The late great Jesus Chuy Negrete would sing all the standard Cuban revolu pro-Che songs as performed by Carlos Puebla and others, but he knew there was a danger in idolizing "leaders" which can become the "ideology of the poster" without understanding the actual material empirical conditions which brings oppression to its end. Many, students for the most part had their Che poster brooding and intense somewhere in their place as if he was the Christ portrait their mom or abuela would have had up in the house. When people claim to be revolutionaries, but they are blood and cut-free fighters for freedom and have never lost a friend to prison or state-sponsored violence and they would never take up armed defense--you have to wonder what kind of Che do they imagine?
How small is the world? Six degrees of separation from Che? Way back in 1978, I received an envelope with a phone number of a man calling himself Ben Lucas, he was seeking to submit a "cartoon" called Chato to a small publication I worked on) It was submitted with four sets of dialog about a goatee-wearing young Chicano who had a Black pal who demanded he stand up for himself after being called a beaner and in turn the Chicano aka Chato starts coming up with terms like " Corn Flaker!" against his gringo mocker. I had a face to face meeting with the cartoonist and he was a big brown Chicano who claimed he had been in the Green Berets and had been sent along with a few others to Bolivia to track some guerillas in early 1967. He said he later found out the leader of this "FOCO" was none other than "el Che" -- he claimed to have been in Viet Nam in November 1967 about a month after the "FOCO" crew was killed or captured and he saw it was Guevara he was hunting. This is the first part of another of how small the world is...I'll save the second half for my own book.
The late great Jesus Chuy Negrete would sing all the standard Cuban revolu pro-Che songs as performed by Carlos Puebla and others, but he knew there was a danger in idolizing "leaders" which can become the "ideology of the poster" without understanding the actual material empirical conditions which brings oppression to its end. Many, students for the most part had their Che poster brooding and intense somewhere in their place as if he was the Christ portrait their mom or abuela would have had up in the house. When people claim to be revolutionaries, but they are blood and cut-free fighters for freedom and have never lost a friend to prison or state-sponsored violence and they would never take up armed defense--you have to wonder what kind of Che do they imagine?
How small is the world? Six degrees of separation from Che? Way back in 1978, I received an envelope with a phone number of a man calling himself Ben Lucas, he was seeking to submit a "cartoon" called Chato to a small publication I worked on) It was submitted with four sets of dialog about a goatee-wearing young Chicano who had a Black pal who demanded he stand up for himself after being called a beaner and in turn the Chicano aka Chato starts coming up with terms like " Corn Flaker!" against his gringo mocker. I had a face to face meeting with the cartoonist and he was a big brown Chicano who claimed he had been in the Green Berets and had been sent along with a few others to Bolivia to track some guerillas in early 1967. He said he later found out the leader of this "FOCO" was none other than "el Che" -- he claimed to have been in Viet Nam in November 1967 about a month after the "FOCO" crew was killed or captured and he saw it was Guevara he was hunting. This is the first part of another of how small the world is...I'll save the second half for my own book.