
Christian Jankowski's bronze statue of an actor playing Che Guevara, set in Central Park, reopens the debate about the real Che.
(Jankowski's other two sculptures are pretty cool, too: professional street performers doing 'Dali Woman' and Caesar.)
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Nice sculpture but JESUS! You spend all that time and then throw some scrawly bullshit chalk words...take a few more minutes and make it look nice...
Che is an interesting study. A physician, he killed people in the name of revolution. At what point did he come to believe that he embodied the New Socialist Man and could judge who was for or against the revolution? To me, that is a step toward egocentrism that is wholly at odds with what he stood for. And yet in so many other ways he really embodied the change he wanted to see.
@3, he was a hell of a lot more than Castro's thug. While the circumstances surrounding his resignation from the Castro government remain shrouded in mystery, there is little doubt that the Cuban government provided nothing more than token assistance to the ill-fated Bolivian venture. Che dead has been much more useful to Castro than Che alive.
Actually, let me specify why. The only evidence of his racism is a few publicized remarks of semi-condescension for his Congolese allies. A couple of right-wing rags like Reason Magazine claim his "secret" diaries reveal a racist bigot, while somehow the best they can offer is "Given the prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to handle their weapons and did not want to learn."
That's supposed to be glaring prood of Che Guevara's racism? Oooh, but if only Castro would declassify Che's secret diaries, then we would know the truth, right? The one group that benefitted the most from the Cuban revolution were Afro-Cubans. And why the fuck would a racist invest so much time and effort in an anti-colonial struggle in Africa?
The least these Cato institute dipshits could do is spend some time actually getting their facts straight. There are plenty of reasons to discredit Che Guevara. Purported racism isn't one of them.
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