Constructing Che Guevara: figurations of an epic hero

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Content 1

Constructing Che Guevara:

Figurations of an Epic Hero

by

Edgar Alejandro Montes

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

December 2014

Copyright 2014 Edgar Alejandro Montes
ii

Para las heroínas:
Mamá, Ana, Bianca, Jennifer, Camila y Xela

iii
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the many people who have helped me navigate through this
project and bring it to its completion. I hope to lean on many of them further in future
pursuits.
I am forever indebted to Roberto Díaz who has been a constant and invaluable
source of guidance, support and expertise throughout my graduate studies, from the
moment we met on my campus visit through the dissertation defense. He has selflessly
served on every single committee helping me clear each and every stage along the way.
He saw this project develop from a simple thought into its current form, and without his
generosity, persistence and motivation this work would not have been possible.
I am forever grateful for the enduring presence, love and support of Bianca
Ciebrant, co-author to two even more challenging, but all the more fulfilling works in
progress: Camila and Xela. Her exceptional strength, tenacity and sacrifice are admirable
and enviable.
My dissertation committee, Panivong Norindr and Samuel Steinberg, patiently
worked with me through these final stages and provided me with their incisive insight
and analysis compelling me to further develop my project. I hope to rely on them along
future permutations of this work.
I am extremely grateful for the support and opportunities extended to me by The
Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. I thank
the various Professors, past and present, who served as mentors that helped shape this
project, including Akira Lippit, Bruce Burningham, Gabriel Giorgi, and William
Thalmann. I am also indebted to Katherine Guevara whose job I am certain I made a lot
iv
more difficult with my ignorance of the bureaucratic responsibilities of a graduate
student.
Without the support and intellectual stimulus of the many friends and colleagues
encountered along my academic journey this work could never have been imagined. I
would like to thank the many kind friends that emerged along my studies at UCLA and
USC.
I am particularly grateful to Jennifer-Ann Bayan for finding countless ways to
motivate, challenge and inspire me. I thank her for every bit of love and support that she
has provided, and for that wonderful and receptive smile at a conference presentation in
Vladivostok, Russia that forever conscripted her into this project.

v
Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Birth of
an Epic Hero 9
Chapter 2: Monumentality, Heteroglossia and the
Revolutionary Epic 60
Chapter 3: Nuestro Americano: Che Guevara and the
Epic of Latin America 117
Conclusion 160
Figures 163
Works Cited 172

1
Introduction
The dissertation examines the figure of Ernesto “Che” Guevara from the
viewpoint of the epic, focusing on his function as an epic heroic model. Parting from
Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an “imagined political community” (6),
and that as such it relies on imagined narratives to affirm its existence, one can presume
that nations (and other regional entities) display a propensity toward the epic; that is, that
they seek to authenticate themselves through official stories of conflict that account for
their origins, justify their existence and behaviors, and define the people that comprise
them.
1
The epic is typically a narration
2
of a military struggle centered on the feats of a
specific agent (the epic hero), normally a military leader that comes to be regarded as the
embodiment of all the virtues of that nation in their purest form, through whose struggle,
a new nation, or historical era is inaugurated. The work at hand is thus an examination of
the configuration of Latin American revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, into the epic
hero of a Cuban and Latin American imaginary.
The theoretical framework of epic informing this analysis of a Che Guevara epic
is that of Paul Zumthor, whose work on oral poetry provides insightful details on the
relationship between epic, audience, and singer; and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, who

1
The epic has figured prominently in Latin America as a preferred form through which to
define or redefine the nation. See Alonso de Ercilla’s La araucana, Esteban Echeverría’s
La cautiva, and Jose Hernandez’s Martín Fierro for some Latin American attempts to
define or redefine the nation through the epic.
2
The epic is largely understood to have its origins in the oral tradition; however, the
advent of literacy, and later film and television, has demonstrated the feasibility of the
epic to be rendered through different media. Therefore, I define the epic primarily as a
narration without privileging one form or another as its most authentic representation.
Paul Zumthor explores the to a degree the impact of electronic technologies on
traditionally oral literary forms.
2
provides the most comprehensive definition of the epic genre and opens up space for
further study on its implications on the notion of nation and tradition.
In his discussion on the epic in his work Oral Poetry, a work that traces its subject
from antiquity up through the advent of electronic technologies, Zumthor focuses
primarily on the oral constituents of the epic form, but provides valuable insight that
helps locate a general understanding of the epic beyond its orality. The epic is
traditionally considered an oral or literary poem; however, it is my belief (and Zumthor
concedes this point as well
3
) that the epic transcends orality and literacy, and that due to
the development of other media and genres (such as television, film, and even the essay)
the epic, as a story accounting for national origins and delineating national identities, has
made a transition into these other forms and continues to exist through them.
4

In identifying the epic, Zumthor alludes to the difficulty of formulating a precise
definition, as it is unclear as to exactly what it refers to. He asks, “Does the term refer to
an aesthetic, to a mode of perception, or to the structures of the tale? Some scholars
would have it include every type of narrative oral poetry, especially any historical
argument, without taking into consideration either solemnity or length,” (80). In terms of
the epic story, Zumthor states that “the epic poem stages virile aggressivity for the sake
of some grand venture. Basically, it narrates a combat and selects from its host of
protagonists one uncommon character who commands our admiration, although he may

3
Zumthor posits that “Perhaps our mass communication has made mediation by
specialized poetic forms useless, and it has recuperated the fundamental epic function:
the exaltation of the hero and of the exemplary exception to the rule” (95). He identifies
the Western movie genre as one example.
4
Walter J. Ong’s seminal work Orality and Literacy examines closely the impact that the
technological innovation of literacy had on orality. My work parts from an understanding
that just as the epic adapted to and thrived under the technological innovation that literacy
at one point constituted, it continues to adapt and find expression in more recent media.
3
not always come out the victor in every test” (81). As this last statement suggests, the
epic hero is at the center of the epic, and his importance has as much to do with his role
in the story as to his significance for the community that his actions are narrated for. As
Zumthor states:
The epic tends toward the ‘heroic,’ only where ‘heroic’ means the
exaltation of a sort of community superego. It has been noted that it finds
its most fertile grounds in border regions where there exists a prolonged
hostility between two races, two cultures—neither of which obviously
dominates the other. The epic song crystallizes this hostility and
compensates for the uncertainty of competition; it foretells that all will end
well, proclaims at least that we have righteousness on our side. (85)

Although the central component of the epic is its hero, as this last statement further
reveals, the hero cannot exist without conflict, without identifying an “other” as an
adversary. The enemy can only be defined once the nation or community has been
defined, for the adversary is potentially anyone that stands outside of this community.
Apart from the hero and the adversary as the primary elements of the epic, its
integration of history is as an important quality of the genre; or as Zumthor phrases it,
“No epic is totally devoid of historical ingredients regardless of the mythic opacity of its
discourse. . . . The universal feature of the epic, even more than its warrior element, is
this interpenetration of [history and myth]” (87). Despite its display of historical
elements, the epic is not in fact a work of history. Bakhtin reveals more about the
integration of history into the epic, for its correlation with the past is one of the epic’s
main constituents.
Bakhtin’s analysis of the epic come through its juxtaposition with the novel which
he regards as a heteroglossic genre, open and continuous, capable of hosting a multitude
of voices, at times contradictory to one another, whereas the epic is marked by its
4
singularity of perspective and is a “a genre that has not only long since completed its
development, but one that is already antiquated” (3).
5
Bakhtin identifies three major
components to the epic: “(1) a national past—in Goethe’s and Schiller’s terminology the
‘absolute past’—serves as the subject for the epic; (2) national tradition (not personal
experience and the free thought that grows out of it) serves as the source of the epic; (3)
an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality, that is,
from the time in which the singer (the author and his audience) lives,” (13). As we can
gather from Bakhtin’s schema on what defines the epic, the past is perhaps its most
definitive component, as it is both its subject and source, and determines the nature of
contemporary society’s relationship to it. Bakhtin states further that “The world of the
epic is the national heroic past: it is a world of ‘beginnings’ and ‘peak times’ in the
national history, a world of fathers and of founders of families, a world of ‘firsts’ and
‘bests.’ The important point here is not that the past constitutes the content of the epic.
The formally constitutive feature of the epic as a genre is rather the transferal of a
represented world into the past, and the degree to which this world participates in the
past” (13).
Collin Graham takes up Bakhtin’s notions on the epic and explores further its
connection to the idea of nation, identifying a symbiotic relationship between the two
(90). As he sees it, the epic is “a genre which comes to have a specific politicized
relationship with the concept of the nation, sharing with it defining characteristics of

5
The extent to which Bakhtin’s characterization of the epic as the novel’s foil is valid is
debatable. William Blake’s famous (mis)reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost that
deems Milton to be “of the Devil’s party” illustrates the problem with Bakhtin’s
characterization. Neil Forsyth’s The Satanic Epic delves into the heroic position of Satan
in Milton’s epic.
5
cultural cohesion, and seeking to become defining of and defined by nationality,” (84).
Furthermore, both notions “are viewed as desiring to be ‘centripetal,’ turning in upon
themselves, denying the existence of the Other,” (84). Examining further the epic’s
grappling with the past, Graham notes that the “epic reads national history in a partisan,
valorizing way, stressing origins and ‘successes,’ producing an ‘epic’ version of history
which promotes the nation/tradition. . . . Epic both faces and embodies the past, while
inherent in it is a knowledge that it constructs a past (one that is marmorealized) for the
future” (88-89). It is not only the epic that reconstructs the past, but the nation does so as
well. According to Graham, “Nations…filter the past ideologically, producing an
‘antiquity’ which can be considered ‘glorious’…‘selective’…and an ‘image’…. And the
crossover with Bakhtinian epic again becomes clearer; it similarly reads the past
ideologically, stressing ‘peak times’ of national (subsequently epic) history, becoming
interwoven with (rather than merely parallel to) the ideological processes of nationalism,”
(92).
Chapter 1 examines the extent to which the revolutionary struggle that culminated
with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959 provides the new national
project with the epic narrative that serves to justify it. The chapter focuses on Fidel
Castro’s construction of an epic of the Cuban Revolution from which Ernesto “Che”
Guevara eventually emerges as the epic hero of said narrative. The chapter surveys
Castro’s early speeches commemorating the various anniversaries of the Revolution,
which illustrate the creation and development of an epic narrative functional to the new
national project. Prior to Guevara’s death, his speeches outline a vague epic that avoids
providing and elaborating at length about the specific details—participants, adversaries,
6
events, etc.—that could constitute the Revolution’s own epic. Instead, in order to render
the Cuban Revolution as “the epic absolute past” of the nation that would constitute “the
single source and beginning of everything good for all later times” (Bakhtin 15), Castro
constructs a general “living” epic narrative, and epic in progress, that identifies the
people as its collective epic hero. Given his oratory talent, and the military displays that
accompany many of these early speeches, the chapter refers to theoretical frameworks on
the oral epic to examine Castro’s speeches as individual epic performances.
Upon his death, Guevara is identified as the Revolution’s epic hero, and as such,
as the exemplary model for the nation under the project of the Cuban Revolution. The
two speeches given by Castro shortly after Guevara’s capture and execution in Bolivia
6

mark the moment in which Guevara emerges as the nation’s epic hero. In the first speech,
corroborating his death to the Cuban public, Castro first assumes the role of investigator
as he reviews the evidence that lead the regime to confirm that Guevara had fallen. In this
speech, Castro works to take control of the discourse about Guevara’s final moments,
while introducing many of the tropes that will form part of Che Guevara’s epic.
The second speech, Castro’s eulogy for Guevara pronounced at the Plaza de la
Revolución, constitutes the first performance of a Che Guevara epic, in which Castro
symbolically resurrects his epic hero through a univocal enunciation, compared to the
flight of Mackandal in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo. In order to rescue him
from death, Castro makes of Che a demigod of sorts, dividing his body into a physical
and mortal self, and an intellectual and spiritual one that will guarantee his continued
presence and relevance to the Cuban Revolution. Due to the transcendental qualities that

6
“Confirmación de la muerte del Che en Bolivia,” (October 15, 1967), and “Vigilia en
memoria del Che Guevara” (October 18, 1967).
7
Castro identifies in Guevara, he is proclaimed as the Revolution’s model upon which
future generations will be molded after: “como queremos que sean los hombres de las
futuras generaciones, debemos decir: ¡Que sean como el Che!” (“Vigilia” 98).
Chapter 2 examines the monument and the memorial as sites—functioning
synonymously with the epic—that participate in the creation, affirmation, or revision of
national narratives. Through a reading of Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo as an
examination of monumentality in Haiti, and an overview of recent examinations of
attempts to define the Caribbean, the chapter explores the region’s propensity to reject the
monument as a totalizing system to identify and control.
The chapter examines the unique and unusual performance of the epic of the
Cuban Revolution, housed within what is itself a monument in the Caribbean: Havana’s
Museo de la Revolución. The exhibits of the Museo are arranged chronologically so as to
provide the narrative that explains the Cuban Revolution as the event that corrects the
misguided path of the nation as it satisfies, at last, the independence sought since the
beginning of its colonial history. While the Museo seeks to offer a perpetual performance
of a totalizing discourse (the Revolution’s epic), it does so by appropriating and
inscribing this revised national narrative within what was until that point the Presidential
Palace, the site of power under preceding regimes. In other words, the epic of the Cuban
Revolution within the Museo de la Revolución does not exist here as an independent,
closed-off, an unadulterated system; it depends on the presence and engagement with
physical remnants of this past to validate its meaning.
Finally, Senel Paz’s novella “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo” is examined
in depth as an affirmation of heteroglossia that challenges to the totalizing and univocal
8
discourse of the epic of the Cuban Revolution. The story centers on the unlikely
relationship that develops between two seemingly opposing and irreconcilable figures,
through which Paz stages a dialogue that posits pressing questions to the discourse of the
Revolution and a re-evaluation of the Revolution’s program on the New Man.
Chapter 3 focuses on Walter Salles’s film The Motorcycle Diaries in its positing
of Ernesto Guevara as the epic hero of Latin America. The chapter reviews a long-
established literary and intellectual tradition of contemplating the notion of a Latin
American cohesive entity as a means of contextualizing the argument of Salles’s film:
that Che Guevara’s journey across South America becomes the epistemological journey
through which he comes to realize the continent’s heroic model as established by the
notable figures of the aforementioned tradition, particularly Simón Bolívar and José
Martí. However, to do so the film revises Guevara’s own account of his journey across
South America in order to resolve some of the limitations of Guevara’s original Diaries,
in which he inhabits the position of a curious and sympathetic outsider whose
experiences are largely framed through the figure of the picaro. Furthermore, Salles
realizes Guevara’s frustrated attempts to communicate with the region’s indigenous by
invoking the testimonio as the means by which the indigenous finally speaks.

9
Chapter 1:
Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Birth of an Epic Hero
The present chapter examines the re-articulation of the Cuban national epic story
under the Cuban Revolution. In a survey of Fidel Castro’s speeches commemorating the
anniversaries of the Cuban Revolution, I identify the recurring performance of a Cuban
national epic, one from which, although initially absent, Ernesto “Che” Guevara
eventually emerges as its epic hero and model for the reinvented nation.
The idea for the topic first presented itself on a visit to the Museo de la
Revolución in Havana. It was there that I witnessed what I call a “performance” of the
epic of the Cuban revolution. Through its exhibits, the Museum of the Revolution
narrates the struggle of the rebel forces against the Batista dictatorship, highlighting the
“epic proportions” of that story, while displaying many of the gestures common to the
epic of the oral tradition. The epic story of the Revolution, as told there, begins in 1953
when a young lawyer named Fidel Castro leads a group of men in an attack on the
Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba, hoping to destabilize the tyrannical
Batista regime and propel the masses to rise up and overthrow it. The venture, however,
ends in failure. Some of Castro’s companions are wounded or killed in the assault and
Castro is taken prisoner and tried for his crimes.
7
He eventually ends up in exile in
Mexico where he meets another legendary figure, Ernesto “Che” Guevara,
8
and months

7
For a detailed account of the failed attack on the Moncada barracks and subsequent trial,
imprisonment, exile and return see Tad Szulc’s “The War” in his biography, Fidel: A
Critical Portrait. Castro relates these events in his own words in “El asalto al cuartel
Moncada” (117-146) and “La Historia me absolvera” (147-158) in his oral biography,
Fidel Castro: Biografía a dos voces.
8
Jon Lee Anderson details the preparations to re-launch the Revolution from Mexico in
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. (160-188)
10
later Guevara, Castro and other Cuban exiles find themselves sailing back to Cuba on the
Granma to lead a revolution against Batista.
9
Nearly shipwrecked and having almost lost
two of their companions at sea before rescuing them from the waters, the small group of
revolutionaries makes a difficult landing on the Oriente province of Cuba. After suffering
serious casualties,
10
the survivors hide out in the Sierra Maestra mountains leading a two-
year revolution against the U.S.-backed Batista regime that finally succeeds on January 1,
1959.
This story of thwarted attack followed by imprisonment, exile, return, armed
struggle,
11
and finally triumph would supply enough material from which to form an epic
of a nation being redefined under a new national era. I examine whether the Cuban
national epic is situated in the story of the Cuban Revolution, primarily by analyzing how
Fidel Castro deals with that material, whether he uses it to formulate or reiterate the epic
of Cuba. I focus my attention on speeches made by Castro commemorating some of the
anniversaries of the Cuban Revolution and examine how such epic is constructed,
manipulated, or averted.
Although I will not delve exhaustively into the oral dynamics of the epic through
which Paul Zumthor arrives at a definition of the form, this is not to say that orality plays
no significant role in the formation and reiteration of the Cuban epic, for in fact, my focus
will be on speeches made by Castro, who, given his oratory talents, is regarded as this

9
Herbert L. Matthews’ report, “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout,” for the New York
Times in 1957 is the first widely disseminated account of the origins of the revolutionary
struggle. Jon Lee Anderson details the landing of the Granma and early moments of the
revolutionary struggles in “A Disastrous Beginning” (211-232).
10
Anderson reports twenty-two survivors, while noting that in official accounts the
number is twelve (213).
11
See Szulc (461-592).
11
work’s “singer of tales.”
12
I quote extensively from Castro for it is my intention to
illustrate that in regards to the epic of the Revolution as rendered by him, the oral
performance is as imperative to its creation as the narrative itself. Castro’s use of
language—repetition, shift in tenses, syntax, etc.—reveals the birth of a more precise epic
narrative centered on the figure of Ernesto Che Guevara. Furthermore, one cannot ignore
the strong oral tradition in Cuba,
13
and the way in which the story of the Cuban
Revolution has in large part been transmitted orally through stories of those who
participated, and those who were witnesses to the time before and after the triumph of the
Revolution.
14
Consideration of these and other oral elements would prove invaluable in
an analysis and search for the epic(s) of Cuba and the Cuban revolution.
In trying to discern the relationship between the revolutionary struggle and an
epic narrative of Cuba, it is important to consider Bakhtin’s point that the epic depicts “a
world of ‘beginnings’ and ‘peak times’ in the national history . . . a world of ‘firsts’ and
‘bests’” (13). The “story” of revolutionary struggle leading to triumph and the initiation

12
Fidel Castro’s affinity for oratory is well recognized. Amongst his most notable
speeches is his defense against the charges brought about as a result of the failed attack
on the Moncada barracks: a lengthy declaration that would eventually be reconstructed
and disseminated as the manifesto “La Historia me absolvera” (“History Will Absolve
Me”). Furthermore, his most recent authorized biography is rendered in testimonial form,
gathered from a series of interviews conducted by Ignacio Ramonet (Fidel Castro:
biografía a dos voces). The English translation of said biography equally stresses its
orality: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography.
13
It is worth noting that the Revolution facilitates the birth of the testimonio placed at the
time of Miguel Barnet’s publication of Biografía de un cimarrón in 1966.
14
The testimonio form has been enlisted to disseminate Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s
biography throughout Cuba, consisting of published narratives enunciated by witnesses to
some of Guevara’s revolutionary efforts. Jose Mayo collects Lenoardo Tamayo Núñez’s
(“Urbano”) testimonio about Guevara in En la guerrilla junto al Che (2002). José
Mendoza Argudín’s Con el Che, los andares de la vida, a recipient of the “Premio de
Testimonio 1998 de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba,” details the witness’s
experiences under the command of Guevara during the Cuban Revolution.
12
of a new nation, or national era, lends itself to two interpretations: (1) this story can come
to be acknowledged as the Cuban epic, as the story illustrating the beginning of a nation,
or, (2) the story can constitute a peak moment in the history of Cuba; that is if we can
identify a preceding epic narrative that initiates a tradition into which this latter story can
be inserted and complemented by it. As I will illustrate, Castro in his early speeches
conceives of the present as a continuation of the revolutionary struggle, one that did not
end but actually began on January 1, 1959, limiting the extent to which he can refer to
this struggle as a distant (epic) past. This conception of the present as an ongoing struggle
will then need to rely on a much more temporally distant epic story as a way of
transferring his present world into the past, which Bakhtin identifies as “the formally
constitutive feature of the epic” (13). At the same time the present will be reformulated as
an epic moment, as an era that will be looked on as such by forthcoming generations
Fidel Castro will look to construct and affirm a Cuban identity through the
formulation of an epic of Cuba being actualized during the years of the Revolutionary
government, as well as through the reiteration of a Cuban epic set in the years of the War
for Independence, over half a century before the Revolution, illustrating what Graham
says of the epic, that “it similarly reads the past ideologically, stressing ‘peak times’ of
national (subsequently epic) history, becoming interwoven with (rather than merely
parallel to) the ideological processes of nationalism” (92). The story of the Cuban
Revolution will be inserted into this earlier epic as a rightful descendant correcting the
direction of a misguided nation.
I approached this subject believing that having a rich story of epic proportions at
his disposal in the events of the Cuban Revolution, Castro would, from the outset, refer to
13
it extensively, and use it to validate and justify the present. However, Castro does not
construct this epic or evoke it as extensively as initially expected. He does participate in
its construction and affirmation but does not rely on the epic story of the Revolution to
the extent that he does, as one could argue, on a national narrative of Independence that
posits Martí as the nation’s forefather. Jose Martí is often invoked, and some would
argue, to the point of abuse, as an authority whose ideas validate the Cuban Revolution;
Castro’s revolutionary project is often articulated as the culmination of Martí’s early
vision.
15
Nevertheless, there is a radical difference in the way in which the revolutionary
struggle is referenced between Castro’s early speeches commemorating the early
anniversaries of the Revolution and those pronounced with greater temporal distance
between the celebration and the historical event celebrated.
Castro’s early speeches commemorating the Cuban Revolution avoid referring to
the story of revolutionaries defeating a tyrannical dictatorship as the epic story of Cuba,
that is, as the story about a historical event located in the distant and inappealable past,
that is responsible for the present, through which one or more epic heroes become the
models for all members of the nation. Although he avoids exploiting the story of the
armed struggle against Batista as a potential story of a new national era, Castro does
extensively construct a sense of epic in those early speeches, and only avoids naming or
highlighting specific epic heroes within the Cuban Revolution and invoking the sense of

15
For an examination of Fidel Castro’s use of Marti for the purposes of identifying the
nation see Donald Rice’s The Rhetorical Uses of the Authorizing Figure: Fidel Castro
and Jose Marti.
Through a comparison of their “life experiences, personalities, and revolutionary values,”
Rafael A. Lecuona challenges the parallels that Fidel Castro and his “followers”
deliberately draw between the two figures, in “Jose Marti and Fidel Castro,”
International Journal on World Peace 8.1 (1991): 45-61.
14
a distant epic past. Castro invokes three epic currents in these speeches that allow him to
reiterate a national identity without referencing the Cuban Revolution as its source: 1) the
people of Cuba are the agents of a contemporary struggle that will be determined as an
epic by future generations; 2) he recalls for his audiences an earlier narrative, already
disseminated by the Cuban tradition, the epic of the Cuban War of Independence, to
which the Cuban Revolution relates as its heir destined to guide the nation back on its
original path set during this initial struggle; and 3) the stories of the Latin American
“liberators,” such as Simón Bolívar, constitute an epic tradition to which the Cuban
people can form a part of as well.
It is perhaps due to the close temporal proximity between the revolutionary
struggle and the contemporary context unto which Castro pronounces his early speeches
that he is unable to disseminate the story of the revolutionary struggle as an epic, let
alone as the epic of Cuba, in spite of the radical restructuring of society and government
being undertaken which would suggest the commencement of a new nation. As Bakhtin
mentions, the past of the epic is “absolute and complete,” closed off to the present, “it
lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect
it with the present,” (15). Furthermore, he states:
The epic was never a poem about the present, about its own time (one that
became a poem about the past only for those who came later). The epic, as
the specific genre known to us today, has been from the beginning a poem
about the past, and the authorial position immanent in the epic and
constitutive for it (that is, the position of the one who utters the epic word)
is the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him
inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendant. In its style, tone
and manner of expression, epic discourse is infinitely far removed from
discourse of a contemporary about a contemporary addressed to
contemporaries. . . . Both the singer and the listener, immanent in the epic
as a genre, are located in the same time and on the same evaluative
(hierarchical) plane, but the represented world of the heroes stands on an
15
utterly different and inaccessible time-and-value plane, separated by epic
distance, (13-14).

Castro cannot conceive of the revolutionary struggle as “absolute and complete”
because the present, as he reveals to us, can only be conceived as a continuation of that
struggle given the fact that there is still an external threat (from Cuban counter-
revolutionaries and U.S. interventionism) to reverse the success of the Revolution. This
however, does not prevent him from finding an alternative method of constructing an epic
relevant and functional to the Cuban Revolution. What he does is then create a living
epic, an epic in progress, an epic about the present, which, as Bakhtin reveals to us, is
possible. That epic will identify in the people of Cuba a collective hero locked in a
current struggle against a great adversary, and whose story will, as it can only do so then,
become an epic for future generations. As Bakhtin reveals, “It is possible, of course, to
conceive even ‘my time’ as heroic, epic time, when it is seen as historically significant;
one can distance it, look at it as if from afar (not from one’s own vantage point but from
some point in the future), one can relate to the past in a familiar way (as if relating to
“my” present),” (14). Epics about the present, says Bakhtin, “transfer to contemporary
events and contemporaries the ready-made epic form; that is, they transfer to these events
the time-and-value contour of the past, thus attaching them to the world of fathers, of
beginnings and peak times—canonizing these events, as it were, while they are still
current,” (15). As we will see, Castro will incorporate the epic form to conceptualize the
present, and will invoke a variety of motifs prevalent within the epic genre to do so.
Fidel Castro begins to construct the “contemporary” epic of Cuba within the first
anniversary of the Revolution. In a speech delivered in Havana in the first days of
January 1960, Castro begins to allude to the initial successes of the Revolutionary era and
16
insists that the struggle is yet ongoing, and its initial feats are not to be credited to
specific figures of the Revolution but to the people as a whole. Castro draws the people
into the story he begins to tell about Revolutionary Cuba; collectively, they play the role
of the hero of this story, displaying all the common qualities of the epic hero, such as
resilience, courage and honor. The Revolution, as Castro pronounces, is not necessarily
the result of the epic fight of a few hundred revolutionaries, himself included, against an
established, and superiorly equipped military, rather, as he states it, the people are its
source and its core; “Se ha logrado solo con el apoyo del pueblo, se ha logrado solo con
el pueblo, con el respaldo del pueblo, que es nuestra única fuerza. Por eso, por eso tratan
de confundir al pueblo. Tratan de confundir al pueblo por todos los medios posibles,
porque saben que la fuerza de la Revolución, saben que la fuerza de la Revolución está en
el pueblo” (“Primer aniversario,” 13).
16
Throughout the speech he insists on highlighting
the heroic qualities of the people, while illustrating what Zumthor says of the epic, that it
“compensates for the uncertainty of competition; [foretelling] that all will end well,
[proclaiming]…that we have righteousness on our side” (85). Castro pronounces to his
audience the following:
Al pueblo lo podrán bombardear, pero lo que no podrán jamás es
conquistarlo. Al pueblo nuestro lo podrán exterminar, lo que no podrán
jamás es hacerlo regresar al pasado, al pueblo nuestro lo podrán agredir, lo
que no podrán jamás lograr es que se rinda, al pueblo nuestro lo podrán
desaparecer de la faz de la tierra, lo que no podrán jamás es vencerlo;
porque nuestro pueblo con su razón, con su heroísmo, con su dignidad,
con su verguenza y con su grandeza es un pueblo invencible y es un

16
It has been accomplished only with the support of the people, it has been accomplished
only with the people, with the backing of the people, which is our only force. That is
why, that is why they try to confuse the people. They try to confuse the people by all
means necessary, because they know that the force of the Revolution, they know that the
force of the Revolution is in the people.
All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated by the page number of a given text.
17
pueblo al que hay que respetar….Si fuésemos un pueblo indigno de la
obra que estamos haciendo habría peligro, pero no hay peligro
precisamente porque se trata de un pueblo heroico, de un pueblo unido, de
un pueblo lleno de esperanza y de un pueblo que no tiene miedo.

Más fácilmente se arremete a un pueblo atemorizado que a un pueblo
valiente, por eso en nuestra conciencia revolucionaria, en nuestra unión y
en el espíritu heroico de nuestro pueblo, está nuestra mayor fuerza y por
eso podemos seguir adelante, (14-15).
17

The passage contains some interesting features that denote the nascent stage of Castro’s
epic at this moment. The syntax is largely in the passive voice, obfuscating the subject
responsible for all of the actions heaped upon the people; the agent of these attempts to
bomb, conquer, and exterminate the people isn’t clear; the actions are merely attributed to
a vague third person subject. As the revolutionary period increases, its epic will solidify
its features more concretely identifying the adversary of the narrative in more specific
terms. Castro assures a favorable ending again in his speech commemorating the second
anniversary, in a passage that is similarly characterized by a lack of clarity, in this case,
in articulating in precise terms what that triumphant future will look like:
Nosotros nos hemos trazado una línea y cualquiera que sea nuestro
destino, será siempre un gran destino, porque grande es el destino de los

17
The people may be bombed, but what they will never be able to do is to conquer it. Our
people may be exterminated, what they will never be able to do is make it return to the
past, our people may be assaulted, what they will never be able to accomplish is that it
surrenders, our people may be made to disappear from the face of the earth, what they
will never be able to do is defeat it; because our people with its reason/righteousness,
with its heroism, with its dignity, with its sense of shame and with its grandeur is an
invincible people and is a people that must be respected. . . . Were we to be a people
unworthy of the task that we are undertaking there would be danger, but there is no
danger precisely because it involves a heroic people, a united people, a people filled with
hope and a people that isn’t afraid.
It is easier to strike out against a fearful people than a heroic people, which is why in our
revolutionary consciousness, in our union and in the heroic spirit of our people, is one
find our greatest strength and because of it we can continue forward.
18
pueblos que triunfan ¡y grande es el destino de los pueblos que saben
morir antes que aceptar la derrota! (my italics “Segundo,” 57)
18

As already mentioned, part of the reason that Castro cannot conceive of the story
of the armed struggle leading to the triumph of the Revolution as existing in an absolute
past is because it is too early to do so, but also because the past, as Castro conceives it
(and perhaps his audience shares his view as well), cannot be described in epic terms, as a
past in which “everything is good,” (Bakhtin 15). Bakhtin states that “all the really good
things occur only in this past. The epic absolute past is the single source and beginning of
everything good for all later times as well” (15). The past that Castro portrays is the past
of dictatorships, devoid of all these “really good things;” it is a past marked by horror,
crime, immorality, injustice, abuse, dispossession, hunger, hopelessness, and submission
(“Primer aniversario,” 24). In order to formulate an epic of and justifying the Cuban
Revolution he must contextualize it in the present, which will be conceived of as an
absolute epic past by future generations. What he tells his audience is that all the “good
things” that epics are made of are currently being undertaken by the collective hero:
Nosotros, sin embargo, tenemos una satisfacción, porque nosotros somos
los que estamos sembrando esta semilla, nuestro pueblo, nuestra
generación actual, ustedes y nosotros, tenemos una satisfacción: sabemos
que nadie hizo nada por nosotros, sabemos que no hicieron por nosotros lo
que nosotros estamos haciendo por las generaciones venideras, sabemos
que los frutos principalmente lo recibirán otros, sabemos que aunque otros
no sembraron para nosotros en los últimos cincuenta años, nosotros en
cambio estamos sembrando para cincuenta, para cien y para todos los año
venideros de la Patria. (29)
19

18
We have laid out for ourselves a path and whatever our destiny may be, it will always
be a great destiny, because great is the destiny of peoples that triumph, and great is the
destiny of peoples that would know death before accepting defeat! (My italics).
19
We, nonetheless, are satisfied, because we are the ones that are planting this seed, our
people, our current generation, you and us, have a satisfaction: we know that no one did
anything for us, we know that they didn’t do for us what we are doing on behalf of
forthcoming generations, we know that the fruits will mainly be received by others, we
19

As is evident in this passage, as well as several to follow, Castro’s speech is marked by
the use of repetition, lending much of his rhetoric a lyrical, at times incantatory quality.
This illustrates the importance of the performative aspects of his oratory in bringing into
being the epic of the Cuban Revolution. In other words, the performance of Castro’s epic
is as crucial to its realization as the contents of its narrative. Walter J. Ong’s work on
orality sheds some light on the effects of Castro’s redundant style. In his work on Orality
and Literacy Ong demonstrates the ways in which oral cultures produce and
communicate information. Those immersed in a literal culture would assume that without
the aid of literacy, complex systems of information would for the most part be fleeting, if
not impossible in an oral culture. Ong clarifies, stating that
In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and
retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in
mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought must
come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or
antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary
expressions, in standard thematic settings. (34)

