portrait appeared: the man in a dark beret with a star, the concentrated face framed by a short beard. A new, previously unknown slogan arose: “Che.” A symbol — of what? An ideal — whose?

At a certain youth meeting I gave offence to a circle of agreeable discussants by pointing out that Guevara was by no means their contemporary — he was regarded as one of their own, one of the young. Sons and grandsons of Yugoslav partisans shrugged with commiseration when I supposed that it was the partisan legend that had introduced the figure of “Che” among them, into their disputes and doubts — no, they had no associations between the old battle on the Neretva and the fresh skirmish in the Yuro ravine. Young French anarchists invoked “Che” in their manifestos “against everything and everyone” — forgiving him for having been, after all, a minister in a centralised government in a highly disciplined state. What psychological hungers, then, what longings of the young generation were met by this forty-year-old Cuban ravaged by asthma, whom Bolivian soldiers captured after the fight, wounded in both legs, and beat to death on 9 October 1967 in a schoolroom in the village of Higueras?

The Bolivian Diary provides a partial answer. It is the document of a man who, from the first page, knows where he is going. It is not a heroic narrative — it is something more unsettling: a methodical, sober record of a march towards inevitable defeat, maintained with the discipline of a commander who does not allow himself the luxury of despair. What the young generation found in it was not a model of success but a model of fidelity — fidelity to an idea, fidelity to one’s comrades, fidelity to oneself, maintained at the cost of everything.

Perhaps it is precisely this — the refusal to surrender even when every rational argument speaks for surrender — that explains the persistence of the Guevara myth beyond the lifetime of the person himself.

source: kapuscinski.info