_Meditations on a Poster
(from the Spanish)
Edgardo Cozarinsky
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 75 (Nov. 2007)
The British composers of successful musicals were right to give Che a supporting role in Evita; his is an ideological “cameo” that respects the limits posed by a sure instinct for show business. It’s no surprise that those composers made a fortune with Jesus Christ Superstar: they knew that the character of Evita possesses star quality for the masses and the character of Che only for those minorities whose esteem is flattering but doesn’t help keep a show going for more than a decade, until its film version finally buries it.
Still, the poster has reappeared in all its manifestations. According to the sensibility of the one who looks at it, there is the noble or “winning” smile, the arrogant or virile cigar, the patchy beard recovered by fashion, above all the gaze always fixed on the distant horizon of utopia, beyond any pragmatic contradiction, crushing the lives of individuals who must bring it to fruition. And, too, the image of the dead leader: the Christ-like, infallible image staged by the CIA and its Bolivian acolytes, satisfied with the victory of one day, minting an icon for decades . . .
Yes, the poster has survived the political and ideological jolts that challenged all the tactical, strategic, or merely human errors of the individual. Impermeable to facts, like the mystic or the autistic, the poster remains faithful to the belief in an always future redemption and won’t be swayed by reality---for example, the fact that its model was surrendered to his executioners by the same people that he sought to redeem.
Detached from history, incarnating a pure revolutionary essence, everything seems to exalt it. First of all, the tacit distance taken from Castro, during years when the regime, exploiting for its own prestige the American blockade (which didn’t prevent it from continuing to trade through Canada or Spain, where Franco was always fond of that heir to the Spanish tradition), allowed the defunct Soviet Union to impose its stamp, no less sinister on the island than in Eastern Europe, but paid for there with a million dollars every day, later two. Those were times in which the country, condemned to monoculture, concentrated on sugar cane and imported dried fruit from Bulgaria; in which, once the first flush of liberty had passed, it tried to destroy the prodigious syncretism of Cuban culture, considered an obscurant residue, to be replaced with dialectical materialism.
Sent to make the revolution under other skies, so that his halo would not darken the real-politik of Castro, the prophet cried out for “a hundred Vietnams, a thousand Vietnams” to catch fire across Latin America to expel U. S. imperialism and recover a golden age under the sign of Marxist-Leninism. Thirty years later, when capitalism dominates the planet and Cuba is barely an open-air museum of communism, which only manages to cling to the life preserver of tourism, that call echoes with all the pathetic arrogance of those who decide to incarnate the “meaning of history,” that voluble, amnesic, Hegelian idol.
Behind the slogan, encouraging it, throbbed the most persistent mirage of the Contemporary Age (1789-1989): the creation of a “new man.” Robespierre and Saint-Just saw him emerge, pure, as if from a nutritious placenta, from the bloodbath in which the terror would submerge society. Not long after, Mary Shelley, a woman and a socialist, imagined a negative fate for Doctor Frankenstein’s creature. The expression came to know a prolonged genealogy: Lenin, Mussolini, Pétain, and Pol-Pot rendered it tribute. The pleasure of deciding who deserves to live (who is worth the bother to keep alive) and who must disappear so as to enable the dawn of new times is not alien to the concept’s allure. Guillotine or firing squad, mere drafts of the Cambodian slaughter, show the exterminating impulse of intellectuals who get close to power. They illustrate as well certain privileges of the leisure classes, revived under the revolutionary ideal, proper to those who only imagine themselves on the proscenium of history. I should say, adapting to an Argentine context a comment Pasolini made about the Red Brigades, that between the police sergeant, a “swarthy type” shot in passing by an armed group, and the militant whose family obtains his release from the ESMA [Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, the largest illegal center of detention and torture during Argentina’s Dirty War---Trans.] and buys him a one-way ticket to Madrid, I don’t doubt for an instant where to place my sympathy.
Because, in that context, Ernesto Guevara also incarnated the possibility of an imaginary recycling for the Argentine upper class, profoundly undermined by Peronism and gradually expelled from the political stage and from economic power by the financial oligarchy that governs the planet today. Careers as a model or a Formula 1 race car driver couldn’t satisfy the aspirations of all its offspring and so it was that no small quantity of them joined the ranks of the guerrillas, inspired by the ideological symbiosis which at the end of the 1960s permitted some in the Tacuara movement [the nationalistic antisemitic right wing---Trans.] to espouse a folkloric Maoism. Father Mujica was not the only clergyman to bless those nuptials.