This is not to suggest that Castro is operating strictly within an oral culture, but that the
advantages offered by said tradition are in play in his orations. In other words, Castro’s
use of repetition in much of his discourse doesn’t merely serve a stylistic purpose, but is
in the service of fomenting knowledge. In other words, he is facilitating his audience’s
access to the information he has processed, and ensuring that it is adopted and retained.
The adversary constitutes the third major component of the epic narrative, as the
figure (or force) against which the epic hero must prove and define himself (and the
greater the adversary, the greater the challenge, and consequently the greater the merits

know that although others did not plant on our behalf in the last fifty years, we in turn are
planting for fifty, for one hundred and for all of the coming years of the nation.
20
and virtues of the epic hero). Interestingly, the epic of the Cuban Revolution that Castro
sketches came to be so through the adversary that presented itself after the Revolution
had triumphed. The Cuban struggle could have merely been a small conflict confined
within a national framework, but achieved its “epic proportions” through the intervention
of the United States; “la lucha de la Revolución Cubana dejó de ser una lucha dentro del
marco nacional, para convertirse en una lucha de los intereses de la nación, contra los
intereses del imperialismo” (44).
20
For Castro, the Revolution became an epic when this
mighty adversary decided to challenge the Revolution:
La lucha de la Revolución Cubana vino a convertirse en una epopeya, la
epopeya de una revolución que tiene lugar en un país pequeño, en lucha
contra el más poderoso imperialismo de los tiempos contemporáneo, ese
poderoso imperialismo que ha puesto todos sus servicios y todos sus
recursos al lado de la contrarrevolución. El imperialismo se convirtió en
jefe de la contrarrevolución, y en este minuto nos vemos envueltos en una
lucha en la cual la contrarrevolución cuenta con todo el apoyo de ese
poderoso imperio. (“Segundo,” 44)
21

Castro will frame this within the motif of David versus Goliath, a motif common
to many other epic works, and a motif prevalent within a Latin American tradition. In a
statement that directly references this motif, and indirectly alludes to José Martí’s
characterization of the United States as “el gigante de las siete leguas,”
22
(“Nuestra
America”), Castro depicts the conflict with the United States, as: “la lucha de David

20
The struggle of the Cuban Revolution ceased to be a struggle within a national scope,
turning into a struggle on behalf of the interests of the nation, against the interests of
imperialism.
21
The struggle of the Cuban Revolution came to be an epic, the epic of a revolution that
takes place in a small country, in a struggle against the most powerful imperialism of
present days, that powerful imperialism that has placed all of its services and all of its
resources on behalf of the counterrevolution. That imperialism became the head of the
counterrevolution, and in this moment we see ourselves involved in a struggle in which
the counterrevolution counts on the full support of that powerful empire.
22
The giant with seven-league boots.
21
contra Goliat: la lucha del pueblo contra el gigante imperialista cuyas largas manos
alcanza a pueblos de todos los continentes” (44).
23
The wars for independence in Latin
America, as Castro repeatedly notes, similarly pitted a determined and courageous
underdog against a superiorly equipped adversary; “todas las guerras de liberación se han
comenzado siempre sin armas y contra las armas de los explotadores” (“Tercer,” 69).
24
In
his speech commemorating the second anniversary of the Revolution, Castro focuses
heavily on portraying the story of contemporary Cuba along these terms:
Un país pequeño se está haciendo una Revolución verdadera frente a un
enemigo tan poderoso como el imperialismo, que dispone de tantos
recursos económicos para sobornar y comprar conciencias, que dispone de
tantos recursos económicos para corromper, que dispone de tantos
recursos técnicos para destruir, (“Segundo” 52).
25

The adversary is so powerful and malevolent that it stands against the whole of humanity:
El apoyo más poderoso de la contrarrevolución era el apoyo de una fuerza
que se hace sentir en todo el mundo, de una fuerza muy poderosa, tan
poderosa, que hoy es el freno principal del avance de la humanidad. Tan
poderosa, que crea conflictos en todos los continentes del mundo; tan
poderosa, que interfiere en los problemas de una gran parte de las naciones
del mundo; tan poderosa, que aspira a decidir destinos y, en muchos casos,
decide destinos de pueblos. El apoyo fundamental de la contrarrevolución
en Cuba vino a ser, necesariamente, el apoyo de los grandes monopolios
extranjeros. Es decir: el apoyo de las grandes fuerzas imperialistas. (My
italics, “Segundo,” 43)
26

23
The battle of David against Goliath: the battle of the people against the imperialist
giant whose large hands reach peoples of all continents.
24
All wars of liberation have always been started without weapons against the weapons
of the exploiters.
25
A small nation is realizing a true Revolution against such a powerful enemy as is
imperialism, which commands so many economic resources to bribe and purchase
consciousnesses, which commands so many economic resources to corrupt, which
commands so many technological resources to destroy.
26
The greatest support to the counterrevolution was the support from a force that makes
itself felt in the entire world, from a very mighty force, so mighty, that today it is the
main obstruction to the advancement of humanity. So mighty, that it creates conflicts in
all of the continents of the world; so mighty, that it interferes in the problems of a great
portion of the nations of the world; so mighty that it aims to determine destinies and, in
22

And it is against this adversary that the hero proves himself, and reveals his
extraordinariness. Just as el Cid Ruy Díaz in the Spanish Christian epic Poema de mío
Cid demonstrates his exceptional courage and honor by confronting and dominating an
escaped lion roaming through his palace, in juxtaposition to the cowardice and false
honor that is exposed in some of the other characters,
27
the Cuban people stood up to this
mighty adversary while others were complicit with their own subjugation; “Tan poderosa,
tan poderosa es esa fuerza, que la mayor parte de los hombres públicos, y la inmensa
mayoría de los gobernantes de este continente y de los demás continentes, siempre tienen
que decir ‘yes.’ Y al que muchos le decían ‘yes,’ ¡nuestro pueblo le dijo ‘no’!” (43).
28
As
previously mentioned, Castro is crafting an epic within a broader Latin American
tradition, one marked by the experiences of U.S. imperial intervention. Akin to the
formulaic phrases of oral poetry, the English phrasing in the passage substitutes the name
of the already-known adversary; its meaning relies on a shared tradition between singer
and audience for whom the reality of U.S. interventionism has been established, so that it
can be referenced in Castro’s epic rendition merely through euphemisms. Even the
submissive characters depicted by Castro bear a strong resemblance to the petty and
inattentive “aldeano vanidoso”
29
of Martí’s “Nuestra America” (15). The extraordinary
qualities make of the hero a model for others to follow. The virtues of the epic hero are

many cases, determines destinies of peoples. The fundamental support for the
counterrevolution in Cuba came to be, naturally, the support from the great foreign
monopolies. That is to say: the support from the great imperialist forces.
27
In “Cantar Tercero” from Poema de Mío Cid.
28
So mighty, so mighty is this force, that the majority of public men, and the immense
majority of the leaders of this continent and the remaining continents, always have to say
“yes.” And to that to which many would say “yes,” our people said “no”!
29
conceited villager
23
typically those values that the nation prizes most. In Poema de Mío Cid, the Cid upholds
those traits most relevant to a Christian and feudal Spain, such as his unconditional
loyalty to his king, his sense of honor, his courage under duress, and his devout Christian
values. The Cuban people, as a collective hero, become through Castro’s construction of
an epic a model for other small nations of the third world. Their struggle comes to hold a
greater significance, transcending its locality, similar to the reinterpretation that converts
the Cid’s actions into deeds bearing on the whole of Christianity:
Ante todos esos pueblos, la Revolución Cubana resulta un acontecimiento
interesante, un acontecimiento importante de la lucha de los pueblos en
esta época contemporánea por su liberación y por la justicia. (“Tercer,”
62)
30

Cumplíamos con dos deberes: un deber para con la Patria y un deber para
con los trabajadores de todo el mundo. Deberes en concordancia con los
principios del internacionalismo proletario. Porque patriotismo e
internacionalismo proletario son dos cosas comunes a la Revolución
socialista. (“Cuarto,” 109)
31

Somos un pueblo con derecho a andar con la frente alta por el mundo, un
pueblo con derecho a hablar con criterio, pensamiento y voz propios; un
pueblo con derecho a ser ejemplo para cualquier pueblo pequeño del
mundo, para cualquier pueblo subdesarrollado del mundo, para cualquier
pueblo dominado por el imperialismo, o por el colonialismo, en cualquier
sitio del mundo. Esto quiere decir que somos un pueblo con determinación
suficiente para lograr un lugar en la historia del mundo. (“Sexto,” 184)
32

30
Before all of those peoples, the Cuban Revolution becomes an interesting development,
an important development in the struggle by the peoples of this contemporary epoch for
their liberty and for justice.
31
We were carrying out two duties: one duty on behalf of the Country and one duty on
behalf of the workers of the entire world. Duties in accordance with the principles of the
proletarian internationalism. Because patriotism and proletarian internationalism are two
common elements to socialist Revolution.
32
We are a people with the right to walk with our head held high throughout the world, a
people with the right to speak with our own discretion, thought, and voice; a people with
the right to be the example for whichever small people of the world, for whichever
underdeveloped people of the world, for whichever people subjugated by imperialism, or
by colonialism, in whichever location in the world. This is to say that we are a people
with sufficient determination to earn a place in the history of the world.
24

I stated earlier that Castro undertakes a process of formulating a living epic, one
that is contemporaneous and in development, performed as it is being recorded. He also
makes use of motifs common to the genre, such as his portrayal of the Cuban struggle as
a struggle between David and Goliath. The commemorations of the anniversaries of the
Cuban Revolution almost always present a military parade that precedes Castro’s
speeches. Castro’s epic thus is not merely an oral iteration of a story in currency amongst
his audience but a visual representation as well. The military parades, consisting of a
display of arms and forces, become a live performance of another motif of the epic genre;
and just as epic poems often involve detailed descriptions of the armies and their
weapons, Castro speeches involve similar descriptions and cataloguing; “Nosotros hemos
visto desfilar hoy por aquí nuestras brigadas de artillería antiaérea, antitanques, nuestras
brigadas de lanza-cohetes múltiples, nuestras brigadas de tanques” (“Tercer,” 67).
33
In
Poema de mío Cid, the Cid’s armies and weapons multiply after every major battle;
similarly, Castro repeatedly points out the increase and improvement of the armed forces
that have just paraded from those of previous years:
El avance de la Revolución en todos los campos lo demuestra este propio
desfile militar de este año, la precisión, la disciplina, la rapidez récord con
que tuvo lugar, demostrativa de la eficacia creciente de nuestras fuerzas y
del volumen creciente de nuestras armas….Hemos crecido en volumen de
nuestros equipos militares y en la técnica de su empleo. (“Séptimo,”
216)
34

33
We have seen parade before us today our anti-air artillery, anti-tank brigades, our
multiple rocket launcher brigades, or tank brigades.
34
The progress of the Revolution in all its fields is demonstrated by this particular
military parade, the precision, the discipline, the record speed within which it took place,
illustrative of the increasing efficiency of our forces and the increasing quantity of our
arms. . . . We have grown in terms of our military equipment and the technique with
which they’re used.
25
Ese ejército, en estos 8 años de constante desarrollo, de constante
enfrentamiento, de constante tensión, a través de sus cursos, a través de
sus escuelas, ha ido formando miles y miles de cuadros, ha ido
desarrollando una eficientísima organización, ha ido creando la
concepción revolucionaria de la defensa de la Patria, que es la concepción
de que todo el pueblo debe ser y es guardián de la Patria, soldado de la
Patria. (“Octavo,” 246)
35

Albert Lord and Milman Parry link these detailed descriptions (inventories) of
armies and weapons in epic poems to the process of oral composition. Lord and Parry’s
research on the oral tradition of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, published in Lord’s work
Singer of Tales, revealed the ways in which illiterate bards were able to perform lengthy
oral poems without any recourse to literacy, such as the immediate reference to a fixed
text. Their discoveries illustrate that, rather than reproducing a given poem strictly from
memory, as it was assumed, bards within an oral tradition compose their work at the very
moment of its performance. That is, the performance and creation of the narrative is one
and the same (Lord 13). However, the bards do not begin with a blank slate from which
they create an entirely original work but rely on their respective oral traditions, and the
rhetorical devices offered by them, to facilitate the delivery of their performances. The
inventories common in many of these works of orality, such as detailed lists of weapons
and armies, provide a rhetorical recourse for their authors. It is not that these bards are
interested in providing a faithful and detailed record of every item worn, looted, or lost
by their characters, but supply them in varying degrees as deemed necessary, such as to
lengthen a performance of favorable reception. I would like to suggest, however, that

35
This military, within these 8 years of constant development, of constant confrontation,
constant tension, through their courses, through their schools, has been forming
thousands and thousands of cadres, has been developing a very efficient organization, has
been creating the revolutionary conception in defense of the Country, which is the
conception that the entire people should be and is guardian of the Country, soldier for the
Country.
26
these inventories do not strictly serve rhetorical purposes, but that, as demonstrated by
the Revolution’s own “Singer of Tales,” they are charged with symbolic value that allows
this feature of the epic to extend its function beyond the purposes of the composition of
the narrative. That is, the inventorying feature of an epic advances the group-forming
functions by incorporating the audience into the imagined conflict.
Castro places these arms in the hands of the people as they are collectively the
epic hero who will bear them for the grand venture, who will bear them for the protection
of the people:
El pueblo acudió en masa a ver desfilar a su fuerza armada. El pueblo
aplaudió los tanques, aplaudió los cañones, porque son sus tanques,
porque son sus cañones, porque son sus armas para defender todo lo que la
Revolución ha conquistado para ellos. Y no los defiende una casta militar,
sino los defienden las manos de los obreros humildes y de los campesinos,
que han aprendido a manejar el cañón y han aprendido a manejar las
armas con la perfección con que jamás aprenderán los privilegiados.
(“Segundo,” 54-55)
36

Interestingly, Castro narrates the episode in the past tense, referring in epic terms to a
past that just occurred. Although most of his early iterations of the Revolution’s epic
narrative is framed in the present, as an ongoing struggle, one witnesses here one of the
first “achievements” that can be rendered in the past, and that is the symbolic moment in
which the people recognized and adopted the arms proffered by the Revolution for their
defense. In subsequent anniversaries, Castro reiterates this moment of recognition
illustrating that his epic has developed recurrent formulas and episodes:

36
The people came in masses to watch their armed forces parade. The people applauded
the tanks, applauded the cannons, because they are their tanks, because they are their
cannons, because they are their arms to defend all of which the Revolution has conquered
for them. And they are not defended by a military class, rather they are defended by the
hands of the humble workers and of the peasants, that have learned to operate the cannon
and have learned to operate the weapons with the perfection with which the privileged
will never learn.
27
El pueblo los ha aplaudido, el pueblo los ha mirado con cariño, porque el
pueblo sabe que la suerte de la Revolución, el pueblo sabe que su destino,
el pueblo sabe que su libertad y su independencia, el pueblo sabe que su
porvenir está defendido por esas armas. (“Tercer,” 67).
37

Nosotros sabemos íntimamente que esas armas siempre estarán al lado de
los intereses de los que luchan por la libertad, y de los intereses de los
trabajadores en todo el mundo. (“Sexto,” 177)
38

It is possible then that in a traditional epic the weapons of the epic hero also belong to the
audience through a process of transference. If the epic hero serves as a model citizen of
the nation as well as a forefather, then his weapons are responsible for securing the
existence of the nation, and therefore the audience must regard them similarly, imagining
taking up arms and demonstrating comparable courage if a similar situation presented
itself.
As the Revolution accumulates more years it slowly becomes possible to speak of
the armed struggle against the previous regime along traditional epic terms. By the sixth
anniversary, the Revolution has a past of which to speak of, and Castro questions whether
it is finally time to look back and focus on the accomplishments of its first years, but
determines to leave it to a forthcoming generation:
Cuando ya se cuenta el número de años con algo más que con los dedos de
una sola mano en un proceso revolucionario, se puede optar entre hablar
de lo que se ha hecho o hablar de lo que falta por hacer….[Me] pregunto si
nosotros hoy tenemos que hacer hincapié en lo que se ha hecho o más bien
en lo que debe hacerse; y me parece que realmente eso de mirar hacia atrás
y de contar lo que se ha hecho debiéramos de dejarlo para un poco más

37
The people has applauded them, the people has looked upon them with affection,
because the people know that the fate of the Revolution, the people know that its destiny,
the people know that its liberty and independence, the people know that their future is
defended by these arms.
38
We are profoundly aware that those arms will always be on the side of the interests of
those that fight for freedom, and of the interests of the workers of the entire world.
28
adelante. Y tal vez sería mejor, incluso, que lo dejáramos para una
próxima generación de revolucionarios. (“Sexto,” 163)
39

It is not until decades later that Castro begins to narrate the armed struggle of the Cuban
Revolution along more traditional epic terms, in which there is a specific event in the
distant and absolute past that accounts for the origin of a new national era, and in which
we can find specific heroes upon which one can look up to as national as well as
universal models.
In 1989, in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution, Castro
returns to Santiago de Cuba to deliver a speech in which he narrates in greater detail the
events leading up the triumph of the Revolution and the demise of the Batista dictatorship
(30 años después). In this speech he looks to highlight the people of Santiago’s
revolutionary heritage placing them along a line of descent of other patriots and heroes
that dates back as far as the Cuban War of Independence by noting their role in the
military victory. Unlike his earlier speeches, in which he prefers to discuss the future,
focusing on the fruits that will be reaped in the coming years, Castro begins his speech to
the people of Santiago in retrospect, simulating a return to the origins of the Revolution:
40

39
When one can count the number of years with more than the fingers of a single hand in
a revolutionary process, one can choose between speaking about what has been done or
speaking about what is left to be done. . . . I ask myself whether we today have to
emphasize what has been done or rather what needs to be done; and it appears to me that
that of looking back and recounting what has been done should be left for a bit later. And
perhaps it would be even better, that we leave it to a subsequent generation of
revolutionaries.
40
Castro’s speech not only simulates a return to the initial moments of the triumph of the
Cuban Revolution, but also highlights the importance of Santiago as a site of an even
earlier national origin: the struggle for Independence. He does so by identifying in the
character of the region an inherent rebellious spirit, present from these early struggles
(manifested by its native son Antonio Maceo) up through the revolutionary struggle.
29
Compatriotas de Santiago y de toda Cuba—creo que fue así más o menos,
como me dirigí la primera vez a ustedes cuando el triunfo de la
Revolución…

Vine a compartir con ustedes este día glorioso y recordar con ustedes
aquella fecha, desde este mismo balcón, en esta misma plaza, donde hace
30 años celebramos la victoria, en un acto quizás no tan solemne, quizás
no tan bien organizado como este—comprenderán ustedes cómo eran
aquellos momentos; pero realmente emocionante e histórico, pienso que
muchos lo recuerden y que también muchos lo habrán escuchado alguna
vez de sus padres o de sus maestros. Realmente aquel fue un día histórico
y pienso que también será un día inolvidable, no solo para nosotros sino
también para las futuras generaciones. (5-6)
41

He then begins to recount the final days of the Batista dictatorship, offering lengthier
descriptions and greater detail surrounding these events, while highlighting the heroic
qualities of the men involved. Having established a general epic of the Revolution, in
which there are no specific heroes but a collective one, the events that Castro narrates
pertaining to the revolutionary struggle can now be inserted into this epic framework. The
revolutionaries display the same heroic qualities that were attributed to the whole of Cuba
years earlier. Outnumbered and facing a superior force, the revolutionaries demonstrate
the same determination, resiliency and courage that wins them the admiration and
sympathy from the opposing side; “[el general Eulogio Cantillo expresó] su preocupación
y su pesar por aquella operación, a su juicio, inaguantable, irresistible, que estaba
próxima a lanzar con 10 000 soldados, y el apoyo de la artillería, unidades blindadas y,

41
Countrymen of Santiago and of all of Cuba—I think that is how more or less, how I
addressed you the first time on the triumph of the Revolution…
I have come to share with you this glorious day and to commemorate with you that date,
from this very balcony, in this very plaza, where 30 years ago we celebrated the vicotry,
in an event perhaps not as solemn, perhaps not as well organized as this—you will come
to understand what those moments were like; but trully exciting and historic, I think that
many remember it and that many must have alson heard at some point from your parents
o your teachers. Trully that was a historical day and I think that it will also be an
unforgetable day, not jusy for us but for future generations.
30
sobre todo, de la aviación, contra nuestros reductos en la Sierra Maestra. Llegó a expresar
que le apenaba la idea de que personas a las que consideraba valiosas se perdieran,” (7).
42

Throughout the speech Castro reiterates the David versus Goliath motif as it applied to
that context, noting how his men were prepared to take Santiago de Cuba despite being
outnumbered 5 to 1 (15), and how the total number of forces that Batista had at his
disposal reached in the 80,000’s whereas the revolutionaries were only a few thousand
(15). He even highlights, in a very roundabout way, his own role in the Revolution
revealing his qualities of an epic hero. He is noble and compassionate, expressing that he
preferred to take the city without violence; he is an astute military leader in having
deciphered that the governing class, along with the United States and the CIA were
behind the staging of a coup d’état immediately after Batista fled the country,
proclaiming their own government and president; and resilient in refusing to concede to
them control of the nation when it appeared that victory had been accomplished (10).
Like a scene out of Poema de mío Cid, Castro tells his audience how his troops made
their way into Santiago, taking the Moncada military barracks, the site of his first effort
to destabilize Batista’s regime, without much resistance, and convinced its officials to
join the Revolution, without accentuating his role above those of his companions (12).
Paul Zumthor finds that epic poems are “impersonal,” that heroes don’t usually “tell of
themselves” (87). Although we are perhaps meant to infer Castro’s role and heroic
qualities from his speeches, he never directly links these qualities to himself, preferring to

42
General Eulogio Cantillo expressed his concern and his regret about that operation, to
his judgment, unbearable, irresistible, that was about to launch with 10,000 soldiers, and
the support of the artillery, armored units and, above all, of the air force, against our
strongholds in the Sierra Mestra. He came to express that he was saddened by the idea
that persons which he considered valuable would be lost.
31
underscore the collective effort.
43
However, the story of the Revolution is not without its
own traditional epic heroes, those figures whose accomplishments and character come to
be shrouded in myth.
Upon his death, Ernesto “Che” Guevara comes to fulfill the role of the epic hero
of the Cuban Revolution, consequently becoming the epic hero/model for resistance and
revolutionary efforts elsewhere. As Zumthor notes, the epic hero, “by his very nature,
must perish,” (36), and once reports begin surface about Guevara’s death he comes to be
shrouded in myth. Many reports surfaced about his alleged death which would then be
negated when Che would reappear engaged in another military struggle, leading Castro to
liken him to the phoenix; “Los imperialistas han matado al Che muchas veces en muchos
sitios, pero lo que nosotros esperamos, lo que nosotros esperamos, es que cualquier día,
donde menos se lo imagine el imperialismo, como Ave Fénix, renazca de sus cenizas,
aguerrido y guerrillero y saludable, el Comandante Ernesto Guevara; y que algún día
volveremos a tener muy concretas noticias del Che” (“Octavo,” 276).
44
When his death in
Bolivia in 1967 is finally confirmed, Castro commends Guevara’s epic qualities, likening
him to Achilles, whose tragic flaw was his extraordinary courage, unwilling to shy away
from even the most dangerous situations.

43
In contrast to Mao or Stalin, there is no personality cult around the figure of Fidel to
speak of. Simon Western and Stephen Wilkinson explore the advantages that Castro has
procured by allowing such cults to develop around the fallen heroes of the revolution
rather than himself in “Che, Fidel and Leadership in Cuba: A Psychoanalytical
Approach.” International Journal of Cuban Studies. 2.1-2. (88)
44
The imperialists have killed off Che many times in many places, but what we expect,
what we expect/hope for, is that one of these days, where imperialism least expects it,
like the Phoneix, will be reborn from his ashes, fierce and warring and healthy, the
Comandante Ernesto Guevara; and that one day we will once again have very precise
news about Che.
32
Che Guevara’s death becomes the moment upon which this broad epic of the
Cuban revolution officially identifies its epic hero. I stress the word “officially” because,
as we will see, there is a ceremonious christening of sorts that occurs in the days
following Che Guevara’s death that posits him as the foremost hero of the revolution and
consequently, as the official model of the Cuban revolutionary. In the days following
news of Che Guevara’s death, Fidel Castro gives two key speeches that 1) mark the
moment in which Che Guevara is officially designated as the epic hero of the Revolution;
2) identify the key elements to a Che Guevara epic that Castro will reiterate at various
points from that moment forward; and, 3) elucidate the complex role and relationship of
Fidel Castro to the Che Guevara epic, not only as its bard but as a witness, as well as its
ultimate authority. In sum, within days of Che Guevara’s death, Castro pronounces Che
Guevara as the ultimate model of the Cuban revolutionary while authenticating his own
authoritative relationship to this epic.
On October 15, 1967, several days after reports of the death of Che Guevara had
surfaced, Fidel Castro appears on Cuban television and radio to address what at this point
were merely rumors to his Cuban audience that Che Guevara had been slain in a Bolivian
jungle, rumors that, as noted earlier, had surfaced on previous occasions but would
inevitably be dismissed. In this initial speech, eventually to be published as
“Confirmación de la muerte del Che en Bolivia,”
45
Castro states, “En otras ocasiones
anteriores se habían publicado cables de que había sido muerto, algunas noticias de este
tipo, pero realmente siempre se podía apreciar que eran infundadas” (45).
46
On this

45
“The Confirmation of the Death of Che in Bolivia.”
46
On previous occasions wires that he had died had been published, some news of this
sort, but one could always truly discern that they were unfounded.
33
occasion, however, Castro must officially confirm to his public the veracity of these
reports.
The main purpose of this speech, as the title indicates, is to confirm the death of
Guevara, as well as to give an official account of the known and possible circumstances
that led to his capture and assassination. The majority of the speech, particularly the first
part, is marked by a somewhat detached, impartial, and methodical tone, as Castro walks
us through the series of facts, logical arguments, and photographic evidence that
ultimately compelled the regime to validate the reports of his death; “Esto forma parte de
lo que yo llamaba anteriormente el conjunto de datos, circunstancias y todo, que nos
ayudan a formarnos un juicio sobre la situación” (70).
47
Before assuming the role of bard
to the Che Guevara epic, we encounter Castro the sleuth, the lawyer, the analytical mind
of the Revolution, in a role similar to the one he held in his own defense in the aftermath
of the failed attack on the Moncada barracks,
48
reporting the results of an investigation
that is to irrefutably confirm to his Cuban public that Che Guevara has fallen, and
subsequently to deduce the final instances of Che Guevara’s campaign. We immediately
get a sense of the isolation of revolutionary Cuba, and the distance between it and its
most exemplary hero, as his fate can only be discerned through a cautious analysis of
secondary accounts and indirect sources. Che Guevara is thus the Homeric hero, the
Odysseus who has left his own Ithaca on another grand venture, and whose whereabouts
are unknown; the Achilles, as Castro will refer to him, who does not return.

47
This forms part of what I previously called the collection of data, circumstances and
all, that help us form a judgment about the situation.
48
See Castro’s “La Historia me absolvera.”
34
Fidel Castro walks us through his initial skepticism as the regime carefully
examined the first reports and photographs that began to circulate in the international
press.
Nuestra actitud fue la de ir reuniendo todos estos elementos de juicio hasta
arribar a una conclusión absolutamente segura a nuestro juicio, es decir,
una evaluación de las noticias sin duda de ninguna clase. Por eso se fueron
recogiendo todas las pruebas, todas las fotografías, las que aparecieron
aquí, las que vinieron de periódicos extranjeros; todas las noticias se
fueron estudiando cuidadosamente. (47)
49

There were serious doubts at first because the information did not concur with the
information about its epic hero that the Revolution was privy to. Like Odysseus’s scar
that reveals his true identity to his maid, Eurycleia, upon his return to Ithaca, Guevara’s
body is similarly marked with identifying scars that allow a similar mode of
authentication, but most importantly that serve as a testament to the epic hero’s proven
valor. In Che Guevara’s case, his body has been etched by the history of revolutionary
Cuba:
Se hablaba, por ejemplo, de una cicatriz en la mano izquierda, y nadie
recordaba una cicatriz en la mano izquierda del comandante Ernesto
Guevara; sin embargo, se recordaba que tenia un cicatriz en el cuello; en la
pierna, heridas de bala de la Guerra; y también en una ocasión, de un
disparo accidental que le había ocasionado una cicatriz en el rostro. No se
hablaba de ninguno de esos detalles, y se percibía un ambiente general de
desconfianza sobre las noticias provenientes de Bolivia. De tal manera que
en la tarde del día 10 a cualquiera que nos hubiese preguntado acerca de la
veracidad de esas noticias le habríamos expresado muchas dudas. (46)
50

49
Our posture was to gather all of these elements to be judged until arriving at an
absolutely certain conclusion according to our judgment, that is, an evaluation of the
news without a doubt of any type. That is why there began to be gathered all of the
evidence, all of the photographs, those that appeared here, those that came from foreign
newspapers; all of the news were studied cautiously.
50
There was talk, for example, of a scar on his left hand, and nobody remembered a scar
on the left hand of comandante Ernesto Guevara; however, it was remembered that he
had a scar on the neck; on the leg, bullet wounds from the War; and also on one occasion,
from an accidental gunshot which resulted in a scar on his face. There was no mention of
35

As Castro sifts through the photographic evidence, presenting each photograph to
his audience, the certainty of Che Guevara’s fate progressively becomes clearer. In the
first photograph obtained, its subject does not bear a strong resemblance to Che Guevara:
“La primera fotografía, era una fotografía en que no se le ve un gran parecido . . . en
general teníamos la tendencia a rechazar que se tratara del Che,” (46).
51
The second
photograph is more compelling: “Cuando muchos de nosotros vimos esta [segunda]
fotografía . . . empezamos a tener por primera vez la verdadera certidumbre de que la
noticia podía ser cierta,” (47).
52
Finally, as more photographs emerge, Castro singles out
one that seems to validate the reports: “Al otro día ya empezaron a llegar más fotografías,
hasta que llego una fotografía muy clara, que es esta fotografía” (47).
53

Castro then turns his attention to the diary, which similar to the scars on
Guevara’s body, constitutes a text that can be authenticated by those most intimate with
Guevara:
54
“esta es la letra del Che, es su inconfundible letra. Nos parece a nosotros muy
difícil de imitar. Pero aun así, si fuese posible o fácil imitar la letra de alguna persona,
sobre todo de una personalidad tan característica como la del Che, lo que resulta

any of those details, and one could sense a general sense of suspicion in regards to the
news originating from Bolivia. As such that on the afternoon of the 10
th
to whomever
would have asked us about the veracity of these reports we would have expressed our
many doubts.
51
The first photograph, was a photograph in which there is no great resemblance . . . in
general we had the inclination to reject that it involved Che.
52
When many of us saw this [second] photograph . . . we began to have for the very first
time the real certainty that the report could be true.
53
The next day there began to arrive more photographs, until there arrived a very clear
photograph, which is this photograph.
54
According to Jon Lee Anderson, it is Guevara’s second wife, Aleida March, who
confirms his handwriting from the photograph of his diary.
36
absolutamente imposible es imitar su estilo” (50-51).
55
The journal that is eventually
published as the Diary of Che in Bolivia undergoes a similar process of authentication
shortly after the full version is leaked to the Cuban government. In another televised
speech
56
we again encounter a Fidel Castro having to corroborate the authenticity of
Guevara’s final reflections, which the Cuban government had published from the
microfilm reproductions it had received months after Guevara had been killed. The
government had been accused by the Bolivian government of publishing an apocryphal
version of the diary to which Castro answers by appealing again to the Revolution’s
privileged relationship to its hero in authenticating the version of the diary that they
received: “la simple lectura del documento nos daba a nosotros esa seguridad por lo
profundamente que conocíamos al Che, su modo de escribir, su estilo, su pensamiento, su
temperamento, todas sus características personales” (128).
57

In its skepticism towards the reports of Guevara’s death, the regime must also
evaluate the possibility that they are a fabrication by the Bolivian government. Following
his public analysis of the physical evidence at hand (photographs and diary), Castro shifts
his focus to some of the circumstantial evidence available. In what is to be regarded as a
display of the regime’s analytical competence, Fidel Castro discards the possibility that
the Bolivian government has fabricated the story. Firstly, he notes that the source of the

55
This is Che’s handwriting, his unmistakable handwriting. In our opinion it is very
difficult to imitate. Nonetheless, were it possible or easy to imitate somebody’s
handwriting, especially that of such a unique personality as Che’s, what is absolutely
impossible to imitate is his style.
56
Delivered on July 4, 1968, Fidel Castro’s speech responding to accusations of having
fabricated the diary is included in Che en la memoria de Fidel (123-136).
57
Simply the reading of the document gave us that guarantee based on how intimately we
knew Che, his way of writing, his style, his thinking, his temperament, all of his personal
qualities.
37
photographs has been the press on the field: “no se trata de fotografías entregadas por el
gobierno, se trataba de fotografías que habían sido tomadas por numerosos periodistas en
la propia Bolivia, en el propio sitio donde se encontraba el cadáver. . . . No existía la
posibilidad o no se podía admitir la tesis de una fotografía fabricada” (50).
58
Furthermore,
an assessment of the Bolivian government itself leads him to deduce their incompetence
and in turn inability to fabricate such story successfully: “resulta absolutamente
imposible que en el seno de ese régimen se pongan de acuerdo ni siguiera para decir una
mentira. . . . Se les veía cautelosos. . . . Estaban tratando de obtener evidencias de manera
que pudieran lanzarse a hacer la afirmación oficial sin temor a equivocarse” (52-53).
59

Having concluded his summary of the investigation Castro officially pronounces
his verdict, in which we immediately sense a shift in tone as emotion and subjective
language is injected into the speech and the project to immortalize the hero begins:
[T]oda una serie de características nos permiten haber llegado a la
conclusión absoluta de que la noticia es amargamente cierta.

