My name is Tom Cummins.
That means I'm not Homi Bhabha.
But it's still a pleasure
to be here in front of you
to begin this--
I think this is the first
of the master classes.
Homi returned from London
a bit under the weather,
and so, I have really
received the great honor
to do the introduction today.
And as many of you
know, but I should
say that the master
classes are that Hendra
said is an attempt to showcase
scholars engaged in one
of the humanities, whether
it's essential practices,
interpreting with scrupulous
care and patients, either
a single text, or an
image, or a practice.
And over the years, we've
hear poems by Yates,
paintings by Caravaggio, and
a shot from Bonnie and Clyde.
This year, there will
be three master classes
that will focus
on one of the most
traumatic years of the
last century that is 1968.
It's hard to believe
that was 50 years ago.
And I will tell you
how old I am by saying
that that was the year that
I graduated from high school.
And those of you
who were not of age
then will remember-- will
not remember, should I say,
that that was such
a traumatic year.
The year of rage in Chicago,
this death of Bobby Kennedy,
Martin Luther King.
Most of you know this,
but to have lived
it was a traumatic year
as I think I've ever
lived until this century.
I never thought it
would be that bad.
And so, in addition to tonight's
speaker, Diana Sorensen,
who will be speaking on Che
Guevara's Pasajes, which
was published in English in
1968, on Thursday, November 27,
Peter Gordon will discuss
Adorno's resignation.
And then, on
Thursday, April 11th,
Homi Bhabha will take on Frantz
Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.
Another really
fundamental text that,
again, is something that has
meant a lot to me and to many
of us working in the humanities,
and working across cultures,
and working with the
colonial shackles
that still seem to have us
entwined in the 21st century.
Tonight's speaker,
Diana Sorensen,
is [SPANISH], retired.
Not from academics, but
from administration.
I had the wonderful privilege--
well, it wasn't a
privilege being chair--
but I had the
wonderful privilege
of working as a chair with
a most spectacular dean.
She is, of course,
more than a dean.
She's is the James Rothenberg
professor of romance languages
and literatures and of
comparative literature.
And so, as she was a dean,
she maintained a high profile
as a scholar.
Before joining the faculty
in 2001 here at Harvard,
she came from Columbia.
Before that, she taught
at Wesleyan University.
She is a specialist in
19th and 20th century
literatures of Latin America.
Her books include The
Reader and the Text,
Interpretive Strategies for
Latin American Literatures,
Facundo and the Construction
of Argentinean Culture, which
won the MLA prize
for the best book
in the field of Latin
American scholarship.
She also wrote on
Sarmiento, someone
who crosses between
Argentina and Boston,
an annotated edition
of his works.
And then, A Turbulent Decade,
Remembered Cultural Scenes
from Latin America in the '60s.
Her current work deals
with mobility and shifting
units of regional coherence--
or, incoherence-- and it
focuses on the transformations
of the global in
the 21st century.
Her book, Territories,
Trajectories, Cultures, and
Circulation, is
a wonderful book.
One that I'm in the process--
actually, right
now-- of reading.
It's published by
Duke University Press.
And as I said, she served--
and really did more
than serve-- she
led as dean of arts and
sciences for 10 years
before stepping down in 2016.
And tonight's talk will be
about Che Guevara, his writing,
and the year 1968.
Please help me welcome
this wonderful [SPANISH]..
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Tom.
And thank you all for coming.
This is an incredibly
busy time of the year,
so I'm happy to see you here.
I also want to thank Homi's
wonderful group at the Humanity
Center, including Steve Beale,
Mary Halpenny-Killip, Andrea
Volpe, and Sarah Razor
for helping get us going.
So the 50 years that
separate us from '68
invite us to remember,
commemorate, assess,
and reinterpret.
Hannah Arendt
anticipated this urge
to remember by
claiming that, I quote,
"The next century will once
learn about 1968 the way we
learned about 1848."
And here we are.
'68 does indeed
occupy a central place
in the revolutionary
archive filled
with the inevitable
contradictions of a youth
culture that sought to reach
out to the working class
while it tried to
integrate culture,
[? Eros, ?] and politics.
Today when we are bereft
of collective projects
and Utopian spirit,
'68 appears like
the nostalgic, dusty residue
of a once dazzling set
of fireworks.
As Tom indicated, my class
will deal with an iconic figure
of '68, Che Guevara.
The best rendition is
in the wonderful poster
that Steve and his
people just did.
And there we go.
So I will look at the book that
appeared in '63, Pasajes de la
Guerra Revolucionaria,
and, as was indicated,
translated into English
in 1968 as reminiscences
of the Cuban Revolutionary War.
Let me begin with
a historical stage
upon which Che's fame arose,
the Cuban revolution of 1956
to '59.
During its early years,
before the repressive turn
of the early '70s,
the revolution
ushered in new configurations
of radical practice
and ideologies of
transformation which
occupied much of the social
imaginary of the '60s,
especially in Latin America.
Their boundless belief
in possibilities,
in the creative verve to fashion
humanity and its culture,
cannot be separated from
the experience of newness
and invention, which
characterizes the writing
of the '60s in the boom.
The group of revolutionaries
who set sail on the Granma
in November, 1956,
fashioned themselves
as an exemplary
community held together
by strong horizontal
bonds, led and united
by a powerful
leader, Fidel Castro.
With few exceptions,
this community
was structured as a
phallocratic brotherhood
based on a spirit of egalitarian
and fraternal solidarity.
In the shaping of
the new community,
Che played an emblematic role.
One could make the
perhaps startling case
with Alma Guillermoprieto
that Che was,
as she put it, the century's
first Latin American.
With that peculiar
mixture of foreignness,
transnational identity,
and marked Argentinean
idiosyncrasies-- hence the Che--
that made him both uniquely
local and continental.
