GLOBAL COLUMN© BY TED CORDOVA

The "vendetta" of Che Guevara

Havelock, NC- When I first wrote about "the revenge of Che Guevara”, in the seventies - the article was first published in the then still young newspaper El Pais, I never thought that the circumnstancial tragic fate of persons (civilian and military) linked to the Revolutionary, would eventually hit high in the echelons of the Cuban Revolution.

On July22, 06, Fidel visited Santa Gracia, a small picturesque town in the mountains of Cordoba, Argentina, where Guevara lived in his childhood, and now is a sort of shrine to the memory of the guerrillero. Guevara is now part of the overgrown contemporary Argentinian patriotic ego, together with the Writer Jorge Luis Borges and the soccer player Maradona. So when Fidel surprisingly attended a Presidential meeting in the city of Cordoba, a prominent group of Argentine admirers of Fidel and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, secretely organized a short trip to Santa Gracia. Nestor Kirchner and other presidents attending the Mercosur summit (common market of South America) were not included in the tribute to the memory of Che.

Today, when I decided to rewrite about this astonishing paranormal episode of Latinamerican politics, we don't now if Fidel is dead or in his final days. At least that suggested, under obvious wishful thinking, some media in Miami… Until Fidel emerged looking quite alive for his 80th birthday...

Fidel was in quite good shape laughing, making jokes and commenting about World affairs. In a widely distributed photograpgh, he appeared with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Ander big photograph of Ernesto Guevara. In the same edition of Cubas' official newspaper Granma there is an information about the incoming smmit of 116countries belonging to the Non Aligned Movement. Obviously, this revival of the NAM, comes in a moment of global crisis, due to the failures of the hiper power unipolar leadership and when a multipolar leadership is advocated. The NAM summit will take place in Havana, under the presidency of Cuba. Was Fidel preparing for this event? Is he going to promote a sort of revolutionary standing at the wake of the current global economy? If so, it means that the spirit of Che's myth remains present in the longeve Cuban leader.

As for Guevara's vendetta is not a conspiration or any form of organized action. It is is only a casual sequence of tragic fate, or, to say the least, a serial of fatalities threaded, by my overheated imagination under a stormy weather of almost 100F in the Carolinas.

When Guevara was killed by the Bolivian Army, Oct 11 1967, the scale of the military government in Bolivia, was the following:

President: Air Force general Rene Barrientos, killed-his body calcinated in a misterious helicopter accident,1969; Chief of staff, general Juan Jose Torres, killed in 1976 by a death squad in Buenos Aires;, another political crime so far not explained; Chief of the Army, general Alfredo Ovando, later to be president-dictator, who had a son who tragically died in a Mustang fighter plane accident, a tragedy that precipitated his physycal decadence until he died; Minister of the government Antonio Arguedas, who played a maddening role as a double agent-for CIA and Cuban Intelligence, died when a bomb he was trying to assemble exploded, in La Paz, Bolivia,1992 ...; Roberto Quintanilla, Intelligence chief, killed by a single revolver shot while he was Consul of Bolivia in Hamburg,1979; Gral Joaquin Zenteno, commander of he 7th Division, assassinated in Paris,when he was Bolivian ambassador to France; Gen Gary Prado wounded by astray bullet of one of his soldiers in 1972, Prado remains paralyzed in a wheelchair. He was a captain when the patrol under his command captured Guevara in the quebrada del Yuro, Valle Grande, Bolivia.

It is not a conspiration. It is like a curse that touches any person in any active political form related to Guevara. And who else more than Fidel Castro himself? It seems finally has been like a sort of Guevara's scourge fo himself. According to several versions, Fidel sent Che to an “impossible mision”, and then abandoned him, under Soviet pressure.

The most compelling version was investigated an later published in a book by former Mexican Foreign minister and historian, Carlos Castaneda. Guevara, died during a guerrilla insurrection in Bolivia because his Cuban backers dropped their support under Soviet pressure, the Mexican historian says.

Castaneda said in a biography in English and Spanish that a Soviet leadership seeking detente with the United States in 1967 was unhappy that Cuban President Fidel Castro had sent his former right-hand man to instigate rebellion in Bolivia. "Soviet pressure mounted until (Soviet Premier Alexei) Kosygin went to Havana and said: 'That's enough of this shit---,' and Castro washed his hands and said: 'It's not my problem,"' Castaneda said in a Reuters interview with American Journalist Martin Andersen.