Lógicamente, la tendencia de cualquier persona ante una noticia que se
relaciona con alguien al que se le tiene un gran cariño, esa tendencia
innata es a rechazarla. Y a nosotros en un grado considerable nos ocurrió
eso en los primeros momentos. Una noticia de este tipo siempre en el
ánimo del pueblo hay la tendencia a rechazarla, en el animo de los
revolucionarios en cualquier parte del mundo hay la tendencia a
rechazarla. (my italics, 54).
60

58
It didn’t involve photographs turned over by the government, it involved photographs
that had been taken by numerous journalists in Bolivia itself, on the very site where the
body was found. . . . There was no possibility nor could one accept the theory of a
manufactured photograph.
59
It is absolutely impossible that in the heart of that regime there could be agreement not
even to tell one lie. . . . One could sense their cautiousness. . . . They were attempting to
obtain proof in order to venture out and make the official confirmation without fear of
being mistaken.
60
A whole series of characteristics allow us to have come to the absolute conclusion that
the report is bitterly accurate.
38

This momentary shift in tone allows us a glimpse into Castro’s forthcoming relationship
to the Che Guevara epic. The remainder of the speech retains the quality of the public
trial, in which Castro continues to assess the information at hand to deduce what
transpired during Che Guevara’s final days in Bolivia, namely how he came to be
captured alive, but he is no longer simply the impartial arbiter, but a direct witness
testifying to the character of the hero.
In his attempt to reconcile reality with the once seemingly invincibility of his epic
hero, Castro, by way of both praise and critique offers his own explanation of the final
moments of Guevara’s life derived at through his intimate connection to him as well as
his own expertise in guerrilla warfare. As expected, the hero is the victim of his own
flaw. Che Guevara becomes the Achilles of the Revolution, characterized by a
fearlessness and recklessness instrumental in forging previous victories, but
unsurprisingly equally responsible for his demise. As Castro explains at length in a
passage that hints at his forthcoming effort to immortalize Guevara:
Debemos decir las personas que conocemos íntimamente a Ernesto
Guevara –y decimos conocemos, porque realmente de Ernesto Guevara
nunca se podrá hablar en pasado–, que teníamos sobrada experiencia
acerca de su carácter, acerca de su temperamento….[T]odo el tiempo que
lo conocimos, se caracterizó por un extraordinario arrojo, por un absoluto
desprecio al peligro, por un gesto siempre, en cada momento difícil y de
peligro, de hacer las cosas más difíciles y más peligrosas. (my italics 55)
61

Logically, the tendency of any person before a story pertaining to someone for whom
there is great affection, that innate reaction is to reject it. And to some of us to a
considerable degree it occurred just that in the initial moments. A notice of this sort
always in the spirit of the people there is the tendency to reject it, in the spirit of the
revolutionaries in whichever part of the world there is the tendency to reject it.
61
Those of us that know Ernesto Guevara intimately should say–and we say know,
because no one will truly ever be able to speak of Ernesto Guevara in the past–that we
had abundant experience regarding his character, regarding his temperament. . . . [T]he
whole time we knew him, he stood out by an extraordinary fearlessness, by an absolute
39

Y nosotros debemos decir que siempre nos preocupó la posibilidad de que
ese temperamento, ese gesto suyo siempre presente en todos los momentos
de peligro, lo pudiesen llevar a la muerte en cualquier combate. (56)
62

Un hombre de ese temperamento, de esa personalidad, de ese carácter, de
esa reacción siempre ante determinadas circunstancias, estaría
desgraciadamente llamado mas a ser precursor que forjador de esas
victorias. !Y los precursores son también, desde luego, forjadores de la
Victoria y los mas grandes forjadores de la victoria! (56).
63

This becomes the recurrent characterization that Castro will attribute to his hero in future
retellings of Che Guevara’s epic.
In spite of the distance between him and his epic hero, Castro nevertheless posits
a version of Guevara’s final days in Bolivia, pieced together from the information
reported at the time and fleshed out from his own personal connection to the hero; a
version that can be read as the epic rendering of the final episode of the Che Guevara
epic. The public trial that his “Confirmation” speech constitutes serves, on the one hand,
to display the regime’s capacity for reason, to affirm its analytical competence and its
commitment to the truth, juxtaposed perhaps with the ineffective, corrupt Bolivian
government whose victory over Che Guevara is largely accidental. Most importantly,
however, the speech is also Castro’s way of taking control of the discourse of Guevara’s
assassination by robbing the Bolivian forces of victory, by disseminating a competing
version of what transpired in which Guevara’s exceptionality is on display until his final

disregard to danger, by the gesture always, in each difficult and dangerous moment, to
undertake the most difficult and most dangerous tasks.
62
And we should say that we were always worried by the possibility that that
temperament, that gesture of his always present in all of the dangerous moments, could
lead him to death in any battle.
63
A man with that temperament, with that personality, with that character, with that
reaction at all times under such circumstances, would unfortunately be better fit to be the
precursor rather than the smith of such victories. And the precursors are also, of course,
smiths of Victory and the greatest smiths of victory!
40
moments. In contrast, reports from those involved in Che’s capture in Bolivia depict a
defeated and demoralized Guevara, who even makes a plea for his life in exchange for
some type of compensation; “‘Don’t shoot. I am Che Guevara. I am worth more to you
alive than dead’” (quoted in Anderson 733).
64
Castro’s narration of the end is no longer a
report of facts and logical arguments, but the performance of the final episode of his Che
Guevara epic.
From Castro’s interpretation of the evidence, Guevara was captured alive and
assassinated within a day of his capture. Castro must then reconcile this information with
the fact that, from his point of view, Guevara could never be captured alive.
Naturalmente que todos los que conocemos al Che sabemos que no hay
forma posible de capturarlo vivo, como no sea inconsciente, como no sea
totalmente inválido por algunas heridas, como no sea que se le destruya el
arma y, en fin, no tenga un medio para evitar caer prisionero privándose
de la vida. Nadie que lo conozca bien tiene la menor duda de esto. (71)
65

Furthermore, Castro is puzzled by the report that the skirmish that led to his capture had
been sustained for over four hours, uncharacteristic of guerrilla tactics. Castro deduces
that, as some of the reports had indicated, Guevara was one of the first to fall wounded,
most likely the result of his audacity on the battlefield (68), impelling his troop into a
prolonged combat in an effort to retrieve him; “es evidente que la circunstancia anormal
aquí fue el hecho de que cayera herido el Che y sus compañeros guerrilleros hubieran

64
Also see Castañeda (486-487).
65
Naturally all of us who know Che know that there is no possible way to capture him
alive, unless he be unconscious, unless he be completely incapacitated by some wounds,
unless it be that his weapon is destroyed and, in the end, has no means in order to prevent
falling prisoner of taking his life. No one who would know him well has the least bit of
doubt about this.
41
hecho un sobrehumano y desesperado esfuerzo y se hayan jugado el ‘todo por el todo’”
(70).
66

Ultimately, as Castro will stress repeatedly, Guevara’s own audacity is the most
significant factor responsible for his demise. As he notes, the combat was largely
inadvertent and not the product of either side lying in ambush (68), a detail that would
otherwise attest to the competence of one side or the grave miscalculation of the other.
However, having once engaged the enemy, Guevara immediately displays the boldness
characteristic of him that in this case proves fatal:
es evidente que al producirse ese encuentro –según todos los indicios –
tuvo lugar algún gesto del Che. Todos los indicios, lo que se dice, todo,
como es adelantarse a ver, o adelantarse a disparar, alejándose incluso del
lugar quizás unos pasos, unos pocos metros donde el resto de los
combatientes se posesionan, es decir todo parece indicar que realiza uno
de sus gestos característicos, como parece indicar que lo hieren en los
primeros momentos y que queda en una especie de ‘tierra de nadie.’ (my
italics 68)
67

In a more lyrical passage, Castro summarizes Guevara’s final moments as such:

Que lo hayan herido avanzando sobre los soldados es una cosa natural en
el. Que hubiera seguido combatiendo herido es lógico en el. Que solo lo
pueden agarrar si esta inconsciente o porque le destruyen el arma y no
puede ni moverse en estado de gravedad, es la única circunstancia en que
lo pueden capturar, incluso con un aliento de vida. Que si le hicieron
alguna pregunta y miro con la mas absoluta indiferencia, y mas que

66
It is evident that the unusual circumstance here was the fact that Che fell wounded and
his warrior companions would have undertaken a superhuman and desperate effort and
would have risked “all for all.”
67
It is evident that when this encounter is produced—according to all indications—there
occurred of one Che’s gestures. All indications, what is said, everything, such as
venturing ahead to take a look, or venturing ahead to shoot, even distancing himself from
position perhaps by a few steps, a few meters from where the rest of the combatants are
positioned, that is everything seems to indicate that he performs one of his characteristic
gestures, as it appears to indicate that they wound him during the first moments and that
he ends up in a type of “no man’s land.”
42
indiferencia desprecio a sus captores, eso si es todo lo que se aviene a su
personalidad, o que hubiera muerto en combate. (76)
68

Castro’s repeated insistence that Guevara’s capture was anomalous to his character, that
he would under most circumstances prefer death than falling prisoner to the enemy,
serves not only to stress the exceptionality of his hero, but most importantly to refute any
claims to the contrary on the part of the Bolivian government. As Bjorn Kumm’s report
from the field indicates, Bolivian officials were already disseminating versions of Che
Guevara’s capture meant to undermine his commitment to his ideals. Kumm reports:
I flew to Vallegrande in a military transport plane from Santa Cruz,
together with Admiral Ugarteche, commander-in-chief of the Bolivian
navy, who said: “I have been told that Che's last words were: ‘I am Che.
Don't kill me. I have failed.’ I have the impression he wanted to save his
life. It's very often like that. In battle, you don't feel fear, but afterwards
you become a coward.” (New Republic)

Castro’s rendering of Guevara’s final moments challenges this and other versions
69
of a
defeated and demoralized Guevara by attributing him the greatest agency in his own
demise—it is he, after all, who fearlessly steps into the line of fire—and rendering him a
unwavering revolutionary even in captivity: “Que si le hicieron alguna pregunta y miro

68
That they may have injured him while advancing upon the soldiers is a natural thing in
him. That he would have continued battling wounded is logical in him. That they could
only take him if he is unconscious or because they destroy his weapon and he can’t move
in a grave state, is the only circumstance in which they could capture him, including with
a breath of life. That they asked him a question and he looked with the most absolute
indifference, and more than indifference disdain toward his captors, yes that is everything
in accordance with his personality, or that he would have died in combat.
69
The Bolivian government was interested in disseminating the version that Guevara’s
death was a result of wounds received in battle and not due to an execution. Ugarteche’s
claims of Guevara declaring his own defeat are based on what was reported by some of
those involved in his capture: “‘Soy el Che Guevara y he fracasado’” (in Castañeda 486-
87); “‘I have failed. . . It’s all over, and that’s the reason why you see me in this state’”
(in Anderson 734).
43
con la mas absoluta indiferencia, y mas que indiferencia desprecio a sus captores, eso sí
es todo lo que se aviene a su personalidad, o que hubiera muerto en combate,” (76).
70

The initial uncertainty of Guevara’s final moments
71
extends further beyond his
death, and Castro similarly capitalizes upon this lack of clarity during those moments to
expound upon the mythical qualities that Guevara has instantly acquired. As Castro notes,
there are questions as to what became of the remains of Guevara: “empiezan a llegar
todas la noticias de que si fue enterrado, de que si lo desenterraron, de que si fue
incinerado, de que si después le habían cortado una mano, que si el dedo, toda una serie
de noticias, además de macabras, contradictorias” (78).
72
However grisly as these
suppositions seem to be, Castro nonetheless takes advantage of them to interpret them in
a way that further advances the Che Guevara epic narrative. For Castro, the violence done
to Guevara’s body once deceased indicates that the enemy is aware of the power that
Guevara continues to hold even in death, to which the enemy once again reacts out of
fear toward its adversary:
Pero, en mi opinión, hay posiblemente algo que todavía ellos valoran más,
y que debe ser la causa fundamental de todas estas cosas extrañas. Y es el
temor al Che después de muerto; que no solo le temían en vida, sino que
aun después de muerto le siguen demostrando temor, y aun un temor
mayor; es la idea que ellos mismos empezaron a deducir de desaparecer
los restos para que no se convirtiera en un santuario.

70
That they asked him a question and he looked with the most absolute indifference, and
more than indifference disdain toward his captors, yes that is everything in accordance
with his personality, or that he would have died in combat.
71
Although the various versions from those present during Guevara’s final moments do
not always concur on some of the details, it has been established that Guevara was in fact
wounded and captured alive in a grave state of health, and executed a day later. See
Anderson (733-739).
72
There begin to arrive all reports about whether he was buried, whether he was
disinterred, whether he was cremated, whether they later cut off a hand, whether the
finger, all sorts of reports, apart from gruesome, contradictory.
44
Es posible que ellos . . . tengan el temor de que, lógicamente, los restos del
Che, el sitio donde estén enterrados, se convierta en un lugar de
peregrinación, ahora o mañana o mas tarde; el deseo de privar al
movimiento revolucionario hasta de un símbolo, algo, un sitio, un punto;
en dos palabras: el miedo al Che después de muerto. (78)
73

74

In the midst of this uncertainty Castro will ultimately perform a symbolic
resurrection of his epic hero. Guevara’s physical death may have just been confirmed, but
his spiritual and symbolic permanence has just been corroborated by the reactions of his
enemies, for whom his physical death was insufficient and therefore attempted to
extinguish him even further.
Alejo Carpentier’s 1949 novel El reino de este mundo
75
offers a comparable
episode of a public spectacle that helps illustrate how Che Guevara is publically rescued
and resuscitated, albeit figuratively, but nonetheless effectively, from an imminent death.
Furthermore, the episode also illustrates the main distinction that Bakhtin draws between
the epic and the novel—the latter is heteroglossic whereas the former is marked by
univocality. In “El gran vuelo”
76
the slaves of the northern plain are herded into Ciudad
del Cabo to bear witness to the execution of one of their own, Mackandal, the runaway
slave that had eluded capture for several years after having orchestrated the slave revolt

73
But, in my opinion, there is possibly something that they value even more, and which
must be the main cause of all of these strange things. And that is the fear of Che after
death; that they did not simply fear him while living, but that even in death they continue
displaying their fear of him, and even a greater fear; it is the idea that they themselves
begin to deduce to disappear his remains so that they are not transform into a shrine.
It is possible that they . . . are fearful that, naturally, Che’s remains, the site in which they
are buried, will be transformed into a site for pilgrimage, now or tomorrow or later; the
desire to deprive the revolutionary movement of even one symbol, something, one site,
one spot; in two words: the fear of Che after death.
74
Interestingly, the town of La Higuera has erected several monuments marking the sites
of Guevara’s final moments in Bolivia (Lonely Planet).
75
The Kingdom of this World
76
“The Great Flight”
45
that poisoned and killed livestock as well as several French colonists. As its narrator
notes, the spectacle is orchestrated for the slaves; it is they who are the intended
recipients of the uncontestable message its producers assume it will bear:
Abajo, cada vez más apretados y sudorosos, los negros esperaban un
espectáculo que había sido organizado para ellos; una función de gala para
negros, a cuya pompa se habían sacrificado todos los créditos necesarios.
Porque esta vez la letra entraría con fuego y no con sangre, y ciertas
luminarias, encendidas para ser recordadas, resultaban sumamente
dispendiosas. (41)

The public execution of Mackandal is intended to restore and reaffirm the dominant
power structure of Haiti by displaying to the slaves the futility of rebellion and reminding
them of the social order to which they are subjected. As Michel Foucault aptly describes
in Discipline and Punish, the public execution is a function of a pre-modern power
structure in which the absolute power of the monarch is reaffirmed through public
displays of its excess and invincibility (48-49). Haiti’s plantation system operates under
the same power dynamics of the feudal society described by Foucault. To the masters, the
message and outcome of the execution of Mackandal can only be one and the same for
both themselves, who have produced the message, and their slaves, the intended
recipients. For the slaves however, the thwarted execution of Mackandal that they witness
is the refutation of the rigid system and logic of the masters, serving to uphold instead
their own worldview. While the masters feel they will physically and symbolically
extinguish any sense of rebellion, by impressing upon the slaves the natural order of
things, in the end, what the slaves will have witnessed is the liberation of their folk hero,
who will free himself from his binds by metamorphosing into other beings “of this
world,” taking flight into freedom: “Eso era lo que ignoraban los amos; por ello habían
despilfarrado tanto dinero en organizar aquel espectáculo inútil, que revelaría su total
46
impotencia para luchar contra un hombre ungido pos los grandes Loas” (Carpentier 42).
One immediately notes the striking resemblance between this refutation and that
delivered by Castro, both rendering the execution of their heroes as futile, perhaps even
farcical in that unbeknownst to their executioners the hero perseveres.
The message intended by the spectacle is not read by the black multitude as is
intended by its orchestrators. Instead they witness the liberation of Mackandal who has
once again thwarted the masters and regained his freedom: “Sus ataduras cayeron, y el
cuerpo del negro se espigo en el aire, volando por sobre las cabezas, antes de hundirse en
las ondas negras de la masa de esclavos. Un solo grito lleno la plaza. Mackandal sauvé!”
(42). Most importantly, the spectacle reaffirms the worldview of the slaves in which they
retain the figurative spaces in which they are free: “Aquella tarde los esclavos regresaron
a sus haciendas riendo por todo el camino. Mackandal había cumplido su promesa,
permaneciendo en el reino de este mundo. Una vez más eran birlados los blancos por los
Altos Poderes de la Otra Orilla,” (43).
The scene in “El gran vuelo” illustrates the discordance that results from the
heterogeneity of Haiti, highlighting the two separate interpretive systems in place
registering a single event. For the masters, they have no doubts about the meaning and
effectiveness of their spectacle; for them, they are confident in the logic of their own
ideologies that they don’t suspect nor are able to register any other interpretation. For the
slaves, this moment that is intended to impress upon them their defeat and reaffirm their
subjugated position is alternatively a triumph and a cause to return home in high spirits:
“Aquella tarde los esclavos regresaron a sus haciendas riendo por todo el camino” (43).
Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy, is unable to register their reactions as nothing other than
47
an inhuman indifference to the suffering of a fellow slave and a testament to their racial
inferiority: “[El] comentaba con su beata esposa la insensibilidad de los negros ante el
suplicio de un semejante—sacando de ello ciertas consideraciones filosóficas sobre la
desigualdad de las razas humana, que se proponía desarrollar en un discurso colmado de
citas latinas—” (43). Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy not only fails to take into account
the possibility of a competing logic and reality that does not render the events in the same
fashion as his, but he likewise fails to note the irony and hypocrisy of his own logic. It is
after all the system that he upholds and is benefited by that has orchestrated Mackandal’s
execution. Furthermore, he fails to account for his own indifference to the same events,
from which he can only extrapolate an academic discourse substantiated by stilted
references in a dead language.
Through a comparison with the episode narrated in “El gran vuelo,” we can see
how Castro’s speeches rhetorically resuscitate Che Guevara through an equally univocal
proclamation akin to the singular “Mackandal sauvé” heard in the plaza. Taking
advantage of the various uncertainties surrounding his assassination, Castro disseminates
an alternative, yet univocal, or epic, interpretation through which he negotiates an
afterlife for Che Guevara, metamorphosing him into a new sort of entity that exerts a
greater power than his mortal self. However, whereas Carpentier’s novel is marked by
heteroglossia (two concurrent but irreconcilable versions of the same event), Castro is
interested in constructing an epic version of Guevara’s death intent on invalidating all
versions but his own. Interestingly, this rhetorical and symbolic resuscitation of the hero
will resonate at various points with a Christian symbolism. Che Guevara’s being is
divisible into the mortal body that has passed, and the spiritual being that can never be
48
extinguished. Insisting on the futility of his assassination, Castro begins to insist on the
transcendence of Che Guevara:
[P]ara el imperialismo, seguro de que se ha librado físicamente del Che, su
mayor aspiración podría ser librarse espiritualmente del Che, encontrar
alguna forma sutil de diluir en una vana ilusión (80).
77

Interestingly, the ghostly figure of Che Guevara will witness a sort of redemption decades
after his death. According to a news report that reached the pages of BBC News, Mario
Teran, the Bolivian sergeant that carried out the execution of Guevara had his vision
restored by a group of Cuban doctors working in Bolivia. As the BBC reported, the
response from Cuba reiterates the immortality of its epic hero: “‘Four decades after
Mario Teran attempted to destroy a dream and an idea, Che returns to win yet another
battle,’ the Communist Party's official newspaper Granma proclaimed” (BBC).
Castro’s immortal Che however will persist more specifically as the model of the
Cuban revolutionary, in short, as the epic hero of the revolution. This is how Castro more
often articulates the immortal Che Guevara, which is reflected by the various propaganda
posters in Cuba expressing gratitude for serving as the example, and is developed in
greater detail and with greater emphasis in the forthcoming speech. The “Confirmación”
introduces us to an inanimate Che Guevara, that is the Che Guevara existing as idea or
example is given agency in the continued struggle against imperialism, exerting greater
power than the physical being could, and proving a continued worry for imperialists:
Los imperialistas saben también la fuerza del ejemplo, la tremenda fuerza
del impacto; y los imperialistas saben que si un hombre físicamente puede

77
Imperialism has certainly freed itself physically from Che, its greatest aspiration could
be to free itself spiritually from Che, to find a subtle way to dissolve in a delusion.
49
ser eliminado, ¡un ejemplo como ese nada ni nadie lo puede eliminar
jamás! Y es lógico que se sientan profundamente preocupados. (81)
78

Es un ejemplo casi único de cómo un hombre ha podido ganar el
reconocimiento y el respeto de sus enemigos, de sus propios enemigos
contra los que se enfrento con las armas en la mano. . . . Y es lógico que
esto tenga que preocuparle al imperialismo. (81)
79

Sin embargo, nosotros estamos seguros de que él era más que nadie un
convencido de que la vida física de los hombres no es lo principal sino su
conducta. Y solo así se explica, solo así encaja dentro de su personalidad y
su acción ese desprecio absoluto por el peligro. (83)
80

The notion of an immortal Che Guevara will be reiterated in Castro’s formal eulogy for
his epic hero, in which he will establish him as the official model of the Cuban
revolution.
The eulogy for Che Guevara is delivered on October 18, 1967, three days after the
speech confirming his death. “Vigilia en memoria del Che Guevara,” as this speech is
formally known in textual reproductions, constitutes the first complete performance of
what is essentially Castro’s Che Guevara epic. The speech, apart from fulfilling the
primary functions of a eulogy, officially proclaims Che Guevara as the epic hero of the
Revolution, as the model of the ideal revolutionary in the ongoing struggle of Castro’s
Cuba. Castro narrates the feats that authenticated Guevara’s prominent role within the
Revolution, which were crucial to the revolution’s victory of 1959, and which ultimately

78
The imperialists are also aware of the power of the example, of the tremendous power
of the impact; and the imperialists know that if a man can be physically eliminated, an
example such as that no one can ever eliminate! And it is understandable that they feel
profoundly worried.
79
It is an almost unique example how a man has been able to garner the recognition and
the respect of his enemies, of the very enemies that he faced with weapons in hand. . . .
And it is logical that this would have to worry imperialism.
80
Nonetheless, we are certain that he was more than anyone someone convinced in that
the physical life of man is not primary but rather his conduct. And it is only as such, only
in this ways does his absolute disdain toward danger fit his personality and his action.
50
help solidify his continued presence and relevance to the revolutionary project after his
death. Most importantly, Castro outlines in greater detail for his public the specific
personal qualities that have made Che Guevara the most exemplary figure of the
revolutionary struggle, and thereby the ideal model for Cuba’s socialist project.
Castro’s biographical overview of Che Guevara in the eulogy will highlight the
many instances in which Guevara emerges as the exceptional epic hero of the armed
struggle that toppled the Batista dictatorship. For the purposes of Castro’s epic, the
biography begins at the moment in which Che Guevara’s life first intersects with Cuban
history, a moment that coincides with the beginning of the expedition that is to re-launch
the revolution from Mexico. Castro’s opening statement to his oration begins precisely at
this point: “Fue un día del mes de julio o agosto de 1955 cuando conocimos al Che. Y en
una noche . . . se convirtió en un futuro expedicionario del Granma. . . . [E]l Che integró
el grupo de los dos primeros de la lista del Granma” (85).
81
Guevara, according to Castro,
arrived to this moment already advanced in his political and intellectual formation: “Se le
veía impregnado de un profundo espíritu de odio y desprecio al imperialismo, no solo
porque ya su formación política había adquirido un considerable grado de desarrollo”
(86).
82
However, the Cuban Revolution will bear witness to his ultimate development.
In Castro’s narrative, the armed struggle serves to illustrate the exceptionality of
Che Guevara the warrior. Through this characterization, Guevara emerges as a traditional
epic hero, noted for his exceptional level of courage and commitment on the battlefield,

81
It was a day in July or August 1955 when we met Che. And in one night . . . he became
a future expeditionary member of the Granma. . . . Che joined one of the first two groups
enlisted for the Granma.
82
One could sense him filled with a profound feeling of hatred and disdain for
imperialism, not only because his political formation had acquired a great degree of
development.
51
willingly and successfully undertaking the most difficult assignments: “ese tipo de
hombres que cuando que hay que cumplir una misión difícil no espera que le pidan que
lleve a cabo la misión” (88).
83
From the outset, Guevara demonstrates his physical
resilience withstanding an asthma attack for which he has no medicinal treatments along
the expedition on the Granma, the yacht that carried the small group of forces to Cuba:
“toda la travesía la paso bajo un fuerte ataque de asma, sin un solo alivio, pero también
sin una sola queja” (86).
84
At a later instance, in the midst of an aerial bombardment from
the opposition, Guevara, without hesitation, agrees to recover arms that had accidentally
been left behind: “bajo el bombardeo, el Che se ofreció, y ofreciéndose salio rápidamente
a recuperar aquellos fusiles” (88).
85
His exceptional courage and selfless commitment to
Cuba’s armed rebellion ultimately earns him the admiration of his comrades in arms,
which is to culminate in his designation as Comandante. Castro summarizes Guevara’s
participation in the conflict as such:
Esa era una de sus características esenciales; la disposición inmediata,
instantánea, a ofrecerse para realizar la misión mas peligrosa. Y aquello,
naturalmente, suscitaba la admiración, la doble admiración hacia aquel
compañero que luchaba junto a nosotros, que no había nacido en esta
tierra, que era un hombre de ideas profundas, que era un hombre en cuya
mente bullían sueños de lucha en otras partes del continente y, sin
embargo, aquel altruismo, aquel desinterés, aquella disposición a hacer
siempre lo mas difícil, a arriesgar su vida constantemente. Fue así como se
ganó los grados de comandante y de jefe de la segunda columna que se
organizara en la Sierra Maestra. (88)
86

83
Those types of men when it is necessary to complete a difficult mission do not wait to
be asked to undertake the mission.
84
He spent the entire trek afflicted with a severe asthma attack, without a single moment
of relief, but also without a single complaint.
85
Amidst the bombardment, Che volunteered, and upon volunteering quickly departed to
recover those rifles.
86
That was one of his essential qualities; the immediate willingness, instant, to volunteer
to undertake the most difficult mission. And that, of course, aroused the admiration, the
double admiration for that companion who fought alongside us, who had not been born
52

Guevara’s unbridled bravery is simultaneously his virtue and his tragic flaw, and
a motif within Castro’s epic narrative of Che Guevara: “Che era, desde el punto de vista
militar, un hombre extraordinariamente capaz, extraordinariamente valeroso,
extraordinariamente agresivo. Si como guerrillero tenía un Talón de Aquiles, ese Talón
de Aquiles era su excesiva agresividad, era su absoluto desprecio al peligro” (89).
87

Guevara’s commitment is commonly cited in a key transformation that occurs in
the Sierra Maestra, from which Che reemerges as combatant from medic. As Castro
narrates,
[Q]uedaba uno de los flancos completamente desprovisto de fuerzas,
quedaba uno de los flancos sin una fuerza atacante que podía poner en
peligro la operación. Y en aquel instante Che, que todavía era medico,
pidió tres o cuatro hombres entre ellos un hombre con un fusil-
ametralladora, y en cuestión de segundos emprendió rápidamente la
marcha para asumir la misión de ataque desde aquella dirección. (87)
88

The repeated metamorphosis of Che Guevara becomes a recurring element in his lore,
and as I argue elsewhere, a key theme that allows for his continued relevance. As

on this land, who was a man of profound ideas, who was a man in whose mind stirred
dreams of struggle in other parts of the continent and, nevertheless, that altruism, that
lack of self-interest, that willingness for always doing that which is most difficult, risking
his life constantly. That is how he earned the rank of commander and of chief of the
second column formed in la Sierra Maestra.
87
Che was, from a military point of view, and extraordinarily capable man,
extraordinarily courageous, extraordinarily forceful. If as a warrior he had an Achilles’
Heel, that Achilles’ Heel was his excessive forcefulness, it was his absolute disdain for
danger.
extraordinariamente valeroso, extraordinariamente agresivo. Si como guerrillero tenía un
Talón de Aquiles, ese Talón de Aquiles era su excesiva agresividad, era su absoluto
desprecio al peligro,” (89).
88
One of the flanks was left completely devoid of forces, there remained one flank
without an attacking force, which could endanger the operation. And in that instant Che,
who was still a medic, requested three or four men among them a man with a machine
gun, and in a matter of seconds quickly embarked on the path to assume the attacking
mission from that direction.

53
officializing as Castro’s epic narrative will be, cementing Che Guevara into the
uncontestable model for a revolutionary Cuba, the susceptibility of transforming Che into
various forms of the ideal member of various imagined communities is a key factor in his
enduring presence. For the purposes of Castro’s epic narrative, the key transformations of
Che Guevara are his evolution from doctor to the complete revolutionary, and ultimately,
the metaphorical one that symbolically rescues him from death.
Castro’s biographical overview of Che Guevara’s role in the struggle in the Sierra
Maestra highlights the exceptionality of the traditional epic hero, one whose feats are
tested and proven in the midst of armed conflict. However, Castro is not merely
interested in the warrior, and will identify in Guevara qualities that transcend the
battlefield. Within Castro’s epic narrative, Guevara emerges as the Revolution’s own epic
demigod, a characterization that serves two purposes. First, as elaborated earlier, the
mythic qualities that Castro identifies in Che are intended to negotiate his immortality,
rescuing him from his fate in Bolivia, which in turn diminishes the victory of his enemies
and retains Che Guevara as a living model with a functional role within his revolutionary
project. Secondly, the transformation of Che into the complete man, a sort of
superhuman, will now serve to present to Cubans a specific model of the ideal Cuban
citizen.
Che Guevara becomes a sort of Marxist Christ, defined by selfless sacrifice, a
commitment to the purest ideals, and faith in mankind. He is a martyr who died on behalf
of the meek: “Che no cayó defendiendo otra causa que la causa de los pobres y de los
54
humildes de esta tierra
89
” (97).
90
In a passage that reverberates with Christian imagery
Castro states:
[S]angre suya fue vertida en esta tierra cuando lo hirieron en diversos
combates; suya por la redención de los explotados y los oprimidos, de los
humildes y los pobres, se derramó en Bolivia. ¡Esa sangre se derramó por
todos los pueblos de América y se derramo por Viet Nam, porque el allá,
combatiendo contra las oligarquías, combatiendo contra el imperialismo,
sabia que brindaba a Viet Nam la mas alta expresión de solidaridad! (99)
91

The Revolution’s Christ is equally defined by his faith in humankind:

Tenía una infinita fe en los valores morales, tenía una infinita fe en la
conciencia de los hombres (95).
92

Eso demuestra su fe en los hombres, su fe en las ideas, su fe en el ejemplo
(90).
93

The parallel is accentuated even further if we recall the Che Guevara who returns to heal
the blind as illustrated in the BBC article noted above.
For Castro, Guevara becomes the ideal model for the revolutionary in having
espoused and developed to their greatest and purest forms the various attributes and
desired qualities to be realized under the revolutionary project: “Che llevo las ideas del
marxismo-leninismo a su expresión más fresca, más pura, más revolucionaria. ¡Ningún
hombre como el en estos tiempos ha llevado a su nivel más alto el espíritu

89
Note the ambiguity of the word tierra, which can be read here to mean “land” or
“earth.”
90
Che did not fall defending a cause other than the cause on behalf of the poor and the
meek of this earth.
91
His blood was spilled on this earth when he was wounded in various battles; his for the
salvation of the exploited and the oppressed, of the humble and the poor, was spilled in
Bolivia. That blood was spilled across all of the countries of America and it was spilled
for Vietnam, because he over there battling against the oligarchies, battling against
imperialism, he knew that he was offering Vietnam the highest expression of solidarity!
92
He had infinite faith in moral values, he had an infinite faith in the consciousness of
men.
93
That shows his faith in man, his faith in ideas, his faith in the example.
55
internacionalista proletario!” (98-99).
94
Guevara’s exceptionality is based on the multiple
qualities that he brought together under one being. Castro’s depictions portray a Guevara
that seems to have achieved the ultimate development of man:
No es fácil conjugar en una persona todas virtudes que se conjugaban en
el. No es fácil que una persona de manera espontánea sea capaz de
desarrollar una personalidad como la suya. Diría que es de esos tipos de
hombres difíciles de igualar y prácticamente imposible de superar. (90)
95

Equally important to his militaristic prowess is his extraordinary commitment to ideals.
The epic hero of Revolutionary Cuba is both a man committed to armed struggle and to
thought and reflection. Whereas the first part of Castro’s eulogy elaborates on the
achievements of his epic hero on the battlefield, the second insists on the heroic qualities
of the man of ideas, the intellectual Guevara:
Constituyó el caso singular de un hombre rarísimo en cuanto fue capaz de
conjugar en su personalidad no solo las características de hombre de
acción, sino también de hombre de pensamiento, de hombre de
inmaculadas virtudes revolucionarias y de extraordinaria sensibilidad
humana, unidas a un carácter de hierro, a una voluntad de acero, a una
tenacidad indomable (94).
96

Having defined his hero as both a man of intellect and action, Castro will again insist on
immortalizing Che Guevara, a project facilitated by the intellectual contributions of its
subject. The transcendence that he is to achieve is in large part due to the intellectual
facets and achievements of this hero:

94
Che realized the ideas of Marxism-Leninism to their most current, purest, most
revolutionary expression. No man today has carried out the internationalist proletarian
spirit to its greatest level as he has!
95
It is not easy to bring together in one person all of the virtues that were gathered in
him. It is not easy for one person to randomly be able to develop a personality such as
his.
96
He constituted the unique case of an extremely rare man in that he was capable of
combining in his character not only the qualities of a man of action, but also a man of
intellect, a man of immaculate revolutionary virtues and of extraordinary human
sensibility, linked to an iron character, a will of steel, and indomitable tenacity.
56
Y no dudamos que el valor de sus ideas, de sus ideas tanto como hombre
de acción, como hombre de pensamiento, como hombre de acrisoladas
virtudes morales, como hombre de insuperable sensibilidad humana, como
hombre de conducta intachable, tienen y tendrán un valor universal (96).
97