The myth, which
grew upon his death,
turned him into a
model for experience
based upon the
compelling mixture
of striking individualism and
unconventional personal style,
on the one hand, with the
will to collective integration
on the other.
What Che Guevara
exemplified was metonymica
of the manner in which the
Cuban revolution wished
to represent itself, thereby
offering a possible resolution
to the '60s growing
disenchantment
with what Marcuse would
call, uni-dimensional man.
This also accounts for the
immediate international
appropriation of Che as
myth after his death and his
symbolic value in the Paris
of May '68 articulated
in the following observation
made by Jean-Michel Palmier
in the May 1968 issue of
the magazine Littéraire.
Palmier says, "Dead,
everyone wanted
to appropriate his reflection,
to approach his shadow,
to forever imprint
in their memory
the features of this corpse
with his wide-open eyes
riddled with bullets."
This spectral quality
of the disembodied Che
seemed to expand his presence
and secrete a magical force
which combined holiness
with violence, austerity
with celebration, effort with
joy, fragility with power,
unsullied heroism with defeat.
Not until '97 were his remains
found so that the resulting
spectrality had the haunting
effect of the disappeared
occupying a space infused
with longing for a body which
had been withheld
but might be found.
As has been the case with
other heroic figures,
the absent body encouraged the
myth of the eternal return.
Here, you see the cover of
an Argentine weekly, Primera
Plana, that fashioned
itself after Time.
And in 1967, in October,
this is its cover.
Guevara, dead or a phantom?
Let me briefly comment
on the exceptional effect
of two photographs
which contributed
to this spectral quality
and myth-making energy.
The haunting
Christ-like figures--
quality, sorry, of the
Freddy Alborta photograph
taken right after his death
in Bade Grande, Bolivia,
has paradoxically
engendered a disjunction
between his captor's desire to
proclaim and verify his death.
And I want to show you
what he looked like when
he was first captured.
So they wanted to leave
no doubt as to the fact
that this was, indeed, Che
Guevara having been captured.
So, on the one hand, proclaiming
and verifying his death,
and at the same time,
an unwitting creation
of an everlasting icon both
heroic and martyr-like.
Jean-Michel Palmier's
observation that I read
a moment ago deals
precisely with the effect
of this [? will ?]
to memory which
had so deep an impact
on the imaginaire 1968.
Equally powerful, but with
different inflections,
was a 1960 photograph by Alberto
Días Gutiérrez, known as Korda,
and is taken at a ceremony
to mourn 81 people killed
at an explosion
in Havana Harbor.
A tragedy that Fidel Castro
attributed, of course,
to the CIA.
Che's face here may have
expressed a mixture of anger
and sadness at the event.
It was captured by Korda's lens
even though, on that occasion,
there were distinguished
foreign visitors.
Among them, Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir whom he,
Korda, was intent
on photographing.
At the time, the photograph was
not chosen by the government
magazine Revolucíon, which
covered this particular rally.
But seven years later
in May or June 1967,
Korda gave a print to
the Italian publisher
Filtrinieri who turned
it into a poster
after the news of Che's
death was divulged.
Of course, the photograph was
to have an illustrious life
in its extraordinary
circulation as can
be seen in a documentary
film about it made in '82.
In Cuba, Korda's photograph was
enlarged to cover the entire
facade of the interior ministry,
which faces the Plaza de la
Revolucíon where a mass rally
was held when Che's death was
publicly announced
on October 18, 1967.
Later, it was appropriated
by the young marchers of 1968
in Milan, Paris, London,
Mexico City, and other places.
The process of posterization
was suited to street rallies.
The form contributed to
their spirit of freedom,
and it had the
boldness of design
to express the widespread
sense of discontent
of the spirit of '68.
The gravitational
pull of the Che myth
produced a space for the
representation of fullness.
It allowed the
reordering of elements,
which existed in dislocated
form in the social imaginary,
producing what Allen Badeau
would call a suturing
effect that helped overcome
paradoxes and disjunctions.
The force of integration
derived not only
from the magic of
his face, but also
from what was known about
his character, his behavior,
and the considerable body
of writing he left behind.
Che's face had the
spontaneity and versatility
of expression associated
less with political figures
than with actors.
Asthma intensified the
awareness of his body,
marking it with fragility and
willpower at the same time.
His devastating asthma
attacks, in fact,
pay an ever-present role in
the representation of a Che
who had to overcome the
crippling effects by dint
of will.
Self-sacrifice and
determination were
key to the production of
self, exemplified by Che,
as central elements
in the new man
to be created after
the revolution.
Che epitomize this new man as
the model the decade aspired to
in its revolutionary
inflection, as the subject whose
self-definition rested on
the politics of wrecking
and building, hard at work
on changing the world.
In the construction of the Che
myth, his style, his behavior,
and his writings were
all deployed to what
an important aim of the early
years of the Cuban revolution.
Finding ways for the transition
from individual passions,
such as love, to the collective
and social dimensions
of the state.
A new vision of community
and the bonds that link it,
negotiated by Che's model, one
that supersedes the earlier
paradigm which rested
on the Bourgeois family,
was strengthened by this myth.
Better suited to the mood
of liberation of the '60s
was his fervent
espousal of a citizenry
united by horizontal ties
of equality and solidarity.
This imagined
community is organized
around a different
kind of desire,
no longer galvanized by the
reproductive aims of the family
and its private values.
It espouses the
grammar of fraternity,
apparently disavowing
patriarchy,
whilst fostering the
conditions for Utopian growth.
And yet, as we shall
see, in its center
is located the
revolutionary leader
Fidel Castro, who performs
exacerbated masculine values
in his relationship
with a body politic.
So how does Che, the
construct, derive
from the myth and
the writer, fashion
the project for the new man?
