A Memorial to a Flawed Hero
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| Cuba |
Breakfast Amusements
Cuba’s default breakfast is a big plate of fruit followed by an omelette, toast and jam.
The jam is resistible. It is red, though nothing in the flavour suggests red fruit – or any fruit at all – and is solid enough to
be carved. The fresh fruit, though, is excellent, a joy every morning, while the omelette
is negotiable.
Breakfast was served by Maydi’s gofer and this morning our Swedish neighbour asked for a boiled egg instead of an omelette. The
gofer nodded. ‘Hard boiled,’ our Swedish friend continued, ‘very hard boiled.’
‘How many?’ asked the gofer. ‘Seven.’ ‘Seven?’ she replied thinking she had
misheard. ‘Seven,’ he repeated firmly, holding up seven fingers. She looked surprised,
turned and headed downstairs to the kitchen.
I waited a little then ventured ‘Do you really want seven?’ ‘Yes’ he said, I like eggs very hard boiled.’ ‘One egg boiled for seven minutes?’ He looked at me
like I was being obtuse. ‘Of course.’ ‘I think,’ I suggested, ‘you have just
ordered seven eggs.’ ‘No!’ ‘Yes, that’s why she looked so surprised.’
After a moment's thought he shook his head, pushed back his chair and headed for the kitchen. Minutes later laughter could be heard from below as light
dawned. English is the lingua franca of the tourist trade, sometimes as a
legacy of the British Empire, more often under the influence of Hollywood. It
is convenient for English speakers, though it makes us lazy; we are notoriously
poor at learning languages. It can also lead to amusing misunderstandings.
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| Today we travel from Trinidad on the south coast, north to Santa Clara then northwest to Jibacoa on the coast just west of Matanzas |
North to Santa Clara
A driver turned up precisely on time at 9 o’clock. He had a shiny new Hyundai and wore a mask and plastic gloves so as not to catch
any nasty diseases from us. Even from our tourist bubble we had seen the world beginning
to change; Covid behaviours that would become commonplace were new and, I thought, a
touch comical. I was wrong about that.
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| Our Well Protected Driver |
We were headed for a seaside resort on the north coast, an hour from Havana, but with a detour to the mausoleum of
Che Guevara in Santa Clara on the way.
Santa Clara is 100 km north of Trinidad, a journey scheduled for 2 hours on the slow and sometimes busy road around the
Sierra Escambray. Our first hold-up was in Trinidad as one the queues which are
a feature of Cuban life was spilling onto the road. I do not know what they
were hoping to buy, but we had heard that soap was currently in short supply.
The queues are a consequence of the American ‘bloqueo’ - a subject I will return to next post.
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| Queue for something in Trinidad |
We had expected driving round the Sierra to be scenic, but the mountains were always too far away and usually screened by roadside vegetation.
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| A Less than thrilling picture of the Sierra Escambray |
The road was in good condition, though at times narrow and, to start with, busy with buses and lorries. The countryside looked poor, scrubland with occasionally fields prepared for planting and some sugar cane and manioc.
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Ploughed fields north of Trinidad
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We overtook one ox-cart, several tractors and many horse-drawn vehicles. There were also cars and vans, and buses apparently converted from
army trucks, the windows well above passenger head height.
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Driving north from Trinidad
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There were a few villages, straggles of poor dwellings….
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Village south of Manicaragua
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...and a shop without a queue – perhaps they had nothing to sell.
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Village shop, south of Manicaragua
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An hour and a quarter into the journey we reached
Manicaragua, the first small town we had encountered.
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| Manicaragua |
It looked a little more prosperous than the surrounding
countryside….
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| Manicaragua |
…as did much of the last part of the journey to Santa
Clara.
Santa Clara
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Santa Clara
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Santa Clara was founded in 1689 by two extended local families and 37 former citizens of San Juan de los Remedios which lies on the coast
to the north. Remedios was continually being ravaged by pirates and the 37 wanted
a quieter life. Santa Clara outgrew Remedios long ago and is now the fifth
biggest city in Cuba with a population of some 250,000.
In 1958 Santa Clara was the scene of the final battle of the Cuban revolution. After preliminary skirmishes two columns led by Che
Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos advanced on the city on the morning of the 31st of December. The defence was chaotic and brief, government forces capitulating by mid-afternoon. Twelve hours later Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba allowing Fidel Castro to enter Havana and assume the
presidency.