The initiatory voyage that revealed to Ernesto Guevara in his youth the social misery of the continent evokes less the road to Damascus that transformed Saul into Paul than the route of Siddhartha Gautama on the way to becoming Buddha. A creature of the mid-20th century, he found along his path no other revelation than that of Marxist-Leninism. In his public images, dreaming on a balcony in Buenos Aires before the decisive voyage, or made up by the Cuban secret service before leaving on a mission to Africa, one can glimpse an echo of adolescent enthusiasm, of the dream to live adventures read in books.
Yes, the poster has reappeared among computers, cell phones, faxes, e-mail, and the whole panoply of communication that is part of the society that Che fought to prevent. None of the young people who attach that poster with thumbtacks to the wall of their room imagines a culture under state control, an economy based on barter, a society where passports are a privilege granted with discretion by the political power and the free circulation of ideas involves the risk of jail. No doubt, they are unaware that the only revolution made by workers was an anticommunist rebellion, and that in 1980 the members of the Polish union Solidarity who occupied the Lenin shipyards in Danzig requested first of all a priest and improvised a confessional in the yard.
Nonetheless, in the pigsty of shopping malls, drug trafficking, rigged justice and plastic surgery that television imposes on Argentine youths as the image of the obscene “reality” in which they live, the poster proposes a distant, heroic fate, without risk of repetition: a pretext for consoling daydreams. It’s a “virtual” daydream, like the images that populate the new digital empire. No one would want to renounce his parcel, however wretched, of individual freedom, but many hoard that ever-open arcadia, that limbo where History writ large shines forth and refuses to consider its thousand and one lamentable small histories.
If the poster can still move us for an instant, that is because we will never know Ernesto Guevara, just as we cannot know any individual in what is inalienable to him: neither as an apostle to a mirage nor as a pampered child eager for risk, whose example dragged more than one generation to defeat, torture, and death.
Communism foretold the inevitable defeat of capitalism. Less than a decade after its worldwide triumph, capitalism seems particularly threatened today by that same triumph: massive unemployment, destruction of the social fabric, tribal wars, proliferation of local mafias. While the left keeps dreaming with eyes closed, political theorists like Carl Schmitt conquer a posthumous public that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
But none of this can worry the poster, finally installed in that impregnable limbo that it shares with Gardel, “the-mute-who-sings-each-day-better,” and Evita, “the-champion-of-the-shirtless.” It is impossible not to recall, once again, the final scene in Brecht’s Galileo. To “Pity the country that has no heroes,” Galileo responds: “Pity the country that has need of heroes.”
(1997)
from El pase del testigo (2001)
(from the Spanish)
Edgardo Cozarinsky
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 75 (Nov. 2007)
The British composers of successful musicals were right to give Che a supporting role in Evita; his is an ideological “cameo” that respects the limits posed by a sure instinct for show business. It’s no surprise that those composers made a fortune with Jesus Christ Superstar: they knew that the character of Evita possesses star quality for the masses and the character of Che only for those minorities whose esteem is flattering but doesn’t help keep a show going for more than a decade, until its film version finally buries it.
Still, the poster has reappeared in all its manifestations. According to the sensibility of the one who looks at it, there is the noble or “winning” smile, the arrogant or virile cigar, the patchy beard recovered by fashion, above all the gaze always fixed on the distant horizon of utopia, beyond any pragmatic contradiction, crushing the lives of individuals who must bring it to fruition. And, too, the image of the dead leader: the Christ-like, infallible image staged by the CIA and its Bolivian acolytes, satisfied with the victory of one day, minting an icon for decades . . .
Yes, the poster has survived the political and ideological jolts that challenged all the tactical, strategic, or merely human errors of the individual. Impermeable to facts, like the mystic or the autistic, the poster remains faithful to the belief in an always future redemption and won’t be swayed by reality---for example, the fact that its model was surrendered to his executioners by the same people that he sought to redeem.
Detached from history, incarnating a pure revolutionary essence, everything seems to exalt it. First of all, the tacit distance taken from Castro, during years when the regime, exploiting for its own prestige the American blockade (which didn’t prevent it from continuing to trade through Canada or Spain, where Franco was always fond of that heir to the Spanish tradition), allowed the defunct Soviet Union to impose its stamp, no less sinister on the island than in Eastern Europe, but paid for there with a million dollars every day, later two. Those were times in which the country, condemned to monoculture, concentrated on sugar cane and imported dried fruit from Bulgaria; in which, once the first flush of liberty had passed, it tried to destroy the prodigious syncretism of Cuban culture, considered an obscurant residue, to be replaced with dialectical materialism.
Sent to make the revolution under other skies, so that his halo would not darken the real-politik of Castro, the prophet cried out for “a hundred Vietnams, a thousand Vietnams” to catch fire across Latin America to expel U. S. imperialism and recover a golden age under the sign of Marxist-Leninism. Thirty years later, when capitalism dominates the planet and Cuba is barely an open-air museum of communism, which only manages to cling to the life preserver of tourism, that call echoes with all the pathetic arrogance of those who decide to incarnate the “meaning of history,” that voluble, amnesic, Hegelian idol.
