My aunt turned 18 the year RFK was murdered. She loved Bobby. She is the least political of my family, but she was a child of the Sixties, and so she also liked that guy who was executed by the Bolivian military the previous fall.
She had the poster, and one of Jimi Hendrix and various others, including some for productions of an avant garde theatre group in Dublin, which was more her cup of tea anyway.
My grandmother, a widow, didn’t like it much when her youngest later went off to train to be a nurse in England and she kept her room in their Dublin flat much the same for years afterwards.
Once, my granny took to her bed with the flu – actually what had been my aunt’s bed because it was out of the way of drafts. The doctor that made the house call was shocked to see a small, fully gray-haired, bespectacled woman in her 60s with a large poster of Ernesto “Che” Guevara on the wall behind her.
“You’re not a fan of that man, are you?” said the MD, who was known to be a person of firmly conservative views.
“Oh, yes! I am,” my granny replied.
All of this was brought back to mind by the hullabaloo over the plan to commemorate with a statue the Argentinean-born revolutionary, himself a medical doctor, in his ancestral Galway (of course, he had several other ancestral places).
It’s easy, perhaps, at the distance of several thousand miles and four or five decades to take a misty-eyed view of revolution. Having said that, some of the critiques have been somewhat over the top, with people laying everything they don’t like about Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and much more, at the door of Che Guevara.
It’s certainly true that Guevara came from the you-can’t-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-a-few-eggs school of revolution. Castro’s government executed several hundred people in its early years. Che oversaw 100 or more of the executions and some say there was little due process. His American biographer Jon Lee Anderson, on the other hand, said that he never heard anybody say that any of the dead was innocent of their alleged crimes.
The second more general criticism of Guevara was that he simplistically believed that the Cuban model of attaining power could be applied elsewhere. He gave up the trappings of power – it’s part of his great appeal – and in the process, critics say, became a pied piper that led thousands of naïve and idealistic young people, many of them from middle-class backgrounds like himself, to their doom – which was to be cut down by ruthless dictatorships in countries such as his own Argentina.
Outside of Latin America, though, and in Europe in particular, it was different. Che, in life a doctrinaire Marxist, was in death almost a generic symbol of defiance and a not very threatening one at that. His image became, as time went on, a bland statement on behalf of social justice and equality – but obviously a statement nonetheless.
My grandmother ran her own small business and was a political moderate, unlike my left-wing grandfather. However, once in a while she liked to stir things up and certainly, in the above-mentioned incident, she welcomed the opportunity to put a member of the professional classes in his place.
It’s that generic Che – the symbol of the fight against oppression and endemic poverty – that people in Galway would like to commemorate. They don’t mean to upset anyone whose family has suffered at the hands of a police state; but nor, I suspect, are they going to be told what they can or can’t do.
