Forty years ago this week, the world's most famous Marxist revolutionary, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, flew into Shannon Airport. His interview with reporters there was the last time he spoke or was seen publicly outside of Cuba.
The next press briefing involving the Argentinean-born hero of the Cuban revolution was 30 months later, when his bullet-pocked body was put on view by the Bolivian military.
Ahead of his well-publicized arrival at Havana airport on March 15, 1965 (after which he disappeared from view, to the Congo, it turned out), Che and 70 other passengers traveling from North Africa made a scheduled stop at Shannon. Their Cuban Airlines Britannia had mechanical trouble, however, and they stayed overnight.
On the recommendation of airport staff, Guevara and some friends went to Hanratty's Hotel on Glentworth Street in Limerick City. A 2004 article in the Limerick Leader reported: "They returned in very good form that evening, wearing sprigs of shamrocks in their lapels."
Just three months earlier, on Dec. 19, Guevara made his first visit to Ireland when severe fog over Shannon forced his Algiers-bound flight to land in Dublin.
"The minister [of industry], who is 36, was dressed in khaki-colored battle dress," one paper reported.
He wasn't forthcoming on the subject of politics with reporters, though he'd made a bellicose address to the United Nations General Assembly that week. When asked through a translator, an Aer Lingus stewardess, what he intended to discuss in Algiers, he said: "The weather."
Guevara preferred to talk about personal matters, such as his wife and four children. Inevitably he was asked also about his roots. He wrote to his father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch: "I am in this green Ireland of your ancestors. When they found out, the television [station] came to ask me about the Lynch genealogy, but in case they were horse thieves or something like that, I didn't say much."
Restless ancestors
In the Spanish tradition, Guevara Sr. attached the name of his mother's family, Lynch, to that of his father's; for the same reason, his revolutionary son was sometimes referred to as Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.
In 1969, two years after Che's execution in Bolivia, his father said: "The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels.
"Che inherited some of the features of our restless ancestors. There was something in his nature which drew him to distant wandering, dangerous adventures and new ideas."
It would seem, however, that reports that his grandmother was an Irish immigrant aren't true. The Irish connection, though real, went back much further.
Jon Lee Anderson's standard 1997 biography, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, said his father "possessed Argentine surnames of good vintage," which claimed respectively ties to Spanish and Irish nobility.
While the nobility might have been exaggerated, the family could certainly be traced back to Galway-born Patrick Lynch, who married in Buenos Aires in 1749.
Anderson writes: "During the 19th century Rosas tyranny, the male heirs of the wealthy Guevara and Lynch clans had fled Argentina to join the Californian gold rush. After returning from exile, their American-born offspring, Roberto Guevara Castro and Ana Isabel Lynch, had married. Ernesto Sr., born in 1900, was the sixth of their 11 children.
The revolutionary's father studied engineering, but never finished his degree, and was a businessman, though not a very successful one, throughout his life.
Ernesto Guevara Jr. was born on May 14, 1928 in the Argentinean port city of Rosario, the eldest child of Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna.
He grew up in relative middle-class privilege and qualified as a medical doctor. At the core of his mystique is the fact that the asthmatic, rugby-playing, carefree youth gave up what would have been a comfortable, professional career for, and ultimately sacrificed his life on behalf of, the oppressed of Latin America and the world.
His death occurred not long before the Paris upheavals of May and June 1968, and young people worldwide, protesting the Vietnam war and injustice in general, were provided with a ready-made martyr. It helped, too, that the famous poster based on a photograph of a longhaired Che taken not long after military victory in Cuba in 1959 (he kept it short thereafter in public life) anticipated the counter-cultural look of a decade later.
But while the slogan "War no, guerilla action yes" was coined in Europe, it's not thought Guevara had much direct influence there. Even in Italy, which saw much violence throughout the 1970s, militants weren't following his blueprint for revolutionary change. One famous leftist, though, was personally close to Fidel Castro: publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli blew himself up in 1972, trying to attach explosives to an electric pylon near Milan.
Instead, Guevara was identified with Third World struggles, particularly those of Latin America. Thus, at a distance, the mainstream left in Europe, which advocated mainly parliamentary methods for social change, could admire and even embrace him as a fascinating and intriguing personality.
"Guevara didn't have much impact on Ireland, but he enjoyed a certain popularity in Official Sinn Fein [later the Workers' Party] and Labor circles, but none among the '70s-vintage Provos," said one left-wing editor.