In the epic world that Castro’s narrative describes for us, the intellectual attributes
of the epic hero are that which grant him a sort of immortality. As noted earlier, in the
speech confirming his death Castro immortalizes Che by dividing him into the physical
and metaphysical being. Here, Castro reiterates that division and correlates the two
aspects of his character with each one of these. The warrior Che has been extinguished;
the physical and mortal body belonged to this Che. However, the intellectual Che has
attained his immortality, resulting in a continued agency in the project of revolutionary
Cuba and in the continued struggles of the world (91).
For Castro, this division is important and necessary in order to proclaim a
symbolic immortality for Che as well as to diminish the victory of his opponents. In
Castro’s narrative, the enemy has merely triumphed over Che Guevara’s physical being;
“Pero se equivocan los que cantan victoria. . . . Porque aquel hombre cayo como hombre
mortal” (92).
98
However, as Castro insists, Guevara was not resigned to a purely mortal
existence:
Ahí es donde esta el lado débil del enemigo imperialista: creer que con el
hombre físico ha liquidado su pensamiento, creer que con el hombre físico
ha liquidad sus ideas, creer que con el hombre físico ha liquidad sus
virtudes, creer que con el hombre físico ha liquidado su ejemplo (96).
99

97
And we don’t doubt that the value of his ideas, his ideas as a man of action as much as
a man of intellect, as a man of pure moral virtues, as a man of human sensibility, as a
man of an impeccable conduct, have and will have a universal worth.
98
But they are mistaken those who sing victory. . . . Because that man fell as a mortal
man.
99
That is where the weakness of the imperialist enemy lies: thinking that with the
physical man it has extinguished his belief, thinking that with the physical man it has
57

Throughout the speech, Fidel Castro has been laying the groundwork for the place
that Che Guevara is to have in the Revolution from this point forward. Castro has
constructed an epic narrative to the Cuban Revolution from which he is now selecting an
epic hero to serve as the model of the ideal member of the Cuban nation that is under
reformation. Castro has identified in Guevara those qualities that are now to be emulated
by the members of the Revolution in order to successfully realize the national project at
hand: “[Che] constituyó por sus virtudes lo que puede llamarse un verdadero modelo de
revolucionario” (94).
100
The oration is in part a reiteration of the epic narrative that
Castro has constructed from the initial moments of the Revolution, to which now it
officially identifies a specific figure as the exemplary epic hero. However, the speech is
also an edict compelling the members of the reinvented nation to abide by the given
revolutionary standard, a standard set by one who is now also identified as its forefather:
“¡nos dejo su ejemplo! ¡Y el ejemplo del Che debe ser un modelo para nuestro pueblo, el
ejemplo del Che debe ser el modelo ideal para nuestro pueblo!” (98).
101
Castro proceeds
to offer what is essentially the official proclamation that establishes Che Guevara as the
model of the Cuban Revolution:
Si queremos expresar como aspiramos que sean nuestros combatientes
revolucionarios, nuestros militantes, nuestros hombres, debemos decir sin
vacilación de ninguna índole: ¡Que sean como el Che! Si queremos
expresar como queremos que sean los hombres de las futuras
generaciones, debemos decir: ¡Que sean como el Che! Si queremos decir
como deseamos que se eduquen nuestros niños, debemos decir sin
vacilación: ¡Queremos que se eduquen en el espíritu del Che! Si queremos

extinguished his ideas, thinking that with the physical man it has extinguished his virtues,
thinking that with the physical man it has extinguished his example.
100
[Che] constituted through his virtues what can be called a true revolutionary model.
101
He left us his example! And Che’s example should be a model for our people, Che’s
example should be the ideal model for our people!
58
un modelo de hombre, un modelo de hombre que no pertenece a este
tiempo, un modelo de hombre que pertenece al futuro, ¡de corazón digo
que ese modelo sin una sola mancha en su conducta, sin una sola mancha
en su actitud, sin una sola mancha en su actuación, ese modelo es el Che!
Si queremos expresar como deseamos que sean nuestros hijos, deben decir
con todo el corazón de vehementes revolucionarios: ¡Queremos que sean
como el Che! (98).
102

The plea will yield a formulaic phrase, infinitely reiterated throughout Cuba in the form
of propaganda adorning walls that echo the call “¡Que sean como el Che!” And nearly 40
years after this proclamation, in what is regarded as his official biography, Castro
articulates what the plea entailed: “Por eso nuestra Revolución se intereso tanto por
luchar contra el analfabetismo, y por desarrollar la educación. Para que todos sean como
el Che,” (quoted by Castro in Ramonet 273).
103

It is important to note a significant distinction between the roles of Che Guevara
and Jose Martí within Castro’s revolutionary narrative. Whereas Martí’s ideas are central
to authenticating the Revolution, Che Guevara bestows it with a model of the expected
values, attitudes and behaviors of its members. This is not to say that Castro overlooks
Guevara’s intellectual grounding, which as we see he cites as a major facet to be
emulated; however, for the purposes of his epic project, it merely remains as an attribute
to be highlighted and esteemed. In other words, there are no specific ideas that will be

102
If we want to express what we aspire our revolutionary fighters to be like, our
militants, our men, we should say without hesitation of any kind: May they be like Che!
If we want to express what we want the men of future generations to be like, we should
say: May they be like Che! If we want to say how we wish our children to be educated,
we should say without hesitation: We want them to be educated in the spirit of Che! If we
want a model of man, a model of man that doesn’t belong to this era, a model of man that
belongs to the future, from the heart I say that that model without a single blemish in his
conduct, without a single blemish in his attitude, without a single blemish in his action,
that model is Che! If we wish to express what we desire our children to be like, all should
state with all of their hearts of fervent revolutionaries: We want them to be like Che!
103
That is why our Revolution was very interested in fighting against illiteracy, and
developing education. So that all would be like Che.
59
evaluated, scrutinized or debated in the epic narrative by which Castro relates to the
figure Che Guevara. At this particular oration, he seems to leave the grappling with
Guevara’s texts to future generations: “y algunos de sus escritos no dudamos que pasaran
a la posteridad como documentos clásicos del pensamiento revolucionario” (94).
104

Fidel Castro subscribes to the epic to articulate and explain the national project,
presenting an epic world that validates the righteousness of the Revolution. In the initial
speeches we detect a broad, general epic narrative in which the foremost heroic agent is
yet to be specified. The death of Che Guevara grants Fidel Castro’s epic discourse with a
specific figure to which he can appeal as the model of the ideal member of revolutionary
Cuba. The two speeches immediately following the death of Guevara reveal the
immediacy with which Castro deploys the epic narrative of Che Guevara, and officializes
him as the revolutionary model. As explained by Castro, it is a role that has been earned
through Guevara’s ability to manipulate, engage and confront the hostile and imperfect
world of his epic. The two speeches also reveal the machinations necessary in order to
postulate Guevara as the epic hero of the Revolution, mainly, in having to rescue him
from defeat and death and christening him as the Revolution’s demigod, an earthly being
in whom we can find the virtues of Castro’s epic world in their purest and greatest form.
The epic narrative through which the Revolution is largely understood and enforced
proves to be, as expected of any epic system, a rigid, homogenizing force. The epic
narrative deployed here will be replicated and disseminated throughout; however, it will
confront important reactions and critiques of its project.

104
And some of his writings we don’t doubt will remain for posterity as classic
documents of revolutionary thought.
60
Chapter 2:
Monumentality, Heteroglossia and the Revolutionary Epic
The current chapter explores monumentality in the Caribbean through an
examination of efforts to erect monuments and memorials that seek to function as
physical sites that participate in the creation, affirmation and at times revision of national
narratives. Through a survey of recent examinations of attempts to define the Caribbean,
and a reading of Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo the chapter explores the
unique presence of monumentality in the Caribbean, illustrating its parallel role to the
epic under modernity—in its attempt to identify and organize the nation—but most
importantly, illustrating the region’s rejection of such totalizing systems of identification.
I then turn my attention to a unique and unusual performance of the epic of the Cuban
Revolution, housed within Havana’s Museo de la Revolución. Through its exhibits, the
Museo narrates the epic story of the Cuban Revolution, guiding its visitors through a
chronological witnessing of the history of Cuba that culminates with the triumph of the
Revolution, the event that corrects the misguided path of the nation. However, the Museo
de la Revolución is also an artifact of postmodernity; while on the one hand the Museo
seeks to offer a perpetual performance of the national epic, it does so by appropriating
and inscribing this revised national narrative within what was until that point the
Presidential Palace, the site of power under preceding regimes. In other words, the epic of
the Cuban Revolution within the Museo de la Revolución does not exist here as an
independent, closed-off, an unadulterated system; it depends on the presence and
engagement with physical remnants of this past to validate its meaning. Finally, Senel
Paz’s novella “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo” is examined in its affirmation of
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heteroglossia and its challenge to the totalizing and univocal discourse of the epic of the
Cuban Revolution.
The opening to Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of this World foreshadows quite
explicitly the violent transition of Haiti—from slave colony to independent nation—that
is to be dramatized by the novel. On his excursion into the city Ti Noel is unusually
perceptive of the many figures and images suggestive of decapitation. The waxed heads
with wigs decorating the storefront of the barber shop appear to him as very real and
thereby very dead, and the fact that they are displayed next to the heads of cattle from the
butcher’s shop lead him to humorously contemplate that, “al lado de las cabezas
descoloridas de los terneros, se servían cabezas de blancos señores en el mantel de la
misma mesa” (22). The display of disembodied heads is continued further by the
bookseller, who has hung on the front of his store stamps bearing the heads of important
ruling figures, including the king of France and other members of the Court, alluding
more directly to the forthcoming literal and figurative beheading of French monarchical
rule and the emergence of an independent Haiti.
Ti Noel’s encounters with these images, however, also foreshadow less explicitly
what is entailed by the emergence of an order based on and sustained through the concept
of the nation. While looking at an engraving bearing the image of an African king, the
bookseller informs him that he is a king from his “country”—“un rey de tu país” (23).
Like the other images he has encountered thus far, the image of the African king similarly
foreshadows future developments in the story, precisely the crowning of Henri
Christophe as the first monarch in the New World. Most importantly, however, the scene
also dramatizes Ti Noel’s first encounter with modernity, as it is that through the modern
62
that the notions of nation and national identity emerge as means to define and embody a
people. To the bookseller, the image of the African king works as an icon meant to speak
to and on behalf of Ti Noel, just as the images of French royalty work to represent as well
as remind the French subjects of the established social order and its values. However, Ti
Noel does not, and perhaps cannot, respond with adulation or embrace for this newfound
figure of African royalty, instead, he immediately returns to the stories told to him by
Mackandal as sources that better inform him about himself, his origins, and his inherent
capabilities to elude confinement. For the bookseller, Ti Noel and his history can be
reduced to and defined under the few elements represented in the image, and further
encapsulated under the notion of a “country,” be it in the sense of a nation or a singular
geographical and ethnographical area, eradicating the complexity and diversity of Africa
and the origins of the slaves in the New World. However, Mackandal has provided Ti
Noel with stories and details about Africa’s various kingdoms, peoples, wars, and
migrations (23).
As already stated, this encounter between Ti Noel and the effigy of an African
king constitutes an initial encounter with modernity. As J. Michael Dash illustrates in his
work on Caribbean literature, the independence of Haiti represented an “experiment with
the modern” (16), in which modernity is appropriated in order to usher in independence
and establish the region’s first nation, one imagined to be engaged with the rest of the
world (44). The emergence of the nation consequently leads to a need to explore and
identify (or construct, if necessary) the national identity, leading to the creation of rigid,
static, and confining notions of a Haitian identity that refuse to acknowledge and account
for its heterogeneity and fluidity. According to Dash, “The legitimacy of the new, black,
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American nation that Haiti represented was literally grounded in the land. The image of
the terre mére is a trope deeply embedded in the literary and political imagination from
this time,” (48). Eventually, such rigid “systems of totalizing” are questioned as
“Plurality, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity now emerge as an enabling discourse that
facilitates new, open-ended ideological formations” (53). When Ti Noel encounters the
image of the African king what he has encountered in reality is a monument of sorts, or
more precisely, a ruin, one that promises or threatens to account for his origins and to
dictate his present constitution.
The emergence of the nation in the nineteenth century as the new entity by which
societies were collected and organized involved processes aimed at defining people so as
to better administer them as wholes. Nations became engaged in disseminating national
myths meant to summarize the nation’s character, origins, values, and purpose as means
to provide the justification for their existence and given courses of action. The monument
becomes one of the modes through which such nationalizing projects are realized. As
Andreas Huyssen notes in “Monumental Seduction,” monumentalism is in our present
time viewed with suspicion, in large part “because it is seen as representative of
nineteenth-century nationalisms and of twentieth-century totalitarianism” (189). The
monument involves both a project of memorializing and a “desire for origins,”
105
by
which its link to the ruin becomes implicit. Or as Huyssen states it, “the only monument
that counts is the one already imagined as ruin,” (189). This notion is best articulated by
“Albert Speer’s ruin theory of architecture, which had the express intent to build in such a
way that the greatness of the Third Reich would still be visible in its ruins a thousand

105
The monument as a desire for origins is an idea posited by Denis Hollier in his work
Against Architecture (Huyssen 191).
64
years hence” (Huyssen 197). As Dash demonstrates, early attempts at defining national
identities in the Caribbean looked to the past for material upon which to construct an
origin, but as another of Carpentier’s novels, The Lost Steps, illustrates, a return to a pre-
Colombian past is no longer possible (Dash 84-86). Whereas other nations in the
Americas had pre-Columbian ruins upon which to site their own particular origins, as
Edouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, and many other Caribbean authors have noted, the
Caribbean is in large part devoid of ruins. In his Nobel Lecture, Derek Walcott states that
“The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are
few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.”
The engraving of the African king is a ruin that, as one is to see later in the novel,
will have relevance under the rule of Henri Christophe. Although his monarchy by no
means constitutes a return to an African origin or state of being, both his reign and the
image involve projects of monumentalization, by which a nation or a people can be
embodied, defined, and controlled. However, as is initially made clear by Ti Noel’s
indifference to the image, the Caribbean is inherently resistant and elusive of such
totalizing projects. As we immediately see, the image that Ti Noel encounters cannot
fully account for all that he has learned from Mackandal. The image is static whereas
Mackandal’s accounts deal in large part with fluidity and metamorphosis.
In dramatizing the transition to modernity that the independence of Haiti entailed
The Kingdom of this World becomes invested in an examination of monumentality in the
Caribbean. Carpentier’s novel comes to reveal that what is entailed by the monument is a
mechanism of power, designed to exert control over its given subjects by identifying,
defining, and ultimately embodying them. However, as has been made clear by previous
65
attempts to define and confine the Caribbean under totalizing and ossifying identities,
inherent in the Caribbean is a resistance to such mechanisms of control. J. Michael
Dash’s The Other America provides a comprehensive survey of all such previous
attempts that can help us understand why and how the Caribbean resists monumentality.
Andreas Huyssen’s work on German monumentality provides important information that
identifies what is entailed by the monument and the process of monumentalization.
Finally, Michel Foucault’s thoughts on power, particularly his work on the disciplinary
system of modern society, will help us understand that the monument is in fact a
mechanism of power designed to control its intended recipients.
From the initial moment of contact between Europe and the Caribbean, the latter
has been subjected to a variety of rigid identities and characterizations as a means for the
former to better comprehend it and justify its relationship to it. However, as Dash
illustrates, from Columbus’s first writings it is evident that Europeans’ assessments of the
region are precarious constructions, revealing more about themselves and Europe than
their treated subject. As Edmundo O’Gorman notes, the Americas were not discovered by
Columbus but were “‘the result of an inspired invention of Western thought,’”
(O’Gorman in Dash 21); or as Dash phrases it, the Americas were imposed a
“provisionally assigned” meaning constructed out European needs, fantasies, and fictions.
Dash illustrates how every European notion of the Caribbean and its inhabitants to follow
were reactions to their own particular anxieties about their own societies. The notions of
the savage and barbaric Other are projections of Europe’s “anxieties about its own
humanity onto unfamiliar places and peoples” (26), but once dominated, the indigenous
66
are then reinterpreted as noble or in a state of innocence through which European society
can be critiqued an reevaluated (28).
As previously mentioned, eventually modernity and the emergence of the nation
give way to totalizing discourses that attempt to subsume people under rigid and singular
categories of identity. However, it is also within this new context that writers begin to
question these official and totalizing constructions by exploring the region’s amorphous
nature. Eventually, the most apt examinations of the Caribbean will be provided in the
twentieth century by those authors that take into account its complexity, fluidity, and
heterogeneity. Dash praises Benitez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island for conceiving the
region as “open-ended,” (8), and Glissant for “visual[izing] a Caribbean discourse based
on heterogeneity and interrelating,” (11). As will be illustrated, Senel Paz’s work will
contest the rigidity of an ossifying discourse by negotiating heteroglossia within a social
landscape marked by univocality. Whereas initially the ground and landscape had served,
as in the case of Haiti, as the symbol upon which to literally ground and cement a
national identity, the sea, through the sense of fluidity, uncontainability, and
interrelatedness that it invokes, eventually emerges as a more adequate symbol through
which Caribbean identity can be understood. Dash states, “The strength of Glissant’s
theorizing has always been his skepticism of a grounded truth. From his early essays, the
island is exemplary as a point of errancy, as he places the island space within this
maritime context. . . . It is the ‘dizzying sweep’ of the sea and not the land that Glissant
associates with island space” (164).
Imagining the island as the ground that embodies identity has been, in a sense,
imagining the island as monument. Dash states that “One is tempted to argue that there is
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as strong an inclination to see the island in terms of a monolithic rock as there is a
recognition of the island location in the sea of historical and discursory possibilities. The
strength of writers such as Alejo Carpentier, like the writing of García Márquez, is their
profound skepticism regarding the immutable rock and the eternal dawn, as we have seen
in Carpentier’s paradigmatic novel The Lost Steps,” (162). Whereas Carpentier’s The
Lost Steps is largely invested in dismantling the conception of the Caribbean as the
experience of “eternal dawn,” Kingdom of This World challenges monumentality in the
Caribbean, that is, the insistence on conceiving the Caribbean as “immutable rock.”
In “Monumental Seduction,” Andreas Huyssen examines the resurgence of
monumental architecture in Germany and its link to the project of memorializing.
Attempting to come to a new understanding of the monument, one that recovers it from
the general rejection it tends to be subjected to, Huyssen explores what is fulfilled
through the monument and how it came to be regarded as an inadequate function of
modernity. Although he is primarily interested in reinterpreting the monument as
something that can hold a positive value in our current age, he doesn’t dispute the
traditional critique of the monument save the notion that it is a relic of an earlier age. In
his view, the purpose of the monument and the context in which it appears has shifted
and thereby so must our regards towards it. He states, “We are facing a paradox:
monumentalism of built space or monumental tendencies in any other medium continue
to be much maligned, but the notion of the monument as memorial or commemorative
public event has witnessed a triumphal return,” (182). The key to understanding
monumentality then, according to Huyssen, is its “historical specificity,” (191) from
which the more recent German projects of monumentality, such as the veiling of the
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monumental Reichstag building in 1995, can come to constitute something different, such
as a “monument to democratic culture rather than a demonstration of state power,” (187).
Kingdom of This World is not invested in recovering the monument but in
providing an examination and critique of monumentality that is contextually based
(historically and geographically), adhering to Huyssen’s tenet of “historical specificity.”
Huyssen’s general analysis of the monument can help us understand the specificity of
monumentality in the nineteenth century, from which we can begin to analyze
monumentality in post-independence Haiti, even if his regard towards the monument
differs from Carpentier’s. In other words, although Huyssen looks to recover the
monument as something positive within the context of post-Cold War Germany,
Carpentier demonstrates a different presence of monumentality in the Caribbean.
Huyssen states that “while the monumental may always be big and awesome, with claims
to eternity and permanence, different historical periods obviously have distinct
experiences of what overwhelms, and their desire for the monumental will differ both in
quality and in quantity” (191). With the emergence of the nation and the new capitalist
order in the nineteenth century, monumentalism became invested in a search for origins
as “the political, economic, and industrial revolutions had begun to strip away the
religious and metaphysical securities of earlier ages,” (Huyssen 191). In other words, the
“obsession with origins and their mythic grounding” that marks this period can be seen
“as fulfilling the culturally legitimizing needs of the post revolutionary bourgeois nation
state in the grip of accelerating modernization,” (192). Furthermore, “the monument
came to guarantee origin and stability as well as depth of time and space in a rapidly
changing world that was experienced as transitory, uprooting, and
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unstable….Monumental architecture especially seemed to guarantee permanence and to
provide the desired bulwark against the speed-up of time, the shifting grounds of urban
space, the transitoriness of modern life,” (192). As we will see, this is precisely what is
entailed by Henri Christophe’s citadel project, but at the same time, it is what is
immediately rejected by the Caribbean’s inherent heterogeneity. Similarly, the Museo de
la Revolución attests to the precariousness of monumentality; it is an institution that
exists in large part as an erasure of a previous monument, the Palacio Presidencial, yet its
own permanence depends on the continuity of the Revolutionary project.
Christophe’s citadel project can be understood as a reaction to what Derek
Walcott has observed as a defining quality of the Caribbean; its lack of ruins and by
consequence the absence of “the sigh of History.” As Walcott has also commented, the
only ruins in the Caribbean are those of the plantation, which must be studied further as
monumental structures for even though they do not attest to a glorious past of the nation
nor establish an idealized identity, they do maintain with it a monumental relation, that is,
they remain as memories that overwhelm. Christophe’s project is in some ways a
monument to a new era through which Haiti can be inserted into the matrix of the modern
world (i.e. Western world) by creating a physical marker that denotes the presence of
History just as the monumental ruins of ancient Greece or Rome have done for the
Western world. However, just as the Citadelle Laferrière may be a monument to Haitian
modernity it also has the function of stamping out an earlier era, or more precisely
replacing the structure of the ruin of the plantation and all that it connotes with one of
grandeur. Andreas Huyssen sees the resurgence of German monumentality as potentially
fulfilling the objective of covering up a less glorious past by literally building over sites
70
that bear witness to that particular history. The plans to build a Holocaust memorial
directly over or in proximity to other monumental sites that the Nazis had envisioned,
according to Huyssen, “appeared to function both as mimesis and cover-up of another site
memory, with the requisite monumentality to match the dimensions of Speer’s original
plan,” (183). Similarly, although Christophe’s architectural project appears to look
forward in time it has also engaged a particular past (and one may even argue has
replicated that past) in order to overwhelm it and overshadow it. Glissant’s comments on
the plantation as ruin reveals how such architectural system functioned as a monument,
that is, as a mechanism that embodies so as to control.
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant’s analysis of the plantation reveals it to be a
system comparable to that of the monument, involving enclosure or embodiment through
which the dominant power is perpetuated. The architectural and social structure of the
plantation is designed to embody the slave population just as a national monument would
embody a nation. He states, “[The plantation] is an organization formed in a social
pyramid, confined within an enclosure, functioning apparently as an autarky but actually
dependent. . . . each Plantation was defined by boundaries whose crossing was strictly
forbidden. . . . everything was taken care of within a closed circle,” (64). Despite its aim
at enclosure and isolation the system is transgressed by the very fact that “within this
universe of domination and oppression, of silent or professed dehumanization, forms of
humanity stubbornly persisted” (65). Orality, according to Glissant, is at once a means of
survival, a “subsistance technique,” as he terms it, and a subversion of the dominant
power that the plantation perpetuated, as it constituted a “form of literature striving to
express something it is forbidden to refer to and finding risky retorts to this organic
71
censorship every time,” (68-69). In Kingdom of this World, this idea of survival and
subversion through orality is most clearly exemplified by the figure of Mackandal, who
not only orchestrates and realizes a rebellion primarily through orality, (serving as
contrast to the forthcoming French Revolution which was heavily reliant on those ideas
committed to paper,) but his own survival is achieved through the same means. His
escape from execution and eventual survival is sustained through orality, having been
achieved immediately upon the group collectively pronouncing his escape—“Un solo
grito llenó la plaza. ‘Mackandal sauvé’”—and maintained with each reiteration of this
story thereafter. Ti Noel’s own life toward the end of the novel is also sustained by the
tales told to him by Mackandal, which have given him the power to transform into other
beings to avoid captivity. Ultimately, Mackandal’s oral legacy gives continuity not only
to his or Ti Noel’s own life but to a general history that extends back to Africa. In other
words, although the Caribbean lacks the physical ruins that would attest to the presence
and continuum of History, such fragments exist within the space of folklore. The
subversion of power is what comes to define and give shape to the Caribbean, or as
Glissant states it, “the boundary, its structural weakness, becomes our advantage. And in
the end its seclusion has been conquered. The place was closed, but the word derived
from it remains open. This is one part, a limited part, of the lesson of the world” (75).
It is important to note that the Plantation is a historically ambivalent system in
that it has presence and relevance within two distinct historical eras. The plantation is at
once the pre-modern world, functioning under the codes of feudalism, and even
72
chivalry
106
, and the modern world, adhering to an emerging capitalist order. Glissant
wonders, “How did a system that was so fragile give rise, paradoxically, to what are seen
as the modern vectors of civilization, in the not intolerable sense that this word
henceforth holds for us?” (63-64). The Plantation may have seemed as a fragile system
only because it belonged to that earlier era, an era that was evidently disappearing during
the time of the Plantation. But as Glissant makes note, “the Plantation is one of the focal
points for the development of present-day modes of Relation,” (65). One of the reasons
that the Plantation has relevance within the modern era is precisely because, as Foucault
demonstrates, it is a system that perpetuates power in its modern form. In other words,
the Plantation is structured to collect and organize people in the most efficient manner
possible with the basic intended effect of dominating and controlling them. Foucault’s
thoughts on power and the complex modern disciplinary system will finally help us make
the connection between monument and control, demonstrating how the Plantation as
monumental ruin, and further, the monument as structure of dominance and control,
makes sense, and thereby the Caribbean’s resistance to monumentality is in essence a
resistance to power.
Foucault opens his extensive analysis and historical survey of modern disciplinary
society with a description of the execution of the condemned regicide Robert-Francoise
Damiens so as to illustrate how power was conceived, formalized, and exercised in an
age before modernity. The condemned man’s torture and execution involve a public

