por Alberto Mueller - enlace al original

24 de agosto del 2009

La internacionalmente laureada bloguera y filóloga cubana Yoani Sánchez, premio ‘Ortega y Gasset’ de El País de España en el 2007 y premio ‘María Moors Cabot’ del 2009 de la Universidad de Columbia en Estados Unidos, declaró, que no usa camisetas del Che porque ella es parte de la contracultura y el Che representa la cultura del gobierno.
En varias ocasiones he tenido el privilegio periodístico de entrevistar a esta frágil mujer con inteligencia de acero y en el intercambio de preguntas y respuestas siempre me ha sorprendido de esta joven cubana, su excelente dicción, su amplio vocabulario, su sensatez espontánea, su precisión de juicios, el apego a su generación y el inmenso cariño a su tierra cubana.

Yoanis se confiesa parte de esa GENERACION Y, que nació en  Cuba durante la década de 1970 o después, con nombres como Yanelis, Yoandri, Yocasta, Yumasandra y Yolanda, entre otros, y que inevitablemente carga con esa cicatriz imborrable de la libreta de racionamiento, de los balseros, de la Escuela al Campo, de la persecución oficial a los intelectuales disidentes, del encarcelamiento y maltrato a los homosexuales, de los rígidos muñequitos rusos, del presidio político y de la frustración por el autoritarismo reinante, que en lugar de construir al hombre nuevo, por un arte de birlibirloque, lo que ha hecho es pisotearlo sin clemencia.

Yoanis enfatiza con seguridad que no es política. No se siente ni de izquierda ni de derecha. Ella se siente identificada con los de abajo. Y el término que más le agrada usar para identificarse es el de ciudadana de a pie.

En el fondo de su ser, Yoanis ve al régimen castrista agotado e incapaz de proveer al país de realidades y esperanzas de futuro.

Su generación llegó al escenario social, insiste, con el derrumbe del Muro de Berlín y la aspiración de sacudirse el paternalismo imperante en el país. Por eso la frescura y la libertad de Cuba está definitivamente en los hombros de esta GENERACION Y.

‘A la gerontocracia que gobierna Cuba le podrán sobrar armas para mantener el autoritarismo y las brigadas que arrastraron a las Damas de Blanco en la plaza pública, por un tiempo’, dice Yoani, ‘pero le falta vitalidad moral y carecen de sucesores, para que ese tiempo de acosos sistemáticos, se prolongue mucho’.
Yoani, conjuntamente con los blogueros cubanos más experimentados, han convocado desde el puerto de Internet, ‘Desde Cuba Punto Com’, el concurso blogger, ‘Una Isla Virtual’, para que participen todos los blogueros de la isla.

Ya el concurso ha recibido sesenta y seis blogs que competirán por los cuatro premios ofrecidos, como una muestra de la fuerza que ha adquirido el periodismo virtual dentro de la realidad cubana actual y del crecimiento de una juventud que se aferra a la libertad y rechaza la intención del gobierno de proseguir prohibiendo la comunicación de los blogueros que naveguen por Internet.

El régimen castrista molesto por la popularidad del blog de Yoani, le impide acceder a su espacio electrónico desde Cuba, y además creó  una Brigada Cibernética Represiva para boicotear su trabajo informativo, con material pornográfico y virus de distintas categorías.

Todo este auge informativo del Blog Generación Y de Yoani Sánchez fue lo que impulsó a que la revista Time la nombrara en el 2008, entre las 100 personalidades más influyentes del mundo.

La ofensiva gubernamental contra los blogs en la isla, es la que explica que el acceso al Internet en Cuba, a través de los Ciber Café’ u hoteles, sea tan costoso.

Por una hora de conexión hay que pagar OCHO DOLARES, lo que representa la mitad del salario promedio en Cuba, que es de QUINCE DOLARES  al mes.

Cuba está entre los países de menos acceso al Internet en el mundo, inclusive por detrás de Haití, que es uno de los países más pobres del planeta.

Yoani insiste en que los blogueros están poco a poco derrumbando el Muro del Silencio existente en Cuba, que tiene cierta similitud con la acción de los berlineses cuando derribaron el Muro de Berlín.

En cuanto al controversial concierto de Juanes en La Habana, Yoani se inclina a favor del concierto, como la mayoría de los jóvenes  en la isla y muchos jóvenes exiliados.

Ella sabe que el exilio cubano más tradicional adversa el concierto, con argumentos que pueden tener validez histórica, pero Yoani prefiere apostar al futuro y a su reto generacional.

