Maravi

Che is still very alive

Che is still very alive
By Fred M'membe
Monday October 08, 2007 [04:00]

I was in my third grade when Commandante Ernesto Che Guevara was murdered in Bolivia on October 8, 1967. But today I can still see Che continue fighting for the cause of the oppressed all over the world – he is still very alive for those who seek a better world, especially the young people of all times, so that, when they have the opportunity to follow his example and retain their tenderness, they can do so.

Talking about Che, Nelson Mandela had this to say: “We also honour the great Che Guevara, whose revolutionary feats in our continent were of such magnitude that no prison or censorship could hide them from us. Che’s life is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom. We will always honour his memory.”

Forty years after his murder, Che and his extraordinary example continue to gain increasing force in the world. His ideas, his image, his name, are the banners of struggle against the injustices of the oppressed and exploited and stir up a passionate interest on the part of students, and intellectuals, workers and trade unionists all over the world. They are making Che’s figure their own. In most combative manifestations of human rights, including in Europe, his photographs are wielded as emblems of struggle.

Few times in history, or perhaps never, has a figure, a name, an example, been so universalised with such celerity and passionate force. Why is this so? I think the explanation for this is simply because Che embodies in its purest and most disinterested form the internationalist spirit which characterises the world today and which will do so even more tomorrow.

From our poor world, oppressed by colonial powers yesterday and exploited and kept down in the most iniquitous underdevelopment by neocolonialism today, there surges this singular figure who is converted into the universal breath of the revolutionary struggle, even in the imperialist metropolises themselves.

Che contemplated his death as something natural and probably in the process tried to emphasise that this eventuality would not impede the inevitable march of the revolution in Latin America and in our poor world in general and he reiterated this thought: “Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism…wherever death may surprise, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons.”

He considered himself a soldier of this revolution without ever worrying of surviving it. Those who saw the end to his ideas in the outcome of his struggles in Bolivia and with the same simplicity negated the validity of his ideas must today be feeling very stupid seeing what is going on in Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and other Latin American countries.

This is a clear demonstration of the strength of just and noble ideas; it is proof of the idea that man can, even in the most adverse circumstances, create himself, sculpt his own life.

The chisel of Che’s humanism rendered his life good and beautiful and, as “truth shines through beauty,” his inseparable ethos and aesthetics compelled him to achieve truth in a renewed world.

I hope an increasing number of young people will want to die in order to live as Che died and to live as he lives.
The legacy Che left us was an admirable example of unity between political and ethical action, a unity whose restoration is demanded with increasing insistence by our time. And Che taught us that we do not need to wait for something or someone in order to tread the path of self-transformation.

Che, like his leader Commandante Fidel Castro, did not preach about anything he had not practiced. His personal transformation had not waited for “grand” developments to make it possible. On the contrary, he had undertaken it since an early age and that – by means of his personal and collective action, based on the transformation attained – was what made it possible for him, together with his companions in the struggle, to generate grand developments in the history of Latin America and our contemporary world.

Che did not believe – nor was he induced to do so – that creating himself was impossible. On the contrary, he cultivated with “an artist’s delight” and, as a result, he materialized an ethics that, at the same time, was a veritable aesthetics of existence: his own existence.

Then, by means of the dialectics typical of epiméleia - the care of the self – those “privileges” attained through the efforts he devoted to himself allowed him to exercise that magnificent degree of governability of others, expressed in the respect, authority, admiration and affection that all who knew him felt for him, and that still manifests itself in that “Che-mania”, in that quest for an ethical alternative.

Che lives - he is still very alive for those who seek a better world!
Long live the spirit of Che!
Long live Fidel!
Hasta la victoria siempre!
Aluta continua!

Labels: CHE GUEVARA, FRED M'MEMBE

posted by MrK @ 3:27 AM