http://marccooper.com/che-day/

Next week will mark 40 years since the death of Che Guevara.

Among my many scrapbooks, I still have the headline clipping I cut from the L.A. Times the day after he was killed in Bolivia. As a 16 year old at the time, I felt it a traumatic event. On my wall, I have a unique copper etching of Guevara, his iconic face superimposed over the South American continent. Purchased in Chile in 1971, it has followed me around all these years. And yes, in my closet, I will freely admit to storing a number of Che T-shirts, bought as far and wide as from Argentina, Italy, Brazil and the nearby Venice Beach boardwalk.

But just what does Che symbolize four decades after his death? Veteran Brit Latin Americanist Isabel Hilton:

"Che's appeal is emotional. His death in Bolivia as a relatively young man created Che as secular Christ, the man who took upon himself the sins of the world and gave his life for the cause of the oppressed. His memory remains available to the oppressed; his image continues to inspire the hope of change and the virtue of rebellion, enhanced rather than diminished by his defeat. Christ, too, was defeated on earth and, again like Christ, Che's death conveys a promise of redemption through inspiration. He is the rock-hero biker revolutionary, the martyr to idealism, a James Dean in fatigues. When Pope John Paul II celebrated mass in Havana's Revolution Square, the giant image of Che that hangs there served as a revolutionary counterpoint. But beyond his quality of universal icon of rebellion, what survives of Che's life's work?"

I guess my answer to her question is rather simple: not much. Or at least, not much of anything attractive. His theories of armed continental revolution pretty much died alongside him when he was surrounded, captured and murdered by Bolivian soldiers led by U.S. Green Berets. Insurrection briefly flickered on in Argentina and Uruguay, but only as prelude to a decade of hellish military repression. In the 1980's the Guevarist spirit once again briefly resurrected; first in the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and then next door in El Salvador. The former experience rid the country of a dynastic dictatorship only to eventually culminate in the sorry stew of personalism and corruption that today replaces it. The latter erupted into a homicidal civil war fought to a bizarre political stalemate.

Otherwise, Latin Americans have shown a strong preference for the peaceful road to change that Che despised. And while those in power today from Caracas to Brasilia to Montevideo venerate the memory of Guevara, they owe their position strictly to the ballot and not the bullet.

Nor does Guevara leave behind much of a theoretical legacy. Regis Debray who, briefly, popularized the Guevarist view of insurrection in his best-selling booklet "Revolution in the Revolution?" today shrugs off such polemecizing as a bout of romantic youthful fever, inspired by whiffs of cordite and the thrill of firing an AK. Guevara's theory of revolt incubated in rural-based focos never had any solid ground -- neither in Marxist theory nor in revolutionary practice. As Jorge Castaneda argues in his brilliant political biography of Che, Guevara had merely extrapolated and grossly universalized the very unique circumstances he had encountered after he landed with Fidel in Cuba. His disillusionment with Soviet Communism was real and took deep root shortly after his rise to power in Cuba. But any even superficial reading of Guevara's writings reveals a crude and unwittingly Stalinist view of Marxism. While he reviled the Russians, he was swooning over Mao.

Guevara was smart enough to sense which way things were heading in Cuba by the early to mid-60's. It's hardly a secret that he renounced his positions of power and headed for the Congo, and later Bolivia, precisely as a sort of moral catharsis -- as a deeply personal and Christ-like act of atonement. Could the mistakes with which he was complicit in Cuba be cleansed away by world-wide revolution, of which he would be catalyst?

Castaneda's (as well as U.S. biographer Jon Lee Anderson's) account of Guevara's adventure in the Congo is always worth re-reading. In it we find a Conradian descent into darkness, a truly mad dive into a fantasy world spurred as much by Guevara's personal depression as well as by an amateurish and overtly disastrous reading of the "objective conditions." On the heels of that catastrophe, Guevara swerves even deeper into delusion, setting off an Quixotic quest in Bolivia that totally contradicts all pre-existing knowledge and political evaluation of the region. The Cuban government, not altogether disturbed by ridding itself of his irritating presence, quietly balks and lets Che meet his day of doom.

I've no idea what kind of a person Guevara was. Christ-like, I think it fair to guess -- but perhaps in the worst sense. A man, from what we can glean, who demanded super-human sacrifice from all those around him: absolute service and virtual marriage to the revolution, 70 hour work weeks punctuated by toil on "voluntary Saturdays" and a monk-like rejection of material goods. It's not a bad position if one is a repentant middle-class doctor. It's quite another to demand that sort of sacrifice from a half-fed peasant who was born into that sort of servitude and who looked for something more in the word "liberation."

One of the most remarkable days of my life took place in 1991 when I met Guevara's then teen-age grandson in the Havana house of a friend. He had come fresh from a confrontation with Cuban police who had tear-gassed a performance by a local rock band.

Just as startling was the day a few months later when I was taken by the Cuban government to a dog-and-pony show to an "experimental farm" run by Fidel's "other" brother, Ramon (known as Mongo).

Out in the fields, tending the cattle, I came upon two wizened, old back men. They were original "barbudos" -- among the bearded ones who fought directly under Guevara's command. Indeed, with only slight reluctance did they reveal they had been part of Che's special squad that, in the earliest days of the revolution, had summarily executed dozens of those branded traitors and counter-revolutionaries. Now, like the cattle around them, they had been put out to pasture.

But as we sipped on bottles of slurpy yogurt, at that point almost 30 years after the killings, their eyes still lit up when recalling 'El Comandante" -- their boss, Che Guevara. Executing "the scum" (la escoria) as they called their victims, they told me, was never easy but certainly necessary. It was Che who gave the orders. And Che, they said, never flinched. Not once.

It's something I think about, or try not to think about, every time I glance at his time-frozen face.