Ella confía que Juanes entienda la importancia de cantarle a todos los cubanos y sea capaz de levantar su voz por un pueblo dividido, discriminado y por ende perseguido.

El tiempo dirá si Juanes elevará su voz para cantarle a todo el pueblo o cantará exclusivamente ambigüedades románticas para no molestar al oficialismo castrista.

La historia nos obliga a ser solidarios con esta generación de Yoani Sánchez, que cree en la libertad, no usa camisetas del Che y denuncia sistemática y cotidianamente los abusos del autoritarismo castrista desde suelo cubano.

publicado en Hispanic American Center for Economic Research  (HACER)  - enlace

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna predicó y practicó el odio como factor de lucha. 

Racista cabal, escribió “Los negros, los mismos magníficos ejemplares de la raza africana que han mantenido su pureza racial gracias al poco apego que le tienen al baño”. 

Sobre los indios anotará “en este tipo de trenes hay una tercera clase destinada a los indios de la región… es mucho más agradable el olor a excremento de vaca que el de su similar humano… la grey hedionda y piojosa… nos lanzaba un tufo potente pero calentito”. A los aborígenes mexicanos los definió como “la indiada analfabeta de México”.

Sobre el campesinado boliviano subrayó “son como animalitos”. Ni su mujer, Hilda Gadea, se salvó de sus humillaciones “Hilda Gadea me declaró su amor en forma epistolar y en forma práctica. Yo estaba con bastante asma, si no tal vez la hubiese cogido…lástima que sea tan fea”.

La homosexualidad será por el Che castigada en los campos de concentración que él dirigía en Cuba y definió al homosexual como un “pervertido sexual”. 

Por su condición de asesino serial se autodefinió como “una máquina de matar”; por su fanatismo enfermizo sostenía que la moderación es una de “las cualidades más execrables que puede tener un individuo”; se consideraba a sí mismo como “todo lo contrario a un cristo” y confesó sentir un profuso “odio a la civilización” a la vez que enseñó que “la más fuerte y positiva de las manifestaciones pacíficas, es un tiro bien dado a quien se le debe dar”.

El Che contribuyó a instalar en Cuba el más prolongado y brutal totalitarismo de la historia moderna en América e intentó llevar adelante golpes de estado en el África y conspiró también contra Presidentes democráticos de la Argentina y Bolivia.

Sus apologistas lo veneran alegando que “murió por un ideal”, cuando lo trascendente en Guevara es que haya fusilado a mansalva por imponer sus inhumanos dogmas comunistas. Lo esencial en Guevara no es como murió sino como vivió.

Este libro, es la única biografía que destruye la historieta del Che Guevara “filantrópico y justiciero” para dar paso al Che Guevara real.

Desenmascarado el mito, ha muerto el “santo laico” y ha nacido “el Canalla”.

Mas informacion en: http://nicolas-marquez.com.ar/

Posted by Chauncey Mabe on January 25, 2009 at 7:00 AM

SunSentinel.com - link

Enersto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban Communist Revolution and the face that launched a gazillion t-shirts, may have been a lot of things: fearless, idealistic, self-disciplined, charismatic, a born leader.

But Che was one other thing, too: A monster.

I haven’t seen the new biopic Che yet, but reading Rene Rodriguez’s profile of director Stephen Soderbergh, I’m dismayed to learn that one of the key events of the revolutionary’s life has been left out. That would be the five-month period in which Che presided over the wholesale executions of hundreds of Cubans deemed “war criminals” by Castro.

Based on Soderbergh’s track record, which includes both Traffic and 

Ocean’s Eleven, he may well have made a masterpiece. But if he’s focused on Che’s heroism at the expense of his atrocities, then he’s created a crime against truth.

Let me say that I’m not Cuban or Cuban-American, so I have no dog in this fight. In fact I’m a liberal-minded Baby Boomer who had a vague admiration for Che. But that was before I read – and reviewed — Jon Lee Anderson’s definitive biography, Che Geuvara: A Revolutionary Life, which came out in 1997.

Anderson’s supremely researched and reported book is an eye-opener. Reviewing the book in 1997, I wrote, “The portrait that emerges of the Argentine doctor-turned-revolutionary is complex and chilling… However attractive his genuine concern for the downtrodden may have been, Guevara was a bizarre fanatic whose intelligence, self-discipline and personal charisma made him globally dangerous.”