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Gone with the Wind (1939) is perhaps the most prominent example of the Plantation
fantasized as a world functioning under the codes of feudalist chivalry. The film opens
with the following foreword: “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the
Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to
be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in
books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...”
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spectacle that has amongst its objectives to “reveal the truth” by re-enacting the original
crime, and at the same time, marking “the truth of the crime [on] the very body of the
man to be executed,” (44). For Foucault, public punishment involved a “political ritual. . .
. belong[ing], even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested” (47).
The crime of the condemned constitutes both an offense to “those who abide by the law,”
and “the sovereign,” for “it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the
sovereign, it attacks him physically, since the force of the law is the force of the prince,”
(47). Power, in the age prior to modernity, exists as absolute and resides in the figure of
the monarch, and thus, it is through and by him that power must be restored when it has
been challenged. Foucault states, “in punishment there must always be a portion that
belongs to the prince, and, even when it is combined with the redress laid down, it
constitutes the most important element in the penal liquidation of the crime,” (48). The
public execution is then a show of an “invincible force” intended “not so much to re-
establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between
the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays
his strength,” and thus becomes “a spectacle…of imbalance and excess…an emphatic
affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority,” (48-49).
In the age of Reason and Modernity the dramatic shifts in power relations lead to
calls for reform of the system of punishment. Foucault argues that the reformations
effected were not the result of a need to “humanize” punishment, nor to make it fairer,
but rather strategies aimed at making power function more efficiently by redistributing it
so as to reduce imbalances and excesses (80-82). Punishment then becomes a “pseudo-
science” in that it is rationalized giving way to a complex system of “discipline”
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involving institutions, codes, and the production of knowledge that together work to
enforce, protect, perpetuate, and hide power. The public spectacle of punishment
disappears as the body ceases to be the focus of punishment and the soul emerges as that
which is targeted for judgment, reform, and ultimately control. Foucault argues that that
which is judged through the judicial process is no longer mere guilt but “normality,” that
is, no longer the crime but the criminal (20-21). Penalties are then intended to be
productive, having a specific end in mind, such as reform, and must be aimed not merely
at the criminal but “at all the potentially guilty” (108).
Ultimately, the redistribution of power results in a machinery of power that
penetrates nearly every aspect of society. The body becomes subjected to this disciplinary
machinery that works to manipulate it, rearrange it, and turn into a productive yet
“docile” body. In short, disciplinary power engages the body in a perpetual process of
normalization, which involves subjecting the body to comparison, evaluation,
homogenization, and at the same time individualization (184). Surveillance becomes the
key method through which disciplinary power is effectuated as the body becomes the
subject of, and subjected to “infinite examination.” Bentham’s Panopticon is the
architectural structure that epitomizes disciplinary power, as it gives rise to the possibility
of a perfect form of power, one that makes its use unnecessary. The Panopticon is an
efficient mechanism of power in that it reduces the amount of those who can exercise it
while increasing those who it can be exercised on. Furthermore, it makes power “visible”
to those that are subjected to it, yet “unverifiable,” as one cannot be sure if s/he is the
subject of surveillance and control at any given moment. Schools, prisons, hospitals,
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barracks, factories, and countless other institutions and social spaces will be structured in
such a way as to make power more efficient, in the same manner as the Panopticon.
In summary, Foucault reveals that ultimately power is determined by its ability to
control, manipulate, and direct bodies, and that modern disciplinary power exists as a
complex system, or machinery, that carries out its function through constant examination
and exercise. It is my argument that the monument is a mechanism of modern power, a
part within the complex machinery. Similar to all other structures through which
disciplinary power is effectuated, the monument perpetuates power through its visibility,
project of normalization, and production of knowledge. The monument is visible in that it
is widely accessible, generally aimed at a wide spectatorship, and, as Huyssen has noted,
is typically designed to overwhelm. Secondly, the monument defines and provides
knowledge on a given society, identifying its members as well as the values and
behaviors that are to be celebrated, thereby inducing conformity or threatening with
exclusion. Several scenes in the novel reveal how the monument ultimately exercises
such control but, as has been insisted throughout, monumentality, and thereby control, is
constantly in the process of being challenged and thwarted in the Caribbean.
Since Kingdom of This World captures the transition from pre-modernity to
modernity experienced in Haiti it should also bear witness to the emergence of the
disciplinary society that corresponds to the modern era. Interestingly, Foucault begins his
exposition on the modern penal system with a detailed description of an execution, and it
is precisely with the execution of Mackandal that we can also begin to understand what
the emergence of modernity entails in the novel. Foucault tells us that the public
punishment typical of pre-modern Western society was a spectacle through which the
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sovereign vehemently affirms and restores his power to its absolute form, while at the
same time reminding the audience of the “dissymmetry” in power between the offender,
who could be any one of them, and the “all-powerful sovereign.” Modern society
redistributes and reconfigures power into more coercive and subtle mechanisms that are
similarly aimed at controlling and manipulating bodies. After having evaded the colonial
authority for several days, Mackandal is finally captured and put on display, to be
executed in front of the black multitude as a means to reaffirm the power of the French
Crown. The execution of Mackandal is at once the spectacle that epitomizes classical
punishment but also an attempt at monumentalization. Monuments are designed to speak
to their intended audiences, yet what they say is rarely at odds with official ideology; or
more precisely, inscribed within every monument is official ideology. Mackandal is
presented to his public as monument, a captive and immobile body, bound by ropes and
knots and to be further immobilized through his execution, speaking a particular message
meant to control his public, to remind them of the dominant power and elicit their
conformity and submission. However, from the outset, the spectacle is already marked by
ambivalence, as the masters are uneasy about whether the slaves will accept the message
conveyed; “Los amos interrogaron las caras de sus esclavos con la mirada. Pero los
negros mostraban una despachante indiferencia” (42). Mackandal’s body is eventually
burned and killed but he eludes this final attempt to dominate him as he is released from
his reins and fleeing into the air and finally into the multitude; “Sus ataduras cayeron, y el
cuerpo del negro se espigó en el aire, volando por sobre las cabezas, antes de hundirse en
las olas negras de la masa de esclavos” (42). Unlike Pauline’s unresponsive body in the
form of the Venus statue, Mackandal is able to evade monumentality, achieving an
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unfixed and prolonged existence, marked by metamorphosis and sustained through the
equally fluid medium of orality. While the text tells us that very few actually saw
Mackandal executed; “Muy pocos vieron que Mackandal, agarrado por diez soldados, era
metido de cabeza en el fuego, y que una llamada crecida por el pelo encendido ahogaba
su último grito” (43); the black multitude is unable to register this totalizing version,
bearing witness instead to Mackdal’s fulfillment of “his promise, [to remain] in the
kingdom of this World” (43).
One of the novel’s final scenes, depicting the Royal family’s exile in Europe, also
offers one of the clearest illustrations of the Caribbean’s resistance to the monument.
Solimán, the family’s servant, who at one time attended to Pauline Bonaparte during her
visit to the Caribbean, finds himself in a world replete with ruins, statues, columns,
marble fragments, etc. The field on which he took his summer naps is ironically fertile
with such fragments of eras long gone by; “Las ruinas proyectaban sombras gratas sobre
el abundante pasto y, cuando se escarbaba la tierra, no era raro encontrar una oreja de
mármol, un adorno de piedra o una moneda mohosa,” (107). At a later moment he finds
himself in a gallery surrounded by statues that come to constitue a dead and static world,
but which seems to become animated through his presence; “Era todo un mundo blanco,
frío, inmóvil, pero cuyas sombras se animaban y crecían, a la luz del farol, como si todas
aquellas criaturas de ojos en sombras, que miraban sin mirar, giraran en torno a los
visitantes de media noche. Con el don que tienen los borrachos de ver cosas terribles con
el rabillo del ojo, Solimán creyó advertir que una de las estaturas había bajado un poco el
brazo” (108). Finally, Solimán gazes upon a statue that he believes to be that of Pauline
Bonaparte. The statue is no longer something to look at but one he must immediately
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touch and massage just as he had done with the body of the real Pauline; “El había
conocido en otros tiempos aquel contacto. Con el mismo movimiento circular había
aliviado este tobillo, inmovilizado un día por el dolor de una torcedura. La materia era
distinta, pero las formas eran las mismas” (109). Solimán is unable to recognize or accept
the monument for what it intends to be—static, congealed, and uncontestable. The
monument is that which engages its spectators but which in turn cannot be engaged by
them, however, Solimán challenges the monumental form of the Venus/Pauline statue
with his touch looking to derive from it a response that never comes. Solimán’s eventual
and painful realization that the monumental form that he has come into contact is nothing
more than a cadaver; “el cadáver de Paulina Bonaparte. Un cadáver recién endurecido,
recién despojado de pálpito y de Mirada” (109); leads him first to temporary insanity and
ultimately to his death. In short, it is Solimán’s eventual recognition of monumentality
that deprives him of his existence.
Similarly, for Henri Christophe, insistence on the monumental proves certain
death. The most recognizable act of monumentalization occurring in the novel is that of
Christophe’s project to construct the Citadelle Laferrière. Interestingly, his citadel fulfills
many of the same functions of those modern structures which seek to control and
perpetuate power over their selected subjects, be it criminals, the ill, or even school-
children. Like Bentham’s Panipticon, as examined by Foucault, Christophe’s citadel
towers over a selected citizenry effectuating its control over them invisibly and
intangibly. The structure stands high enough; “encima de las nubes” (84); as if to be able
to keep a constant and invisible “gaze” over all, but most importantly, its effect resides
not merely in its capacity at effective surveillance but in the fact that its immensity and
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visibility work to remind its intended recipients of their subjectivity to the dominant
power. Also, the structure is designed to encapsulate the nation; its capacity to sustain
fifteen thousand men would seem to be able to reconstitute the nation itself; “la
Ciudadela La Ferrière sería el país mismo, con su independencia, su monarca, su
hacienda y su pompa mayor” (84). However, as has been insisted throughout, the
monumental as that which attempts at absolute control and embodiment, is resisted in the
Caribbean and as a result the project is left incomplete due to the final rebellion. In a
more explicit allusion to the novel’s understanding of the monument as that which is
synonymous to death than Solimán’s experience with monumentality, Henri Christophe
is literally petrified and buried within his own structure achieving the monumentality he
sought in more literal ways than he may have imagined.
The Museo de la Revolución in Havana is also an attempt at monumentality, not
simply as an architectural structure meant to impress or overwhelm, but through the
performance of the epic narrative that it hosts. The Museo performs the epic of the
Revolution through its series of displays, organized in chronological order so that the
spectator can witness the official narrative that recounts the historical developments that
produced the new national order. Visitors are guided through a series of halls displaying
artifacts, descriptions, maps, and images attesting to the epic narrative of the Revolution,
through which the origins of the nation (Figure 2.1) along with its heroes (Figure 2.2) and
values (Figure 2.1) are identified and celebrated. Although the Museo purports to
function as a historical museum, merely housing and displaying many of the artifacts that
advance an understanding of the Cuban Revolution, it is nonetheless insistent on
reiterating and validating the epic narrative of the Revolution. It is important to recall the
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relationship between epic and history established earlier, since that relationship is clearly
at play in the Museo de la Revolución. Although, as Zumthor points out, “No epic is
totally devoid of historical ingredients” (87), it is important to keep in mind that “epic
reads national history in a partisan, valorizing way” (Graham 88). The stone marker
signaling the entrance to the Museo includes the caption “...donde está toda la historia”
(see figure 2.3, my italics), revealing the museum’s intended dual function: to preserve
knowledge/information, and to curate that knowledge/information into an absolute and
uncontestable official (epic) account.
Figure 2.1 includes a fragment from Fidel Castro’s speech delivered to the First
Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in 1975, juxtaposed with a map plotting
some of the significant events, including slave and indigenous revolts, in the history of
the Oriente Province. The caption from Castro’s speech offers the explanation for the
point of origin of the Revolution, explaining that the Oriente Province was selected as the
launching point because of the advantages its geographical location offered, as well as the
rebellious tradition that characterizes the region. (This latter point is reiterated in his
return to Santiago for the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution.) The display advances
some of the established elements of the epic narrative of the Revolution (as outlined in
Chapter 1), by highlighting the virtues of the ideal members of its society and inserting
the Revolution into a tradition of rebellion that has characterized the region since
colonialism, thus justifying it as the culmination of a long series of historical struggles
against oppression.
In its performance of the epic, the Museo de la Revolución selects and highlights
the extraordinary figures from the conflict, particularly Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevara
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and Fidel Castro, whose images recur throughout the museum, such as in Figures 2.2 and
2.4. Unlike most of the other items displayed in the museum, these two displays (2.2 and
2.4) are not of historical artifacts, but rather they function as fragments that reference the
general epic narrative. In both displays, the well-known combatants are depicted in
military fatigues on the battlefield, working much like a formulaic phrase from an oral
epic, or images from Ancient Greek vase paintings that, merely as fragments, are meant
to evoke their respective general epics. Some of the historical artifacts in the museum,
however, also perform functions similar to the formulaic phrases of the oral epic. Figures
2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8 show some of the common artifacts found within the museum. These
serve as pieces of evidence attesting to the veracity of the historical account of the
museum, yet many, such as the ones included here, are seemingly superfluous, akin to the
redundant inventories of an oral epic performance. In other words, the pen, the
sunglasses, the spoon and the pocket watch name and authenticate the presence of some
of its participants, but, like formulaic phrases, they are also present to fill space within an
epic performance.
The history of the building of the Museo de la Revolución is also conscripted into
the performance of the epic narrative. The museum is a reinvented space, reconfigured
from its previous function as the seat of power to serve as the host of this epic
performance. The appropriation of this space, of what was throughout the first half of its
history the Palacio Presidencial, serves to advance the general epic narrative of the
Museo de la Revolución. According to the information from one of the displays (Figure
2.9), the building is the product of the whims of the privileged classes from an earlier,
less egalitarian era; “las clases acomodadas concibieron la ubicación de los más
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importantes edificios públicos en suntuosos lugares a tono con sus intereses” (Figure 2.9).
From that point forward, the Palacio Presidencial only represented the emanating source
of the nation’s maladies, but also the focal point for popular protest and revolt (Figure
2.10). The appropriation and reinvention of the Palacio Presidencial into the Museo de la
Revolución is a symbolic gesture that posits the Cuban Revolution as the event that
corrects the skewed course of the nation. However, the erasure of the Palacio’s function
as the representation of power inevitably also entailed the erasure of its function as the
focal point for popular organization. As Susana Draper argues in Afterlives of
Confinement, “architectural recycling operates as an attempt to erase the ruin and turn it
into a symbol without fissures—a past that has been recycled to become a new fantasy
that embodies a present capable of both remembering the past and using it to produce
income” (my italics 16). The Museo, however, is not only invested in remembering the
past in order to produce income, but perhaps most importantly, to produce national
identity and conduct. Hence, the Museo de la Revolución closes off any space for a
discourse that may challenge its univocal and totalizing account; however, as what has
been identified in the preceding pages as the Caribbean’s enduring heteroglossia, Senel
Paz’s novella “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo” identifies those spaces beyond the
monotony of the official discourse.
Senel Paz’s novella proposes dialogue as a way to contest and revise the totalizing
narrative of the Cuban Revolution as witnessed and performed in El Museo de la
Revolución. The story centers on the unlikely relationship that develops between two
seemingly opposing and irreconcilable figures, through which Paz stages a dialogue that
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posits pressing questions to the static and monolithic discourse of the Revolution and a
re-evaluation of the Revolution’s program on the New Man.
In adherence with theoretical ruminations on literary beginnings, including the
notion that a work’s narrative origin can exist in its paratexts, (a notion introduced by
Gerard Genette to denote those texts preceding a literary work, such as subtitles,
dedications, and epigraphs (Bennett and Royle 5), Paz’s title is the precise place to begin
our reading and interpretation of the story at hand, as it identifies its subject and invokes
narrative discourses through which one must read the novella. In his seminal work on
literary beginnings, Edward Said notes that “The beginning….is the first step in the
intentional production of meaning” (italics in text, 5). Furthermore, he states that “one of
the chief characteristics that Joyce, Yeats, Conrad, Freud, Mann, Nietzsche, and all the
others share in common has been a necessity at the beginning for them to see their work
as making reference, first, to other works, but also to reality and to the reader, by
adjacency, not sequentially or dynastically” (10). He introduces to the notion of
beginning the notion of adjacency, which is the idea that a work’s relationship to its
predecessors is not one of linear descent. This is important in our reading of Paz’s work,
for his title deliberately places us within the realm of a specific literary genre, the
cautionary fairy tale. However, he does so without simply duplicating its most salient
elements, tropes and formulas, but in order to produce new meaning and discourse. As
Said further elaborates, adjacency results in “the production of meaning within a work
has had to proceed in entirely different ways from before, if only because the text itself
stands to the side of, next to, or between the bulk of all other works – not in a line with
them, nor in a line of descent from them.” (10).
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The title of Paz’s novella designates three elements as the subjects of the story,
(the wolf, the forest, and the new man), asking its reader to identify each one within the
narrative. However, the identification will be befuddled and ambiguous as the story
develops, as each element will prove to be fluid, each of its meanings contested and their
identification with particular characters and places obscured. Through his works’ title Paz
invokes two distinct narratives into its reading. The first, obviously suggests that the
work at hand is a cautionary fairy tale, as it invokes the framework of the “Little Red
Riding Hood” in its reading. However, this narrative tradition is conflated with Cuba’s
own traditional discourse on the New Man, as laid out in particular by Che Guevara in his
quintessential essay “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba,” in which he also,
coincidentally, warns of the predatory nature of capitalism, deeming it as “una carrera de
lobos: solamente se puede llegar sobre el fracaso de otros,” (8). Through the invocation
of the tradition of the fairy tale, Paz scrutinizes and asks to rectify the Revolution’s
official program of the New Man.
The story begins just as the narrator, David, parts with his friend Ismael, and
procuring to avoid solitude; “me quedé con aquella necesidad de conversar, de no estar
solo” (9); he decides to visit “Coppelia, la Catedral del Helado,” a designation he adopted
from his friend Diego: “Así, la Catedral del Helado, le llamaba a este sitio un maricón
amigo mío” (9). David’s visit to Coppelia elicits and frames what is the actual narrative, a
retrospective of David’s relationship with Diego, a self-proclaimed proud patriot,
homosexual and lezamiano, from their complicated initial encounter at this precise
location, through its end, brought about by Diego’s exile from Cuba. This visit to
Coppelia doesn’t merely elicit the story, but conjures Diego in a sort of way, introducing
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an important motif in the story, as we will witness several important figures inhabiting
the narrative as specters that are sustained through the persistence of memory and
ritualized performance. As David begins to recall Diego, he states, “Me parece que lo
estoy oyendo, de pie en la puerta del balcón, con la taza de té en la mano” (9).
El lobo
David begins his recollection of Diego and their relationship precisely at its point
of origin, Coppelia, and as his narrative begins to unfold it temporarily places us within
the clear confines of the cautionary fairy tale. We can immediately discern, that from
David’s point of view, he has encountered the story’s wolf, counterpoised to himself, the
sheepish and coy villager from Las Villas, who by his own admission, is inept and
vulnerable under uncomfortable social situations—he doesn’t know how to end
conversations that do not interest him (14); he sacrifices himself romantically to women
he is not interested in out of pity or fear for hurting them (16); he gets fidgety and
embellishes stories when he senses boredom in his listener (31). Nonetheless, at this
particular moment, he is resolute in his determination to ward off Diego, as it is
unambiguously clear to him that the figure that has sat himself in front him uninvited is
an undesirable threat.
This initial encounter between David and Diego is troubled and incomplete due in
part to David’s insistence on employing a different lexicon to evaluate his counterpart.
Rather than dialogue, which is essentially what the story proposes, David’s reticence and
insistence on deciphering Diego strictly through visual signifiers and mannerisms filtered
through the codes of masculinity and the Revolution prevent any form of intimacy.
Before any dialogue even commences, David has already deciphered and discarded
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Diego based on what he sees: “Le eché una ojeada: no había que ser muy sagaz para ver
de qué pata cojeaba; y habiendo chocolate, había pedido fresa” (10). Initially, Diego’s
intrusive proximity to David threatens his masculinity. He fears that by association, by
his mere proximity, his own sexuality will be compromised. He states: “Estábamos en
una de las áreas mas céntricas de la heladería, tan cercana a la vez a la Universidad, por
lo que en cualquier momento podía vernos algunos de mis compañeros,” (10).
Diego then begins to provoke David becoming a predatory and perverse force that
the latter is forced to contend with: “Sentí como si una vaca me lamiera el rostro. Era la
mirada libidinosa del recién llegado, lo sabia, esta gente es así, y se me tranco la boca del
estomago” (11). We also learn that Diego has apparently been stalking his prey for some
time now as he knows quite a bit about him—that he is from Las Villas, that he is an
aspiring writer, and that he played the role of Torvaldo in his preparatory school’s
rendition of Ibsen’s Doll House. In spite of David’s clear unwillingness to engage in
conversation, Diego insists on asserting an intimacy with David: “‘Yo a ti te conozco. Te
he visto muchísimas veces paseando por ahí, con un periodiquito bajo el brazo. Chico,
como te gusta Galiano’” (13).
As David notes, within the confines of the small villages like the one he originates
from, social ridicule of gays provided him a safeguard; however, he is now beyond the
bounds of that space of safety: “en La Habana, había oído decir, son otra cosa, tienen sus
trucos” (11). The ruse by which Diego will attempt to seduce David is an appeal to his
literary aspirations. Aware that David is limiting any communication beyond the
interpretation of visual markers, Diego deliberately parades in front him foreign books,
including authors banned under the Revolution, such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s La guerra
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del fin del mundo, which inevitably arouses his interest: “¡Madre mía, ese libro nada
menos!” David says to himself. David is well aware that Vargas Llosa is an enemy of the
Revolution but is nonetheless intrigued by the prospects of reading his latest novel, but as
Diego persists with the seduction offering to reveal the books to him in a more private
setting; “‘si te interesan, te los muestro… en otro lugar’” (12); David remains true to his
revolutionary duties. In spite of his curiosity, David attempts to ward off Diego’s
persistence, responding with his own display of visual signifiers: “Me cambié el carnet
rojo de militante de la Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas de un bolsillo a otro: que
comprendiera que mis intereses de lector no creaban ninguna intimidad entre nosotros”
(12-13).
Nonetheless, in spite of David’s futile resistance, the sheepish student from Las
Villas is unable to escape: “Yo había terminado el helado y ahora no sabia como irme,
porque ese es otro de mis problemas: oigo todo lo que me quieran decir aunque me
importe un pito” (14). His hesitation prompts Diego to goad him even further with a less
discreet provocation, one that infuriates David, surprisingly not because of its sexual
boldness, but because it forces David to revisit an unpleasant memory, as it becomes
apparent that Diego already possesses an intimate knowledge of Diego in spite of the
latter’s reservations: “‘Yo, si vas conmigo a casa y me dejas abrirte la portañuela botón
por botón, te la presto, Torvaldo” (14). Diego’s reference to David’s portrayal of
Torvaldo forces David to interject into the narrative a flashback from his school days in
Las Villas, in which he was goaded into accepting the role of Torvaldo in a rendition of
Ibsen’s Doll House. In spite of his reservations of playing the role out of his heightened
sense of masculinity – “Tenia un concepto demasiado alto de la hombría como para
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meterme a actor” (15) – he is goaded into it by the school’s director who appeals to his
sense of debt and duty to the Revolution: “me planteo el asunto como una tarea, una
tarea, Álvarez David que le sitúa la Revolución, gracias a la cual usted, hijo de
campesinos paupérrimos, ha podido estudiar” (16). The performance proves to be an
embarrassing disaster for David and all involved as his girlfriend and counterpart in the
play forgets her lines and David is practically left alone in an uncomfortable silence,
forcing him to improvise a monologue to compensate for Nora’s muted words:
La obra tuvo que continuar en un monologo autocrítico de Torvaldo hasta que la
profesora de literatura reacciono, hizo bajar dos pantallas y al compás de El lago
de los cisnes, la única música disponible en la cabina, comenzó a proyectar
diapositivas de trabajadoras y milicianas, citas del Primer Congreso de Educación
y Cultura y poemas de Juana de Ibarbourou, Mirta Aguirre y suyos propios, con
todo lo cual, opino después, la pieza adquirió un alcance y actualidad que el texto
de Ibsen, en si, no tenia (18).

The flashback serves a multi-faceted function within Paz’s story. As mentioned, it
reveals that in spite of David’s repeated deterrence of Diego, he nonetheless already
penetrates an intimate space within David, having witnessed the event firsthand. As
David claims, “rogaba con toda mi alma que se produjera un efecto de amnesia total
sobre todos y cada uno de los presentes y que nunca, jamás, never, ¿me oyes, Dios?, me
encontrara con uno de ellos, alguien que me pudiera identificar,” (18). Diego is thus one
who prevents such amnesia, a role he seeks to parallel within the Revolution itself, as the
narrative will reveal him to be a cultural patron of a forgotten Havana.
The scene can also be read as Paz’s critique of art under the Revolution. The play
is truncated by an unexpected silence, a censorship of sorts, as Rita, playing Nora, is
overcome by stage fright and abruptly abandons the role, frozen in silence. The play can
only continue as a poor “self-critical monologue,” as David states, conflated with images
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and slogans of the Revolution. It is at this moment that Paz’s story engages and responds
to the official doctrine on the relationship between art and Revolution as spelled out in
Fidel Castro’s “Words to the Intellectuals,” and reiterated in Fernandez Retamar’s classic
essay “Caliban.” Responding to artists’ and writers’ concerns about the regime’s
censorship of the short film P.M., Castro attempts to assuage any fears of further
censorship by arguing that the Revolution’s relationship with art will be mutually
beneficial, only insofar as the latter is subsumed under the supremacy of the former,
summed up by his famous declaration: “within the Revolution, everything; against the
Revolution, nothing” (7). The Revolution’s artist will be a committed artist who will
“sacrifice even his own artistic vocation for the Revolution” (5). And although Castro
ensures the freedom of artistic expression, he does so, nonetheless, in paradoxical terms,
alleging that under the Revolution “everyone should express himself in the manner which
he believes proper, and express the idea that he wants to express,” but adding that “we
shall always evaluate their creation through the prism of the revolutionary crystal. This is
also a right, one of the Revolutionary Government, and one to be respected as much has
the right of everyone to express what he wishes to” (13). Castro’s speech prescribes
precisely the aesthetic that rescues David’s scene bestowing it with “un alcance y
actualidad” not found in Ibsen’s original, as his teacher alleges (17).
The scene also enlists another narrative into the story’s reading, Ibsen’s Doll
House, providing a template for the relationship that David and Diego will eventually
develop. The relationship between Diego and David will provide the latter an opportunity
to complete his failed and truncated performance of Torvaldo. Under Diego’s direction,
David will redeem his failed relationship with art, which he attempted to resign from in
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favor of a career in science, through several performances that Diego will stage and
produce for him. As David explains, “me comprometí a pensarlo dos veces cuando
volvieran a asignarme una tarea, a no masturbarme y a estudiar una carrera científico-
técnica, que eran las que necesitaba el país entonces” (18). Diego, however, will compel
David to engage the tasks he had at that point abandoned, casting him in new
performances, including that in which Diego will substitute Rita in the role of Nora,
compelling a more effective and complete self-reflective and transformative critique from
David.
In spite of his irritation at Diego’s provocation, David is nonetheless lured by the
prospects of examining Diego’s books and agrees to accompany him to his apartment,
where it will become even clearer to David that Diego’s true predatory threat to the
Revolution lies not merely in what he deems to be a sexual perversion, but because he
also seems to pervert the Revolution’s intellectual foundations. In the apartment, Diego’s
attempts at finalizing the intimacy he seeks with David are successfully thwarted:
Era obvio que [Diego] conocía a la perfección la técnica de despertar el
interés de reclutas y estudiantes, y también la de relajar a los tensos, como
aclararía después…. Sin embargo, no avanzaba conmigo. Yo había
llegado, como los otros, me había sentado en la butaca especial, como
ellos, pero, como ninguno, había clavado la vista en la loseta y de allí no
lograba despegármela (25).

At last, David leaves no longer with an interest in the objects of temptation that
had lured him there, and a sense of pride at having reaffirmed his revolutionary zeal:
Eso estuvo bien, me dije en la calle, aun con el portazo en los oídos: ni
quitarle los libros ni aceptarlos como regalo. Y mi espíritu, que dentro de
mi había estado todo el tiempo preocupado, se relajo y comenzó a
experimentar cierto orgullo por su muchacho, que al final-final no fallaba.
Era lo que esperaba de mi, su joven comunista que en las reuniones
terminaba por pedir la palabra y, aunque no se expresara bien, decía lo que
pensaba (28).
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However, as David explains, his being is divided into several facets. Whereas his spirit
feels a sense of pride at upholding his revolutionary post, another component, which he
identifies as his conscience, which is merely the voice of a revolutionary doctrine,
demands an explanation for his temporary deviance. As if to denote that such voice is not
inherent, natural, or organic to his being, but one borrowed or imposed from outside,
David begins to question his actions oscillating between the second and third person:
Con mi Conciencia la cosa no es tan fácil, y antes de llegar a la esquina
pedía que le explicara, pero despacio y bien, David Alvarez, por que, si
era hombre, había ido a casa de un homosexual; si era revolucionario,
había ido a casa de un contrarrevolucionario; y si era ateo, había ido a casa
de un creyente…. ¿Por que delante de mi se podía ironizar con la
Revolución (tu Revolución, David), y ensalzar el morbo y la podredumbre
sin que yo saliera al paso? ¿No sentí el carnet en el bolsillo, o es que
solamente lo llevaba en el bolsillo? ¿Quien eres realmente tu, muchachito?
¿Ya se te va a olvidar que no eres mas que un guajirito de mierda que la
Revolución saco del fango y trajo a estudiar a La Habana? Pero si una
cosa he aprendido en la vida es a no responderle a mi Conciencia en
situaciones de crisis.

The origins of the Conscience that David refers to are external; it is the voice of
the Revolution that he has internalized to a given degree. It is also the authoritative voice
of the cautionary fable chastising him for not heeding the warnings of associating with
wolves set on luring one away from his designated path. It is worth recalling that Charles
Perrault’s version of “The Little Red Riding Hood” ends with the morality explicitly
stated:
From this story one learns that children, / Especially young girls, / Pretty,
well-bred, and genteel, / Are wrong to listen to just anyone, / And it’s not
at all strange, / If a wolf ends up eating them. / I say a wolf, but not all
wolves / Are exactly the same. / Some are perfectly charming, / Not loud,
brutal, or angry, / But tame, pleasant, and gentle, / Following young ladies
/ Right into their homes, into their chambers, / But watch out if you
haven’t learned that tame wolves / Are the most dangerous of all. (13)

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However, as David’s spirit has made it clear, his experience has also provided him with a
sense of victory for ultimately resisting Diego’s threat. Nonetheless, there is a vulnerable
division within David’s being that will be penetrated by Diego and open up a space
within his monolithic discourse. Furthermore, as Perrault’s “Moral” illustrates, some prey
are at greater risk depending on the degree to which they display a society’s cherished
attributes. In Paz’s story, David is the most alluring prey being the innocent, uncorrupted
being from whom a new man can be forged.
In Fidel Castro’s commemorative speeches on Che Guevara, he similarly
describes him as a being composed of two complimentary facets, subsumed under one
body: his spirit, which compelled him into a courageous struggle against oppression and
tyranny until the last moments of his life, and a conscience marked by a profound social
awareness and intellectualism. David’s being is similarly divided into these facets,
however, as the passages above illustrate, his Conscience seems to be external and at
odds with his spirit, not fully integrated as they are in the being of Che Guevara. It is a
Conscience that to a large degree can be considered the mimicry of a revolutionary
model. It is the conscience of the Revolution, but not one that has been completely
absorbed and integrated by David. It is the same authoritative voice echoed by the
headmaster that compels him into the role of Torvaldo by positing it as an assignment on
behalf of the revolution: “una tarea, Álvarez David, que le sitúa la Revolución, gracias a
la cual usted, hijo de campesinos paupérrimos, ha podido estudiar” (16).
During this initial encounter between Diego and David, the latter operates under
an awareness that dictates that Diego is the predatory wolf that can corrupt and consume
the developing young revolutionary. However, one must also consider that in spite of the
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sexual and intellectual enticements that Diego tempts David with, the former is also the
prey of the fable that the title identifies. Diego informs David of five truths about himself
as a precondition to his visit to the apartment, as a courteous warning of what the visit
could entail for his guest, including that he has had problems with the revolutionary
authorities, that he has been incarcerated, and that he is under the constant surveillance of
the neighbors. As Diego notes, the relationship he insists on forging with David is equally
dangerous to him as well: “‘Eres de esas personas cuya ingenuidad resulta peligrosa’”
(19), seemingly echoing Perrault’s characterization of the most dangerous wolves of all:
“But watch out if you haven’t learned that tame wolves / Are the most dangerous of all”
(13). Diego’s reading of David proves accurate once David leaves his apartment
determined to denounce he whom he deems to be involved in counterrevolutionary
activities. David’s reaction reiterates the fact that Diego is a much better reader than
David, who from their first encounter has been unable to engage in a more penetrating
reading of his counterpart, and thus is unable to reconcile Diego’s apparent incongruity
with the Revolutionary models leading him into a misinterpretation of Diego as a
counterrevolutionary.
After leaving the apartment, overtaken by the nagging voice of his conscience, or
rather, the internalized voice of revolutionary authority, David is resolved to denounce
Diego to the authorities. In other words, David comes to occupy the role of the wolf
momentarily, as an agent of the revolutionary authority, by threatening to consume Diego
and the space of sexual and intellectual liberty that he has been able to procure for
himself in the midst of a homogenizing revolutionary project. This parallel predation is
made clearer when Diego admits to David that his initial encounter with him was indeed
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a ruse orchestrated between German and himself as a bet to prove whether Diego could
sexually conquer David. Diego apologizes and expresses his regret and ironically
suggests that David, on the other hand, would never surreptitiously plot against him in
this way: “‘¿Me perdonas?’….¿Ya ves?, no soy tan bueno como crees. ¿Hubieras sido tú
capaz de una cosa así, a mis espaldas?’” (58). David, however, is unable to answer or
confess his own betrayal; he never discloses that when he left Diego’s apartment that first
time with a determination to absolve his conscience of the temporary deviation he
undertook, he ended up in the office of a bureaucrat to whom he went as far as
denouncing him as a counterrevolutionary agent: “‘El tipo es contrarrevolucionario’,
enfatice. ‘Tiene contactos con el agregado cultural de una embajada y le interesa influir a
los jovenes’” (31). As a result, David is enlisted as an agent to keep a close watch on
Diego’s activities.
From David’s initial impressions, Diego is the seductive force that threatens his
revolutionary formation; however, as revealed by Diego throughout the account, David
also poses for him a dangerous and perhaps more powerful seductive force. As Diego
will reveal, David has inadvertently been a captivating figure whose intimacy he has
desired from the first moment he saw him in the role of Torvaldo, four years prior to their
encounter at Coppelia—an alluring force that approximates the ideal form he’s been
searching since his first sexual encounter with the basketball player he stumbled upon in
the showers of his boarding school.
El hombre nuevo
If from an initial reading we identify Diego as the wolf of the story, a similar
reading posits David as the second character identified in the title. The title refers to
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Guevara’s concept of the new man, a concept that is adopted as part of the revolutionary
project in order to bring about the final stage of socialist development. The title suggests
the new man as Che Guevara himself, introducing him into the narrative indirectly,
although, interestingly, the story never mentions, or to be more precise, textualizes Che
Guevara: his name is completely left out of the pages of Paz’s story. Even when Diego is
planning his departure and plans to conceal items that he will smuggle out of the country
in a diplomatic parcel, he asks for the pictures of Camilo with Fidel, and of Martí (53), in
spite of the fact that much of the photographic iconography that reiterates the
Revolution’s narrative is produced around the figure of Guevara.
Guevara is nonetheless present as a specter in the story. He is present most
obviously in the figure of David. David is the New Man that Che Guevara and the
Revolution proposed as its ultimate project. He is the benefactor, the descendant, and the
surrogate of this other original New Man. It is in this role that Diego will seek to dialogue
with the Revolution’s foremost authority. In his eulogy for Guevara, Fidel Castro
compels Cuba to produce more men like him. In one of its most famous passages, Castro
officially pronounces Guevara as the model of the Revolution; the ideal being by which
all future Cubans should be molded under. He states,
Si queremos expresar como aspiramos que sean nuestros combatientes
revolucionarios, nuestros militantes, nuestros hombres, debemos decir sin
vacilación de ninguna índole: ¡Que sean como el Che! Si queremos
expresar como queremos que sean los hombres de las futuras
generaciones, debemos decir: ¡Que sean como el Che! Si queremos decir
como deseamos que se eduquen nuestros niños, debemos decir sin
vacilación: ¡Queremos que se eduquen en el espíritu del Che! Si queremos
un modelo de hombre, un modelo de hombre que no pertenece a este
tiempo, un modelo de hombre que pertenece al futuro, ¡de corazón digo
que ese modelo sin una sola mancha en su conducta, sin una sola mancha
en su actitud, sin una sola mancha en su actuación, ese modelo es el Che!
Si queremos expresar como deseamos que sean nuestros hijos, deben decir
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con todo el corazón de vehementes revolucionarios: ¡Queremos que sean
como el Che! (98).

David is that new generation of revolutionaries that have been brought up under the
model of Guevara. He is that child that has been reared to be like Che. As his Conscience
tells us, he is constantly reminding himself of this fact, that he is the son and product of
such revolutionary project. He chastises himself for disobeying this metaphorical parental
authority and progenitor in forgetting that the Revolution made it possible for him to
obtain the educational formation he is undergoing.
Castro’s response to the question of art under the Revolution in “Palabras a los
intelectuales” further illustrates the extent to which David is the intellectual product of a
revolutionary project. In response to the question of whether the Revolution will stunt art
by limiting its freedom, Castro defends the Revolution’s authority over artistic and
intellectual freedoms with the argument that quite to the contrary, it will produce truer
artists. He goes on to list the goals of the revolution in relation to art and intellectual
development of the Cuban citizen, among which includes a project to extend into the
forgotten spaces of Cuba, such as the one that David originates from, the educational
opportunities to anyone with the talent to develop to their fullest degree their artistic and
intellectual potential:
We must not forget this, and we must also not forget the thousands and
thousands of talents which must have been lost in the countryside and in
our cities for lack of conditions and opportunities to be developed. . . . We
are going to bring opportunity to all those intelligences. We are going to
create the conditions that will permit every artistic, literary, scientific, or
any other kind of talent to be developed. (16)

David is thus a direct beneficiary of these efforts. David is a descendant of these
revolutionary projects, of the efforts to create organic intellectuals devoid of bourgeoisie
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interests, a point he is reminded of when his conscience questions, “¿Ya se te va a olvidar
que no eres mas que un guajirito de mierda que la Revolución saco del fango y trajo a
estudiar a La Habana?” (my italics, 29).
It is precisely David in the role of the New Man that entices Diego to develop an
intimacy that although initially seemed purely sexual, is in truth intellectual. The sexual
relationship between both figures is substituted with an intellectual one; a consensual
agreement between both figures that will involve an interpenetration of ideas.
The identification of the New Man, although detected in David, as a surrogate of
Che Guevara is obfuscated just like the identity of the story’s wolf. One must also
consider Diego as the “new man” that the title refers to. He is the new man in the sense
that he exists on the peripheries of a Revolution that has become static, frozen into place
by ideals and projects that are in serious need of re-evaluation. He is a being unaccounted
for by the Revolution; a being that the revolution refuses to acknowledge into its project:
“‘Aquí no me quieren, para que darle mas vueltas a la noria, y a mi me gusta ser como
soy,’” (51). He is a figure that the Revolution has discarded, but as the story proposes,
one that had yet to be rediscovered and integrated into the national project. Diego
provides a serious critique of the Revolution’s totalizing projects while seeking a point of
integration as a new participant. Retamar’s “Caliban” which reiterates many of Castro’s
points in “Words to Intellectuals” marks the rupture that the story seeks to restore.
Diego’s narration of his first sexual encounter further emphasizes his position of
the “new man” of the story. In an attempt to establish an intimacy with David during their
first communion in the apartment, in order to break the silence between them, David
shares an intimate experience that is also meant to compensate for his own inadvertent
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intimate awareness of David, an offering of his own vulnerable formation in order to
bridge the distance between them. Diego offers David the opportunity to propose the
subject of their first conversation: “‘Propón tú el tema, no quiero imponerte nada’” (23);
however, akin to Rita’s moment of stage-fright, David insists on remaining reticent
prompting Diego to offer the story of his own transformative moment: “‘¿No se te ocurre
nada? Bueno, ya se, te contare como me hice maricón” (23). Diego shares with David the
story of his own origins, with parallels to David’s experience in Doll House, invoking yet
another relationship as a template from which their own relationship will be forged. The
event happened when Diego was twelve years old attending a Catholic boarding school,
when, looking for a match to light a candle, stumbles into the showers and onto the figure
of a naked basketball player:
Allí, bajo la ducha, desnudo, estaba uno de los basquetbolistas de la
escuela, todo enjabonado y cantando ‘Nosotros, que nos queremos tanto,
¿debemos separarnos?, no me preguntes más…’ ‘Era un muchacho
pelirrojo, de pelo ensortijado’, preciso con un suspiro, ‘con esa edad que
no son los catorce ni los quince. Un chorro de luz que entraba de lo alto,
mas digno de los rosetones de Notre Dame que de la claraboya de nuestro
convento de los Hermanos Maristas, lo iluminada por la espalda, sacando
tornasoles de su cuerpo salpicado de espuma.’ El muchacho estaba
excitado, añadió, tenia agarrada la verga y era a ella a quien le cantaba, y
Diego quedo fascinado, sin poder apartar la vista de aquel semidiós que lo
miraba y se dejaba mirar (24).