Speeches given at
commemorative festivities,
at factories, high schools
and universities, peasant
gatherings, and
inaugural ceremonies
construct a force
field which attain
an alchemical fusion of
personal and collective,
secular and religious.
Che maps the terms for the
definition of the new man
in language appropriated
from religion.
His eyes set on the
ideal revolutionary
as he works out a
new social pact.
Here, we come to
the aporia which
the efforts of critical theory,
as developed by the Frankfurt
School, never quite
resolved, but whose way
out was glimpsed by Benjamin
in his less secular moments.
The possibility of
happiness as indissolubly
bound up with
images of redemption
claiming freedom and
reconciliation as Utopian,
yet possible, if our earthly
existence is transformed
into a superior form.
Che seemed to suggest that these
aspirations might be realized,
and his death arrested
the dream whilst
creating the conditions
of possibility
for its perpetuation.
Herbert Marcuse's
one-dimensional man
was to point in
the same direction.
He says, "Society will be
rational and free to the extent
to which it is
organized, sustained,
and reproduced by an essentially
new historical subject."
That goal would seem to lie
beyond the limits of the state,
to prefigure a new form
of celebratory, masculine
sociability in which voluntary
work took on a festive air.
To show how these powerful
forces find their way
into writing, I have chosen
this text written originally
in serialized form and published
in [INAUDIBLE] and later
as Pasajes de la Guerra
Revolucíonaria in 1963
translated in '68 as
reminiscences of the Cuban
Revolutionary War.
I will refer to it
briefly as Pasajes.
In reconstructing the Pasajes
of the revolutionary campaign
which culminated in the
overthrow of Batista,
Che is working out an
interesting narrative project.
How to construct the future
in the telling of the past.
The temporal
complexities, in part,
the work of memory,
but it is furthered
by the scene of reading, which
is invoked by the Pasajes.
The reader in question
is experiencing
the new revolutionary society.
He is being embodied and
modeled by the text in his hand
as he traces the origin of the
nation to be reconstructed.
And here, let me
announce that I'm not
going to say he or
she because this
is a deeply masculine
and patriarchal vision.
And it's really a
masculine society
that Che is referring
to, even in his most
revolutionary spirit.
So Che's ostensible purpose,
as set down in the preface,
is to help preserve the
memory of the revolution,
protecting it from the
ravages of oblivion,
and addressing a question posed
by the revolutionary leaders
themselves, namely, how to write
a history of the revolution.
The effort of retrieval is
central to Che's writing, which
we could describe as
an ethos of remembering
marked by the
conceptual attempt to be
self-critical and accurate.
This is a part of the preface.
"The years pass, and the
memory of the insurrection
is dissolving in the past.
We have not yet definitively
set down these events,
which already belong to
the history of America.
For this reason, I'm
starting a series
of personal reminiscences
of attacks, battles,
and skirmishes in which
we all participated.
It is not my intention that
this fragmentary history, based
on remembrances and
a few hasty notes,
should be taken
as a full account.
On the contrary, I hope that
each theme will be developed
by those who lived it."
This is presented as the
beginning of a collective work
to be executed by a
community of memory workers.
In the very writing, the project
had a collective dimension.
Che would begin by
recording the first draft.
Then, when the typed version
was produced by his secretary,
he would not only rework it
using his diaries to achieve
greater accuracy, but he
would also review the text
in meetings held at the Ministry
of Industry with his old
comrades in arms who shared
their own reminiscences
to correct and discuss Che's.
Che claims to be taking
only the first steps
issuing an invitation essential
to the success of this project.
There are many survivors of
this battle, and each of them
is encouraged to contribute
to his recollections
so that the story may
thus be filled out.
The ethos of remembering
is not fulfilled
until the task of
recalling and writing
are submitted to
scrupulous self-criticism.
The author is to remove any word
which may not be entirely true
or of which he may
not be entirely sure.
Precisely because
Che's ideal reader
is learning as he
followed his tale,
Pasajes is structured along the
[? topoi ?] of errors, becoming
and beginnings.
Since the victorious outcome
is the very presupposition
of the book, he excused
the predictably epic tone
and triumphalist
rhetoric, replacing them
with the rhythms of
learning and transformation
better suited to narrative
form to the persona cultivated
by Che, and to the mood
of his youthful admirers
who were drawn to
his informality
and lack of pretense.
The opening pasaje
entitled Alegría de Pío--
it's just a place in the
Sierra Maestra area--
is a case in point.
It is built as an
exemplary story
in which the
inventory of missteps
is meticulously described,
the better to avoid them
in the future.
Like school children
who have yet
to draw the unforgiving
distinction between game
playing and war games,
the 82 youthful rebels
who disembarked
on December, 1956,
were soon to learn
the dire consequences
of inexperienced campaigning.
Wearing ill-fitting boots,
having lost their way at sea
and on land, leaving traces
which allowed the enemy
to detect their whereabouts,
lacking the judgment needed
to tell friend from foe, they
fell prey to an air raid that
left many wounded--
Che himself among them--
and inflicted
their first defeat.
This pedagogy of mistakes
is but the reverse
of the process of learning
and transformation,
which leads to becoming
a revolutionary army
in this particular version
of the Bildungsroman.
Che's narrative is punctuated
by moments of evaluation,
which keep marking beginnings.
This master plot is
reenacted at every occasion
when the rebels seem to be on
the verge of becoming an army.
He ends his memoir
with an account
of effective, though
minor, accomplishments.
He calls them,
small feats, which
began to drive Batista's troops
away from the Sierra Maestra.
As if what constituted
a desirable Koda were
the vision of a promising
beginning in which the rebels
have become a fully-fledged
army and the process of learning
that particular lesson
has come to fruition.
Thus, the significance
of Pasajes
lies in the narration of
learning from mistakes,
which is at the center of Che's
construction of the new man.
