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Abstract
This article reads graphic biographies of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in the light of the cultural readings of Che that describe themselves as works that ‘get to know the man behind the myth’. Framing this desire within the shifting, postmodern nature of the well-known Che icon – Alberto Korda's ‘Guerrillero heroico’ – the article looks at comics by Spain Rodriguez, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, Sergio Sinay, and Héctor Oesterheld and Alberto and Enrique Breccia. With specific reference to the ways these works depict Che's death in Bolivia, the article shows how they all fail to engage with the local specificities of his failed Bolivian campaign; rather than deal with Che's inability to attract local peasants, they choose to show the campaign as an act of heroic sacrifice. In so doing they forget how those selfsame peasants participated in the globalization of the Che icon.
Notes
1. Korda's various retellings of the moment he took the photograph of Che at a memorial rally in Havana are suggestive of another process of myth making: sometimes he stated that he was oblivious to the shot being special and sometimes he described himself recoiling in shock at what he had taken (Casey Citation2009, p. 44).
2. Various reasons are given for the campaign's failure, one that left only a handful of survivors after less than a year in the mountain hinterlands in the south of Bolivia. Poor planning, unsuccessful liaisons with the Bolivian Communist Party, broken short-wave radios meaning no communication with Cuba, the arrival of CIA operatives, in-fighting amongst the guerrillas and the inability of the latter to encourage inhabitants from the zone of operations to bolster their ranks, all contributed to the failure.
3. Sarah Seidman and Paul Buhle make the further point that there is a strong tie between ‘Che’s fervent support of international unity, and the resulting globalization of his image' (Citation2008, p. 102).
4. See, for example, Patrick Symmes' travelogue Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend (Citation2000).
5. See, for example, http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1352-man-or-myth-steven-soderbergh-talks-che [Accessed 10 April 2010].
6. The film points at how Che had become a symbol even before the end of the revolutionary war: after the Santa Clara battle Camilo Cienfuegos jokes that he plans to take Che around the country like a fairground attraction and charge admission. Thus the film is complicit in building on the myth of Che. Indeed, the sequences depicting the asthma attacks that debilitated Che during the guerrilla campaign aside, the choice of Benicio del Toro for the lead revealed how the film used physicality to build up Che the myth: at approximately 5 feet 10 or 11 Che was not an especially heavy-set man; Castro, on the other hand, was around 6 feet 2, bulky, broad and much closer to del Toro's stocky 6 feet 2. Frequently filming del Toro such that he is half out of the shot, as if his mere physical presence were going beyond the frame, and frequently filming the slim Brazilian Rodrigo Santoro (playing Castro), as sitting or lying down, Che comes across as physically more dominant than the revolution's leader, reversing what is evident in photographs of the two men.
7. http://us.macmillan.com/che-1 [Accessed 11 April 2010].
8. The work was envisioned as the first of a series that was to include biographies of Emilio Zapata, Augusto Sandino, John F. Kennedy and Eva Perón; in practice, even though Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia would go on to participate in a 1970 graphic biography of Evita, only the Che biography was ever produced in the series (García Citation2008a, p. 4).
9. Unfortunately I have not been able to verify the precise sources for Oesterheld's text, which is heavily reliant on extracts from Che's Bolivian diary. Whether Oesterheld used quotes from the diary read out at Régis Debray's trial in late 1967 or had access to transcriptions of the illegal photocopies of Che's diary that had been smuggled out of Bolivia is not clear. Whichever, Oesterheld's inclusion of quotes from the diary must have given the graphic biography the impact of immediacy and the impression of proximity to Che, not least since Castro would not receive a copy until early 1968 and the diary would not be published in full until July 1968. There are, however, some intriguing discrepancies between the graphic novel and the diary: in the episode entitled ‘Mayo 14’ Che says that Braulio and Urbano were stealing food (Oesterheld Citation2008, p. 20), yet in the Bolivian diary it is in fact noted as being Benigno and Urbano (Guevara Citation2009, p. 152). Presumably such differences stem from the sources that Oesterheld was using rather than later alterations to the diaries.
10. 1968 saw a number of groundbreaking art exhibits, happenings and acts, notably Tucumán arde, a protest against the exploitation of sugar workers in northwest Argentina, and Experiencias '68, an exhibit in the Di Tella which ended with the majority of the artists destroying their works on the street outside after the censure and closure of one of the installations. In addition, two exhibitions organized by the Sociedad Argentina Artistas Plásticos (SAAP) in November 1967 and October 1968, both carrying the title ‘Homenaje a Latinoamerica’ and closed down by the police, valorised revolutionary violence by paying homage to Che in the wake of his death (Longoni and Mestman Citation2000, pp. 75–76).
11. The phrase ‘New Man’ is a reference to the figure of the revolution set out by Che in his essay ‘Man and Socialism in Cuba’(Guevara 1997). The symbolic, heroic nature of death is evident in the original Bolivian Diary when Che, quoting Neruda, writes about the death of Rolando: ‘Of his sorrowful death, only one thing can be said, for a hypothetical future yet to materialize: “Thy brave little captain's corpse has stretched to immensity in its metallic form”' (Guevara Citation2009a, p. 140).
12. Another example of Rodriguez's symbolism is that he draws Che in Bolivia wearing his famous starred beret, which Che never wore in Bolivia since it would have aided his identification.