As David goes on to mention, without a single word spoken between them, the saintly
figure of the basketball player takes Diego: “lo volteo contra la pared y lo poseyó.” Diego
defines the experience as a sort of awakening, an abrupt rebirth: “‘Regresé al dormitorio
con la vela apagada . . . pero iluminado por dentro, y con el pálpito de haber comprendido
el mundo de sopetón’” (24) However, as we immediately learn, Diego’s story parallels
David’s own experience in Doll House. It is also a story of an unrealized, incomplete
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formation; it is a story violently disrupted leaving behind only the doubts of a possibility
that went unfulfilled. Diego returns two days later, “[para] prender otra vela,” only to
learn that the basketball player had died in an accident, kicked by a mule.
As Diego claims, the experience marked his transformation, one that also parallels
the transformation that the Revolutionary project aims to carry out within its national
subjects. Furthermore, this moment that marks the origin of his new being similarly
imposes on him a model, an ideal that is lost and leaves him with the unfulfilled and
possibly futile task to attempt to regain. In other words, Diego’s basketball player, lost
unexpectedly, is his own personal Che Guevara, an idealized being who can only be
approximated but never materialized completely again. Since that moment when he
learns of his death, Diego states, “‘desde entonces…mi vida ha consistido en eso, en la
búsqueda del ideal del basquetbolista,’” (25). Then he says of David, “‘Tú te le das un
aire,” (25). David is thus now the approximation of two versions of the ideal, the
Revolution’s New Man and Diego’s basketball player.
As mentioned, the story that Diego offers accounting for his origins narrows the
distance between David and Diego. Although, David remains on guard, unwilling to
reciprocate the dialogue, and Diego continues an attempt at sexually seducing David, it
posits nonetheless the two characters as parallel figures, rather than antagonists within the
narrative of the fairy tale. It is only under moments when both cease to occupy the space
of the predatory force that threatens to consume the other that an attempt at reaching their
own ideals can be facilitated.
Just as Diego is compelled to return to the basketball player that awakened a new
consciousness within him, David will return to Diego’s apartment and undergo a similar
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transformation. The pair eventually forms a symbiotic relationship sustained by an
intellectual intimacy that substitutes and mimics the sexual one that Diego initially
proposes. Diego becomes the master (maestro) that intervenes in the development of
David into a more sophisticated artist, and just as importantly, a more complete version
of the New Man. The moment comes when David eventually feels comfortable enough to
share with Diego his own literary work: “Diego insistía en leer mis escritos, y cuando por
fin me atreví a entregarle un texto, me hizo esperar dos semanas sin hacer comentarios,”
(38). Diego eventually returns the work with a critique of his literary style, and looks to
rectify his abuse of an unnatural language stubbornly modeled on the works included
within the official revolutionary literary magazines (38). From that moment forward,
David states, “[Diego] tomo en sus manos las riendas de mi educación,” assigning him
literary works ignored or outside the bounds of the Revolution, including those deemed
perverse to the revolutionary project: “‘Este lo forras con una cubierta de la revista Verde
Olivo, y no lo dejes al alcance de los curiosos: es el El monte, ¿me entiendes?’” (38) The
reading assignments that Diego gives David are all in preparation for what is to culminate
in an eroticized literary climax of sorts. As Diego explains: “Y aquí esta, pero esto si que
es para después, todo lo que hacemos no es mas que una preparación para llegar a ella, la
obra del Maestro, poesía y prosa. Ven, ponle la mano encima, acaríciala, absorbe su
savia” (38, my italics).
David reciprocates Diego’s teachings by serving as a surrogate of the New Man
and providing him with the dialogue that the Revolution has denied him. As David
reveals, Diego’s interests in David are to a large extent borne out of a desire to converse
with the New Man, and David, as a incarnation of such ideal, offers Diego the possibility
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of what has up to that point been an unrequited desire, substituting that of the lost
basketball player. David wants to produce an approximation to the Revolution in order to
verify whether the concept of the New Man, in which he has an invested interest in, has
merely been a socialist fantasy, or can be upheld as an honest revolutionary value:
Yo era su ultima carta, el ultimo que le quedaba por probar antes de
decidir que todo era una mierda y que Dios se había equivocado y Carlos
Marx mucho mas, que eso del hombre nuevo, en quien el depositaba tantas
esperanzas, no era mas que poesía, una burla, propaganda socialista,
porque si había algún hombre nuevo en La Habana no podía ser uno de
esos forzudos y bellísimos de los Comandos Especiales, sino alguien
como yo, capaz de hacer el ridículo, y el se lo tenia que topar un día y
llevarlo a la guarida, brindarle te y conversar, no estaba siempre pensando
en lo mismo, como me explicaría en otra de sus peroratas (27).

The story is a proposition for dialogue, for finding the fissures within the
monolithic discourse of the revolution for a more democratic space that will allow
Diego’s integration into the national project. Diego detects in David the possibility of
such fissure, (a fissure that is confirmed when David reveals the incongruity between his
spirit and his conscience). As Diego tells him, “me he sentido distinto conversando
contigo. Conversar es importante, dialogar mucho mas. No tengas miedo de volver, por
favor…. Creo que nos vamos a entender, aunque seamos diferentes” (27-28).
The acknowledgement of dialogue however entails the recognition of an
individuality that the Revolution has disregarded as perverse in its drive toward
homogeneity. Diego’s proposition for dialogue and the recognition of the heterogeneity
that it entails are challenging to David, as indicated by his initial unwillingness to engage
and his immediate and sudden departure after Diego explains that his own individual
position lies outside the bounds of the Revolution:
‘Yo se que la Revolución tiene cosas buenas, pero a mi me han pasado
otras muy malas, y además sobre algunas tengo ideas propias. Quizás este
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equivocado, fíjate. Me gustaría discutirlo, que me oyeran, que me
explicaran. Estoy dispuesto a razonar, a cambiar de opinión’ (28).

Furthermore, whereas David interprets Diego’s homosexuality as a perversion of a
natural sexual order, and his intellectual individuality as a perversion of the Revolution,
Diego raises the point that a homogenizing national discourse is a form of perversion in
itself when he exclaims to David: “‘Pero nunca he podido conversar con un
revolucionario. Ustedes solo hablan con ustedes. Les importa bien poco lo que los demás
pensemos’” (28). This a point validated soon after by David’s Conscience; the
introspective moment that we witness David undergoing after leaving Diego’s apartment
is merely the chastising voice of the Revolution, and an exercise in redundancy. It is once
again the poor self-critical monologue that he was forced to improvise in that limited
rendition of Doll House. And the fact that David is compelled to denounce Diego merely
for his request for dialogue further reveals the incomplete formation of this New Man.
However, as mentioned above, Diego intervenes in order to bring about a truer version of
the New Man, substituting Che Guevara as the means through which the New Man can
be brought about.
As mentioned earlier, Senel Paz’s story never names Che Guevara yet he is
obviously incorporated into the narrative through the title’s reference to the concept of
the new man. The work, however, conjures him in other ways as well. Throughout his
narrative David is subjected to the penetrating gazes of others, primarily from David, as
well as from Ismael, the bureaucrat to whom he denounces the former. The repeated
references to these penetrating gazes force us to gaze upon the figure of Che Guevara in
turn. Guevara persists through the iconographic image derived from the Alberto Korda
photograph, an image that captures a gaze that is the focus of much of its discourse.
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Mario Benedetti, for example, describes it as infused with life in spite of the decades that
have passed since his death: “sin embargo los ojos incerrables del che / miran como si no
pudieran no mirar / asombrados tal vez de que al mando no entienda / que treinta años
después sigue bregando / dulce y tenaz por la dicha del hombre” (“Che 1997”). Jon Lee
Anderson’s biography of Che Guevara, similarly draws our attention to Guevara’s gaze
making much of its “implacability” as well, as he describes the moment from which the
iconic image derived:
As Fidel spoke to the crowd from a balcony, flanked by the other
revolutionary leaders, a young Cuban photographer named Alberto Korda
found a good vantage point from which to take pictures. Finding Che in
his lens, Korda focused and was stunned at the expression on Che’s face.
It was one of absolute implacability. He snapped, and the photo soon went
around the world, eventually becoming the famous poster image that
would adorn so many college dorm rooms. In it, Che appears as the
ultimate revolutionary icon, his eyes seeming to stare boldly into the
future, his very face symbolizing a virile embodiment of outrage at social
injustice (my italics 465).

Throughout the narrative David is haunted by a series of intense and unsettling gazes.
During their first encounter David is unsettled by Diego’s unwavering gaze at various
moments, including the “libidinous gaze” that he describes above (11), and again another
one that compels him to plot his flight from the encounter: “se quedo mirándome.
Empecé a contar: cuando llegara a cincuenta me ponía de pie y me iba pa’l carajo,” (14).
In the office of Ismael, David is again subjected to a similar unsettling gaze. He states,
“Tenía como Diego, la mirada clara y penetrante, como si ese día los de miradas claras y
penetrantes se hubieran puesto de acuerdo para joderme,” (30). And further, “Me miro
con su mirada clara y penetrante y un escalofrío me recorrió el espinazo porque me
pareció adivinar lo que iba a decir” (31). Diego eventually learns to discern the difference
between the distinct gazes from his two counterparts, as he states:
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Lo que diferenciaba las miradas claras y penetrantes de Diego e Ismael es
que la de Diego se limitaba a señalarte las cosas, y la de Ismael te exigía
que, si no te gustaban, comenzaras a actuar allí mismo, para cambiarlas.
Es por esto que era el mejor de los tres (48).

David seems to prefer Ismael’s penetrating stares because they are more akin to that of
Che’s. They are productive, they compel action, they seem to be charged with the virility
that Anderson denotes in Che’s bold stare into the future. Diego’s stares, on the other
hand, seem to merely insist on dialogue as opposed to action. However, unrecognized to
David, they are charged with a productive virility of their own. It is through the dialogue
that these gazes have demanded throughout their relationship that David emerges as the
New Man. As David recalls one of Diego’s final intense stares, he states, “Un dia se
quedo (te quedaste, Diego, no voy a olvidar esa mirada tuya), mirándome con una
intensidad especial” (55). Within the parentheses David sustains the dialogue with Diego
in spite of his absence at the point of the story’s narration; David has become yet another
haunting specter in the narrative, in exile as David narrates his story. From this stare
Diego posits David a series of pressing questions, “‘Dime la verdad, David,’ me
pregunto, ‘tú me quieres?’” (55). Unsatisfied with David’s equivocal response, Diego
presses further, “‘No hablo de aprecio, sino de amor entre amigos. Por favor, no le
tengamos mas miedo a las palabras,’” (55). It is at this moment that David is compelled
to demonstrate his transformation in spite of his inability to express it in words:
Era también lo que yo había querido decir, ¿no?, pero tengo esa dificultad,
y para que estuviera seguro de mi afecto y de que, en alguna medida, yo
era otro, había cambiado en el curso de nuestra amistad, era mas el yo que
siempre había querido ser, añadí: ‘Te invito mañana a almorzar en El
Conejito’ (55).

David reaffirms this transformation yet again as he leaves Diego’s apartment one last
time and along the path he is traversed by a group of young uniformed scouts marching in
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single file, (another generation within the revolutionary project molded in the cast of Che
Guevara). David then casts his gaze upon one particular scout, who upon being noticed,
disrupts the uniformity of the group and responds to David’s gaze by sticking out his
tongue at him, to which David responds,
Y entonces le dije (le dije, no le prometí), que al próximo Diego que se
atravesara en mi camino lo defendería a capa y espada, aunque nadie me
comprendiera, y que no me iba a sentir mas lejos de mi Espíritu y de mi
Conciencia por eso, sino al contrario, porque si entendía bien las cosas,
eso era luchar por un mundo mejor para ti, pionero, y para mi (59).

Diego is thus now the complete and cohesive new man. It is through Diego’s intimacy
that David attains the stage of the Revolution’s ultimate project, synthesizing, as Castro
notes of Che, an extraordinary spirit with a heightened consciousness (“Vigilia”). David
ends his narrative with a final gesture in tribute to Diego, returning to Coppelia and
ordering strawberry ice cream, when there was chocolate available (59).
El bosque – navigating through spaces beyond the bounds of the revolution
The third element toward which the title of Paz’s story directs our reading is
space. Again, the identification of the metaphorical forest that it indicates becomes
ambivalent. Throughout his development David comes to occupy a series of physical
spaces, which are initially forests to him marked by an unfamiliarity that he eventually
overcomes and in doing so transforms these spaces into sites that mark and explain his
being as he acquires a different conceptual relationship to them and of himself.
Coppelia is initially a type of forest for David, as it is the site of an unprecedented
and threatening encounter. It is worth recalling that David first meets Diego in Coppelia
on a day marked by the possibility of fluidity: “Nos conocimos precisamente aquí, en
Coppelia, un día de esos en que uno no sabe si cuando termine la merienda va a perderse
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calle arriba o calle abajo” (10). Coppelia offers one of the small fissures within the
Revolution that allows for the possibility of dialogue, for the opening of democratic
spaces and relations. Coppelia offers Diego the opportunity to breach David’s comfort
zone, sitting himself in front of him uninvited to initiate the dialogue that he has been
desiring for some time. However, it must be noted that Coppelia is nonetheless an
institution created by the Revolution; it is a product of the overarching revolutionary
project (EcuRed). Although Coppelia offers the possibility for dialogue as a limited
democratic space, it is still permeated by the Revolution, as noted by the official slogans
painted on the walls (Figure 2.11). Yet, Coppelia, even in its function as an extension of
the revolutionary project, is not exactly the Museo de la Revolución, to which it is worth
comparing.
As illustrated, the Museo de la Revolución houses and performs the epic narrative
of the Revolution within its walls, echoes of which find their ways onto the very walls of
Coppelia, and those of many other public spaces in Havana. However, Coppelia is a
flexible and fluid living space. Even if the revolutionary rhetoric has permeated the
spaces of Coppelia, it is an open space that offers, albeit limited, the possibility for
dialogue, unlike the Museo de la Revolución whose function is to reiterate the nation’s
values through a perpetual performance of its epic narrative—one is merely a witness, a
spectator of the totalizing uncontestable narrative of the Cuban Revolution. In Coppelia,
one is not merely a spectator or a subject of the nation’s effort to instill and forge national
habits, but a participant. Diego even goes on to claim that it is the only project that the
Revolution has gotten right: “‘Es lo único que hacen bien en este país. Ahorita los rusos
se antojan que les den la receta, y habrá que dárselas’” (13).
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David, however, transforms Coppelia into his own personal memorial; it becomes
the site from which he can conjure and celebrate the memory of Diego, as noted by the
visit that elicits the narrative at the beginning. In this new function that David has
assigned to the ice cream pavilion, “La Catedral del Helado,” similarly to the Museo,
becomes a sacred and monumental space in which to ritualize and celebrate the events of
his own formation—to revisit the point of origin, inhabit it temporally and physically,
and habituate his new man(hood). The breakfast at el Conejito, through which David
asserts to Diego his new being is followed up by a visit to Coppelia: “Terminamos con el
postre en Coppelia” (56). The narrative ends with David’s ritualizing his new self during
his return to Coppelia through a gesture that memorializes and pays his gratitude to his
friend: “Y quise cerrar el capitulo agradeciéndole a Diego, de algún modo, todo lo que
había hecho por mi, y lo hice viniendo a Coppelia y pidiendo un helado como este.
Porque había chocolate, pero pedí fresa” (59). Coppelia serves as the site that frames
David’s own revolutionary evolution; it becomes his own personal monument embodying
the narrative of his own origins and triumphs, just as the Revolution has infused what was
once the Presidential Palace, the site of failed relation with its national subjects, with a
new point of origin that celebrates the project to revise and correct that past.
Diego’s apartment, where the majority of the narrative unfolds, is similarly a
forest to David during his initial visit, and a space in an interesting juxtaposition with the
Museo de la Revolución. Whereas David eventually comes to exert a conceptual control
over Coppelia, Diego’s apartment is similarly his own private space over which he exerts
a personal control dictated and arranged in accordance with an expression of his own
intellectual tastes. During his initial visit David is unsettled by a space that is foreign to
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him—its furnishings, sounds (music), inhabitants (the sculptures of saints, the specter of
John Donne), ideas (books), and nourishments (foreign liquors) are unprecedented and
strange. David states, “Aquel día casi todo el espacio lo ocupaban santos de madera,
todos con unas caras que deprimían a cualquiera…. estoy en el centro de la guarida,
rodeado de santos con dolor de estomago y convencido de haberme equivocado de
lugar,” (20-21). Then David offers him a seat “en la butaca de John Donne” who as
David soon learns, “era un poeta ingles totalmente desconocido entre nosotros, y que el
[era] el único que poseía una traducción de su obra,” (22). Diego’s music collection is
equally foreign to David to the former’s amusement: “‘Celina Gonzalez no se quien es’,
dije con toda sinceridad y Diego se doblo de la risa. La gente de La Habana cree que
porque uno es del interior se pasa la vida en guateques campesinos.”
Although initially an outsider and a spectator, David eventually attains a
familiarity with Diego’s private space becoming one of its own natural inhabitants,
adopting Diego’s conception of it – “El apartamento, que en lo sucesivo llamare La
guarida, pues no escapaba de esa costumbre que tienen los habaneros de bautizar sus
viviendas cuando son minúsculas y viven solos” (20) – and navigating through it with a
comfort and ease that affirms the intimacy developed between them – “Yo andaba
descalzo por la guarida, me quitaba la camisa y abría el refrigerador a mi antojo, acto este
que en los provincianos y los tímidos expresa, mejor que ningún otro, que se ha llegado a
un grado absoluto de confianza y relajamiento” (37).
As the name suggests, the apartment functions as a refuge from the revolutionary
project, which Diego resists mostly due to his artistic sensibilities. And, although the
revolutionary slogans have not permeated the private space as they have Coppelia, David
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nonetheless infuses the apartment with the Revolution. In Fresa y chocolate, David
introduces into the apartment the image of Che, claiming a space within Diego’s
monument and altar to his intellectual heroes.
The apartment functions as a museum of sorts, outside the bounds of the official
program of revolutionary art, housing a different collection, invested in different Cuban
narratives, those either forgotten or deliberately excluded as contrary to the revolutionary
project. Diego functions as the curator of his own personal museum, housing a collection
in accordance to his individual, private tastes. However, Diego is also a forgotten cultural
patron and historian of the spaces beyond the apartment, as he is the keeper of several
important archives of a forgotten Havana. Diego’s la guarida is a refuge from a system
hostile to a different conception of Havana and Cuban culture, of which he safeguards
some of its important archives. However, from the apartment, the pair will also plot to
recapture, even if only symbolically, or through the space of imagination or performance,
that lost city.
Paul Julian Smith’s analysis of Fresa y chocolate in his work Vision Machines
proves relevant to this examination of space and the museum as it pertains to Tomas
Gutierrez Alea’s adaptation of Senel Paz’s story. As the chapter of his examination of
Fresa y chocolate indicates, “Cinema as Guided Tour,” Smith argues that the film offers
a carefully orchestrated “guided tour” of the interpellation of the homosexual subject’s
incorporation into the national project, a tour that, as evidenced by the film’s
international success, is not only directed at a domestic audience but appeals to an
international “art-house” audience intrigued by a form of “cultural tourism” (81).
According to Smith, the “guided tour” offered up by the film derives from Gutierrez
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Alea’s recourse to a “naturalist” style symptomatic of a “nostalgia for the studio” (87),
the emblematic site of the classical period of cinema that would be “impossible to revive
today” (87). Smith faults Gutierrez Alea’s adaptation for displaying an “unusual timidity
[in] its mode of representation” (82) by recurring to the narrative form of Hollywood
cinema, a feature that he finds surprising given Gutierrez Alea’s innovative and
experimental style displayed in other works and by what is elaborated in his own
theoretical propositions (83). Smith says of Gutierrez Alea that “the committed director
assimilates or incorporates bourgeois techniques, using them to confront spectators with
an image of themselves immersed in the world and thus provoke in them a crisis of
consciousness” (83).
Smith elaborates extensively on the significances and limitations of the privileged
first-person perspective through which the film is narrativized. He argues that the guided
tour occurs as such because the director, through his own identification with the
heterosexual protagonist as his “alter-ego witness” (94), privileges David’s “specular”
position in the film, comparing it to Visconti’s Death in Venice in which “history is seen
only through the eyes of a privileged witness-narrator, who bears the look of the director
himself, the former serving as the narcissistic object of the latter,” (92). It is through the
director’s use of David as the heterosexual lens that the story is framed, unraveled, and
made sense of. David is the privileged heterosexual witness through which the audience,
as spectators along the guided tour, witnesses the negotiation of the homosexual subject’s
incorporation into the Revolutionary project. As Smith puts it, “Fresa y chocolate uses a
privileged witness figure, re-marked for art-house audiences as the specular object of the
auteur (David—Gutierrez Alea) to render a critique of the environment both inhabit.”
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(93). The limitation to Gutierrez Alea’s technique is that the film “fails to address the
structural reasons for revolutionary homophobia, reinscribing a properly political
question in terms of the conflict between individuals” (93), a point he illustrates earlier
with clear precision:
The necessity of Fresa y chocolate’s naturalism thus becomes clear: by
narrativizing explicitly, if discreetly, the oppression of homosexuals in
Cuba, the film stages a domesticated mise-en-scene in which the
unspeakable horrors of the other scene (out of shot, behind the door) are
allowed to emerge into visibility, but only on condition that they do not
trouble the heterosexual spectator. Rather the film provides a picturesque
alibi for his look, which is not returned to him as if in a mirror. It follows
that while Diego is allowed to invoke UMAP camps, David can simply
dismiss them as an ‘error’ of the Revolution. The incorporation of
homosexuality into a preexisting concept of nationality is thus stage-
managed in such a way as to avoid the contemplation or modification of
either that nationality or the heterosexual masculinity from which it is
inseparable (88).

Smith’s critique of the film as a “guided tour” suggests that Fresa y chocolate
replicates a museum experience that is actually within the official paradigms of the
Revolution, rather than offer a space outside of it, as I have suggested of Senel Paz’s
story. It is important to note some significant distinctions between Fresa y chocolate and
its source, “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo,” because although the latter seems to
similarly uphold the heterosexual perspective as the privileged vantage point through
which the story is materialized, as Smith suggests, (it is after all David who is narrating
the events of the story), it would be hasty to dismiss it as occlusive to the homosexual
narrative that Smith is unable to detect in Gutierrez Alea’s rendition. Smith finds in Paz’s
original story a space for a homosexuality that Gutierrez Alea seems to deliberately omit
in his film. He states that “At first Paz seems simply to prefigure in literary terms the
visual regime of Gutierrez Alea: the first-person narration spoken by David ensures that
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masculine behavior and its other are held rigorously separate as subject and object,
restively” (91). However, for Smith, the “equation” between Diego and Ismael made in
Paz’s work “suggests, discreetly and ironically, a possibility unspeakable in Fresa y
chocolate:…a gay relation between masculine-identified men who are nonetheless fully
and invisibly integrated into the revolutionary establishment” (91). I would, however,
argue that Paz’s story goes further than merely proffering “discreetly” a space for an
otherwise “unspeakable” homosexuality, and actually offers the queer narrative that
Smith is unable to find in either work.
As Smith has suggests, Fresa y chocolate guarantees that the lens through which
we witness the spectacle is a masculine one, negating a queer or feminine perspective as a
possible narrative point of elocution. In fact, he argues, the film equates the homosexual
subject with the feminine in which one can easily but exclusively substitute the other
insofar as they are the service of the development of the masculine protagonist (89).
Smith writes,
Gay men and straight women are thus equated in their emotionalism
(Nancy is sentimental, suicidal, superstitious), but they are not allowed to
occupy the same place, must always substitute for one another in their
attempts to procure the affection, indeed the attention, of the straight man
for whose sentimental education they can only be vehicles: Nancy claims
that she ‘wants David to know love through her’ (89).

Senel Paz’s story, devoid of prominent female characters, initially appears to
provide the source of this rigid paradigm. After all, Diego has come to substitute Rita by
playing David’s opposite in what we can consider a re-staging of Doll House played out
by their friendship, as well as assuming the feminine role in the Lezamian supper that he
stages for David. In both dramatizations of these earlier works that Paz engages
intertextually, Diego is not only substituting for the female counterpart, but assuming the
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role of the female and queer artist as well—the female director of Doll House and the
maestro Lezama. In other words, he is both supporting character and artist/director in a
re-staging of previous works at the service of the development of a male protagonist.
Paz’s story, however, reveals that Diego is a much more successful counterpart and
director in helping successfully realize the artistic-political ambition of the earlier
rendition of Doll House, and additionally in successfully disseminating Lezama’s work
rescuing him from censorship and obscurity in that David now seeks to reproduce the
scene for his friend Ismael. Nonetheless, as Smith rightly points out of Gutierrez Alea’s
adaptation, the filmic rendition remains largely monotonous leading him to conclude that
it precludes a possible unity between “gay men and women” that would only be possible
through “a first-person feminine-identified narrative, in which Diego and Nancy might
assume the position of photological mastery so effortlessly and unthinkingly granted
David by Fresa y chocholate’s narrative structure, cinematography and editing” (89-90).
I would like to suggest Diego’s origin story (the encounter with the basketball player) as
a moment that offers, albeit temporarily, the gay narrative that Fresa y chocolate negates.
Despite Smith’s assessment of Fresa y chocolate as a rather formulaic and hetero-
normative proposal, he is able to find within it spaces that offer a new reading of the film.
Smith notes that as a postmodernist work the film displays an overabundance of the
visible, from which surplus, or “cinematic props,” one finds residual openings to a new
reading “not restricted by the limits of its technique” (83). Most importantly, he focuses
on the parallel between the sunflower that is passed around throughout the film and the
unmarked intertextuality in Paz’s original story of Lezama’s text, voiced by both
characters at the Lezamian supper without the use of quotations to signal their original
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source. Smith interprets this occurrence in Paz’s text as a “defiant and discreet assertion
of an uncontrollable intertextuality (of a citation unrestricted by quotation marks) [that]
raises the possibility of a promiscuous flow of text and of bodies one unbounded by the
conventions of classical realism or ‘democratic communism’” (92). Its equivalent in the
film is found in the repeated exchange of the sunflower “from hand to hand, room to
room, man to woman, and straight to gay…[which] seems to suggest that promiscuous
flow of text and bodies…in Paz’s insistent but unacknowledged citation from Lezama”
(96). The significance of this occurrence to this reading of both works lies in the fact that
Paz’s and Diego’s appropriation of the maestro’s work de-emphasizes the authority of the
original text, or the notion of authorship altogether by shifting its emphasis from a notion
of artistic originality to performance, or reiteration, in a way that is liberating and allows
for the queer narrative to surface, even if it is displaced and enunciated through David.
Paz/Diego’s “plagiarism” ensures the continued dissemination of the maestro’s work,
thus we can interpret Diego’s appropriation of Lezama’s text for his own immediate
purposes not as a violation, but in service of the original as a memorialization, ensuring
its persistence even if in its rendition the original is slightly distorted. David can thus be
similarly rendered an interlocutor to Diego’s own narrative ensuring its own permanence
despite his subsequent exile.
The narration of Diego’s transformative story, of his rebirth at the hands of the
basketball player, is omitted in Gutierrez Aleas film. However, as I indicated above, that
moment is key to Paz’s story, illustrating that albeit parallel to David’s formation, it is
nonetheless a transformative moment unique to Diego. One could argue that David has
appropriated and reformulated Diego’s experience into the latter’s origin story, framing it
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in terms that reflect his own sense of being and formation. However, like the appropriated
scene from Lezama’s work, Diego’s origin story is also a joint performance, it is dually
narrated by David and Diego, whose voice appears through quotations and in whose
words the experience is interpreted as a transformative moment: “‘Regresé al dormitorio
con la vela apagada…pero iluminado por dentro y con el palpito de haber comprendido el
mundo de sopeton’” (24). Furthermore, for Paz, this notion of originality, of original
point of artistic/narrative elocution is of secondary importance to the assurance of a
continued performance of such narrative. In other words, it is not perception/perspective
that is privileged but reiteration, rendered as a creative quality necessary to sustain a
work beyond its initial point of creation. Thus, reminiscent of Alea’s seminal work,
Memorias del subdesarollo, the privileged character is not the passive eyewitness, but the
character of action, in this case, the one capable of orchestrating and delivering
subsequent performances of an original work.
Paz introduces appropriation as an aesthetic value necessary in reinvigorating and
giving permanence to past works. From the performance of Doll House in Las Villas, to
the Lezamian breakfast, to the new man’s forced introspection and subsequent revision,
Paz’s story is a series of appropriated texts. Appropriation as a reinvigorating force is
illustrated by Diego’s formation at the hands of the basketball player—“lo tomo…y lo
poseyo” (24). And, just as Diego has appropriated Lezama’s text for his own purposes,
ensuring that the Lezamian supper is replicated, he has similarly appropriated the New
Man. He has taken the New Man and re-enacted within him a performance that displays a
broader and more relevant appeal that the original did not have, as David’s drama teacher
says of the improvised rendition of Doll House (17). Thus, Paz’s story values second
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performances, not in their faithful rendition of the original but in their possibility for
endless reconfigurations, that is, in the propensity for fortuitous accidents that allows for
new readings.

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Chapter 3:
Nuestro Americano:
Che Guevara and the Epic of Latin America
The period of independence in Latin America witnesses the emergence of an
intellectual tradition of imagining Latin America as a singular political and cultural
entity. Beginning with Simón Bolívar, and reiterated at later points by others such as José
Martí, the notion of a Latin American congruent whole has been an alluring and enduring
one. With this long tradition in mind, the chapter examines the figure of Ernesto “Che”
Guevara as one of the more recent instances through whom this notion has been
contemplated, and reformulated as the epic narrative to this imagined and desired Latin
American whole. The chapter focuses on Walter Salles’s film The Motorcycle Diaries as
a revision of Guevara’s own travel journals that reconfigures Ernesto Guevara as the
realization of the continent’s heroic model based on the terms delineated by the
aforementioned intellectual tradition.
The chapter at hand analyzes the most notable pronouncements of this notion of a
Latin American singularity in order to understand under which terms each proposal is
sustained, and in turn to help explain the prominence of Che Guevara in an age in which
his political projects have been deemed irrelevant by many, but in which he nevertheless
remains a prolific political, social, and cultural icon. As a point of origin to this tradition,
the chapter surveys Bolívar’s expressed desire for a common Latin American political
unity that would facilitate the independence of the region from Spain and in turn initiate
its modernity; José Martí’s call for Latin American unity in light of the rise of U.S.
imperialism; and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s renewed call for unity under the identity
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of Caliban in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution in order illustrate the discourses that
inform Salles’s revision of Che Guevara. The chapter’s general aim is to demonstrate that
the persistence of this Pan-American icon can in part be attributed to its configuration
into the epic narrative of a Latin American utopia.
The persistence of Ernesto “Che” Guevara has sparked a debate regarding the
relevance of the Latin American revolutionary in an age in which his political doctrine
has been “debunked,” as his critics contend. Detractors argue that his continuous appeal
is the product of a general ignorance amongst his followers who fail to recognize that the
“real Che Guevara” was a murderer, a “killing machine” as Latin American economist
Alvaro Vargas Llosa argues.
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Many others attribute the prevalence of the icon to mere
Cold War nostalgia or kitsch. The political left has similarly lamented the proliferation of
the icon likewise citing a lack of awareness of the true Che Guevara by those who don his
image and thereby reduce him to an object of consumption. Mario Benedetti’s poem
“Che 1997,” for example, is an elegy lamenting what is in a sense the second death of
Che Guevara. What I would like to underscore is that these debates make clear that what
is at hand is a struggle for control of the meaning of Che Guevara (as symbol), where
some look to contest its power by interjecting it with a separate set of signifiers and
others looking to restore what is believed to be its essential, authentic, unadulterated
meaning. In treating the subject at hand I do not strive for a single static and authoritative
meaning to Che Guevara but look to approach the subject with an awareness of the
multiplicity of meanings and functions it holds, even when the present version of Che
Guevara I am examining, the one realized through the epic form, is itself marked by