If this lesson is
learned, the task
of vigilant self-fashioning
can begin again and again,
much in the same way as each
arrival of reinforcements
enacts the pattern of
transforming the newcomers
into true revolutionaries.
A reading attune
to literary echoes,
one that I cannot resist,
detects text in Che's writing
two quite different forms
which work together to address
questions of ethics.
One of them, the
Picaresque, is inscribed
in the rebellious register.
It flouts normativity and opts
for an irreverent contestation
of the doxa.
Conversely, the earlier
one, the medieval exemplum,
invokes normativity
in a didactic manner,
making the story
subservient to the lesson.
This particular mix is
perhaps the rightfully version
of Che's style,
carefree and moralizing
at one and the same time.
It makes the text hover on an
interestingly unstable edge
which mitigates the heavy
imprint of teaching.
In the emplotment provided
by the economy of mistakes
and learning, there
are picaresque echoes
infused with humor and a
penchant for the ridiculous.
Like the main character
of picaresque novels,
the young rebels
sometimes resort to tricks
when their own
military callowness
makes their wits more reliable
than their soldiering.
This lightens the
narrative tone,
and in the pleasure
provided by humor,
the reader can catch a
glimpse of the youthful spirit
of camaraderie which blurred
the boundary between living
and dying, danger and fun,
between soldiering and playing.
Early on, for example,
a brilliant ruse
played by Fidel Castro on Chicho
Osorio, an infamous foreman who
terrorized the peasants on
behalf of the local landowners,
yields valuable information
about the whereabouts
of the army headquarters
and the possible allegiances
of the rural population.
Che tells the story
with obvious delight,
not only at Fidel's
daring and inventiveness,
but also at the
process of astutely
giving the unwitting
Osorio his just desserts.
Tricking and
tripping up the enemy
are presented tongue-in-cheek,
and the narrated encounter
is not always lethal as is the
case with a captured soldier
who never suspects that he's
being fed the very horse he
is intending to look after.
Picaresque echoes
are also present
in the economy of scarcity that
the rebels are subjected to.
Lack of food and
proper weapons is
the focus of narrative concern.
Che sometimes depicts himself
as a latter-day Lazarillo de
Tormes lovingly evoking the
ingestion of four sausages
as one of the greatest
banquets of his life,
or acknowledging that the most
lamented aspect of a defector's
departure was his absconding
with a can of condensed milk
and three sausages.
For Che's Cuban readers in
1963, this regime of shortages,
of making do and
doing without, may
have helped
negotiate experiences
they were confirming
in their daily lives.
More powerful than the
Picaresque is, in the Pasajes,
the vestige of an earlier
narrative form which
has been essential to the
transmission of learning,
the exemplum.
Interspersed in
the reminiscences
are numerous tales
whose exemplarity
lies in their presentation of a
gallery of heroes and traitors
through their actions,
complete with Kodas which
explicate and develop the
didactic value of the passage
in question.
The result is a veritable study
of human potential ranging from
the model provided by
heroes, such as Frank País,
to traitors such as Eutimio
Guerra, Philippe Pasos,
and Raul Chivas.
But Che's task is not simply
hagiographic or demonizing.
He's also sketching the embrace
of a future community for which
it is important to offer a
spectrum of acceptable forms
of behavior and degrees
of political commitment.
In Pasajes, one can detect
a productive tension
between the self, constructed
by the narrative voice,
and the one observed and admired
in the heroic figure of Fidel.
The I who tells the
stories is self-effacing
and modest to a fault,
reluctantly assuming
the protagonist's
role, and careful not
to indulge in emotional
self-expression
unless he's recording the
frailty of his asthmatic body.
And while Che goes
out of his way
to name the women who have
made heroic commitments
to the revolution, this
foundational community
is essentially phallocratic.
So the horizontal bonds of
this collective singular,
as Reinhart Koselleck calls
this kind of community,
configure the state
only if the dynamics
of egalitarian solidarity
is organized around a higher
authority.
This, of course,
is Fidel Castro,
the leader whose representation
occupies the space carved out
by Che.
Wherever he has noted a lack
derived from physical frailty,
or military ineptitude,
poor strategic thinking,
or faulty judgment,
Che has filled it
with a totalizing presence,
the leader, Fidel.
Furthering the heroic
representation of Fidel
is a framing based on distance
which connotes infallibility.
If Che can be construed as a
possible model for an emerging
kind of masculinity
inviting identification
through the
acknowledgment of weakness
and the compensatory
effort that accompanies it,
Fidel can be seen,
instead, as the emblem
of a certain
hyper-masculinity performed
as infallible leadership.
So as I draw to my
conclusion, I want
to close with a
small anecdote that
encapsulates the dynamics
that I've just described
between Che and Fidel.
Che's deliberate undermining
of his own authority
for the sake of underscoring
Fidel's is amusingly
encapsulated in an anecdote
conveyed with obvious delight
by the novelist Guillermo
Cabrera Infante.
And I quote, "The
late Comandante Duque
used to tell a story of a
shooting match in Sierra
Maestra that he witnessed.
Castro and Guevarra were
engaged in a war against boredom
doing practice against
some empty beer bottles.
Castro was hitting all the
bottles, but Guevarra hit none.
Later, Duque asked Guevarra, who
was a sharp shooter famous all
over the Sierra, why Che, you
could do better than that.
Guevarra answered with a
sneer and a true confession.
You want me to make
our leader lose face?
You should know
better than that."
How telling that this master
of self-effacement and
revolutionary commitment would
be appropriated by the branding
and marketing machine
that had turned him
into an advertising tool for
Smirnoff Vodka, for Mercedes
Benz, for Converse Sneakers.