As much as I admire Soderbergh as a filmmaker, I’ll be very surprised if his Che comes across as a bizarre fanatic. For once, the Cubans protesting the film in Miami may have a case.

Ironically, the project that became Soderbergh’s film started out as an adaptation of Anderson’s book. But early producers had trouble finding a screenwriter, and the rights to Anderson’s book lapsed. The filmmakers wound up using other material as the basis for the picture, including Che’s own book, Bolivian Diary.

Too bad. Che remains an important figure. If Soderbergh had hewed to Anderson’s book, he might have produced a more rounded and accurate portrait.

Note: The criticisms of Anderson’s writing have nothing to do with the value of his reporting and documentation. His book remains the definitive biography. If I were writing this review today, I might or might not make as big a deal of the misused words or the lack of a unifying analysis. I hope it doesn’t deter anyone from going to Anderson’s book to find the real Che.

1. EPIC LIFE, POORLY TOLD

DEFINITIVE LOOK AT CHE GUEVARA SUFFERS TOO MUCH DETAIL, NOT ENOUGH FINESSE

Date: Sunday, May 4, 1997

Edition: FINAL Section: ARTS & LEISURE Page: 8D 

Byline: By CHAUNCEY MABE Book editor 

CHE GUEVARA: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE. Jon Lee Anderson. Grove Press. $35. 814 pp.

Jon Lee Anderson’s monumental biography of Ernesto “Che” Guevara demonstrates that it is possible to write an important book without writing a particularly good one, at least if such things as style, analysis, sentence structure and correct word usage are considered to be of value.

That’s not to disparage the historical significance of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. In the five years journalist Anderson spent working on this project, he gained unprecedented access to Guevara’s personal archives, Cuban government files, the man’s friends throughout Latin America. He interviewed former Soviet officials, examined documents in Moscow and obtained the cooperation of Guevara’s widow, Aleida March.

It seems, in fact, that Anderson talked to virtually every person still living who was remotely relevant to his story, except for Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, who, along with Guevara, were the leaders first of the Cuban Revolution, then of the misguided effort to export communist revolution to Africa and Latin America. Of course, Anderson benefited from doing his work after the end of the Cold War, but he is also a thorough and indefatigable researcher, traits that will likely make Che Guevara the definitive biography.

The portrait that emerges of the Argentine doctor-turned-revolutionary is complex and chilling. Anderson shows Guevara as a true believer willing to make any sacrifice of himself or others to promote the triumph of communism. Guevara dispassionately conducted the first execution in the Cuban Revolution, pressed Castro to move his centrist uprising toward socialism, oversaw the more than 500 trials and firing squads that purged the armed forces after the fall of Batista.

Following the Cuban missile crisis, he openly preached the desirability of nuclear war, and publicly proclaimed his willingness to sacrifice the entire Cuban population in an atomic Armageddon if it would realize the defeat of capitalism and democracy _ that is to say, the United States. However attractive his genuine concern for the downtrodden may have been, Guevara was a bizarre fanatic whose intelligence, self-discipline and personal charisma made him globally dangerous.

Ernesto Guevara was born in 1928, son of an Argentine society family fallen on hard times. His parents still lived relatively well, though money was always a problem, and Ernesto grew up with the sense that he was a member of the privileged class. The salient aspects of his childhood are his relationship with his parents and his severe bouts with asthma. Both parents were loving, but his father, Ernesto Sr., was a weak-minded philanderer. Celia, his mother, was by far the stronger personality, the one the boy most resembled, and mother and son were very close.

As for the asthma, Anderson makes a persuasive case that it imposed upon the young Ernesto the implacable self-discipline that later awed, terrified and sometimes annoyed his Cuban comrades. The affliction was severe enough to be crippling _ attacks left Ernesto prostrate for days at a time _ but the boy was determined to participate in sports and other normal childhood activities. To combat the allergies that triggered asthmatic episodes, the boy was taught to deny himself a wide variety of ordinary foods. He learned to do without common comforts just to survive, let alone to have an active life.

Acquiring a strong sense of personal destiny, the young Ernesto acquired a medical degree _ though he never practiced medicine _ and set out to travel South and Central America as a vagabond. As a teen-ager, he had not been political, but during his peregrinations he became sensitive to the oppression of the working classes, Indians and blacks. Always a voracious reader, Ernesto began digesting the works of Marx and Lenin, while searching for a cause. Before he met Fidel Castro in Mexico, where the Cuban guerrilla leader plotted in exile, his conversion to communism was complete.

