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BERGER, John - Che Guevara Dead
BERGER, John - Che Guevara Dead
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On Tuesday, October 10, 1967, a photograph was trans- an anonymous grave in an unknown place. Then they dis
mitted to the world to prove that Guervara had been killed interred it. Then they claimed to have burned it. Before
the previous Sunday in a clash between two companies of that they cut off the fingers for later identification. This
the Bolivian army and a guerrilla force on the northside of might suggest that they had serious doubts whether it was
the Rio Grande river near a jungle village called Higueras. really Guevara whom they had killed. Equally it can sug
The photograph of the corpse was taken in a stable in the gest that they had no doubts, but feared his corpse. I tend
small town of Vallegrande. The body was placed on a to believe the latter.
stretcher and the stretcher was placed on top of a cement The purpose of the radio photograph of October 10th
trough. was to put an end to a legend. Yet on many who saw it, its
During the preceding two years "Che" Guevara had be- effect may have been very diffe
come legendary. Nobody knew for certain where he was. What, precisely and unmysterio
There was no incontestable evidence of anyone having mean now? I can do no more
seen him. But his presence was constantly assumed and in- impact on me.
voked. At the head of his last statement—sent from a guer- There is a resemblance b
rilla base "somewhere in the world" to the Tricontinental Rembrandt's painting of The An
Solidarity Organization in Havana—he quoted a line from sor Tulp. The immaculately
the 19th century revolutionary Cuban poet Jose Marti: taken the Professor's place. Figure
"Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be cadaver with the same intense
seen." It was as though in his own declared light Guevara the doctors on the Professor's r
had become invisible and ubiquitous. ures in the Rembrandt as in the stable at Vallegrande. The
Now he is dead. The chances of his survival were in in- placing of the corpse in relation to the figures above it, and
verse ratio to the force of the legend. The legend had to in the corpse the sense of global stillness—these, too, are
be nailed. "If," said The New York Times, "Ernesto Che very similar.
Guevara was really killed in Bolivia, as now seems prob- Nor should this be surprising, for the function of the
able, a myth as well as a man has been laid to rest." two pictures is similar: both are showing a corpse being
We do not know the circumstances of his death. One can formally and objectively examined. More than that, both
gain some idea of the mentality of those into whose hands are intended to make an example of the dead: one for the
he fell by their treatment of his body after his death. First advancement of medicine, the other as a political warning,
they hid it. Then they displayed it. Then they buried it in Thousands of photographs are taken of the dead and the
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