Che's ideals may belong
to the past in our era
bereft of collective projects,
but the work of nostalgia
and marketing marches on.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
That was a wonderful exposition
of both the commercialization
of Che and Che's own text
and the contradictions that
lie within that which are
sometimes very hard to resolve.
And just before opening
it up to questions,
I just had a few
comments because I
sat down and reread the text.
I must have read
it in 1969 or '70.
And one of the things
that really struck me,
which you mentioned
here, are two things
that Che does talk about
in which, all of a sudden,
he moves out of the deprecating
individual to one that
is, as you read it, a
somewhat heroic individual.
And that is when he is shot
and thinks he's going to die.
And it's the only time,
I think, in the book--
I may be wrong--
that he actually
appeals to literature.
Jack London.
And he appeals to Jack
London and his short story
to build a fire.
And of those of you who
have ever read that,
it's the coldest
story ever written
because this individual is in,
of all places, the antithetical
place where he's talking
about mosquitoes,
the heat, the bother.
And to build a fire, of
course, takes place in Alaska.
And it's about an individual
who is freezing to death
and tries to build a fire.
And in the end, he
gets the fire going.
And the fire is under a tree.
And the branch, as I remember,
drops the snow on the fire,
and it puts it out.
And then he has to sit
back and heroically
accept his own death, stoically.
And Che says this.
I was like this figure.
He doesn't mention the
story, but I know the story.
I mean--
He mentions the author.
He mentions the author.
And it's that moment of
self-realization of both death
and accepting death in this,
you know, really stoic way
that couches him in a
very different light.
And the other instance is one
that, as you're reading it,
you realize that he is
writing this down to someone
who he talks about
teaching to read and write.
The peasant.
Yes.
[SPANISH]
Yes.
And all of a sudden,
there's an engagement
with a reader for whom he
has performed the heroic task
of learning to read and write.
So every once in a while for
me, Che comes through not--
and he comes through
one other time this way.
And it's when they're
in full retreat,
and he has to make a decision.
Because he's a doctor
or he's a guerriero.
And he says, I can't carry
both medicine and ammunition,
and I have to decide.
And what does he decide?
He picks up the ammunition, and
he leaves his medicine behind.
So that there are these
moments to me in the text where
Che professes himself in
different ways that are not
about Fidel, but really are
about him and his becoming
either by dying or choosing
to be I am a guerriero.
Those kinds of things.
So that there is a
multiplicity, I think, sometimes
when you read this between
Che as the individual
there, who also gets
blisters and has
to carry his shoes as you said.
But also, these
moments that mark him
as teacher, as reader,
and as a revolutionary as
opposed to being a doctor.
That's a wonderful
observation, Tom.
And I would add
one more instance,
which is when Fidel decides
to make him Commandante.
And he's named Commandante
in a very casual way,
but for Che Guevarra, this is
another moment of becoming.
So there not many, but they
are significant moments.
And they punctuate the text.
I mean, they don't
come one after another.
As you're reading along
as you described it.
But every once in a
while, it opens that up.
Yes.
And it is, as you say,
a very hyper-male text.
So the three women who
he names are named,
not as individuals,
but as companeras.
Yes.
And nobody else is called
companero that way to anybody.
I would rather, you
know, open it up now
for those who might
have questions
or comments about the text
or comments on the talk.
Peter.
Thank you, [INAUDIBLE].
Hello?
Can you hear me?
Yes.
It's on.
OK.
Thank you very much.
It was fascinating.
The particularly interesting
to me is a literary question.
Namely, the question of the
picaro, or the picaresque,
and the degree of
its reconcilability
with moments of learning.
And it seemed to
me that you were
arguing that there's
a simultaneity
of the picaresque and--
well, I wouldn't say the
Bildungsroman, but of learning.
Whereas, it seems to me
that the learning that
happens in the course
of a picaresque
is always only pretense
or only temporary,
and by the fifth or sixth
misadventure at the latest,
you no longer think
of any of the learning
from mistakes that's going on
as being in any way authentic.
And so, I'm wondering if you
could trouble that a bit more.
Thank you.
Thank you for the
question, Peter.
I would say that
these are strands
that appear in the
text, and the picaresque
lightens the tone in
the tradition started
in the 16th century by
Lazarillo de Tormes.
The Lazarillo does
learn quite a lot,
but it's all very disenchanting.
You know, it's about
Spanish society
in the 16th century
overwhelmed by appearances
and lacking any kind of agency.
But I think that
Che is finding ways
to draw on the repertoire
to lighten up and make
the didactic tone
a more digestible--
[INAUDIBLE] the
picaro the function
of the learning by mistake
rather the other way around?
Yes.
And I would be doing
the text an injustice
if I considered it an example
of the picaresque because there
is a lot at stake here.
But there is a lot of
that sort of light-hearted
tripping up or tricking because
the characters themselves
are learning, and
they're trying to make
their way through by dint of wit
more than soldiering at first.
Thank you.
Yes?
Could you tell us who you are?
This is being recorded.
Yes?
And we need this for the mic.
Could you take the mic?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Hi.
I'm Ogden Ross.
Is there a way in which Che's
political Marxist theory which,
in my mind, was somewhat
more radical in nature
than Castro, perhaps, be
contrasted in the stories
to Castro, particularly
in response
to the overthrow of
Batista, which was
the whole point of this anyway.
And is that part
of the narrative?
Part of the?
Narrative.
Not in this case because this
is the story of the exploits
that took place
between '56 and '59.
So it's about trying to
convince the rural population.
And of course, you
referred to Che's doctrine.
He articulated the
foco theory which
was based on rural uprisings,
not urban uprisings.
But this text,
The Reminiscences,
is more about remembering
than about expounding
a political program.
That will come later.
And you are right that,
as the Cuban revolution is
consolidated, Fidel will tend
towards the Soviet model,
and Che for a while--
because it was a
very short while--
felt greater allegiances
with the Chinese model.