Behind the slogan, encouraging it, throbbed the most persistent mirage of the Contemporary Age (1789-1989): the creation of a “new man.” Robespierre and Saint-Just saw him emerge, pure, as if from a nutritious placenta, from the bloodbath in which the terror would submerge society. Not long after, Mary Shelley, a woman and a socialist, imagined a negative fate for Doctor Frankenstein’s creature. The expression came to know a prolonged genealogy: Lenin, Mussolini, Pétain, and Pol-Pot rendered it tribute. The pleasure of deciding who deserves to live (who is worth the bother to keep alive) and who must disappear so as to enable the dawn of new times is not alien to the concept’s allure. Guillotine or firing squad, mere drafts of the Cambodian slaughter, show the exterminating impulse of intellectuals who get close to power. They illustrate as well certain privileges of the leisure classes, revived under the revolutionary ideal, proper to those who only imagine themselves on the proscenium of history. I should say, adapting to an Argentine context a comment Pasolini made about the Red Brigades, that between the police sergeant, a “swarthy type” shot in passing by an armed group, and the militant whose family obtains his release from the ESMA [Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, the largest illegal center of detention and torture during Argentina’s Dirty War---Trans.] and buys him a one-way ticket to Madrid, I don’t doubt for an instant where to place my sympathy.
Because, in that context, Ernesto Guevara also incarnated the possibility of an imaginary recycling for the Argentine upper class, profoundly undermined by Peronism and gradually expelled from the political stage and from economic power by the financial oligarchy that governs the planet today. Careers as a model or a Formula 1 race car driver couldn’t satisfy the aspirations of all its offspring and so it was that no small quantity of them joined the ranks of the guerrillas, inspired by the ideological symbiosis which at the end of the 1960s permitted some in the Tacuara movement [the nationalistic antisemitic right wing---Trans.] to espouse a folkloric Maoism. Father Mujica was not the only clergyman to bless those nuptials.
The initiatory voyage that revealed to Ernesto Guevara in his youth the social misery of the continent evokes less the road to Damascus that transformed Saul into Paul than the route of Siddhartha Gautama on the way to becoming Buddha. A creature of the mid-20th century, he found along his path no other revelation than that of Marxist-Leninism. In his public images, dreaming on a balcony in Buenos Aires before the decisive voyage, or made up by the Cuban secret service before leaving on a mission to Africa, one can glimpse an echo of adolescent enthusiasm, of the dream to live adventures read in books.
Yes, the poster has reappeared among computers, cell phones, faxes, e-mail, and the whole panoply of communication that is part of the society that Che fought to prevent. None of the young people who attach that poster with thumbtacks to the wall of their room imagines a culture under state control, an economy based on barter, a society where passports are a privilege granted with discretion by the political power and the free circulation of ideas involves the risk of jail. No doubt, they are unaware that the only revolution made by workers was an anticommunist rebellion, and that in 1980 the members of the Polish union Solidarity who occupied the Lenin shipyards in Danzig requested first of all a priest and improvised a confessional in the yard.
Nonetheless, in the pigsty of shopping malls, drug trafficking, rigged justice and plastic surgery that television imposes on Argentine youths as the image of the obscene “reality” in which they live, the poster proposes a distant, heroic fate, without risk of repetition: a pretext for consoling daydreams. It’s a “virtual” daydream, like the images that populate the new digital empire. No one would want to renounce his parcel, however wretched, of individual freedom, but many hoard that ever-open arcadia, that limbo where History writ large shines forth and refuses to consider its thousand and one lamentable small histories.
If the poster can still move us for an instant, that is because we will never know Ernesto Guevara, just as we cannot know any individual in what is inalienable to him: neither as an apostle to a mirage nor as a pampered child eager for risk, whose example dragged more than one generation to defeat, torture, and death.
Communism foretold the inevitable defeat of capitalism. Less than a decade after its worldwide triumph, capitalism seems particularly threatened today by that same triumph: massive unemployment, destruction of the social fabric, tribal wars, proliferation of local mafias. While the left keeps dreaming with eyes closed, political theorists like Carl Schmitt conquer a posthumous public that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
But none of this can worry the poster, finally installed in that impregnable limbo that it shares with Gardel, “the-mute-who-sings-each-day-better,” and Evita, “the-champion-of-the-shirtless.” It is impossible not to recall, once again, the final scene in Brecht’s Galileo. To “Pity the country that has no heroes,” Galileo responds: “Pity the country that has need of heroes.”
(1997)
from El pase del testigo (2001)