The Death of Che Guevara, by Jay Cantor, and Family Portrait With Fidel
Franqui, Carlos
temperament and the flaky insistence of her New Age politics; Red and Sophia Lesczynski both have, above all, each other, their children, and a close-knit Polish-American community in...
...Well, yes...
...And a phrase then came to my mind, I don't know from where: If you want to know what you're thinking, watch your own hands in dreams...
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...We are left to suppose that Americans make up a nation worthy of love, intense loyalty, and genuine pride--in a word, patriotism--yet a nation in whose character quite a bit has gone awry...
...rather, they were related to Che's independence of spirit...
...They may just do better than the hero-martyr of the Revolution if guerrilla activity in El Salvador and Nicaragua hold any clues to the future...
...A timely critique written m a lively and readable style hd 309p $14.95 THE PHILOSOPHIC THOUGHT Of AYN RAND Edited by Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen The ttrst lull exammat0on o) Rands writings by p~ilosophers~ Antony Flew...
...As irony of ironies, according to the Wall Street Journal's Everett G. Martin there is evidence that 200 to 500 radical leftists have been trained in Cuba to instruct armed guerrilla groups and that a few small guerrilla bands have begun organizing in the countryside...
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...In short, the perfect paradigm for the decade of which he literally became the symbol...
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...Cantor primarily appears concerned with all that is failure in Guevara's life...
...The villagers, once they have conquered their bodies, can live in voluntary simplicity...
...It all must be done over...
...was gesturing with my cigar as [ spoke, and by mistake touched the lighted end on my own wrist...
...No, you said, you must not tremble...
...As for any sense of what Cuba, Guatemala Bolivia, or Argentina are like, the reader will look in vain...
...Wallace Matson and Robert Hollingvr hd 256p $21.95 THE CAPITALIST ALTERNATIVE by Alexander Shand This book introducv,, the idea,, ot the Nco-Austrian school o1 economics and compare,, them with other ,,chool', t~t economic thought...
...They would never limit their greed until we destroyed them utterly, crushed their heads...
...1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984...
...2 One of Guevara's cameo appearances in Franqui's book gives more material, raises more questions, intrigues far more than all the many pages of Mr...
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...Or is he merely indulging in an o v e r l y long literary exercise, blending t o d a y ' s f a s h i o n a b l e p o l i t i c a l p o s t u r e s with y e s t e r d a y ' s f a s h i o n a b l e h e r o suitably " d e m y s t i f i e d " ? I tend t o the l a t t e r view...
...And if Congress remains so resolutely opposed to any U.S...
...What was it like being a Minister of Industry, then Minister of Finance at 32, when one knew nothing about industry, finance, or government...
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...The Soviets were then unwilling to sponsor any creation of "two, three or more Vietnams" in Latin America, and relations between the two countries were severely strained...
...Nothing...
...In the mid-sixties Guevara's concept of guerrilla-peasantry insurgency together with Castro's strategy of exporting revolution contradicted and even challenged the Soviet doctrine for diversified roads to socialism...
...Monje was scratching himself through his beard, over and over...
...Each Andean village was an organ whose veins were the Inca roads...
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...He was ungovernable...
...Cantor lengthens the entries with many stage directions: Guerrillas are constantly screaming, crying, yelping when they're not whimpering or wailing...
...Cantor's Indians are pseudo-mythic presences, owing more to Carlos Castenada than to any direct observation of the Indians of the altiplano...
...A lone sentence dropped in Webb's offhand description of that minor incident sums up what James Webb stands against and what his novelist's eye can see that too much of America, a country such as this, has let itself become: "The driver of the other car was walking around holding his neck, feigning whiplash...
...And what a curious Guevara we have...
...I cooled off, but my anger had left me exhausted...
...intervention last fall...
...They are all presented as interchangeable alien lands with no indication that the author is aware of their highly different cultures, histories, and economies...
...Cantor, however, sees Guevara quite differently...
...A view which gives rise to such passages as: The truth is in the villages...
...Red and Sophia Lesczynski both have, above all, each other, their children, and a close-knit Polish-American community in Pennsylvania, a place to come to amid the frequent displacements of Red's military career, but a hometown threatened by labor troubles and bewildering social change...
...If you want to know what the bourgeoisie is thinking, don't listen to their words, watch their hands...
...A blockbuster investigation into the politics and science of cancer...
...Charle,, King...
...And that was a fact, but Che's enlightenment is another story...
...But they would then kill us all indifferently...
...Absorbing...
...A harsh wind took me over and made my body tremble...
...What would Lenin have thought of that...
...ECONOMY S~00 $12.50 Mill...
...by Thomas Sowell Blending hard facts and clear logic Sowell demolishes much conventional wisdom on the civil rights question Challenging the vi'~w that only government can eliminate inequity...