Yes?
So you talked about--
Could you just
identify yourself?
I'm Kayla.
I'm a student here.
You talked about
disembodied images,
and it seemed to me that it
was very profoundly ambivalent
the ways that images get
disembodied because the image
that was meant to capture
Castro's death and show
everyone--
Che's death.
Oh, sorry.
Che's death--
Castro dies much later.
[LAUGHTER]
To show the US's ultimate
victory over Che Guevara
did anything but,
and got circulated
as a revolutionary trope that
empowered a lot of movements.
But then, at the end, you
said that now, that image
has been appropriated by
capitalism in commercializing,
ironically, everything
he stood for.
So how does that shift
happen, and do you
think it's possible to shift
it again and read Che Guevara's
consistent, haunting
presence in capitalism
as kind of the potential for
that revolutionary sentiment
to reappear?
Thank you, Kayla.
I'll start with
your last question.
And I don't mean to be
flippant, but the answer
is up to you and
your generation.
Are you ready to, you
know, espouse idealism
and a sense of the
collective that's
based on solidarity and not on
competition and a rearrangement
of certain values?
The other part of your
question would take--
perhaps deserves a long answer.
But let me say
that the '70s right
after the death of
Che Guevarra, the '70s
are a period of retrenchment.
All the revolutionary
fervor of '68
ends up becoming
clandestine movements
in mostly urban environments.
And there are military
takeovers to avoid
what is seen as a terrible
risk to democracy.
And then, we have
the further decline
of moments like the
dirty war in Argentina
or the various dictatorships.
And again, leaping
through the decades--
50 have gone by--
I would say that
the neoliberal order
has done a lot to dissolve
ideologies of change
for the sake of a vision of
prosperity, the free market,
and has silenced some of the
ideological programs that
were so confidently
proclaimed in the '60s.
So I'm not giving you
the answer you deserve,
but it sort of points to
the general direction.
We have a question here.
Yes.
Just wait for the mic.
If you could just
identify yourself.
OK.
Hello.
Thank you.
My name is Rosa Montez.
I'm a visiting
scholar from Mexico
but originally from Argentina.
And I really enjoyed your
talk and the going back
to these writings.
I would like to
just make a comment.
Sort of anecdotal evidence from
a recent visit a few years ago
to Cuba in early 2016.
And being from Argentina, I
talked to a couple of people
on the street who
remembered those times
and had reminiscences of Che.
And I remember very
clearly a conversation
while we were on a long
wait with a bus driver, who
seemed to have known a lot of
people around that time, very
critical of the current
government and very critical
of the people that had,
according to this bus
driver, sort of lost their way.
And his opinion-- he had some
kind of official function--
but his opinion was
that Che and Fidel
were really crossing
paths, and were going
to come to a big confrontation.
And Che had to leave.
And how he rejected
some of the privileges
that the ruling class at
that time, the government
at that time, were enjoying.
And the anecdote was
how during the blockade
and during the crisis, Fidel
had sent some food to his home,
and [? Dona Leda ?]
very happily was
cooking the chickens and
the rest of the provisions
that had been sent.
And when Che got back, he
had them sent back to Fidel
thanking him, but
rejecting him because he
couldn't accept something
that the rest of the people
were not enjoying.
Thank you.
This may be true
or not, but it's
part of how the myth
lives on right now.
Yes.
And a lot has been said about
the tensions between Fidel
and Che in '65, and Che went off
to Congo, and then, eventually
to Bolivia.
And there is a sense
that it may have
been because there was no longer
a role for him to play in Cuba.
Thank you.
Mariano.
Thank you, Diana, for
this wonderful talk.
Mariano, could you just identify
yourself for the recording?
Oh, sorry.
Yes.
My name is Mariano Suskind.
I'm [? department ?] from
[INAUDIBLE] languages
and literatures and
comparative literature.
And thank you for
the wonderful talk.
And I think you touched
upon a bit about what
I want to ask you.
So maybe if I reformulate
what I was going to ask you.
It's not about Che, but
about the wonderful ending
of your paper about the--
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, I don't know.
But that's what I won't ask you.
But it's about the image,
and the appropriations
of the image, and working
in two different ways.
One thing that I
had never thought,
but it was a
striking resemblance
and reminiscence of--
When you projected the
photograph of his death,
bodies surrounded by
the Bolivian military.
Do you want me to--
Yes, please.
I mean, let's-- because--
and this is just
a comment, but I
think it's striking
in the composition
of the photograph the
way it seems to mimic
Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson.
And so, I wanted to ask you if
there was any thought in terms
in Che's scholarship in
relation to-- because,
I mean, this is a
very, as you explained
in detail, highly
produced scene that
had a very deliberate intentions
in terms of the circulation
to attest to the death of Che.
So that is one thing.
And the other one has to do with
the ending of your paper, which
is the--
Can we see the Kordas picture?
In terms of the processes of
commodification of his image
that you finished
with, the composition
of Barack Obama's poster Hope,
particularly the direction
of the gaze and the position
of the head reappropriated,
of course, devoided of any of
the radical politics of Che,
a form of radical politics
that perhaps could
have been consumed when the
poster came up during the 2008
campaign.
But as time went on, eight
years of his presidency
perhaps dissolved
and perhaps going
in the same direction of the
processes of commodification
that you pointed to.
So those two-- not
intertextualities,
but interfigural
relations of these images.
And the fact that you've
written so much wonderful texts
about Che, but making
clear, I think as a gesture,
but this is what I want to ask
you, that he can be reread.
He can be put in different
kinds of networks.
But he can be
reinscribed as a writer,
but not recuperated in terms
of his radical politics.