For traditional nationalists, even those supporting the use of violence, Guevara's communism and anti-Americanism made him highly suspect.
This changed in more recent times. Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams visited Cuba in late 2001, and elsewhere has sat on platforms with Guevara's surviving daughter. (Aleida Guevara, a physician, like her father, visited Ireland in 2002 as part of an official Cuban delegation. She expressed interest in finding more about her Galway roots, adding that her grandfather, who died in Havana in 1987, was "very Irish.")
”Fire-starters"
While Guevara may not have had an impact on Ireland, an Irish artist who met him is credited with helping spread his posthumous fame. Jim Fitzpatrick, best known for his Thin Lizzy album covers, designed some of the earliest Che posters.
On his Web site, Fitzpatrick says, an "original poster art and an oil painting I intended using as a print went on tour after being exhibited in the Lisson Gallery in London . . . both 'disappeared' in Eastern Europe where an individualistic idealist like Che was anathema to their corrupt regimes."
Guevara's relationship to the Soviet Bloc and China was rather more complex, however. He condemned both for not giving enough support to Third World revolutions. For their part, the Soviets, who bankrolled the Cuban government, were troubled by Castro and Guevara's policy of spreading revolution, privately calling the two men "fire-starters."
And although senior members of the underground Bolivian Communist Party were trained in Cuba for Che's planned adventure in their country, they thought it was a bad idea and ultimately weren't brought along.
Some modern-day liberals have joined conservatives in pointing out that Che was rather more dogmatic than most communists. In a 1997 essay in the online magazine Slate, Paul Berman referred to Guevara as "instinctively authoritarian, allergic to any democratic or libertarian impulses, quick to order executions, and quicker still to lead his own comrades to their deaths in doomed guerrilla wars."
(The executions referred to took place in the months following the takeover of power by Fidel Castro's July 26 Movement. At the time, Guevara Lynch noted a change in his son, who was presiding over the trials of former government agents – he'd become a "hard man," he said.)
In a 1996 memoir, Frenchman Régis Debray, who was a Guevara militant in Bolivia and later an advisor to President Francois Mitterand, noted the incongruity of the "anti-authoritarian revolt of '68 taking this hardcore partisan of authoritarianism for its emblem."
In his Slate essay, Berman pointed to a precedent for the Che cult. "In the 19th century, intelligent people in France knew perfectly well that Napoleon had embodied the worst aspects of the French Revolution, had betrayed the revolution's democratic ideals, and had spread death and fire from Spain to Moscow. Yet those same clear-thinking people found ways of separating Napoleon's horrors from his glamour."
In a 2004 essay in Slate, Berman said that "The Motorcycle Diaries" – a movie that documents a young Che traveling Latin America – "in its concept and tone, exudes a Christological cult of martyrdom, a cult of adoration for the spiritually superior person who is veering toward death – precisely the kind of adoration that Latin America's Catholic Church promoted for several centuries, with miserable consequences." And the consequences of thousands of middle-class idealists exiting Latin American universities to pursue Che's dream were also miserable, he argued.
Final message
Liberals, however, don't deny him his martyrdom, unlike the right, who've mocked him for reportedly telling Bolivian soldiers on Oct. 8, 1967: "Don't shoot! I'm Che Guevara. I'm worth more to you alive than dead."
In fact, CIA agent Felix Rodriguez reported that Guevara accepted his fate and died bravely on Oct. 9.
Anderson writes: "[Rodriguez] entered Che's room and announced he was 'sorry,' he had done everything in his power, but orders had come from the Bolivian high command. He didn't finish his sentence, but Che understood. According Rodriguez, Che's face turned momentarily white, and he said: 'It's better like this. I never should have been captured alive.'"
Asked if he had any final message, Guevara told Rodriguez to "tell Fidel that he will soon see a triumphant revolution in America. And tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy."
The task for his execution was given to a drunken soldier who was distraught at the death of his comrades in the previous day's battle. Che Guevara's death was not instantaneous.
It was long thought his body would not be found, but in July 1997 a Cuban-Argentine forensic team discovered it, minus his hands, which had been removed following his death.
Though he was said to have remained intensely devoted to, and always missed, his native Argentina, Che's body was flown to Cuba.
In October 1997, at a ceremony attended by his widow, Aleida, and Fidel Castro, Che Guevara's remains were interred at a mausoleum outside the city of Santa Clara, where he'd led a decisive military engagement that helped make the Cuban revolution.
