I still plan to write some thoughts about Soderbergh’s Che, but that will take a bit more time.
The following article was written by a man I believe to be my second cousin twice removed, Dr. Alberto Benegas Lynch (my father’s mother was a Benegas). It was quoted last year in the Wall Street Journal, but apart from the brief passage quoted there I can’t find it anywhere in English. I believe its original publication is here (in Spanish). I hope its author and publisher don’t mind my supplying a translation for those who cannot read the original. I cannot vouch for any of its content, of course, and it should perhaps be noted that its author is something of a “neoliberal” (what in the States might be called a “conservative”) economist (and adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute – there’s some more about him here).
My Cousin, El Che
by Alberto Benegas Lynch
for LiberPress
October 14, 2007Now that the waters have calmed some on a new anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, I write about this ghastly character with some element that, in part, introduces another perspective.
In my family, Che has been talked about quite a bit, since my father was a first cousin of his. The grandfather of the man in question was a wonderful person, Roberto Guevara, married to Anita Lynch, sister of my maternal grandmother. [Trans.: By my own genealogical reckoning, Anita Lynch was the sister of his paternal grandmother, Martina Lynch. And this would make sense of his saying his father rather than his mother was Che's cousin. But the Spanish here is 'abuela materna.'] In genealogical line, I note that I am more Lynch than Benegas, since my father and mother both descend from the children of Patricio Lynch, from whom Che also descends.
From the start, this born revolutionary revealed certain inclinations by his failure to keep his word, since he promised his first girlfriend that he would go buy cigarettes and never came back. He also showed certain oddities in striving to take ten steps exiting elevators and landing on the left leg, if not succeeding then returning to the thing and repeating the operation until getting it just right (its being the left leg already seemed to announce something of his dogmatic future).
My father used to repeat the famous aphorism, “you choose your friends, you don’t choose your relatives.” While it is certain that in all families there is good, ordinary and bad in proportion to their size, I always noticed a certain amount of shame for the fact that a character with such sinister features had filtered into ours.
On one occasion, one of my aunts related to me that when very young, Che delighted in inflicting suffering on animals, and, when older, insisted that death (of others) is not so bad after all, and that, in this context, he anticipated Woody Allen’s definition: “Dying is the same as sleeping but without getting up to piss.”
This last, which might seem funny and witty within the scope of film, resulted in an enormous tragedy for the hundreds murdered by Che, who finally transformed that definition into, “the true revolutionary must be a cold killing machine.” And all by the mania of the Stalins, Pol Pots, Hitlers and Castros of this planet, who, in their anxiety to create the proverbial “new man,” have tortured, hurt, maimed and killed millions of human beings.
And to think that Cuba, despite the corruption of Batista, was the nation with the highest per capita income in Latin America, world-class in its sugar industry, petroleum refineries, breweries, mineral plants, alcohol distilleries, liquors of international prestige; it had televisions, radios and refrigerators relative to its population equal to the United States, railways of great comfort and extension, hospitals, universities, theaters, and periodicals of the highest level, scientific and cultural associations of renown, steel mills, factories for foods, engines, porcelains and textiles.
All before Che was Minister of Industry, a period in which the dismantling was scandalous. The Cuban currency quoted on par with the dollar, before Che was President of the Central Bank.
As could not be otherwise, Che began his career as a hardened Peronist. Let’s remember that the Nazi-fascist policy of Perón plunged Argentina into a quagmire from which it still has not recovered and that, among other things, he wrote in 1970 that, “If the Soviet Union had been in a condition to support us in 1955, I could have become the first Fidel Castro of the continent,” and, when he was in power cried in 1947, “Let us raise gallows in all the country to hang the opponents,” and, in 1955, proclaimed, “To the enemy, no justice.”
It is inadmissible that someone with half a mind maintain that education in Cuba is acceptable since, by definition, a tyrannical regime requires domestication and can only offer brain-washing and indoctrination (and with notebooks on which one must write with pencil so that they can serve the next group, due to the scarcity of paper). In the same way it would seem that there remain some distracted minds that have not been informed of the ruins, the misery and the pigsty into which Cuba’s health system has been transformed, which only maintains some clinic in the window to make an impression on cretins.
Let’s hope that those who continue using the symbols of Che as a grace perceive that it is the darkest, most morbid and pathetic joke that can happen to a human being. It is the same as flaunting the image of the gloomy swastika cross as a sign of peace.
Alberto Benegas Lynch is President of the Economic Sciences Faculty of the National Academy of Sciences, in Argentina.