We saw almost nothing of the city. Our driver took us west round the efficient circunvalación to the Che Guevara Mausoleum
which lies just a just a couple of hundred metres inside the ring-road.
The Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex
The Sculptural Complex is a large concrete plinth, with a statue of the great man on a column, a bas relief
of him in action and three stones, two inscribed with Guevara’s credo, and a
third with more words than I care to translate.
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| The Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex, Santa Clara |
The statue is described as being 7m high, but I suspect that includes the column. The words underneath are Hasta la victoria
siempre (‘Ever onward to victory’ – Spanish word order can sometimes appear
eccentric to the anglophone).
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| Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, Santa Clara |
The bas relief shows the advance of Guevara’s column on Santa Clara.
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| Bas relief, Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Park |
The inscription in the corner translates as ‘Commander Ernesto Guevara was assigned the mission of leading a column of rebels from the
Sierra Maestra to the province of Las Villas.’
Three inscribed blocks are, I feel, too much writing for a ‘sculptural complex’ but then Fidel Castro was famous for his immensely
long speeches, so perhaps that is the Cuban way. Below is the middle-sized block…
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| The medium sized inscription Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex, Santa Clara |
…which roughly translates as ‘I feel so much a patriot of Latin America, of every Latin American country, that whenever necessary, I
would willingly give my life for the liberation of any Latin American country, asking
nothing, exempting nothing and exploiting no one.’
Che Guevara: A Very Brief Biography
Born in Rosaria, Argentina, in 1928 Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was from a comfortably-off middle class family with leftist inclinations.
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Che as a medical student in 1950
Photo in the Public Domain, sourced from Wikipedia |
In 1948 he entered the University of Buenos Aires as a medical student and played rugby for the Club Universitario de Buenos Aires
(prophetically known as CUBA).
During his student years he took two long motorcycle trips through South America. Everywhere
he saw poverty, hunger and disease caused by the greed of the powerful, and came
to view Latin America as a single entity in need of a continent-wide revolution.
He qualified as a doctor in 1953, and in 1954 went to Guatemala where the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz’s
land reform programme had transferred unused land from the American United
Fruit Company to peasant farmers. In May Árbenz was
replaced by the vicious authoritarian Castillo Armas in a coup organised for
the United Fruit Company by the CIA. Guevara concluded that it was no co-incidence that Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, was also on the board of the United Fruit Company. Wanting to fight on with the Communist youth militia, Guevara was disappointed when Árbenz bowed to the inevitable and capitulated.
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Che in Cuba, 1958
Photo in Public Domain, sourced from Wikipedia |
He escaped to Mexico City and was working as a doctor when he was introduced to the Castro brothers. Cuba’s President Batista was another repressive leader
controlled by US business interests and Guevara agreed to help the Castros overthrow
him. He participated in guerrilla training, intending to be their combat medic.
In the event his charisma, physical strength and courage made him much more than that. After the revolution he became Fidel
Castro’s de facto Number 2, travelling widely to present the Cuban case to
world leaders.
Guevara was a revolutionary not an administrator, so in early 1965 he left Cuba for the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) with
a small Cuban force, offering his experience and expertise to the Marxist Simba
movement. By November he had concluded that the rebel leaders were corrupt and the
venture a failure. He wrote: ‘we cannot liberate, all by ourselves, a country
that does not want to fight’
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| Che in Bolivia, photo in Public Domain sourced from Wikipedia |
A year later he was in Bolivia, hoping to foment a pan-Latin American Marxist Revolution. However, expected support from local
dissidents did not materialise and nor did help from the Bolivian Communist
Party which Guevara described as "distrustful, disloyal and stupid". His
well-equipped guerrilla force of some 50 men scored several early successes but
he was unable to recruit from among the local inhabitants, many preferring to
become government informants.
On the 8th of October 1967 Bolivian forces surrounded Guevarra’s encampment and in the following action he was wounded and captured. The
next day he was murdered – some called it an execution – and later buried in an
unmarked grave.
Once dead ‘Che’ was a martyr, and lived on as a poster boy for every student’s wall.