Awed by Castro’s energy and personality, he joined the Cubans as they prepared a small invasion force. He was recruited to serve as a doctor, but during the disastrous landing, when the rebels were ambushed and scattered by Batista’s army, he made the momentous decision to salvage a box of ammunition rather than a box of medical supplies. Anderson identifies this as the defining moment in Guevara’s life, the moment at which he became a soldier.

Guevara’s reckless courage and evident leadership capability soon gained Castro’s favor. By now known as “Che” _ from his penchant for the Guarani word that means “Hey you” _ Guevara in fact became the most important combat officer of the revolution, leading the column that won the major battles across central Cuba that resulted in the fall of Havana on Jan. 1, 1959. After Castro took power, Guevara served in a succession of key government posts; he is primarily responsible for forging Cuba’s close ties with the Soviet Union. But it was the export of communist revolution from Cuba to the rest of Latin America that Guevara devoted himself to. During the years, he grew restless as a communist government administrator and longed to returned to combat. In the camaraderie forged under fire, Anderson says, Guevara found the close relationships his asthma had denied him as a child, and the author marshals a convincing collection of quotes and reminiscences to buttress the notion. Eventually Guevara left Cuba to lead revolutionary bands, first in Africa, then in Bolivia. The first ended in defeat when the guerrillas could not muster peasant support; the second ended in Guevara’s capture and execution.

As impressive as Anderson’s research is, however, his writing is dispiriting. He seems to have dumped everything he learned into the book, exercising little discretion regarding what’s relevant and what’s not. The first 200 pages are largely taken up with Guevara’s childhood and coming of age, a period that should have come in at well under 100 pages. As a stylist Anderson simply doesn’t exist –the book reads like a long, long magazine piece or a dossier.

For a veteran journalist, Anderson makes amazingly elementary mistakes. He uses “between” when he means “among,” and he doesn’t know the difference between an “inference” and an “implication.” And these are only the most glaring of his misusages.

Finally, and this is of a piece with his other shortcomings, Anderson displays no overarching intelligence. He presents the facts of Guevara’s life in a brusque chronological order, with no analysis, and the absolute minimum of context. It’s a testimony to his literary and intellectual shortcomings that Anderson relegates what little analysis he does muster to an appendix, rather than weaving it into his narrative.

At its best, biography can be not only a collection of reliably researched facts, but also a work of narrative verve and skill that rivals fiction. It offers a reading pleasure equal to, but different from that of the novel. No one will read Che Guevara for pleasure, but it will stand as a major work solely on the basis of Anderson’s research.

BY MYRIAM MARQUEZ

The Miami Herald - link to original article

Posted on Thu, Jan. 22, 2009

Another movie romanticizing Ernesto ”Che” Guevara comes to Miami. Cuban exiles are appalled. Most everybody else shrugs and says, “Get over it.”

We would if only someone in Hollywood would do an accurate portrayal of the homophobic, racist Butcher of La Cabaña. Instead we get Che, another propaganda film romanticizing the Argentine comandante in Cuba’s revolution who was killed trying to foment rebellion in Bolivia in 1967.

Fidel Castro’s predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, certainly had his own henchmen who killed innocents who disagreed with him. But it was nothing, absolutely nothing, on the scale of Castro’s bloodletting — much of it by Che, including executing a 14-year-old boy.

COLD KILLING MACHINE

Guevara set the tone after the revolution’s triumph for a totalitarian regime that executed hundreds — and some estimates go as high as 2,000 — Cubans after quickie show trials that mocked any international sense of justice. And that was just in the first year.

Yet there’s not one scene depicting the relentless firing squads at the Havana fortress-turned-prison in director Steven Soderbergh’s 4 ½-hour film.

The years between 1959, when Che was in charge of executions at La Cabaña, and 1966, when he reached Bolivia, get no mention. Some will call this absence of the bloody truth “artistic license.”

To me, it’s another cynical plot to turn the making of the Cuban communist regime into a fairy tale. Except there are about two million Cuban exiles throughout the world who know otherwise and millions more in Cuba still suffering.

Consider Che’s own writing on the subject of executions: “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. . . . These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of El Paredón.”

So in Che’s thinking, el paredón — the wall that carried the splattered brains and hearts of the men shot at La Cabaña — was a teaching tool. People recoiled in fear as they watched executions on TV.