107
See Vargas Llosa, “The Killing Machine” in The New Republic. 18 July 2005.
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univocality, or monoglossia. In other words, my examination of the Guevara of The
Motorcycle Diaries is interested in understanding the terms along which this particular
version of Che is formulated and not in measuring it against an authoritative and static
version, if one existed. Furthermore, although I will be contrasting the film with
Guevara’s own narration of the events it depicts, I do so only to illustrate that the revision
that Salles performs is to reformulate Che Guevara as the continent’s epic hero.
As we have seen, Guevara persists today in large part through the epic form, that
is, Che Guevara has been configured into and disseminated as an epic, a malleable form
that helps sustain his relevance in spite of the 45 years that have passed since his death. It
will be necessary to briefly re-examine the epic form in order to understand how Che
Guevara has been configured as such, and just as importantly, to demonstrate that it has
not rendered him inactive, marbleized and “emptied of fire” as Mario Benedetti’s poem,
“Che 1997,” bemoans, but just the opposite, given him relevance to ongoing concerns. As
Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, one of the more recent installments to this epic cycle,
will demonstrate, Che Guevara continues to be a powerful and active medium through
which present geopolitical questions can be debated.
As has been illustrated, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorizing on the novel has provided
the most recognizable as well as the most debated definition of the epic. His examination
of the novel via its juxtaposition with the epic has led to an understanding of the latter in
terms of its relation to the nation and other similar entities—as a literary form through
which communities are defined, its members identified, and its official values
promulgated. In sum, the epic can be understood as a narrative form invested in the
creation, affirmation, or reiteration of a given group identity, be it national, regional,
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religious, etc., through the depiction of a conflict, most typically of a military nature,
between representatives of that community and an external and undesirable other.
Through the narration of such “historical” conflict and the “exceptional” figures that
emerge from within that conflict, the community is defined: its habits, values, and
purpose. The epic hero is for the most part the utmost representative of that community as
it is in him that the qualities that are meant to define the community reside in their purest
or most heightened forms.
Bakhtin’s analysis and definition of the form must be carefully scrutinized as in
his attempt to define the novel as the antithesis to the epic he sacrifices a more complex
view of the latter that would otherwise recognize its capacity for heteroglossia, or
dialogue. Although, as Bakhtin suggests, the epic form strives for univocality, or
monoglossia, its realization relies in large part on the participation of an audience, reader,
or spectator that would consequently give rise to multiple and at times contradictory
variants, thereby germinating the possibility of heteroglossia that Bakhtin’s believes it
excludes. This audience-epic engagement and all that it entails is most apparent within an
oral tradition. An analysis of the oral epic provides a strong foundation upon which to
examine the notion of other non-literary epic “performances,” including those realized
through visual media, such as film. Millman Parry’s and Albert Lord’s discoveries of the
intricacies of oral poetry, as well as Walter J. Ong’s comprehensive examination of
orality versus literacy allows us to contemplate the idea of the non-verbal epic that
emerges and continues to thrive in an age marked by the preponderance of non-literary
expressive technologies.
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In its earliest manifestations, the epic was strictly an oral form. As the research of
Parry and Lord demonstrates, in cultures without literacy, epic poems are constructed and
mediated through orality, without recourse to many of the functions (as well as
limitations) that are only available with writing. Their work reveals the intricate
mechanisms involved in the composition of epic poetry, in which bards are not mere
performers reproducing a fixed and memorized text but are actively involved in the
construction of the story. The stories that they construct vary not only from singer to
singer, but with each performance as well, as varying conditions, such as the mood of the
singer or the preferences of a particular audience on a given day, affect what story is
performed and how. What I would like to underscore here is the multiplicity of variants
that a specific epic could have, as singer, audience, and context determine a specific
production that would very likely never be reproduced in the same way again. The epic of
Che Guevara involves a similar moment of performance, however relying more heavily
on the role of the audience, more precisely the spectator, for its fulfillment. It is only
through the advent of writing that the notion of a fixed and authoritative text emerges,
and variations are looked at with suspicion. But just as writing absorbed and transformed
the epic, eliding the functions inherent in oral composition, more recent expressive
technologies, such as television and film, have equally adapted and transformed the form.
Similar to early epics, and those from primarily oral cultures today, the epic of
Che Guevara is not located within one specific text but exists through a network of
accounts on his life, including those he himself left behind. Walter Salles’s film is one of
the more recent contributions to the epic cycle of Che Guevara, as it retells a particular
period of Guevara’s life, one that we can find in his own writings, but at the same time,
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reformulates (and to a great extent amends) it so as to render Guevara as a viable model
through which to understand, reiterate and forge a sense of Latin American cohesion.
Salles’s film recurs to a Latin American, specifically a Martían tradition that posits Che
as the realization of the ideal Latin American, or nuestro americano, one that embodies
the virtues that promote the region’s true utopian state—defined by unity, congruity, self-
awareness, and self-worth—while eviscerating the vices that inhibit it.
The odyssey in The Motorcycle Diaries serves as the film’s symbolic and visual
representation of a possible Latin American singularity and cohesion in that it proposes
that the figure of Che Guevara is born out of an intimate and physical encounter with the
continent, eventually shedding an identity marked by class and nationality for a broader
pan-American one. However, the film drives its point most effectively with its
engagement of notable discourses on Latin American identity and unity and positing Che
Guevara as the epic hero in the endeavor to bring about such utopia. From the outset, the
journey begins with a symbolic dismissal of the racist and divisive ideology that emerged
during the early stages of nationhood, epitomized by the figure of Domingo Sarmiento,
who characterized the Americas as the battleground between the forces of “civilization,”
represented by all that is European, and “barbarism,” encapsulating all native and hybrid
forms of the continent. For Sarmiento, the only desirable course for his nation was to
emulate Western European models of government and thought, highlighting the
“progress” and “modernity” of the United States as the prime example of a successful
nation in the Americas. In an effort to realize a second “American success” in South
America along these lines, early Argentinean national projects resulted in campaigns to
exterminate the indigenous population, complemented by an immigration strategy to
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import Western Europeans in order to “whiten” the nation and bestow it the necessary
racial qualities needed for a nation striving for modernity and progress. In Salles’s film,
Che Guevara’s trek into the rural landscape constitutes an overt dismissal of his nation’s
forefather for whom the rural was the site of barbarism and the city the only site upon
which to realize the project of modernity.
The film’s most discernable message is inspired by previous notable figures of the
continent that at one time expressed the desire or even implored Latin Americans to
abandon any sense of national differences and unite under one political and cultural
identity. The idea of the young Guevara having been made through the intimate
interaction with the continent resonates in interesting ways with those visions of Simón
Bolívar and José Martí who called upon Latin Americans to build their nations, societies,
and governments with the materia prima of their own particular contexts, rather than
impose imported models of government. The film is in large part the epistemological
journey of the young Ernesto Guevara, who leaves the classroom with three courses short
of completing his medical degree, and unexpectedly acquires a more significant
education through a direct engagement with the continent. Trekking through Argentina,
Chile, Peru, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela in the span of seven months, Guevara
uncovers a reality that has been ignored yet largely unchanged since the conquests that
these regions were subjected to.
Simon Bolívar, credited with the liberation of a great part of Latin America from
Spanish rule, is the first prominent voice in what is to become a tradition of
contemplating a Pan-American political and cultural unity. In his “Carta de Jamaica,” in
which he addresses Henry Cullen's inquiries regarding the state of independence in the
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region, Bolívar presents a detailed exposition on the political landscape of the region and
introduces his vision of continental unity. Although the continent's seemingly cohesive
character begs for such unity, Bolívar's reflections are tempered by the reality of a
politically heterogeneous and complex continent as well as his own thoughts on the
nature of a successful democracy. In short, the idea of a singular Latin American political
entity, as alluring and promising as it may be, is discarded by Bolívar as unlikely in light
of the political landscape of the region and as running contrary to an effective democracy
in which such expansive region would be difficult to govern without involving some
form of autocracy. However, his thoughts introduce certain precepts, questions, and
themes that will characterize subsequent ruminations regarding the character of Latin
America and attempts at unity.
Inspired by the idealistic fervor of the Enlightenment,
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Simon Bolívar's vision of
Latin American unity is expressed as a utopia, well aware of the notion of impossibility
inherent in the idea: “Yo deseo más que otro alguno ver formar en América la más grande
nación del mundo, menos por su extensión y riquezas que por su libertad y gloria” (72).
The region's seemingly homogenous character and the geopolitical potential of the
isthmus of Panama gives rise to the ideal of a singular Latin American state:
Es una idea grandiosa pretender formar de todo el Mundo Nuevo una sola
nación con un solo vinculo que ligue sus partes entre sí y con el todo. Ya
que tiene un origen, una lengua, unas costumbres y una religión, debería,
por consiguiente, tener un solo gobierno que confederase los diferentes
estados que hayan de formarse. . . . ¡Qué bello sería que el istmo de
Panamá fuese para nosotros lo que el de Conrinto para los griegos! (75)

He even ventures to posit the isthmus of Panama as the ideal location for the capital of
the world: “Esta magnifica posición entre los dos grandes mares, podrá ser con el tiempo

108
See John Lynch, “Lessons from the Age of Reason” in Simon Bolivar: A Life (22-40).
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el emporio del universo. . . . ¡Acaso sólo allí podrá fijarse algún día la capital de la tierra
como pretendió Constantino que fuese Bizancio la del antiguo hemisferio!” (75)
Bolívar does not dwell on the utopian potential of a single Latin American
republic for too long as each flirtation is immediately dismissed as an impossibility:
“Aunque aspiro a la perfección del gobierno de mi patria, no puedo persuadirme que el
Nuevo Mundo sea por el momento regido por una gran república; como es imposible, no
me atrevo a desearlo," (72). In fact, many of Bolívar’s political propositions are marked
by a call for moderation in place of overly ambitious projects: “Busquemos un medio
entre extremos opuestos, que nos conducirian a los mismos escollos, a la infelicidad y al
deshonor” (74). In a gesture that will precede Martí’s own implorations to the continent,
Bolívar vows for a political system and constitution that adheres to the needs of its
particular region rather than introducing foreign models of government that would not be
easily adopted by an pre-enlightened populace. In his “Discurso de Angostura,” he
repeadedly calls for a constitution relevant to the particular needs and circumstances of
the region: “la excelencia de un gobierno no consiste en su teórica, en su forma, ni en su
mecanismo, sino en ser apropiado a la naturaleza y al carácter de la nacion para quien se
instituye” (99). Furthermore, “Lós codigos, los sistemas, los estatutos por sabios que sean
son obras muertas que poco influyen sobre las sociedades: hobres virtuosos, hombres
patriotas, hombres ilustrados constituyen las republicas!” (98). And finally, “Si
queremos consultar monumentos y modelos de legislación, la Gran Bretaña, la Francia, la
America septentrional los ofrecen admirables. . . . La educación popular debe ser el
cuidado primogénito del amor paternal del congreso. Moral y luces son los polos de una
república, moral y luces son nuestras primeras necesidades” (108). The question
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concerning the adequate forms and systems necessary for the continent’s advancement is
one that will be debated by future Latin American intellectuals, including Domingo F.
Sarmiento, who likewise assessed the continent to be devoid of a citizenry adept to
western European models, for which he proposed resolving by rejecting all native forms
as incapable of sustaining a modernity and democracy, and sought a populace not only
versed in the foreign political models aforementioned but one that more closely
resembled Western Europe in its racial makeup. By contrast, Martí rejects this prescribed
racist project by in turn celebrating Latin America's native forms as viable resources from
which to found and sustain successful nations. As will be illustrated, The Motorcycle
Diaries delivers a similar rejection of Sarmiento's ideology and posits Guevara as a
Martían hero whose journey results in forging within him a Latin American
consciousness.
Further impeding the region's cohesion into a single political unit is the opacity of
knowledge that seems to exist on the region itself. Referring to the varied struggles of
independence Bolívar states, “aunque una parte de la estadística y revolución de América
es conocida, me atrevo a asegurar que la mayor esta cubierta de tinieblas, y, por
consecuencia, solo se pueden ofrecer conjeturas mas o menos aproximadas” (58). As far
as obtating a precise calculation of the population one can only draw approximations;
“He dicho la población que se calcula por datos mas o menos exactos, que mil
circunstancias hacen fallidos sin que sea fácil remediar esta inexactitud, porque los mas
de los moradores tienen habitaciones campestres y muchas veces errantes, siendo
labradores, pastores, nómades, perdidos en medio de los espesos e inmensos bosques,
llanuras solitarias y aisladas entre lagos y ríos caudalosos,” (65). This call to familiarize
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oneself with the region and unearth its knowledge recurs in subsequent discourses on the
region, such as in José Martí's “Nuestra America,” which urges for those “pueblos que no
se conocen han de darse prisa para conocerse, como quienes van a pelear juntos” (15),
and calls on Latin Americans to shift their object of study and veneration to the region
itself. Walter Salles's Che Guevara heeds these calls as he symbolically enters this abyss
that Bolívar describes, contacting those that have not been counted, those “lost in the
midst of “espesos bosques, llanuras solitarias y aisladas entre lagos y ríos caudalosos.”
Bolívar’s projected Latin American modernity rests on the conception of a
singular identity formed through hybridity, proclaiming at various instances “no somos
indios ni europeos, sino una especie media entre los legítimos propietarios del país y los
usurpadores españoles” (66).
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Although it acknowledges heterogeneity, his vision does
not allow for this heterogeneity to persist through the end of the imagined trajectory into
modernity. Bolívar proposes, if not its immediate elimination since races are inherently
different, at least its temporary “fictitious” veiling through the enlightenment of the
citizenry; “La naturaleza hace a los hombres desiguales, en genio, temperamento, fuerzas
y caracteres. Las leyes corrigen esta diferencia porque colocan al individuo en la sociedad
para que la educación, la industria, las artes, los servicios, las virtudes, le den una
igualdad ficticia, propiamente llamada política y social” (96). However, the necessary
unity and uniformity will be fully realized through the melding of the disparate elements
of the region; “Para sacar de este caos nuestra naciente república todas nuestras
facultades morales no serán bastantes, si no fundimos la masa del pueblo en un todo. . . .
Unidad, unidad, unidad, debe ser nuestra divisiva. La sangre de nuestros ciudadanos es

109
He reiterates this conception twice in his “Discurso de Angostura” (89; 95)
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diferente, mezclémosla para unirla” (108). Under Bolívar’s proposals the indigenous is
not altogether abandoned and excluded from the national project, but his participation is
under the condition that he is to be eventually subsumed by the emerging national
project; it is a negotiated invitation into the modern nation on the conditions that he abide
by the terms and paradigms of the new order. Like the reticent indigenous of Guevara’s
Diaries,
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the indigenous voice in the foundational discourse is muted. For Bolívar, he is
inevitably incapable of fully and functionally participating in the foundational project
until he becomes fluent with the new terms of the Enlightenment; “¡hombres virtuosos,
hombres patriotas, hombres ilustrados constituyen las republicas!” (98). Walter Salles’s
film will revise what is in many ways Guevara’s reiteration in his Diaries of an
indigenous that exists only as an object that evokes contemplation without producing
discourse by dramatizing Guevara’s witnessing of the indigenous’ enunciation of his and
her own conditions.
In contrast to Bolívar and Sarmiento, Martí does not completely subscribe to the
notion of race as the impediment to the region’s modernity, stating that “No hay odio de
razas, porque no hay razas. . . . El alma emana, igual y eterna, de los cuerpos diversos en
forma y en color. Peca contra la Humanidad el que fomente y propague la oposición y el
odio de las razas” (22). Whereas Bolívar’s project precludes the participation of any
being that has not undergone the necessary transformation to sustain the nation, either
through education or miscegenation, Martí finds the region, in its heterogeneous state,
adequately capable of developing its own institutions and projects that will successfully

110
The chapter will refer to Guevara’s actual diaries, previously known as Notas de
Viaje, simply as Diaries to distinguish it from Salles’s film, which will be referred to by
its complete name, The Motorcycle Diaries.
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usher it into modernity. His project calls for the organic voices of the continent to
participate in the national projects stating that “El hombre natural es bueno, y acata y
premia la inteligencia superior, mientras ésta no se vale de su sumisión para dañarle, o le
ofende prescindiendo de él, que es cosa que no perdona el hombre natural, dispuesto a
recobrar por la fuerza el respeto de quien le hiere la susceptibilidad o le perjudica el
interés” (17). The notion that the continent holds the seeds of its own development leads
him to exhort Latin Americans to dispel their Eurocentrism to instead venerate their own
local histories and forms, stating that “Nuestra Grecia es preferible a la Grecia que no es
nuestra. Nos es mas necesaria,”
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a point illustrated in the film through the juxtaposition
of the young Guevara with Esteban, a member of the Argentinean elite recently returned
from a trip to London that included a seminar at Cambridge, and reiterated again during
the scenes depicting Guevara’s visit to Machu Picchu, his encounter with the continent’s
“own Greece,” where he comes into contact with that civilization’s descendants, and as if
paying heed to Martí’s decrees, communicating with them, learning and taking part in
their customs. Interestingly, in contrast to the film, Guevara’s own journal from his
travels across the continent depicts a general reticence amongst the indigenous whose
communication is almost always mediated through a mestizo or an institution, precluding
their direct engagement with the discourse that Guevara develops about them.
As a further gesture to Martí’s decrees, the film pays important homage to some
of Latin America’s own literary and artistic tendencies by adopting them and
incorporating them as forms through which to deliver its narrative. Walter Morris, a film
critic of the Boston Globe, sees the film’s interest in depicting and romanticizing the

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“Our own Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours; we need it more.
Statesmen who arise from the nation must replace statesmen who are alien to it”
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region’s landscape as its shortcoming, while Guillermina de Ferrari deems the “beautiful
landscapes” as a mere convention of the “road movie,” both failing to note that what is
also at play is a gesture toward some of the region’s earliest literary efforts to document
and showcase the national (or regional) through the modalities of realism, naturalism and
costumbrismo. During the incipient period of nationhood, writers and intellectuals
correlated national identity with the establishment of a national literature, whereby
literary styles in the tradition of realism emerge as means through which to document and
depict the particularities of a given nation or region as a means to distinguish it from
others. These early tendencies to define the national recurred to literary models that
promised to capture and display snapshots of a particular national character and
landscape, resembling the various “breathtaking settings” and the “grand postcard” that
Morris notes as the film’s shortcoming. As Carlos Fuentes notes:
La tendencia documental y naturalista de la novela hispano-americana
obedecía a toda esa trama original de nuestra vida: haber llegado a la
independencia sin verdadera identidad humana, sometidos a una
naturaleza esencialmente extraña que, sin embargo, era el verdadero
personaje latinoamericano.

In his own retrospective on the boom, Jose Donoso describes this tradition’s writers as:
Ellos, con sus lupas de entomólogos, fueron catalogando la flora y la
fauna, las razas y los dichos inconfundiblemente nuestros, y una novela
era considerada buena si reproducía con fidelidad esos mundos
autóctonos, aquello que específicamente nos diferenciaba—nos
separaba—de otras regiones y de otros países del continente. (25)

The Motorcycle Diaries engages in a form of costumbrismo, producing snapshots of the
landscapes and characters encountered by the young Guevara; however, unlike the artistic
endeavors of the regionalist writer, as described by Donoso, it does not aim to maintain
the demarcations around each regional entity but to subsume them under a single identity
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and suggest a singular political trajectory. Furthermore, unlike the tendencies of the
continent’s notable works of naturalism, the natural and primitive in Salles’s film is
rescued and celebrated along Martían terms, as that upon which the identity and the fate
of the continent depend.
The testimonio is another prominent literary form of the continent invoked by the
film. Several scenes in the film depict the two young travelers, who initially embarked on
a journey driven by a certain self-centeredness, imagining themselves as the agents of a
great epic odyssey and the envy of all those they encountered, as mere spectators to the
reality of a continent that in the end transforms them and eventually creates the
revolutionary Che Guevara that the audience is most familiar with. The hand-held
cinematography employed in various scenes bestows the film a sense of a documentary
akin to the testimonio literature of the continent, a point that will be elaborated in greater
detail below. Beginning with the scene in the Chilean marketplace, the film interjects
several “testimonial moments” in which the pair’s individualistic journey heeds to the
narratives of many of the continent’s inhabitants.
The film was criticized by many, including Walter Morris, for not depicting the
Che Guevara that we are most familiar with: the mature and political Che, the
revolutionary, the barbudo of the Cuban Revolution who later embarked on projects to
create “many Vietnams” across the world.
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Examining the film as an epic performance
can explain the disparities between its Che Guevara and the “authentic” one that critics

112
Surprised by the “simplifications in the representation of a character as complex as
Che Guevara,” Luis Duno-Gottberg questions whether this “pacification” of Guevara in
the film are in the service of offering “exotic representations of the third world” to a
“global market” (my translation). See “Notas sobre Los Diarios de Motocicleta o las
travesías de un Che globalizado.”
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insist could have been represented. As an epic of Latina America’s Martían hero, The
Motorcycle Diaries does not need to be complete, exhaustive, or even accurate, because
similar to the epics of oral cultures, a comprehensive and complete account is not
required, as the general knowledge of it amongst its audience is implied. The film
functions as a prequel to the greater story that it assumes its audience is somewhat
familiar with, just as Homer’s Iliad depicts a segment of the greater narrative that was the
Trojan War.
Morris criticizes Salles’s casting of Gael García Bernal in the lead role, arguing
that “he's cursed with beautifying everything he touches and a lot of what he sees. Like
Jude Law, even when Bernal is dirty, it's never dirty enough,” and asking, “Is he too
pretty to play Guevara?” However, placing the film within the context of the long-
standing tradition to imagine a cohesive Latin America with a common purpose reveals a
certain complexity that critics such as Morris fail to note. The film gestures toward the
transformation within Latin American thought of initially aligning oneself with the Ariel
figure of The Tempest, William Shakespeare’s defense of colonialism, and eventually
recovering the play’s antagonist Caliban as the figure emblematic of the continent.
Shakespeare’s pro-colonialist play depicts its protagonist Prospero’s encounter with the
untamed and volatile environment of an “undiscovered” island in which he encounters
two native figures, Ariel and Caliban, the first accepting and complying with his
submission to Prospero, and the latter the monstrous and subversive figure who is beyond
all hope of redemption as he rejects Prospero’s civilizing project choosing instead to
demand control of his own island. José Enrique Rodó, an Uruguayan writer and
intellectual from the beginning of the twentieth century adopted Ariel as the region’s
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symbol in its struggle against the nascent imperialism of the U.S. which he depicted as
the Caliban of the region. Decades later and in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution,
Fernández Retamar recovers Caliban as the region’s more suitable emblem highlighting
his subversive qualities and his unwillingness to comply with Prospero’s colonialist
project which entailed Caliban’s submission to a worldview that deemed him inferior.
The film in a sense hints at this transformation depicting a young Ernesto Guevara in the
style of Rodó’s Ariel, prior to his transformation into the subversive incompliant
revolutionary whom the “civilized” world will fail to fully comprehend choosing instead
to define him as a monstrosity only because of his refusal to accept new colonialist
projects.
Ernesto’s Guevara’s diary is generally understood as the text that illustrates the
key transformation of the young Guevara into the committed idealist. The revolutionary
that we are most familiar with emerges through a journey in which he unearths a Latin
American reality ignored or unbeknownst to most. The film’s narrative structure neatly
orders the events along Guevara’s journey across South America so as to culminate with
the rebirth of Ernesto Guevara into the region’s native son, one who has shed his class
and national identities to begin sculpting one committed to challenging the problems that
mark the entire continent. The introductory material to the republished Diaries directs the
reader to this interpretation as well. In the first published edition of the Diaries, Aleida
March, Guevara’s daughter, states: “The reader can also witness the extraordinary change
which takes place in him as he discovers Latin America, gets right to its very heart and
develops a growing sense of a Latin American identity, ultimately making him a
precursor of the new history of America” (4). In the reissue of the Diaries of 2004 as a
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tie-in with Salles’s film, March reiterates this reading in a second preface: “he discovered
the reality of our continent, continued to mature as a human being and to develop as a
social being” (2). And further: “Slowly we see how his dreams and ambitions changed.
He grew increasingly aware of the pain of many others and he allowed it to become part
of himself…. [He] becomes before our eyes increasingly sensitive as he tells us about the
complex indigenous world of Latina America, the poverty of its people and the
exploitation to which they are submitted,” (2).
Guevara’s own opening chapter suggests to his audience a similar reading: “All
this wandering around ‘Our America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I
thought” (32). However, Guevara, in this introduction to his Diaries, is not thoroughly
clear, nor insistent, and perhaps most likely unconvinced by a neat climatic summation
that the journey captured by the diaries is generally subjected to. While the film presents
a clear sequential narrative structure depicting the slow evolution of Che Guevara, the
actual Diaries do not lend themselves to such an orderly reading, a difference that has as
much to do with the differences in form (film vs. epistolary writing), as it does with the
fact that both works are created with different Che Guevaras in mind. Che Guevara in a
seeming disavowal admits to a disparity between the Guevara depicted in his notes and
the one now ordering and presenting these notes to his reader: “The person who wrote
these notes passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again. The person
who reorganizes and polishes them, me, is no longer, at least I am not the person I once
was” (32). The diary, as expected of a journal, offers disparate glimpses from which this
transformation can be discerned. Guevara himself is aware of the fragmentary nature of
his work calling it a “haphazard record,” (31). He characterizes his journey and the
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content within the pages of the diaries as a game of luck, without a clear cohesive vision:
“It is likely that out of 10 possible heads I have seen only one true tail, or vice versa. . . .
Is it that our whole vision was never quite complete, that it was too transient or not
always well-informed?” (31). He further elaborates on the ethereal quality of the
experiences he captured likening them to textualized photographs: “Readers of this book
will not be well versed about the sensitivity of my retina – I can hardly sense it myself. . .
. if you don’t happen to know the scene I’ve ‘photographed’ in my notes, it will be hard
for you to find an alternative to the truth I’m about to tell” (32).
The film opens with an epigraph of an abridged version of Guevara’s own
opening to his Diaries: “No es éste el relato de hazañas impresionantes. Es un trozo de
dos vidas tomadas en un momento en que cursaron juntas un determinado trecho, con
identidad de aspiraciones y conjunción de ensueños.” The opening in both works frames
their respective narratives as journeys, suggesting a given genre for each form. In the case
of the diary, the claim that “This is not a story of heroic feats,” can be read as a rhetorical
device feigning humility by undermining the adventures of the protagonists, but also its
inverse, as an honest and precise assessment of what can be read as a work of the
picaresque, a form very much at play in the film as well, as pointed out by Guillermina de
Ferrari
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, but which the film eventually abandons as it approaches its main focus: the
transformation of Ernesto Guevara. Guevara’s Diaries inverts the epic form as his

113
See Ferrari “Diarios de motocicleta: lo que los ojos de Ernesto Guevara le contaron a
Walter Salles.”
In an interview with Film Journal International, Salles attributes the presence of a
picaresque element in the film to screen writer “José Rivera’s talent in shaping the
material and understanding that, behind these characters, . . . there was extraordinary
humor and an interest in understanding ‘the other.’” See Richard Porton, “Road to
Revolution.”
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experiences can only be rendered as the misadventures of two underwhelming figures.
On the other hand, Walter Salles’s film, as some critics have dismissively noted, adheres
primarily to the conventions of the coming-of-age film, thus the epigraph can be read
ironically, in which the “heroic feats” of its protagonists are merely interiorized ones. As
I will illustrate below, the film undergoes a similar transformation parallel to that of its
protagonist, starting off as a conventional coming-of-age story and ending as a more
ambiguous work without clear boundaries of genre, having been traversed by other forms
along its course.
The film begins with the young Ernesto Guevara, a medical student, about to
embark on an ambitious journey across the South American continent with his
companion, Alberto Granado. We are introduced to Ernesto at a crossroads in his life,
three courses short of completing his medical degree, holding off on the pre-scripted life
of an Argentinean bourgeois doctor by taking a detour from which we all know he will
not completely return. While planning the trip in a café, Alberto impels him on the
journey by pointing out that if he hesitates, his future can be foreseen in the aging man
sleeping at one of the tables next to them. The adult world around Ernesto is marked by a
stasis that he is not ready to adopt, indifferent to his implacable spirit. His father,
although not keen on his son’s ambitious journey, confesses his own benign envy to
Ernesto, telling him that were he a few years younger, he would join him. While
Chichina’s parents dote over the young Argentinean law student whose professional
training has included a semester at Cambridge and a familiarity with the city of London,
they have their reservations about Ernesto, whose own journey of discovery is not apt for
one of their class. As reported by Chichina, her mother has even promised a pilgrimage to
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the Virgin if she intercedes to break the relationship. The trip to Miramar ends with the
conventional scene of the two lovers momentarily stealing away in her parent’s car, out
of the gaze of the scrutinizing relatives. Ernesto promises Chichina his return and she her
patience before resuming the journey that will slowly acquire greater dimensions and
cease to be a conventional coming-of-age film.
As mentioned above, Guevara’s Diaries can be read as work of the picaresque,
which comes about through a mimicked and frustrated attempt at the epic. Guevara flirts
with the form of the epic as he projects unto his journey and the world he has entered a
vision that is composed from its elements. In his accounts one can detect a masculine
desire for a self-fulfilling epic adventure. As the pair resumes their journey after their
stay in Miramar, Guevara writes: “we still looked into the future with impatient joy. We
seemed to breathe more freely, a lighter air, an air of adventure. Distant countries, heroic
deeds and beautiful women spun around and around in our turbulent imaginations,” (40).
Their visit to Easter Island is imagined as an epic and racial fantasy, their own detour
through Circe’s island:
Easter Island! The imagination stops in its ascending flight to turn
somersaults at the very thought: “Over there, having a white ‘boyfriend’ is
an honor”; “Work? Ha! The women do everything – you just eat, sleep
and keep them content.” This marvelous place where the weather is
perfect, the women are perfect, the food perfect, the work perfect (in its
beatific nonexistence). What does it matter if we stay there a year; who
cares about studying, work, family, etc. In a shop window a giant crayfish
winks at us, and from his bed of lettuce his whole body tells us, ‘I’m from
Easter Island, where the weather is perfect, the women are perfect…’”
(69)

The environment into which they have entered is endowed with transformative powers
over the hero of this imagined epic fantasy, as he describes a photograph taken of him
while resting a fever early in his trip:
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[G]aunt, flushed, enormous eyes and a ridiculous beard whose shape
didn’t change much in all the months I wore it. It’s a pity the photograph
wasn’t a good one; it was an acknowledgement of our changed
circumstances and of the horizons we were seeking, free at last from
“civilization.” (41)

The passage also invokes the world of Sarmiento defined by the dichotomy of civilization
vs. barbarism, from which Guevara articulates his project for epic adventure. As noted
earlier, the film refutes Sarmiento’s ideology by identifying and venerating a true Latin
American identity beyond the spaces that Sarmiento demarcates as civilization and the
ideal sites upon which to foment the nation. In the Diaries, Guevara replicates
Sarmiento’s dichotomy in his imagined flight into the spaces beyond civilization, which
in many instances reveal his attempts to reaffirm his own national identity through his
assessment and witnessing of the spaces of the “other.” However, as we will see, and as
the quotations around the word “civilization” indicate, the imagined epic fantasy into the
unfamiliar is often registered by Guevara in his Diaries as a playful parody. Furthermore,
unlike the heroes of Sarmiento’s world, those who venture beyond the spaces of
civilization only to be consumed and extinguished by its barbarity,
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Salles’s Guevara
will merely be transformed, deposed of an identity marked under such construct.
In his attempt at the epic, Guevara’s journey is often mediated through the prism
of the conquistador, invoking the narratives of those that preceded his own traversal
across the continent, particularly those of Pedro de Valdivia. Guevara and Granado
presumably “dedicate [their] journey to the city [of Valdivia, Chile] in tribute to the great
conquistador whose name the city bears,” in an article that appeared in that city’s
newspaper (57). The episode can be read ambiguously, as mere pandering on the part of

114
See Esteban Echeverrías “La cautiva” and “El matadero,” as well as Jorge Luis
Borges’s “El Sur.”
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the picaros who are constantly scheming for their survival. Without making any mention
of their dedication to Valdivia, the film depicts the episode as such. However, upon
retracing the expedition of Valdivia, in the Diaries Guevara elaborates at length his
admiration for the feats of the conquistador, in a passage that echoes the desire for epic
that is oftentimes projected unto the continent:
These utterly desolate pampas emit a sultry heat during the day, though as
with all desert climates it is considerably cooler by night. The thought that
Valdivia came through this way with his handful of men, traveling 50 or
60 kilometers a day without discovering a drop of water or even some
shrub to shelter from the hottest hours, leaves a strong impression.
Knowledge of the terrain actually crossed by the conquistadors
automatically elevates Valdivia’s feat to one of the most notable of
Spanish colonization, without doubt superior to those that endure in the
history of America because more fortunate explorers found wealthy
kingdoms at the end of their adventurous wars, turning the sweat of their
conquest into gold.

Valdivia’s actions symbolize man’s indefatigable thirst to take control of a
place where he can exercise total authority. That phrase, attributed to
Caesar, proclaiming he would rather be first-in-command in some humble
Alpine village than second-in-command in Rome, is repeated less
pompously, but no less effectively, in the epic campaign that is the
conquest of Chile. If, in the moment the conquistador was facing death at
the hands of that invincible Araucanian Caupolican, he had not been
overwhelmed with fury, like a hunted animal, I do not doubt that judging
his life, Valdivia would have felt his death was fully justified. (84-85)

As the passage illustrates, Guevara measures his own expedition against those undertaken
by figures that attained epic proportions. His relation to the environments he encounters
is understood through the framework of the conquistador embarking into a strange
environment in which values of masculinity can be measured and affirmed.
The narratives of the conquests constitute in many ways the first literatures of the
continent, narratives that Guevara identifies with and reiterates to inform his own
attempts at an epic journey. The passage is also significant because it reveals the
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redundancy inherent in the epic. Guevara is in a sense citing the first narratives on the
continent and inserting his own journey into that tradition. However, as his opening
statement to the Diaries affirms—that “this is not a story of heroic feats”—we must also
consider that Guevara was aware of the problematic epic fantasy in his narrative. As the
introduction also informs us, the diaries are mediated through the eyes of a second Che
Guevara, one more distant to the one that is the source of the original writings. Guevara
revisited his original impressions, organized and edited them possibly for publication in
the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, although there is debate regarding the matter. As
Aleida Guevara reveals in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times regarding the
publishing of the Diaries:
Since the 1980's, we – Che's family and others – have been working on his
unpublished manuscripts. These were maintained as part of his personal
archive, and in large part were and continue to be jealously guarded by my
mother. To publish anything written by him that he himself did not intend
for publication – as is the case with the notes that became "The
Motorcycle Diaries" – serious editing work is required. We can't omit text,
but at the same time we can't be completely sure he would have given his
permission for the text to be published as it was originally written. That is
why we have a commitment to edit what he wrote without changing what
he meant - a very difficult task.