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| The poster on our spare bedroom wall! |
The Che Guevara Mausoleum and Museum
The sculptural complex sits on the top of a low hill. Round the back is the entrance to the Museum and Mausoleum which are beneath the concrete
plinth. We were unsure whether it was open to all or if we needed tickets, but when
the door opened to admit a waiting group, we tagged on behind.
The mausoleum, to the left is dark and sombre.
In July 1997 after a year’s searching near the Bolivian town of Vallegrande, Cuban geologists and Argentine forensic anthropologists
discovered two graves containing seven bodies. Dental records positively
identified one body as that of Che Guevara. On 17 October 1997, Guevara's
remains, along with those of six of his fellow combatants, were laid to rest with
full military honours in this purpose-built mausoleum. Fidel Castro lit the
eternal flame.
We stood among the graves in silence for a moment.
To the right is the museum. It tells the story of Guevara's life with many photographs and documents and a sprinkling of objects he used –
his water bottle, his pipe, his compass etc. Neither the mausoleum nor the
museum permitted photographs.
Over the road from the museum/mausoleum is a neatly tended, tiered graveyard and we walk round reading the names and dates. Most were of those who
died during the revolution, but there were more recent burials too as the
revolutionary generation passes quietly on. Nobody stopped me taking photographs there, but I have none. Oh, well.
On to Jibacoa
Leaving the complex we returned to the circunvalación and took the link road to the A1 Autopista Nacional which runs for 360 km down the island's spine southeast from Havana. It is nor particularly impressive
or well-made as such roads go, but it is more than sufficient for the meagre
traffic.
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| The A1, Autopista Nacional |
Our driver stopped for lunch at a service station. He had a sandwich while we waited patiently for the coffee machine to be mended. Our
table had a good view of the television where Covid was receiving extensive
coverage. After filmed reports from China and Europe a Cuban minister appeared to
explain the local measures. Spanish is easy when it is a matter of reading the
captions, but when anyone speaks we quickly become lost.
Back on the road we passed the junction where we had turned south to Cienfuegos three days ago, and 30 km later swung north towards Matanzas.
We passed through much richer agricultural land than in the morning with fields of sugar
cane, maize, oranges and bananas.
We hit the coast at Matanzas, known as the home of the rumba, but more obviously to us the home of tank farms and other oil installations. 35
km further east is Playa de Jibacoa and the Memories Resort where we were originally
scheduled to stay three nights, but it would now be two as Covid was shutting down
European airlines.
Memories, Jibacoa and Che (again)
The next post will be about the Memories resort – it will
be a short one – but our stay gave us time to think about what we had seen. And
here are some thoughts.
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| Lynne meditating beside the sea |
The student accommodation of my youth, basic as it usually was, was often adorned with a poster of Che Guevara. I never had one then, but I have one now, so was Che a real hero?
He was certainly a man of great charisma and energy and he was totally sincere in his belief that Marxist revolution was the only
way to improve the lot of the common people. But apart from Cuba, revolutionary
success eluded him. And maybe he had a death wish. When his Congo venture was failing,
he had to be persuaded from sending his Cuban troops home and staying on alone
to fight to the death. And fight to the death was what he did in Bolivia.
In Cuba he had turned up with the Castros and a small force and recruited a large one. Did this experience lead him to believe that successful
revolutions needed only a charismatic leader and a small force prepared to grow.?
It worked once, but he had been accompanied the Castro brothers, Cubans who knew their country. How did this middle-class Argentinian white
boy look to Congolese villagers or Bolivian peasants when he arrived in their
midst and announced he was their saviour?
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| The idle rich in the worker's paradise - but the idle are not that rich and the paradise is less than entirely paradisiacal |
He met Juan Perón shortly after leaving the Congo. Perón’s verdict? He was an immature Utopian. Society needs Utopian thinkers, and just possibly
maturity is an over-rated quality; my problem with Che Guevara is that he was
an immature Utopian with a gun.You don't make people better by shooting them.
So, no hero then, but
will I take down my poster? No I won't, Guevara,
who died in 1967 symbolises the spirit of 1968. I was an 18-year-old starting University
in September 1968. I knew it was a special time, but I did not really appreciate
it. Perhaps the poster is a mild reproach to my younger self for not quite getting
it, for being genuinely immature but not Utopian enough.