...The villages formed a single human body, incarnated and imaged in the Inca...
...Latin American country people don't need manufactured goods...
...Once we make that clear, once you help us make that clear, the people will understand...
...How did Guevara and his fellow-committed Communist friend Raul Castro jockey for power against the Cuban Communist party with whom they had virtually warred during the whole time in the Sierra Maestra (Franqui's Diary of the Cuban Revolution richly documents the struggle...
...Ironically the Bolivian Communist party, which by its refusal in 1967 to give logistic support to Guevara's guerrilla activity virtually signed his death warrant, today holds two of the most critical posts in the present cabinet: mining and labor...
...Begin again...
...We paused for a moment...
...Then, as now, Bolivian Communists hew slavishly to Moscow's line...
...The asthmatic childhood, the traveling about Latin America (a lark according to Guevara's letters to friends and family, but treated by Cantor as veritable Stations of the Cross--a long ordeal of asthma attacks, dirt, stench, vomit, bile, and misery), the Granma expedition, and the early days of the Cuban adventure culminating in the 2Franqui's Family Portrait with Fidel is well worth reading for the one scene alone in which he describes Castro at the outset of the Cuban Missile Crisis punching a control button in the Soviet electronic station in Cuba to shoot down an American U-2 plane with a ground-to-air missile...
...And this has been Webb's consistent theme...
...It's Daddy and Gandhi all the way, which gives rise to such passages of querulous Gandhi-ridden soul-searching as: We might stop, Father, be nonviolent warriors...
...And what is the reader to think of this long drawn-out whine of a novel that ends by saying, "You've misinterpreted the instruction you must take from the history you've been given . . . . Let his life interrogate yours...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 Throughout his long book Cantor completely ignores the role of the Soviet Union vis-a-vis Cuba, Latin America, Guevara and his fate...
...Witness Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada (until the timely U.S...
...Fidel's problems with Che had nothing to do with communism...
...Cantor typically enough describes the break between Guevara and Mario Monje of the Bolivian Communist party in somewhat heightened terms, which serve to illustrate his general handling of political situations in the book: "The Revolution must be continental...
...What...
...THE ECONOMICS OE POL ANt) RACE $15.95 Weber...
...An accident...
...There are flashbacks within flashbacks, reworking of entries from Guevara's own writings with " r e a l " quotations cunningly threaded in, segments of shooting scripts and movie treatments, playlets featuring characters named Scum Mouth, Big Ass, Shit Head, Dog's Breath plus quick takes of a half century of recent political history...
...The pain was good for me, it distracted my mind from my anger...
...He would defend the Soviet Union and the Cuban Communist Party, while I attacked them...
...In A Sense o f Honor, for example, a midshipman AWOL for a compelling personal reason is involved in a fender-bender in Washington, D.C...
...qui's two books, Diary of the Cuban Revolution (1977) and above all in the recent Family Portrait with FideL Franqui, archivist of the Cuban Revolution, comrade-in-arms of Castro and Guevara in the revolution's heyday, went o f f in 1968 into permanent exile in Italy, having decided that Fidel had betrayed Cuba, the Revolution, and Franqui...
...With the result that by the mid-seventies Cubans had become the Gurkhas of the Soviet Empire, and revolution was once again being exported, this time with Soviet blessing and aid...
...Clearly 1 was tired...
...You must share my vision...
...action...
...POPULAR POL...
...while racing back to Annapolis during the wee hours of the morning to beat reveille...
...His new book is a series of brief, vivid, informal, impressionistic views, a series of "takes" of Fidel in action during his first eight years in power, supplemented by glimpses of some of the other players, like Raul Castro, whom he loathes, and Guevera whom he esteems...
...qpb, 256p $ I ! . 5 0 CITIES AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS by lane J'acobs Is Amernca actuallv m decline:' V~,'hat are the economic prospects f o r the Soviet LTnton and (_'hind...
...Jay Cantor, who was 17 when a Bolivian Army Sergeant killed Ernesto Che Guevara with a burst from an M-2 carbine, ambitiously pulls out every literary stop he can...
...Che and I had many arguments during that period...
...None of which qualities, alas, applies to Cantor's "diaries...
...is Cantor saying that Revolution in Latin America is desirable, but that the next time around Gandhi-loving asthmatics should be left o u t o f t h e e q u a - tion...
...His Guevara through all of these 578 pages is a whiny, father-dominated, asthmatic, meanspirited, humorless wimp whose god is Mahatma Gandhi, of all people...
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...Tihor Machan...
...Cantor's creative writing: Anyway you look at it, Che made himself into a guerrilla leader through force of will;~ talent, and sheer audacity...