The English-language version of his book "Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara," was published by Alfred A. Knopf of New York on Oct. 9, 97 the 30th anniversary of Guevara's death. The Spanish version, "La Vida en Rojo," appeared in Mexican bookstores on Sept. 6. 97

Argentine-born Guevara was shot to death after he was captured by Bolivian soldiers combatting the guerrilla campaign he wasleading. He was then 39. He had been a leading figure in the revolution that took power in Cuba in 1959 and held a number of government posts including industry minister before resigning in 1964 to try to spread the Cuban example of guerrilla-fired revolution to the Third World. He spent a year fighting with a Cuban batallion alongside rebels in the Congo led by Laurent Kabila in 1965-66 before heading for Bolivia.

In fact, Castaneda rejects the widely held theory that Guevara was sent to Bolivia on a "mission impossible" by a Cuban leadership with whom he had fallen out of favor. He said Guevara's principal aim had long been to return to his native Argentina and begin a guerilla campaign there, but the Cuban leadership recalled how Argentine guerrilla Jorge Masetti, on a similar mission, disappeared without trace in 1964, so they persuaded Guevara to go to anarchic Bolivia instead.

"I believe Fidel (Castro) sent him to Bolivia to save him rather than to kill him," Castaneda said.

The Bolivia campaign began to founder, however, as a result of poor organization combined with the difficulties of surviving in a region with sparse vegetation and few people. Guevara's guerrillas, weakened by hunger and jungle diseases, also suffered from betrayals and lack of support among the few peasants inhabiting the region. After they lost radio contact with Havana, they were hunted down by the Bolivian army, with the exception of a handful of survivors.

Havana was well aware that the guerrilla force had run into serious trouble, Castaneda said, but its hands were tied by a Soviet government that had decided not to support more guerrilla campaigns in Latin America and was unhappy after it found out about Guevara's presence in Bolivia.

Castaneda recalled the Soviet leadership had changad since it came close to war in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and was moving toward peaceful co-existence with the United States. "Castro has always tried to give the impression he didn't really know what was going on (in Bolivia), and that is not true," Castaneda said in an interview with UPI. He cited recently declassified official documents from the British Foreign Office and the former Soviet Union and extensive interviews he had with Guevara's former comrades-in-arms and retired Soviet and Cuban officials.

"The second falsehood is the reason for not sending people to the rescue. It was not because it was not possible but because the Soviet government told (the Cuban leadership): 'Do this (help Guevara) and it's over,"' Castaneda said, referring to the specialrelationship between Moscow and Havana

Earlier in his career, Guevara had spent two crucial years in Mexico. When he arrived there in September 1954 he was a socially aware 26-year old with wanderlust who had backpacked overland from Argentina after graduation from medical school.

During his time in Mexico, the multi-faceted Guevara eked out a living taking photographs of children in a Mexico City park. He also did research into allergies and other medical work, married his first wife, a Peruvian lady, and climbed the 17,720-foot volcano Popocatepetl.

It was also in Mexico that he met an exiled group of Cuban at a party in the Venezuelan embassy. Fidel Castro, persuaded him to accompany them as medic on an expedition in November 1956 to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. And it was the Cubans in Mexico who gave Guevara his famous nickname "Che" because they were amused by the common Argentine trait of addressing people that way.

Now, almost 4 decades after his death, Guevara still symbolizes a lasting shift in social and cultural attitudes, although it did not turn out the way Guevara had hoped, Castaneda said in the interview. "It was a confluence of the man and his times that made the myth. ... The revolution did not happen, there can be no argument about that," he said.

"The most important changes in the second half of the 20th century symbolically took place in 1968," in the months following Guevara's death, Castaneda added in the interview. "They were not the changes Che or the left hoped for but that's the way it goes, ", Castaneda concluded.

And now we know that Fidel himself was touched by the curse, the vendetta of Che Guevara.

I know well, since, after writing many stories about Che, -including about the secret place where his remans were buried after he was killed-, I am also writing from my wheelchair paralyzed after a stroke suffered in1996, in the high lands (lack of oxygen) in La Paz, Bolivia, while doing some researh about that failed revolutionary adventure.

BIP