RACIST AND HOMOPHOBE

There’s more ”creative license” taken in another Che-extravaganza, The Motorcycle Diaries. Absent from that movie is this diary passage:

“The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. The contempt and poverty unites them in the daily struggle, but the different way of dealing with life separates them completely. The black is indolent and a dreamer, spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink. The European has a tradition of work and saving. . . .”

Aside from being a racist and cold killing machine, Che was a homophobe. He put gays in work camps — the start of detentions to “build the New Man.”

Historian Pedro Corzo, a former Cuban political prisoner and one of the authors of Misionero de la Violencia, Missionary of Violence, about Guevara’s life, says the Che myth is particularly galling when everything he did — as Cuba’s minister of banking or industry or heading delegations overseas or trying to create rebel movements in Latin America — failed.

”Just by reading Guevara’s own writings you can perceive the type of person he was,” Corzo said. “He spoke of hate, vengeance, getting even. He never spoke of getting along, of peace or understanding.”

It’s all there in his writings, but nowhere to be found in Hollywood history-making. Shameful.

But it makes no films about the Cuban resistance movement.

By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY

Dec 29, 2008

Link to original article in The Wall Street Journal 

Hollywood hotshot Benicio Del Toro is not a stand-up comic, but he seemed to be playing one earlier this month when he said he found the role of Cuban Revolution hero Ernesto Guevara, in the new film “Che,” like Jesus Christ.

“Only Jesus would turn the other cheek. Che wouldn’t,” Mr. Del Toro explained. Right. And Bernie Madoff is Mother Teresa, only she wasn’t into fraud.

With next month marking the 50th anniversary of the Castro dictatorship, it’s no surprise that the film industry is trying to cash in by celebrating pop-culture icon Guevara. As one of Fidel Castro’s lieutenants in the Sierra Maestra and a Castro enforcer in the years following the rebel victory, his name is synonymous with the Cuban Revolution.

Interesting films are hard to come by these days and “Che” is a good example of the problem. Rebel glamour sells T-shirts and coffee mugs so why not another airbrushed rerun of Guevara’s life? Or, more precisely, some mythical version of it, sanitized for the mass market. Meanwhile the real marvel of the past 50 years in Cuba — the steady stream of heroic nonconformists who have risked all in their aspiration to think, speak and act freely — remains the untold epic of our time.

If Mr. Del Toro’s “Christ” comment is foolish, it’s nothing compared to film director Steven Soderbergh’s explanation of why we should care about Che. Bad things happen in society when “you make profit the point of everything,” the movie director told Politico.com. Che’s “dream of a classless society, a society that isn’t built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology.”

Putting aside for a moment the hilarity of Mr. Soderbergh’s personal revulsion with profits, the “methodology” that he suggests is debatable is otherwise known as murder. Che had a “homicidal idea of justice,” Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained in The New Republic in 2005, after researching his life. In his April 1967 “Message to the Tricontinental,” Che spoke these words: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.”

The results of Che’s utopian agenda aren’t much to admire either. As author Paul Berman explained in 2004 in Slate, “The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster.”

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their “morality” on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba’s privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims — artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience — would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

The Cuban regime loves its apologists. They give cover and deflect international criticism while at home the regime brutalizes its people. Reports from the island are that since Raúl took over from Fidel in 2006, the repression has gotten worse.

Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Varela Project, which collected more than 11,000 signatures calling for free elections and civil liberties in 2002, says that in recent months there has been a crackdown, “with a fierce persecution against Varela Project activists, other members of the opposition, and the ongoing scandal of not freeing the prisoners of conscience.”

Among Castro’s captives is Oscar Elias Biscet, an Afro-Cuban doctor who is renowned for his commitment to peaceful resistance and is serving a 25-year sentence. Fifty-eight journalists, writers and democracy advocates rounded up in March 2003 also languish in Fidel’s deplorable jails. The total number of political prisoners is not known but is undoubtedly much higher.

State security and rapid-response brigades — aka thugs paid to rough up dissidents — have been fully employed this year. But, despite the terror and the threat of imprisonment, the Cuban spirit still struggles for freedom.

At least five resistance publications now circulate in eastern Cuba. Thirty-two-year-old blogger Yoani Sánchez has been warned to keep quiet, but she still chronicles the ridiculousness of Che economics, giving a voice to ordinary Cubans who live lives of desperation. The Ladies in White — wives, sisters and mothers of prisoners of conscience — still walk quietly in Havana on Sundays. Rock bands mock the old dictator.

This is the wonder of the revolution: Fifty years of state terror hasn’t silenced the resistance. Maybe one day Hollywood will make a film about it.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com