...I slammed my foot down on the pavement, smashing one under foot and not blood but milky-white juice ran from it, like sperm...
...By cutting directly from failure preHavana to the impending failure in Bolivia, Cantor deprives the reader of any perspective on the Bolivian venture or on the man himself...
...Lenin's phrase came to mind...
...11:00-6:00 Eastern Time...
...Che had always declared himself to be a Communist, but his brand of communism never convinced Fidel, who recognized Che's independence of character and his sense of morality...
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...My words were annoying flies...
...Nations...
...What of his economic policies, his concept of non-material incentives, his losing jousts with economist Charles Bettleheim, his theorizing about the creation of the New Man, his travels abroad, his meetings with Chou en Lai, Khrushchev, Ben Bella, his relations--all important--with Fidel...
...Monje said...
...All that is success, power, glory is rigorously scrubbed from the novel, which means effacing a lot of interesting not to say essential political history...
...I wondered what Lenin would have t h o u g h t o f that...
...Latin America can regain the socialism of the Incas...
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...He raised the level of the w a r . . . Fidel, ever the pragmatist, later used Che's innovations...
...My chest shook...
...argue,, lacob,,, are strictly the economic creatures ot their cities, becomnng ~.ealthy as their cities become more productive and numerous, subsidzng into poverty a,, cities lose economic vitality...
...Sowell finds that blacks were advancing more rapidly before affirmative action became law than after...
...All this is compressed into those years in Guevara's life already extensively documented by Guevara himself, by biographer Daniel James, and Guevara's first wife Hildea Gadea...
...Remember The Hindu Science of Breath Control!' I t is interesting to contrast this "pathetic little mother . . . . . . , " as Cantor all too accurately characterizes his protagonist at one point, with the real Guevara as perceived in Carlos Fran~This passage regrettably is entirely typical of the prose in which the whole novel is written--vibrating with high-strung emotion and utterly devoid of humor except for that which is clearly involuntary...
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...military assistance this would seem more than likely...
...He carried out the first raids into the lowlands . . . . Within the free zone he set up factories, bakeries, hospitals, arms-repair shops, and Radio Rebelde--aU with supplies sent by the urban underground...
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...For him, they were synonymous with socialism . . . . Fidel would say that soon enough I would see Che arguing with and fighting against the Communists in the same way he disagreed with me...
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...He made sick men with broken weapons into the second guerrilla force in the Sierra...
...THE DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA Jay Cantor/Alfred A. Knopf/$17.95 FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH FIDEL Carlos Franqui/Random House/S17.95 Cynthia Grenier Any man who writes a 578-page post-modernist novel with the eponymous hero one of the icons of our age certainly desires to be taken seriously...
...The Russians were flabbergasted, but Fidel simply said, 'Well, now we'll see if there's a war or not.' " near disaster at Algeria di Pio, and, of course, the final Bolivian campaign...
...I yelped...
...Adventurer, d o c t o r , apocalyptic visionary, would-be poet, a mystic who had no God (dixit Regis Debray), viscerally hostile to the United States, intensely political, personally engaging, witty, attractive-the intellectual who died as a man of Cynthia Grenier, a movie producer, maintains an ongoing interest in matters Latin American...
...The Latin American Revolution does not require violence, only noncooperation with the Imperialists, with their panderings to our lusts...
...COMMERCE DEFENDED . ~ 0 $1~.75 Mill, ESSAY Of THE IMPOLICY OF A BOUNTY ON tiff EXPLORATION OF GRAIN S~ $4.25 Murphy...
...Or maybe he was being bitten by mosquitoes...
...Karl Marx, Vladimir I. Lenin, and Fidel Castro are, well, almost incidental...
...The Bolivian adventure itself takes up more than half the book, and is an extremely free reworking of the actual Bolivian Diaries described by their American editor Daniel James (certainly far from a pro-Guevarist) as "crisp, restrained, highly literate with a dry sense of humor...
...With noncooperation the imperialists will evaporate like specters...
...Topics include the meaning anti effect,., ol lntlahon, the taulure,, ot central planning, liberty and the markct, and blographJr nott,,, ,,~n repre~.,t,ntatlve'-, ot the Austrian school...
...Robert Anderson, the American pilot, would be the only fatality in that war...
...The original was, one would have thought, ideal raw material for a novelist...
...From his depiction of authentic characters buffeted by real events, Webb achieves a moving commentary on the character of a whole nation...
...After you examine the books, if for any reason you are not pleased, return them tor a prompt ret~und...
...Following Guevara's death in 1967, when most of the Latin American guerrilla movements had been wiped out or foundered from lack of support, Fidel Castro recognized the need to come to terms with Moscow...
...then improvise an answer--the next, necessary step...
...SOCIETY...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
