Agustin Blazquez has produced a compelling film that demolishes the radical heartthrob’s reputation as a brave guerrilla fighting on behalf of the oppressed.
Mary Grabar
PajamasMedia
2/17/2011
Among Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s final requests before he was executed by Bolivian forces in 1967 was that a message of hope be sent back to Fidel Castro: the revolution would come to America.
Che immediately became the martyr for the radical left, with his image seized by American protestors of the 1960s. Since then another, cultural, revolution has taken place. Wikipedia catalogs references to him worldwide from restaurant names, to advertising campaigns, to music, to pop culture. His image adorned an Obama Texas campaign office in 2008. Che’s image is now displayed by average college students and even toddlers. No one blinks an eye when a student garbed in clothing bearing his iconic upward gaze takes a seat in my classroom. Students get their fashion cues from music, movie, and sports stars, and follow professors who display Che on office doors and websites, and teach courses about him. Students can find online guides to writing papers about the 2003 New York Times bestselling translation of Che’s Motorcycle Diaries, which was made into the 2004 box office hit.
Those who document the reality of the Castro regime, however, do not find themselves well received in the academy. For example, Juan J. Lopez once taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago but was denied tenure in spite of a teaching award and a well-received book published by The Johns Hopkins University Press titled Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro’s Cuba. Lopez had escaped Cuba with his parents and moved to the United States in 1967.
Agustin Blazquez who wrote about Lopez’s predicament in 2002 also is a Cuban exile frustrated by the artistic/academic community that, while ostensibly worshiping all that is “Latino,” shuns those who expose the communist Castro regime. In Cuba, Blazquez had been apprehended twice on bogus charges, and saw the inside of El Castillo del Principe prison that he calls a “dungeon.”
In 1965, at the age of 21, he used the offer of an acting school scholarship in Canada to request an exit permit and managed with some finagling of the communist bureaucracy to leave. After living in Spain and Canada, Blazquez arrived in the U.S. in 1967. He was greeted with warmth by Americans — except those in the art world.
He learned that grants and prizes for documentaries in his series “Covering Cuba” would not be forthcoming. The latest, and seventh, titled Che: The Other Side of an Icon, was produced on a budget of $14,000. Only about $4,000 of that was from a non-profit that he had started himself. He had submitted a more typical budget of $494,000 to CPB-PBS (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting System). Blazquez had no success with the publicly supported organization, nor did he with the taxpayer-supported American Film Institute in his other projects. In fact, he could not even get an airing on POV (Point of View), the program created by PBS specifically for the purpose of airing “controversial” films…
…The Argentinean-born Che’s contemptuous attitudes towards Cubans, blacks, and peasants are revealed by those who knew him and are backed up in his own writings. Wheelchair-bound Margot Menendez, whose brother was executed, describes the treatment she and other women received as they waited futilely to visit relatives in prison. Strip searches and arbitrary cancellations are recalled. So are the beatings by guards when the women rushed “Che’s” car as it entered the prison yard. Blanca Rojas recalls learning of her father’s execution by seeing it on television the same night she gave birth to her son. The dramatic footage is shown of Col. Cornelio Rojas — made an “example” — who stands tall and defiant up to the point when the gun shots in the head bring him down.
Journalist Humberto Fontova recounts Che’s 1962 terrorist bomb plot that would have likely exceeded the devastation of 9/11. It was planned to explode in New York City’s shopping district on the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year. The plan was foiled by the FBI.
Fontova exposes “Che” not only as a sadistic killer but as an incompetent revolutionary…
Read the entire article at PajamasMedia.
H/T Babalu Blog
