2023-06-14 15:39:35
At every moment I felt that I, like each one of his countless children by country, the guerrilla who fell that October had left me on earth when I was only 24 days old and in the end entrusted to the multitude of my generation, for his brother Fidel, to enroll me in the impossible mission: to be like Che.
Thousands of Cubans from the year ’67 record our age with the time of his absence, marking our own aspirations with the feats of the friendly commander. Thus, now that he continues to be born, my 56th arrival date is approaching along with his number of permanence and I verify what others predicted from the beginning: the Che they thought they killed is still more alive than all of us.
In such hauls of memory the oath always emerges. Surely he — who once rebuked an enthusiast who cheered “Che” to his face — would have opposed reciting that proposal, but given the generous utopia that he has given birth to, it must be said again: Fidel was right to sow in Millions of boys the “insolence” of violating the modesty of the man who gave himself completely without gilding his name.
“We will be…” we said then next to who, being an adult and being the Chief, was also the main Guevarian pioneer.
Raising statues of thought to him, those same boys also contradict the modesty of the older bearded man who, before entrenching himself forever in a stone, tried to limit the tributes they would pay him.
It is obvious that most did not reach the promised height and also that a few were rather the reverse of their light, but the goal honors because it refers, better than individual coordinates, where to point the gaze of a people.
You have to look at Che, among true rays and among the growing illusions of other “lights.” Just as Cuba keeps a thousand sparks of heroes in its headlights, the world as a whole increasingly requires the fruitful presence of these men who seem to come from the time of the titans. Che cannot hide, he cannot be hidden, because when he marches with us he continues to shake clouds.
No, “the most complete human being of our era”—as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called him—does not conform to the dark. For thirty years they tried to hide him and they only succeeded in making us see him more and he found us again.
Honor has genetic markers. A bank president who often had no money, a commander who wore a soldier’s uniform and boots, a boss who shared the table equally, as well as the trench, a leader devoted to loyalty but allergic to adulation, a sentenced man who said to the executioner: breathe, aim well, that you are going to kill a man… it does not go unnoticed, however modest it may be.
There are ways to explain it: he is “like a flash of gold in consciousness,” said Ludovico Silva. Convinced that Che did not begin or end in that body of green serenity, José Saramago defined it as “what so often lives dormant within us.” And when in Bolivia they took his life and mutilated his hands, Julio Cortázar only found meaning in his by offering them to Ernesto for new acts and other deeds. Say it at last: How many others swore to follow you, Commander?
Here I am, a guerrilla, already older, with the age that the clumsy say you have not reached. Beside your triumphant march I look at the “dangerous habit of continuing to be born” that one day Eduardo Galeano discovered for you.
In effect, you are born —you have another first asthma attack at the age of two—, you play, you grow, you grow, you grow… and one morning at school you even take the oath we swore to you in our name for the first time. We’ll be… You probably just wanted to be like us.
Cover photo: Collage of Onlinetours
#Che #Guevara