A lot of noise and excitement has been raised already about Che, Steven Soderbergh's two-part film epic about the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentinean blue blood guerrilla leader. The film stars Puerto Rican actor, Benicio Del Toro, in the leading role. The very talented Del Toro has already been awarded the Best Actor award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
The French love anything and everything about Che and have been the leading commercializer of his image; for instance, Che vodka and Che cigarrettes).
In the next few days I will set aside half a day to go and see the film, and because I have been an avid Guevara follower nearly all my life, I will bring with me some prejudices, notions, knowledge, facts, and ideas about how a film — any film — should depict Guevara. One such fact is that Guevara’s paternal grandparents, Roberto Guevara and Ana Lynch, were born in California, and he was part Irish (from his mother's side).
Whoever does the trailers and advertising for the film should remember his name is pronounced Geh-va-rah with a soft "G" like in "get" and not Gueh-va-rah. The "u" in his last name is silent in the correct pronunciation.
"Che Guevara" by F. Lennox Campello. Charcoal © 2003. 6 x 15 inches
My father was born in Cuba. Like Castro, Cienfuegos, and other Cuban guerrilla leaders, my father was the son of Galician immigrants and fought alongside Guevara during the Cuban Revolution. Like the vast majority of the brave young men and women who fought against the Batista army in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and the Escanbray range, and the students who battled the Batista police on the streets of Havana and Santiago de Cuba, my father wasn't a Communist and he never expected the Cuban Revolution to institutionalize a far worse dictatorship than Batista's bloody regime.
Che Guevara never hid his Communism, but even he admitted that Communists were rare in the ranks of the rebels. Most people are unaware that the official Cuban Communist Party was part of the Batista government while the Revolution was taking place. The Communists were part of the Batista regime.
Guevara had harsh words for the Cuban Communists during the struggle. In 1958 he wrote that there were "mutual fears" between the rebels and the Party, and "fundamentally, the Party of the Workers has not perceived with sufficient clarity the role of the guerrilla." After the revolution, Guevara further added that he "only knew of three Communists who had participated in combat."
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