So if that's, in spite of
what you answer to Kayla's--
like, I want you to
say more about the way
that you see the
possibilities and limitations
of this revisiting
of his figure today.
Thank you, Mariano.
Let me start with the images.
And indeed, shortly
after Feltrinelli
created the poster,
John Berger--
who many of us have read--
you know, the art historian
and theoretician--
said, oh, this is just--
well, not this one, but the
one where he's lying dead--
this-- Gracias.
This is--
I'm good at this.
--just like the anatomy
lesson of Dr. Taupe,
and this is just like
Mantienias painting of--
Christ.
--Christ.
And, I would add, just like
Holbein's Christ in his
[INAUDIBLE].
So it was immediately captured.
There is one thing about the
way in which this image that
seems to be so
carefully arranged
has a rather gruesome detail.
Do you see a limb
down there in front
of one of the soldiers
on the far left?
So as much as this seems
to be an arranged scene,
it betrays some of the terrible
things that were going on.
Che was captured with
two other guerrieros.
So that about the images
that you absolutely
identified correctly about
the revolutionary message
and how we could
arrest the marketing
and the commercial appropriation
of Che's [INAUDIBLE] that
would make him die all
over again if he saw it.
Imagine Mercedes
Benz selling its car
putting on the little logo
instead of the star up there,
or, you know, ice creams.
There's a magnum ice cream
called, Cherry Guevara.
And we could go on and on.
I think the big
question of our time
and the big task of the
work we do in a university
is to rethink the whole
question of a program
for community, for solidarity,
for reigniting some kind
of Utopian possibility.
Right now, for all the reasons
I don't need to even refer to,
I'm very pessimistic,
which is not in my nature,
but it's difficult to get
up every morning these days.
And it's not just
Trump's America,
but a lot of what's happening
in other parts of Latin America,
such as Venezuela, where what
would be a populist message
has derailed in
really terrible ways.
So it's something I'd love
to talk more about with you.
So I'm just sort of
gesturing towards an answer.
I'm going to
interject just to say
one thing about
Mariano's question
and the commercialization
of this photograph.
First of all, the
photograph is taking
on a trope that goes back to
the 16th century, at least,
in terms of a kind of
portrait type, which is a--
When the viewer doesn't look
at you and looks up like that,
that's a regal photograph.
I mean, this is a
posed photograph.
This is not a snapshot, and
it is one that resonates
completely within the history
of art as a kind of [SPANISH]----
Portrait.
--portrait that is well known.
So that, as soon
as you see it, you
associate it with certain
kinds of rhetorical meanings
whether you know it
or not because you've
seen it over and over again.
And just as you see in
this photograph here,
there's also the
demonstration of proof
which is to counter
the Doubting Thomas.
When you put your finger
in the chest like that,
that becomes a Christlike
figure immediately.
But here, he's proving
he's dead, but of course,
in doing that, you're
proving he's alive.
And the other thing I
just couldn't help saying
is that Adorno's analysis
of the culture industry
has been used to really
talk about this image
and what happens to
political imagery as--
and rap and all kinds of radical
counterculture images, music,
et cetera, as it's run through
the culture industry as Adorno
describes very well.
So this was
well-articulated in the '50s
already in terms of what
was going to be happening.
But this photograph is
paradigmatic of what
Adnorno was arguing about.
There's a question right here.
I would just add that,
interestingly, the portrait--
not this one, but
the other one--
was snapped by Korda while
he was watching the crowd
at this memorial service.
Yeah, but it's cropped,
and taken down below--
It's just a perfect choice.
He's a professional
photographer.
And by the way, Tom, he
keeps all the rights and--
Yeah, I know.
--and the revenues, so--
Well, thank you, Diana,
for a wonderful talk.
Would you just identify--
Oh, sorry.
My name is Adriana
Guteirez and a I
teach at romance
languages and literatures.
No.
Thank you for a very, very
meaningful, thoughtful talk.
And my question was more--
I was puzzled by the
another or relationship
with the picaresque is that
self-effacement of the picaro
that is there to tell
the tale of others
and by learning through
watching and witnessing.
And in that he
self-effacement serves
for the purpose of creating the
image of Fidel as, you know,
the perfect leader.
And he portrays himself
as somehow the imperfect,
or the learner, after Fidel
in this very paradigmatic duel
that is also very much
of the picaresque.
But and as thinking about
what Mariano said later,
that self-effacement is as if he
were also preparing the ground
for this social destiny of
his own image that is that
self-effacement that has allowed
people to put in the anecdotes,
real or imagined--
some of them--
and just to present a very
pristine image precisely
because of that self-effacement.
That he, somehow, never--
even though he's using
himself as an exemplum,
he really doesn't become that.
It's Fidel who becomes that.
So it's as if he's there to tell
the tale, but at the same time,
he's the one who follows the
revolutionary dream that Fidel
never really achieves.
So in that sense, I disagree
with Mariano in the sense
that he's also an open
mark for reinterpretation
and that political
ideologies may come and go,
but that he's still
an open symbol
to be refilled
with possibilities.
Maybe not of technical
guerrilla warfare,
but with possibilities
and images
that will be created
in the future.
Well, I will be keen to see
how that gets reappropriated,
and if one could say,
rested from coaptation.
But it would be a
very productive thing
if the miracle could happen.
My name is Gustavo Quintero.
I'm from the Romance
Studies Department.
Diana, thank you so much.
It was a great talk.
I have two questions.
The first one is--
I mean, we can see how
there is a Christification
of the Che in all these images,
but I was wondering how,
or to what extent, there is this
presence of religious topics
and religious tropes within
El Pasajes de la Guerra
Revolucionaria.
Does he mobilize
some of those to--
And the second question I have,
and it's more like a comment,
it's very interesting because,
if I understand correctly,
these Pasajes come from a--
they were previously circulated
in [INAUDIBLE] magazine, right?