Whether or not his own revision is carried out with the events of the Cuban Revolution in
mind, redirecting his text for a particular audience, and whether or not the editing that the
Diaries underwent in their posthumous publication are likewise mindful and made to
concord with the narrative disseminated on behalf of the revolutionary project in Cuba,
one cannot overlook the striking similarities, to the point of redundancy, between the
description of Valdivia’s feats and the official narrative of the Cuban Revolution itself.
Both express an admiration for the heroic feat that a handful of brave men undertook over
a hostile enemy and environment. The passage does however remind us that we are still
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examining a world deciphered through the eyes of the young Ernesto, desirous for
personal glory and self-fulfillment. What is to be admired, after all, is the exceptionality
of a single man: “He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so
often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it
seems natural, and he had become the omnipotent ruler of a warrior nation” (84).
In the entry titled “Tarata, el mundo nuevo,” Guevara again invokes the
framework of the conquest in his description of his entrance into the town of Estaque; a
description that could easily be mistaken with a passage from a narrative from the
conquest:
We entered the town of Estaque and the view was incredible; our ecstatic
eyes fixed themselves momentarily on the landscape extending around us
and then we had to find out the names and explanations for all the things
we saw. The Aymaras could barely understand us but the few indications
they gave, in confused Spanish, only increased the emotional impact of the
surroundings. (92)

This is another attempt at the epic, in which Guevara reproduces that moment of a “first
encounter” characteristic of many of the narratives on the conquests. Guevara mimics the
role of conquistador coming into contact with environments and people beyond the
reaches of his known world. However, Guevara’s desire to replicate a “first encounter”
with the new world is quickly curbed by the realization that this is no longer a world that
is either new or untamed:
[I]n every typical scene, the town’s very breath evokes the time before
Spanish colonization. But the people before us are not the same proud race
that repeatedly rose up against Inca rule, forcing them to maintain a
permanent army on their borders; these people who watch us walk through
the streets of the town are a defeated race. Their stares are tame, almost
fearful, and completely indifferent to the outside world. Some give the
impression they go on living only because it’s a habit they cannot shake.
(93)

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This marks another significant moment in the text in which Guevara is faced with the
limitations of his epic framework, frustrating his desires for the traditional epic
adventure. This is not to say that the continent is devoid of a propensity toward the epic.
As Salles’s film illustrates, Guevara will emerge as the continent’s epic hero through a
transformation that adjusts his limited vision of this world. Guevara recovers the epic
dimensions offered by the continent by adjusting his lens, enabling him to identify the
new heroes, and most importantly, the monsters of the continent.
On his visit to Chuquicamata, his epic framework is also re-evaluated:
And how many of those mountains surrounding their famous brother
enclose in their heavy entrails similar riches, as they wait for the soulless
arms of the mechanical shovels to devour their insides, spiced as they
would be with the inevitable human lives – the lives of the poor, unsung
heroes of this battle, who die miserably in one of the thousand traps set my
nature to defend its treasures, when all they want is to earn their daily
bread. (80)

This world described here is not distant nor antiquated but real, and it stands in
juxtaposition to Guevara’s fantasies of adventure. The hostility of this environment is
alien to him, faced by the “unsung heroes” that he mentions; they are the ones that are
devoured by the monster that the mine constitutes. In an addendum inserted into the
Diaries a year after his trip, Guevara articulates more clearly the epic foe of the region:
“the biggest effort Chile should make is to shake its uncomfortable Yankee friend from
its back, a task that for the moment at least is Herculean, given the quantity of dollars the
United States has invested and the ease with which it flexes its economic whenever its
interests appear threatened” (89).
In comparison to the momentous feats undertaken by the mineworkers, Guevara’s
own adventure is one that has been carefully orchestrated, if not completely devoid of its
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own perils, willingly undertaken, and an attempt at realizing a fantasy projected unto the
continent as first depicted by epic tales of the heroic feats of the conquistadors; it is the
product of a Eurocentric nostalgia. As the couple that they encounter along the way to
Bariloche makes clear, Guevara and Granado are merely passing tourists within the
unrecognized reality of Latin America:
It was so fiercely cold that a visitor soon appeared asking to borrow some
blankets because he and his wife were camping by the edge of the lake and
they were freezing. We went to share some mate with this stoical pair who
for some time had been living beside the lakes with only a tent and the
contents of their backpacks. They put us to shame. (51)

The point is articulated more emphatically by the husband of the Chilean couple on their
way to find work in the mines. Guevara writes: “we remembered his straightforward
invitation: ‘Come, comrades, let’s eat together. I, too, am a tramp,’ showing his
underlying disdain for the parasitic nature he saw in our aimless traveling” (78).
These episodes mark the instances in which Guevara must register the dissonance
between the world he is actually traversing and the one he initially expected to find. As
Salles’ film will argue, this is a world in need of a new sort of epic hero. The
transformation of Che Guevara consists in registering the reality of the continent through
a disavowal of his previous forms of knowing. That introductory assessment of the
Diaries now achieves a new significance: it is an admission of his meekness in relation to
the vastness and challenges of the continent.
Guevara’s epic narrative is also thwarted at times by the picaresque. The journey
of discovery and conquest that he attempts is often inverted resulting in the comic
misadventures of the pair of travelers. In their travels along the Camino de los Siete
Lagos, they seek shelter with “An Austrian caretaker… [who] gave us a place to stay in
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an empty shed” (52). The caretaker warns them of a puma stalking the area: “‘And pumas
are vicious, they’re not afraid to attack people! They have huge blond manes…” (52).
The episode offers the possibility of the epic trial of courage and valor, an opportunity to
tame and triumph over the beasts of their hostile environment. Guevara writes:
Attempting to close the door we found that it was like a stable door – only
the lower half shut. I placed our revolver near my head in case the puma,
whose shadow filled our thoughts, decided to pay an unannounced
midnight visit. The day was just dawning when I awoke to the sound of
claws scratching at the door. At my side, Alberto lay silent, full of dread. I
had my hand tensed on the cocked revolver. Two luminous eyes stared at
me from the silhouetted trees. Like a cat, the eyes sprang forward and the
black mass of the body materialized over the door.

It was pure instinct; the brakes of intelligence failed. My drive for self-
preservation pulled the trigger. (53)

Unfortunately, the epic moment never fully materializes resulting instead in a quixotic
misadventure:
For a long moment, the thunder beat against and around the walls,
stopping only when a lighted torch in the doorway began desperately
shouting at us. But by that time in our timid silence we knew, or could at
least guess, the reason for the caretaker’s stentorian shouts and his wife’s
hysterical sobs as she threw herself over the dead body of Bobby – her
nasty, ill-tempered dog. (53)

Rather than realizing the exploits of epic heroes, the pair most often finds
themselves living out scenes of the picaresque—in perpetual hunger and procuring food
and wine through guile. In San Martín de los Andes, the pair carries out an elaborate
scheme to steal wine from the festivities that they helped organize for the drivers of a
motor race. Guevara writes:
We executed, furthermore, a carefully calculated plan. I pretended to get
drunker and drunker and, with every apparent attack of nausea, I staggered
off to the stream, a bottle of red wine hidden inside my leather jacket.
After five attacks of this type we had the same number of liters of wine
stored beneath the fronds of a willow, keeping cool in the water. (46)
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The picaros plans are spoiled and they end up humbled and as destitute as before:
Alberto made it first and threw himself under the willow: his face was
straight out of a comic film. Not a single bottle remained. Either my
drunken state hadn’t fooled anyone, or someone had seen me sneak off
with the wine. The fact was, we were as broke as ever….We were well-fed
and well-watered, but with our tails between our legs, not so much for the
wine but for the fools they’d made of us. (46-47)

As both the Guevara’s diary and Salles’s film reveals, the pair resorts to a
rehearsed routine to procure food and wine from unsuspecting people they meet. In the
Diaires, Guevara provides the specific details to this 5-step technique, which he claims to
always work. The “highly refined routine” entails luring the unsuspecting victim to treat
them to food and drink in honor of the supposed anniversary of their journey, as they are
unable to properly celebrate due to their “dire circumstances,” (131).
Walter Salles’s film retains the aspect of the picaresque in his film, but only
insofar as it demonstrates the evolution of Ernesto, from the carefree anti-hero into one
attaining a greater consciousness of his world. In other instances, it sanitizes Guevara’s
failed attempts at adventurous exploits that result in moments of the picaresque. The
episode involving Ernesto’s failed attempt to seduce the wife of the mechanic is
reformulated in the film to depict a sincere Ernesto clumsily trying to seduce the wife
having had too much to drink. However, as depicted by Guevara himself, the moment is
simply another presumptuous and miscalculated attempt at an exploit:
One of the particularly friendly mechanics from the garage asked me to
dance with his wife because he’d been mixing his drinks and was not
feeling very well. His wife was hot and clearly in the mood and, full of
Chilean wine, I took her by the hand and tried to steer her outside. She
followed me meekly but then noticed her husband watching us and told
me she would stay behind. I was in no state to listen to reason and we
began to argue in the middle of the dance floor. I started pulling toward
one of the doors, while everybody was watching, and then she treied to
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kick me, and as I was pulling her she lost her balance and fell crashing to
the floor. (61-62)

As in the film, the pair has to make one of several escapes Guevara reports, “pursued by a
furious swarm of dancers,” (62).
The picaro becomes an identity against which the evolving Ernesto will be
measured, as an identity that he will outgrow. In his evolution, Alberto will remain in this
space as a foil to the burgeoning Che Guevara. In her review of the film, Guillermina de
Ferrari is critical of the unjustly imbalanced relationship between the travelling pair that
Walter Salles employs, deeming it as a formulaic recycling of conventions from the
Spanish Golden Age:
Lamentablemente, sin embargo, el guión se apoya demasiado en el modelo
‘Don Quijote y Sancho Panza,’ digo demasiado pues esta estructura
termina separando a los personajes en jerarquías y hasta en géneros
diferentes. De hecho, el Granado de Salles, aunque sensible y de buen
corazón, parece relegado a personaje de la picaresca, genero del que solo
sale para admirar al futuro Che, mientras que este habita el relato de
aprendizaje, en el que comienza a erigirse tempranamente como
protagonista de la Historia. (150-151)

The widening divide between the two in their degrees of social consciousness and
sensitivity to the Latin American reality they witness will be accentuated further with the
prop that Salles introduces to the narrative, the fifteen dollars that Ernesto receives from
Chichina, a point of conflict that never existed between the two in Guevara’s Diaries.
The American money will measure the extent of development of the young Guevara, as a
currency that allows Che, the future president of the National Bank of Cuba, to determine
its exchange rate. Chichina gives Ernesto the money to buy her a swimsuit when he
reaches Miami, and he holds onto it dearly for a great part of trip as it symbolizes the
promise to Chichina and to his former self of a return, in spite of Alberto’s constant
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harassment that it should be used to treat them to “a royal dinner.” Further along the trip,
Alberto once again tries to procure the money from Ernesto in order to complete a sexual
transaction with one of the sex workers on the ship traversing the Amazon, but we learn
that Guevara, in a gesture meant to highlight his sacrifice and a disavowal of the ties to
his former self has given it away to the couple of the Chiquicamata mine.
The divide between the two is symbolically affirmed at what is a key turning
point of the movie, shortly after the pair has duped Jazmín and Daniela with their
“anniversary routine.” As they get ready to continue their dates with the Chilean girls,
Ernesto is called to attend to an ill woman, much to the disappointment of Alberto who
mocks him for being rigorously faithful to his Hippocratic Oath. Alberto carries on with
the date while Ernesto attends to the dying woman leading him to a moment of sincere
reflection as he writes to his mother his impressions about the condition of the woman’s
life and his inability to intervene. The episode is treated in greater detail in the Diaries,
which offer a clearer glimpse of the forthcoming Che Guevara materializing out of
moments such as these. Whereas the film depicts an Ernesto that is more reflexive about
the existential questions that the scene invokes within him, in his Diaries, Guevara
detects the social injustice linked to the situation of the dying woman:
It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete
powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice
of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning
her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity.
In circumstances like this, individuals in poor families who can’t pay their
way become surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised acrimony;
they stop being father, mother, sister or brother and become a purely
negative factor in the struggle for life and, consequently, a source of
bitterness for the healthy members of the community who resent their
illness as if it were a personal insult to those who have to support them. It
is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has
always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy
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circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. . . . How long this
present order, based on an absurd idea of caste, will last is not within my
means to answer, but it’s time that those who govern spent less time
publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money,
funding socially useful works.

Walter Salles rearranges Guevara’s chronology so that this moment coincides
with the death of La Poderosa. Whereas we witness a young Ernesto begin contemplating
the greater questions at hand having just witnessed the tragedies of human life, Alberto
tearfully mourns the death of his motorcycle. In the Diaries, Guevara is not completely
indifferent to the loss of the motorcycle as he appears in Salles’ film, registering it as a
transformation in itself, a downgrade in status that both complicates and reaffirms their
aspirations to the epic adventure:
To a certain extent we had been knights of the road; we belonged to that
long-standing ‘wandering aristocracy’ and had calling cards with our
impeccable and impressive titles. No longer. Now we were just two
hitchhikers with backpacks, and with all the grime of the road stuck to our
overalls, shadows of our former aristocratic selves. (68)

The pair then proceeds to Valparaiso where Ernesto experiences another key
transformative moment as he receives Chichina’s letter pronouncing their break-up. The
scene in the film signals another important rupture in Ernesto from his former self, one
documented as such in the Diaries, although it occurs much earlier in the chronology of
the journey: “I read and reread the incredible letter. Just like that, all my dreams of home,
bound up with those eyes that saw me off in Miramar, came crashing down for what
seemed like no reason” (53-54). In the film, the romantic rupture also marks the end to
the romantic misadventures of Salles’s Guevara. Freed from his romantic aspirations,
Ernesto’s forthcoming transformation will be accelerated as he winds through the rest of
his journey more attentive to the realities of the region. While Alberto continues in his
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pursuits for romantic exploits, Ernesto will in contrast no longer be burdened by such
concerns, and enter into a more intimate contact with the continent itself.
The scene also marks a transformation of the film itself, its own rupture from the
conventional coming-of-age film. The form of the testimonial will now intersect the film
repeatedly as Ernesto assumes the role of witness from this point onward culminating in
his rebirth in the Amazon River. Immediately after their departure from Valparaiso, the
pair find themselves in the Atacama Desert, when they encounter the couple looking for
work in the mines, who share with them their own story of injustice, having been forced
off their lands and far from home in search for work, which, as mentioned earlier, forces
Guevara to re-evaluate the nature of his travels..
Further along their journey, which takes them into Peru, they are confronted with
the realities of the indigenous of the region, and again the pair assumes the role of
witnesses to the various testimonies offered along the way. There is an important
discordance at this moment between the film and the Diaries. Guevara’s encounters with
the indigenous of the region do not convey the testimonial exchange that the film
introduces as part of Ernesto’s development of a Latin American conscience. In the
Diaries, Guevara’s attempts at these types of exchanges are often frustrated or negated.
The indigenous of Guevara’s writings are reticent, resisting any form of exchange with
him; “the wary Indians barely dignified our questions with a response, offering only
monosyllabic replies” (101). On the route to San Martin de los Andes, he is unable to
procure a dialogue with the laborers he has encountered:
In general they didn’t try to communicate with us, as is typical of the
subjugated Araucanian race who maintain a deep suspicion of the white
man who in the past has brought them so much misfortune and now
continues to exploit them. They answered our questions about the land and
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their work by shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘don’t know’ or
‘maybe,’ quickly ending the conversation. (43)

The pair encounter a similar indifference on their ride into Lima when they inform one of
the young cattle hands that the horn of one of the animals in the truck is scratching the
eye of another: “With a shrug of his shoulders, into which he poured the whole spirit of
his race, he said, ‘why, when all it’ll ever see is shit,’ and quietly continued tying a knot,
the task he’d been dedicated to before being interrupted,” (125). At other instances, the
attempts at communication are limited by the indigenous’ inability to speak Spanish
fluently: “The Aymara Indians in the back [of the truck] looked at us curiously but didn’t
dare ask anything. Alberto tried to start a conversation with some of them though their
Spanish was bad” (92). And again in Iquitos, Peru: “We ate terrible and expensive food
with an Indian belonging to the Yagua tribe, strangely attired in a red straw skirt and a
few necklaces of the same straw; his name was Benjamin but he spoke almost no
Spanish. Just above his left shoulder blade he had a scar from a bullet shot at almost
point-blank range, because of ‘vinganza,’ according to him” (144). Unable to produce
any detailed information other than his name and the vague explanation to his gunshot
wound, Benjamin is identified primarily by his physical characteristics; he is rendered
through the gaze of Guevara and not by his own words.
In his Diaries, Guevara’s efforts to communicate with the indigenous of the
continent are from the position of an interested outsider. It is hard to imagine that, had
they been realized, these encounters would provide Guevara with the transformative
experiences that Salles’s bestows them with, since he already appears to hold a certain
understanding of their condition in spite of their unwillingness to communicate. Unlike
his North American counterpart, the tourist that makes a quick trip into the city of Cuzco
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without witnessing the realities of the city, Guevara is interested in documenting these
realities but still from the position of an outsider; the indigenous never cease to be the
object of his gaze. In this way, he is merely a more invested tourist than the North
American tourist who “visit[s] the ruins and return straight home, not believing that
anything else is worth seeing” (117). In various descriptions of his encounters with the
peculiarities of a given place, his identity is never subjected to any form of
transformation or questioning, but only reaffirmed as it serves as the point of reference
from which to make sense of what he sees. As a passing traveler he seeks to document
the peculiarities of each particular place he visits, peculiarities that appear as such
because he maintains his original point of reference throughout, in contrast to Salles’s
Guevara.
His description of Valdivia, Chile bears the tones of a travelogue, observations
made by the outsider measured against those he is familiar with at home:
The harbor, overflowing with goods that were completely foreign to us,
the market where they sold different foods, the typically Chilean wooden
houses, the special clothes of the guasos, were notably different from what
we knew back home; there was something indigenously American,
untouched by the exoticism invading our pampas. This may be because
Anglo-Saxon immigrants in Chile do not mix, thus preserving the purity of
the indigenous race, which in our country is practically nonexistent. (57)

Santiago is also described through its comparison of what he is familiar with; “Santiago
has more or less the same feel as Cordoba. Though its daily pace is much faster and its
traffic considerably heavier, its buildings, the nature of its streets, its weather and even
the faces of its people, reminded us of our own Mediterranean city” (66). His description
of Estaque documents the peculiarities of the town in a detached and methodical tone in
which the indigenous are merely objects for observation:
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The different crops cultivated by the Indians, carefully grown in terraced
beds, allowed us to penetrate a new realm of botanical science: oca,
quinua, canihua, rocoto, maize. We saw people wearing the same dress as
the Indians in the truck, in their natural surroundings. They wore short,
sadly colored woolen ponchos, tight calf-length pants, and sandals made
from rope or old car tires. Absorbing everything we saw, we continued
down the valley to Tarata. In the Aymara language this means the apex, or
place of confluence, and it’s been well named since it stands within a great
V formed by the mountain chains that are the town’s guardians. It is an
ancient, gentle village where life continues on the course it has traveled
for centuries. (93)

The information about the indigenous that Guevara succeeds in gathering is often
through intermediaries, such as the father who through his son inquires about “the
wonderful ‘land of Perón,’” to whom the travellers respond ironically with idealized
images “filling the minds of our listeners with stories of the idyllic, beautiful life in our
country” (95). At other instances, they gather information about the indigenous through a
mestizo that speaks on their behalf such as from Señor Soto, the manager of a hotel in
Cuzco: “Señor Soto, as well as being a wonderful individual, was also a very learned
person, and after exhausting his favorite topic of sport we were able to speak at length
about Inca culture, about which he knew a great deal” (116). Guevara’s curiosity about
the Incas leads him into some of the museums in the region; however, these result again
in frustrated attempts to gather substantial information as these institutions of Incan
culture have experienced a second sacking:
The archaelogical museum in Cuzco is pretty poor. When the authorities
opened their eyes to the mountain of treasure being smuggled out of the
various sites, it was already too late. Treasure hunters, tourists, foreign
archaeologists, anyone at all with any interest in the subject, had
systematically looted the region and they were able to collect of the
museum only what remained: virtually the scraps. Even so, for people like
us, without much archaeological education and with only muddled and
recently acquired knowledge of Inca civilization, there was enough to see,
and we saw it over several days. (117)

153
Here they encounter a mestizo curator whom Guevara authenticates as an authority on the
information they seek in large part based on the traces of the indigenous blood he detects
in his appearance:
The mestizo curator was very knowledgeable, with a breathtaking
enthusiasm for the race whose blood flowed in his veins. He spoke to us of
the splendid past and the present misery, of the urgent need to educate the
Indians, as a first step toward total rehabilitation. He insisted immediately
raising the economic level of Indian families was the only way to mitigate
the soporific effects of coca and drink. He talked of fostering a fuller and
more exact understanding of the Quechua people so that individuals of
that race could look at their past and feel pride, rather than, looking at their
present, feel only shame at belonging to the Indian or mestizo class. (117)

For Guevara, the curator becomes the most valuable element of the museum,
being one of the only instances in which he is able to acquire direct knowledge on the
objects of his curiosity. Interestingly, as the passage reveals, the curator offers essentially
the same solutions that originate from the earliest national discourses: the integration of
the indigenous through education. Nonetheless, Guevara’s desire for knowledge of the
other is fulfilled through the encounter with the curator, whose physical characteristics,
Guevara insists, authenticate him as a voice of the indigenous. As a result, Guevara
redefines the poorly furnished museum as a “living museum” that attests to the
persistence of the indigenous of the region: “The semi-indigenous features of the curator,
his eyes shining with enthusiasm and his faith in the future, constituted one more treasure
of the museum, but a living museum, proof of a race still fighting for its identity” (118).
In order to fulfill the frustrated attempts to communicate with the indigenous, Salles takes
Guevara out of the museum and places him into the “living museum” conjured in this
passage, where he will stage the dialogues that are missing in the Diaries. Through these
154
dramatized encounters, the inhabitants, who are merely interesting characters populating
Guevara’s Diaries, will in turn speak and return the gaze unto the viewer.
The film attempts to resolve these incomplete or frustrated moments of dialogue
by incorporating the testimonio as one of its forms. Beginning with the couple in the
mine, the pair assumes the role of witnesses to some of the testimonials offered by the
inhabitants of the continent. In Cuzco, the pair converse with a pair of indigenous women
(one of which only speaks Quechua so her story is relayed to Guevara and Granado by
her companion) who reveal to them the conditions under which they live. On their way to
Machu Picchu, the pair encounters a man who tells of his eviction from the land he had
cultivated by a wealthy and well-connected landlord. Both of these instances provide the
details of the conditions of the indigenous uttered by the subjects themselves, and not
through the intermediaries Guevara’s Diaries relies on.
John Beverly’s definition of the testimonio illustrates how these scenes in the film
function as testimonial instances, even while inscribed within an artistic work. The
testimonio places at the center of its narrative “a narrator who is also the real protagonist
or witness of the events he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’
or a significant life experience” (13). However, the personal narrative of the testimonio is
meant to be read as a collective narrative, bearing the truth of a shared experience, “a
problematic collective social situation that the narrator lives with or alongside others”
(Beverly 15), rather than as a narrative that underscores the individuality or
exceptionality of the protagonist, as can be said of the novel. It is this function that
Elizabeth Burgos identifies in Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio stating that “Menchú, al
relatar su vida, propaga al mismo tiempo el gran manifiesto de una etnia” (10); and going
155
as far as to suggest that her narrative has bearing on the entire experience of all
indigenous groups of the Americas: “lo encontramos igualmente entre los indios
norteamericanos, los de América central y los de Sudamérica” (9). In the film, upon his
ride into Cuzco, the Guevara that is now more perceptive of his surroundings gazes upon
a row of indigenous people whose stories are at the moment inaccessible to him. The film
supplies the collective story through the characters that speak to him in the
aforementioned scenes, yet these characters also remain anonymous as the film never
identifies them by name, insisting on their function as collective subjects.
Beverly draws important distinctions between the testimonio and other forms of
writing that can help approximate what the indigenous voice in Guevara’s Diaries would
function as. Guevara insists on the figure of the reticent and timid Indian unable or
unwilling to provide the account of his own subjectivity; however, given the
autobiographical form of the Diaries, it is unclear to what extent these exchanges with
the indigenous would be subjected to Guevara’s authorial intent and deprived of the
agency that the subjects assume under the testimonio form. In contrast to the testimonio,
Beverly states that in autobiographies and memoirs:
there is implicit an ideology of individualism in the very convention of the
autobiographical form that is build on the notion of a coherent, self-
evident, self-conscious, commanding subject that appropriates literature
precisely as a means of ‘self-expression’ and that in turn constructs
textually for the reader the liberal imaginary of a unique ‘free,’
autonomous ego as the natural form of being and public achievement. (23)

As stressed earlier, Guevara’s Diaries largely reflect the individual’s desire for adventure;
Writing his experiences is mainly a means of legitimizing said adventure. When he
encounters that which is different, it is immediately registered through a comparison with
what he is familiar with. In the testimonial scenes of the film, Salles removes this
156
authorial relationship between Guevara and the indigenous that finally speak, placing him
in the role of witness, alongside the audience of the film itself. Beverly states that “the
position of the reader of testimonio is akin to that of a jury member in a courtroom” (14),
and from these brief moments in the film one could suppose that the audience is to
imagine themselves occupying the same position as Guevara.
Burgos reiterates this secondary position of the witness, discovering that her
unfamiliarity with Menchú’s culture becomes an advantage, allowing her to assume the
role of student; “He tenido que adoptar la postura del alumno” (16). However, in the
position of witness one is not intended to remain passive, as she later states, “Situarme en
el lugar que me correspondía: primero escuchando y dejando hablar a Rigoberta, y luego
convirtiéndome en una especie de doble suyo, el instrumento que operaria el paso de lo
oral a lo escrito” (18). According to the film, Guevara’s witnessing of these moments, his
unadulterated exchanges with the inhabitants of the region, similarly lead him to an active
role, but one that will attempt to remedy their conditions through armed struggle, as the
journey through Cuzco culminates with a visit to Machu Picchu where symbolically
Guevara comes to the realization of the futility of “a revolution without gunshots.” The
scene ends with a pensive Guevara wondering how “a civilization capable of building
[Machu Picchu] is wiped out to build [Lima, Peru],” juxtaposing images of each place,
inverting the civilization versus barbarism dichotomy that the film engages throughout.
It is important to note that the testimonial scenes in the film do not themselves
constitute actual testimonios; they are after all in the service of advancing a larger
narrative about Guevara, working within the confines of the script. However, they work
as gestures that invoke the form, emerging in the film as exclamations that attest to the
157
presence of other narratives that transcend the film’s own narrative and temporality.
Beverly states that “What is important about testimonio is that it produces if not the real
then certainly a sensation of experiencing the real and that this has determinate effects on
the reader that are different from those produced by even the most realist or
‘documentary’ fiction” (my italics 22). Whereas as Beverly sees a clear distinction
between testimonio and “‘documentary’ fiction,” Salles’s film attempts to blur these lines
so that the film fulfills a dual function as a biographical account of this period in
Guevara’s life as well as the summary of Latin American history. As Salles reveals, some
of the scenes of Guevara interacting with the inhabitants of the continent are unscripted,
and at times shot with handheld cameras, giving them this sense of documentary realism.
In the screening of the film at the National Film Theatre in London, Salles described the
process of filming some of the scenes in Cuzco, stating that they involved a great degree
of improvisation on the part of Gael García Bernal and Rodrigo de la Serna as they were
filmed with non-actors playing themselves:
And the little boy in Cuzco, we found him in the streets, or he found us.
He came to us and asked if we wanted to know a little bit more about the
city and offered himself as a guide. So we said, “Yes, but can we bring the
Super16 camera along?” And he said, “Bring whatever you want.” And
there it was. That scene, everything is Take 1. Nothing was repeated. Later
that same day, we found those Indian women who don't speak Spanish but
only Quechua, who also started to talk to Gael and Rodrigo. And the two
of them were so immersed in their characters that they were able to
improvise freely within the framework of the screenplay. You have to be
careful not to open all the windows and be totally free and unprepared, but
you have to try to capture reality as it happens. (quoted in Andrew)

One of the final sequences of the film groups together a series of black and white
shots of the various figures that Guevara encountered along the journey, giving the sense
that they are rendered through a photographic lens thereby ascribing them with a
158
nostalgic, even historical quality, as the subjects stand still seemingly frozen in place.
However, the images are not still photographs, as revealed by the light movements of
some of the subjects, creating a sense of continuity beyond the scope of the film. These
shots also call attention to the medium by which they are rendered, as we are no longer
within the films lineal narrative and are in turn made aware of the presence of the camera
through the subjects direct gaze into the lens. Beverly states that “The narrator in
testimonio is a real person who continues living and acting in a real social history that
also continues. Testimonio can never in this sense create the illusion of that textual ‘in-
itselfness’ that has been the basis of literary formalism” (25). These seemingly still shots
suggest this very testimonial quality as the narrative ends with the images of the film’s
various “non-actors” no longer in character but still within the settings in which they
were encountered in the film, the same that they inhabit off-camera.
This final sequence also creates an effect similar to the one described by Walter
Mignolo about Pedro Lasch’s “Black Mirror/Espejo Negro” installation at the Nasher
Museum. The art exhibit consists of several Mesoamerican statues each facing and being
reflected by a black mirror placed in front of them, which itself bares images of figures
from Spanish culture, creating the sense of a mutual gaze between both figures, unto
which the gaze of the museum visitor is added through his or her own reflection in the
mirror. Mignolo states that what is displayed is “a very complex installation where art,
lights, reflections, archeology, history and . . . coloniality are organizing the power
relations of intricate compositions. . . . and now what you are looking at was the story
told from the perspective of those who were not allowed to tell their story” (3). For
Mignolo, the art installation constitutes a form of “de-colonial thinking” through which
159
colonial forms of knowing are challenged if not undone. The configuration of each work
turns the gaze unto the European, as represented by the figures within the mirrors, as
“they are being observed in the scenario of what they did in the Americas in their
dismantling of highly sophisticated civilizations” (5). Similarly, Salles does not allow the
figures of his film to exist primarily as objects of observation, as they appear in
Guevara’s own writings, but they are bestowed with an agency that allows them to return
the gaze back unto the viewer as they rupture the traditional relation between spectator
and film.
Finally, I’d like to end with a brief consideration of the relevance of Pan-Latin
Americanism in the age of globalization. Whereas this notion has been complicated by
the recognition of Latin America’s heterogeneity and the abandonment of absolutist
models, nonetheless a trend toward integration remains visible, interestingly under the
economic model of neoliberalism which has given rise to various trade agreements and
common markets, amongst the most notable being Mercosur. Once again, it is worth
looking at the Che Guevara of Walter Salles’s film as it not only celebrates the Pan-Latin
Americanism of its protagonist, but it involves a Pan-American commercial enterprise.
Furthermore, the absence of the political Che Guevara leave its political interpretation
open-ended—the film never proposes that the integration of Latin America be realized
under any socialist ideals opting instead to simply identify the need for social justice and
economic equality as part of the region’s common character, which have also served as
the guise for many neoliberal economic policies.

160
Conclusion
Club Che, located in the center of Moscow, offers its patrons the fantasy of
revolution under the tropics. If one makes it past the bouncers who don t-shirts imprinted
with emblems of military bars and red stars, one will not necessarily find a memorial to
the revolutionary figure that the club has appropriated as its theme. Nor is the club a
nostalgic tribute to Soviet and Cuban solidarity. Here, Che is merely the label that
authenticates and subsumes this fantasy borne to a global capitalist culture of
experiencing and consuming the temporally and geographically distant. The fantasy is
created through a pastiche of Latin American exoticisms: enclosed by walls emblazoned
with revolutionary slogans in Spanish, patrons can partake of $15 dollar mojitos, live
Latin music, and salsa dancing. As such, the club is closer to a themed restaurant or a Las
Vegas casino than it is to any of the monumental spaces erected throughout Latin
America as sacred destinations of a Che Guevara pilgrimage.
At the 77
th
Annual Academy Award in 2005 Che Guevara took the stage via the t-
shirt worn by Carlos Santana who, alongside Antonio Banderas, performed the featured
song of The Motorcycle Diaries, “Al otro lado del río.” The event was marked by the
controversy surrounding the performance as the Academy producers opted for a
performance featuring the two internationally recognizable stars rather than one by its
original singer and composer, the Uruguayan Jorge Drexler. While presenter Salma
Hayek celebrated the moment as historic, constituting the first song in Spanish to be
nominated for an academy award, Uruguayans reacted to the snub as an affront to
national pride (McLaughlin). While Guevara had been subsumed by Hollywood
consumer culture allowed to take the stage, the symbolic act of rebellion was left to
161
Drexler who was praised by Uruguayan newspapers for his defiant acceptance of the
Oscar with his own brief a capella rendition of his song (McLaughlin).
As these two relatively recent apparitions of Che reveal, Guevara persists and
continuous moving across borders like a wandering Odysseus. However, his proliferation
and emergence in the most unlikely places is largely facilitated under the auspices of
capitalism. The dissertation examined the construction of an epic hero authored to a great
extent by the bard of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro. Yet, in spite of the
monoglossic, marmorealizing effect of the epic, Guevara has eluded the grasp of its most
authoritative figure. Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat features a segment highlighting
Castro’s performative gesture during his orations of pausing to manipulate the
microphones with his hands in order to create emphasis or allow for applause; however,
this rhetorical device is frustrated during a speech in Moscow as the microphones placed
in front of him are rigidly fixed in place. This sequence is symbolically juxtaposed with
Castro’s declaration of a forthcoming institutionalization of the Revolution. As the
dissertation illustrates, Guevara has been an epic construction largely in the hands of
Fidel Castro; however, Guevara has eluded the grasp and absolute manipulation of one
who has authored his persistence through the epic, and has emerged beyond the margins
of this form. As the Revolution cemented institutions and memorials to Guevara, the
corpus, apparitions, and permutations of Che Guevara keep growing and exceed the
framework of the epic to which Castro’s rhetoric has attempted to cement him.
As John Berger points out, Guevara’s elusiveness during the final years of his life
was the source of his legendary appeal, and as such, it was believed that his capture and
execution would naturally neutralize and eradicate it. However, according to Berger,
162
Guevara’s final photograph, in which his lifeless body is laid out and displayed as a
confirmation of his death, reveals how even in this final moment Guevara eludes this
attempt to render him as finite and concluded (43).
While Guevara has largely been rendered and disseminated as epic, his continued
re-emergence under various forms proves him a polyvalent and incommensurable sign
without any clear ending to its proliferation. Unlike many of the socialist figures of the
twentieth century, Guevara has not been fixed to one final resting place. And, although
numerous commemorative sites exist throughout Latin America, none provide any sense
of finality or stasis, as would a mausoleum. Even upon death, his captors seemed unsure
about how to dispose of his body, subjecting it to a series of manipulations that perhaps
inadvertently contributed to his continued presence.
The projected changes in a post-Castro Cuba will undoubtedly be the cataclysm of
future permutations of Che Guevara. Some are visible already. The official Guevara, the
one memorialized and incanted as the static model to the nation through the numerous
murals and billboards in public spaces, can be juxtaposed to the one invoked by tourists
wearing berets and t-shirts with his image bought from street merchants, but most
importantly, to some Cubans for whom he represents a model not fully encapsulated by
the bounds of the Revolution—as the unfulfilled possibility under Castro’s project.
Undoubtedly, Che Guevara will be resurrected yet again and be made to speak in regards
to any major development in Cuba.

163
Figures

Figure 2. 1
164

Figure 2. 2
165

Figure 2. 3
166

Figure 2. 4
167

Figure 2. 5

Figure 2. 6
168

Figure 2. 7

Figure 2. 8
169

Figure 2. 9
170

Figure 2. 10
171

Figure 2. 11

172
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Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 09/26/2014

Defense Date 09/26/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cuba,el bosque y el hombre nuevo,El lobo,epic,Ernesto Che Guevara,fidel castro,Fresa y chocolate,Kingdom of this world,Latin America,monumentality,Motorcycle diaries,OAI-PMH Harvest,Reino de este mundo,Senel Paz,Walter Salles

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Advisor Díaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee chair), Norindr, Panivong (committee member), Steinberg, Samuel (committee member)

Creator Email emontes@usc.edu,montesfraire@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-485579

Unique identifier UC11286988

Identifier etd-MontesFrai-2992.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-485579 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MontesFrai-2992.pdf

Dmrecord 485579

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Montes Fraire, Edgar Alejandro

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Constructing Che Guevara: Figuration of an Epic Hero examines the figure of Ernesto “Che” Guevara from the viewpoint of the epic. The dissertation analyzes Fidel Castro’s construction of an epic of the Cuban Revolution from which Che Guevara eventually emerges as the epic hero of said narrative