Che Guevara Was Not a Fan of Honors

By Martin Guevara 

HAVANA TIMES — Thousands of people who believe in revolutions but lack a living, honest leader will travel to Vallegrande, Bolivia to be there on Monday October 9th. On Sunday night, the Bolivian President will lavish a privileged group of guests who instead of turning down this expense, will go ready to down sumptuous dinners, exquisite wines and alcoholic drinks, parties, hotels, appearances and everything that Che precisely fought against: corruption, being comfortable, gentrification, double standards, manipulation and especially against what he disgusted the most:

Obedience and honors.

If you want to pay tribute in true Ernesto style, go into the jungle to fight and give up your comforts, don’t go and party it up.

Che was vastly more useful to the Revolution dead than alive. Alive, he wasn’t able to do anything great, he just moved the working class’ spirits, but he was really bothered by socialism’s flaws, the lies of USSR’s communism, Cuba’s bureaucracy, the corrupt, etc.

Many people didn’t want him to stay in Cuba, in the way of them enjoying the spoils. Naturally, the rebels had fought to live well, to remove the bourgeoisie from their seats in power and to move them to exile, jail or death and to stay in their neighborhoods with their homes and their comforts. This is what happened.

They didn’t make a revolution to go and do voluntary work, to eat the same as their working class neighbor. Che used to go and do voluntary work every weekend and he didn’t allow provisions or essentials to enter his home that everyone in Cuba didn’t have access to via the rations booklet. This “parallel drive” ended up being a nuisance for those who had fought to become the new oligarchy. He was too strict and not very corruptible, he didn’t sit well.

For those people who will go to the celebration events for the 50th anniversary of his death, who will spend the Bolivian people’s money, allowing themselves stay in expensive hotels, eating like pigs and drinking like Cossacks, appearing in photos, pretending that they care about the poor because they are going to have a good time.

For these people, Che dying was the best thing he could do, and as a result of his passing, all of these shameless people in his ranks, who betrayed him, who didn’t want him nearby, first mixed a tear of sorrow with a sigh of relief, then they stopped going to do voluntary work, they decked themselves out with homes, cars, ranches, luxuries that no ordinary Cuban had, and then, from that moment onwards, they could calmly take advantage of his life and death for their own benefit and began to idolize him.

From Fidel, Raul and all the fake communists in the world, to the shameless people who have made a profit off of his image.

And because people like to feel this mixture of the strong man, the successful man suffering, the contrast that can be seen in a hero’s tragedy, these crooked people came out winning. First they betrayed him, they abandoned him because he was very annoying as a critic and then they pocketed his divine corpse.

But, for destitute people who are always searching, he was made more human by dying with half of his body weight, hungry, tired, betrayed, in more misery than an unemployed worker, and then these people picked up on the strength of this image and made it a myth.

And what would Ernesto say to these hedonists who are going to take a sip from the honey his death created? What he always said about honors:

Les honneurs, ca m’emmerde (Honors bother me).