Posted on 10/04/2004 9:19:48 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Tourists and political pilgrims can now follow "Che's trail" in Bolivia, which traces Ernesto Guevara's fatal attempt to export the Cuban revolution to one of Latin America's poorest countries.
Authorities opened the trail on Monday, allowing visitors to travel the same route through Bolivian villages and remote countryside that Guevara's small band of revolutionaries took before they were defeated by the Bolivian army.
The opening of the trail coincides with the release of "The Motorcycle Diaries," a critically acclaimed film that depicts a young Guevara on his motorbike trip through Argentina, Chile and Peru.
Guevara, an Argentine, became an icon after helping Fidel Castro (news - web sites) lead the Cuban revolution. His beret-wearing image still appears on T-shirts worldwide. Soldiers captured and executed him in October 1967, cutting short his ambition to turn Latin America into "one, two, three Vietnams."
The five-day trip on "Che's trail" includes a visit to the Quebrada del Yuro, where the injured Guevara was captured, and La Higuera, the village where he was executed.
When one of his executioners hesitated to pull the trigger of his rifle, Guevara reportedly yelled, "Shoot! Don't be afraid."
The tourist project has been financed by the government and international charities to provide a source of income for poor villagers and local Indian communities along the route.
Another stop on the tour is Vallegrande, some 500 miles southeast of La Paz, where the Bolivian army displayed Guevara's half-naked, open-eyed corpse. Many older women in this town keep shrines to "Saint Che."
A Bolivian boy shows 'Che' Guevara's drawing in La Higuera, some 900 Kilometers southeast of La Paz, in this picture taken in December 15, 1995. Tourists and political pilgrims can now follow 'Che trail' in Bolivia, which traces Ernesto Guevara's fatal attempt to export the Cuban revolution to one of Latin America's poorest country. REUTERS/David Mercado/Files
Our hero is better:
I'll never understand the appeal of Che. He's just another dead red in my book.
The nutbags over at DU were celebrating this guy a week or so ago.
Che is a loser and scumbag. Thank God he is dead now. That dirty commie.
The POS ran friggin' torture camps in Cuba under Castro.
I suspect that a lot of the youngsters who revere him do not know what he really stood for.
Sickening to see people revere such a butcher...
Che Guevara is a good man.
Using the General Sheridan definition of good, of course.
I wish I could believe that.
"...Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system...
"...Che was an enemy of freedom... He helped establish an unjust social system...
"...a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.
"...Václav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians.
"...The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibilitythose days appear to be over..."
Search Order
by Raúl Rivero
What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?
What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I've written
the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"?
What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?
How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?
Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?
Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.
They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
"Castles with music box. I won't let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie."
A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.
Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.
"SHADOW WARRIOR"
Felix Rodriquez
he trailed Che' and was on the team that terminated him. He tells exactly how 'brave' comrade Che' was at his end. Good book also.
(thanks Max)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.