Yes.
And so, at the same
time they tried
to show how the future
should be from the past,
it seems to me that
the future is already
split because they
published it twice.
So it's already this
idea of circulation
of how the future
is, but it's already
published once in
[INAUDIBLE] and another time
in the passages.
Well, I don't think I would
run with that hypothesis
because that would suggest that
every time a book is reissued,
there aren't new
readers to be reached.
And when it appeared
in [INAUDIBLE],,
it was really at
the very beginning.
And so you could
imagine that you
have a readership
that's sort of following
[INAUDIBLE] which was truly
a kind of military journal
that got set up
immediately after '59.
And then, in the
process in which
a book gets, if you will--
I won't say canonized--
but established as
that important book
for the revolutionary
project, then it
continues to create a
sense of the future.
Now, does it do that now?
Did you do that 10, 20
years after it came out?
No.
At that point, it
was read differently,
and that's sort of
the life of a text.
Remind me, Gustavo,
what was your other--
oh, you asked me if the Christ--
I think what you see is a kind
of secular project expressed
in religious terms.
And a lot of his speeches, not
just in this book, but in many,
many speeches--
and he gave a lot--
you have this sense of a future
march towards a greater, higher
level of humanity.
And it's difficult to separate
that from the vocabulary
we have inherited
in religious terms.
But I would not say
that Che, in any way,
portrays himself
as a Christ figure.
These are kind of
accidents of the evolution
of the myth, the photographs,
and the historical record.
And that's why I mentioned
the strangeness of the body
disappearing for 30 years.
Nobody knew where it was.
They surgically
removed his hands.
And a few years after his death,
they were sent to Fidel Castro.
So the body was
turned into a kind
of spectral, ghostly absence.
One question there,
and then, we'll
take the last one over here.
OK.
I forgot to introduce
myself the first time.
Sorry.
Peter Berger, German department.
And forgive me for
asking a second question,
but I found this anecdote
about a shooting contest
very striking.
And I think it's topical given
the question of self-effacement
because it strikes
me that it is both
a self-effacement and an act
of power, an act of arrogance
and presumption.
For losing to Fidel
on purpose, of course
Che is becoming Fidel, right?
Is showing fidelity to him.
But at the same
time, he's losing
on purpose, which is an act
of presumption and arrogance
and placing himself
above Castro.
I wonder what you think about
that being a highly problematic
example of self-effacement?
I'd be with you, Peter,
if he were losing
in a very explicit, clear way.
But the assumption is that
the man went up to him
and said, what are you doing?
Because it looked as though he
wasn't managing to hit the beer
bottle.
So I think we can assume that
he was not flaunting his--
I don't think
flaunting, but he is
in this very technical sense in
the sense of the name becoming
Fidel, right?
By doing that.
Yes, but I wouldn't call
it-- what did you say?
Defiant?
I think it's a much
more muted gesture.
Well, presumptuous, I
would say, but maybe
it's not right word for it.
Anyway, thank you.
Thank you.
My name's Anala Thangelo,
York University.
I have a couple of questions.
The one goes to your--
when you were talking about the
picaresque around the ethics
question.
So you set it up
as being about--
the one is about doxa, you
know, and [INAUDIBLE] basically.
And then, the second
one, you we're
talking more about
the pleasure provided
by humor, and then, of course,
the food economy as well.
I'm wondering if there was--
I don't know, I haven't read
the text very carefully,
but I'm curious if there was
a different way of reading it
that points not
to this kind of--
in a lot of ways-- so the
one is the hyper-masculine,
and the other one is the
masculine embodiment.
But whether you can
read it in a way
that really challenges this
kind of dichotomization
of the subject itself
through these ethics
and these economies that
you have articulated.
So that's the first
question, and the--
Can I answer it just so
that we don't get lost?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that would be great.
No, I think that if
you read the text,
you will see that there is
one elegantly self-effacing
narrative voice that is
obviously becoming [INAUDIBLE]..
As Tom was saying, he
was really a doctor,
and the commitment to giving
Fidel Castro the leadership
role.
So I would say that
that distinction
holds through the whole.
No.
I mean, I'm not saying
that it doesn't hold.
But is there any way as the
readers, contemporary readers,
that are interested
in disrupting some
of these kind of appropriations
that are taking place, that we
can do a reading that
can also open kind
of different orientations
beyond these kind of, you know,
dominant, very masculine--
Well, there, you'd have
to do it and show me,
and I tell you whether I could
go along with it because this
is not an open text.
This is a text with a purpose,
but I'd be very curious.
I mean, it's always important
to reread and discover
other interpretations.
And my second
question comes out--
and probably is
not in this text--
but since you suggested
it, around the Chinese
and the Soviets.
And I'm really curious--
I mean, based on
your other work--
whether some of
that comes through,
you know, a little bit later
in terms of the tensions
that are generated.
And the reason I'm interested
in that since everybody's
talking about the
future, I mean,
where there are some kinds of
imaginations that were really
crucial, but were not taken--
you know, let's say through
the project of Fidel--
but they are still important
for us to take more seriously.
Thank you.
I would say that there's an area
in many of his later writings--
that is before he leaves in '65.
Because after that, he
writes his Congo diary
and his Bolivian diary.
But there is something to think
about when he is speculating
about voluntary labor.
And how to create community
motivated by solidarity,
by the willingness to
work, by doing away
with a distinction between
labor and intellectual work.
And so, that's a project that
he was extremely keen on and did
not really succeed in, but
it is quite a bit of writing,
and it would be
interesting to see
that because, for him, the new
society can only take place
if the collective needs
and the willingness
to do voluntary work at
every level is sustained.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
All right, Tom.
I think we'll bring
it to a close.
Yes.
Please.
[APPLAUSE]
