Beautiful Revolutionary: Che Guevara Remembered [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

OCTOBER 6, 2017
“Beautiful Revolutionary”: Che Guevara Remembered
by DANA COOK

Fifty years ago—on October 8, 1967—the Argentine guerilla leader who played a key role in the Cuban Revolution was captured by the Bolivian military, with help from the CIA. He was executed the next day. In the following, Pablo Neruda, Maureen O’Hara, Jerry Rubin, I.F. Stone and others write about their encounters with the revolutionary icon who most know only from his image on tee-shirts. Susan Sontag and Jesse Ventura tell why he was their idol.

(Compiled by Dana Cook)

‘Ideological differences’
Herbert Matthews, journalist (New York Times)

I was in the Cabanas Fortress of Havana to greet Guevara when he entered the capital in triumph at the beginning of January 1959, and I came to know him fairly well until the time he disappeared on the quixotic quest that was to fail but, as with the hero of Cervantes’ story to whom Che likened himself, was to immortalize him. Our meetings were always long arguments in the small hours of the night when he would defend Marxism and the measures that the Castro government was taking—while I disagreed. In two of his books which he autographed for me, he expressed friendship despite our “ideological differences.”

from A World in Revolution: A Newspaperman’s Memoir, by Herbert L. Matthews (Scribner’s , 1971).

Freedom fighter
Maureen O’Hara, actor and singer

…we arrived in Havana on April 15, 1959 [to make the film Our Man in Havana, based on the Graham Greene novel].

…I stayed close to the Capri Hotel, our home base. You would meet everyone important in the revolution there sooner or later because it was a popular place to go for dinner or coffee or to smoke a cigar. I enjoyed interesting conversations with Che Guevara there…I would see him in the restaurant and he’d come to my table to say hello and eventually would sit down and join me. Che would talk about Ireland and all the guerilla warfare that had taken place there. He knew every battle in Ireland and all of its history…

…I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter. I think he was a product of his grandmother and her teachings. I look back on how young [31] and idealistic Che was when I made that picture. It’s hard to believe that he had already helped to topple a dictator and liberate a nation. Today he is a symbol for freedom fighters wherever they are in the world and I think he is a good one. When word came of his capture and execution, I was deeply saddened…

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/06/beautiful-revolutionary-che-guevara-remembered/