The Importance of Being Ernesto

I went to Cuba in 2012 with a tour group. We were in the first wave of Americans to go to Cuba strictly as tourists, although we were cautioned that this wasn’t supposed to be typical tourist fun and frolic. Our tour director had to fill out reams of paperwork admitting us under the auspices of serious cultural exchange. We had to swear we were going for strictly educational purposes. So please - no laughing!

I had heard about the prevalence of old cars from the 40’s and 50’s on Cuba’s streets. So I wasn’t completely surprised to see Havana’s morning rush hour to be a re-creation of a busy street in America in 1950. But I was surprised to find that so much of Cuba as a whole was a frozen-in-time tableau of American circa 1959, when Castro came into power. This trip became an experience of time-travel even more than its intended “People-to-People” exchange.

                                  

When Castro took over, he ordered an end to most private enterprise, to most free market buying and selling. However he didn’t confiscate a lot of what ordinary citizens already had. So although Cuban citizens couldn’t buy new cars, machinery, or many large appliances in the ordinary way Americans are used to, they could still own the things that were in their possession as of 1959. Cubans have made an art and a science of keeping all those things repaired and running.

I was almost overcome with nostalgia when we were ushered through a print shop in Santa Clara. There was the printing business my parents had started in the 1940’s! There were the Linotype machines and the treadle flatbed presses. There was the manual cutting machine with the big bar-handle I used to hang on as a child to apply the weight needed to get the blade to lower and slice through the paper stack. Who says you can’t re-live your childhood – you can’t go home again? I found I was able to do both in Cuba.

 

Along with its evocation of a homesick melancholy, Castro’s ban on private ownership also had some humorous side effects. Cubans are allowed to own pigs and chickens – but they aren’t allowed to own cows. The cattle, which are mostly Brahmins, are government property. Farmers are only appointed as caretakers of the cow or two allotted to them. They are not allowed to slaughter or in any way personally use the products of the animals in their care. What little beef is available in Cuba is reserved for tourists.

But when Castro first put this edict against slaughtering and eating cattle into effect, many farmers found a sly way around the ruling. They would claim their cow had met with an unfortunate accident, or even that it had “committed suicide” by falling on a very sharp knife. Not wanting to see any meat go to waste, the farmer had claimed it his duty to eat the meat before it spoiled.

Castro soon put a stop to this risible evasion. Our guide read us the amended ruling that Castro had handed down. He now specified that farmers were not allowed to slaughter or consume any cow, no matter in what manner it met its demise. Any bovine death, whether by accident or by self-inflicted wound, had to be reported to government officials, who would then come and collect the carcass. Anyone caught eating the meat of such an animal was subject to a heavy fine and/or imprisonment. Anyone who saw someone eating such unauthorized meat and failed to report the crime, was similarly subject to heavy fine and/or imprisonment.

Apparently cows cheered up considerably after that more specific enactment. The suicide rate among Cuban ungulates has dropped to almost zero.

Another one of the dietary restrictions that has come about as the result of bans against private ownership was surprisingly – fish. As we tourists sat with the vast expanse of ocean in view out of our restaurant window, we were served mahi-mahi imported from Viet Nam. Of course! I suddenly realized what had been missing from all these scenic ocean views. Boats! There was beautiful Havana Harbor, with not a boat, not a dinghy, not a skiff, not a canoe in sight. I realized the problem. The average Cuban citizen is strictly forbidden from owning a boat or even so much as a plank of wood – for fear of more attempts to cross to Miami. So fishing is almost completely foreclosed as an occupation throughout most of Cuba. Even we tourists were reduced to eating fish imported from Viet Nam, or even something like Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks – imported from Canada.

But throughout all the beauty and melancholy and anachronism of Cuba – the primary message our tour guide was assigned to get across to us was the message of “The Revolution.” Everything begins and ends with the Revolution in Cuba. This is where we get down to Che (Ernesto) Guevara.

We saw Revolution Square; we saw the bullet holes that an early uprising had put in the Palace from which dictator Batista escaped through a secret door; we saw Granma, the boat which brought the Castro brothers and Che along with a ragtag band from Mexico to the Sierra Maestra region of Cuba to start their forward push to power; we saw the revolutionary car they’d used and the one plane they’d briefly had at their disposal. Those latter are in cordoned off areas of the Revolutionary Museum, guarded by functionaries with shrill whistles they’ll blow at you if you step off the designated walkway and get too close to one of these almost mythic artifacts of the Revolution. But mostly there was Che.

There weren’t any loudspeakers exhorting the citizenry to Revolutionary fervor in Cuba, as I heard there had been in Maoist China. Cuba is a quiet place, with no cell phones, no boom boxes, very little media noise of any kind. But there are posters and billboards everywhere, almost all of them containing a picture of Che and one of his classic quotes such as the somewhat ambiguous and grammatically skewed, “Hasta la Victoria Siempre” (Until Victory Always”).

I asked our tour guide if Fidel Castro might feel a little left out. There are ten public invocations of Che for every one there is of Fidel. Our guide said oh, no. It was customary to honor the dead. That’s why Che’s image is writ large all over, while Fidel waits in the wings when it comes to mythic representation.

                                

I wonder though. If Che had been less handsome, would he be featured as prominently? If Alberto Korda’s photograph of him hadn’t become a world-wide rallying point for anyone with a discontent – would his images have so markedly outnumbered those of Fidel in Cuba? Even I have one of those iconic posters of him on my wall at home. Seeing it for the first time, an acquaintance said, “What? Are you a Communist?” I told her no. A former flower child I knew had just been down-sizing, and I was the recipient of a lot of the “stuff” she unloaded. Besides, I explained, everybody has a picture of Che. It doesn’t reflect anyone’s political philosophy. I fall into that insouciant category of people described by the Argentine saying, “Tengo una remera del Che, y no sé por qué” (I have a Che T-shirt, and I don’t know why).

But for whatever reason, Che is the order of the day in Cuba. I hadn’t known much about what he did after his and Fidel’s band took over Cuba. Some of the other people in my tour group were better informed though, and they filled me in on details our Cuban tour guide could not, or dare not, mention. I learned that Che had ordered the execution of scores of people he considered to be Batista “loyalists,” or people who had simply been too successful as businessmen and were therefore assumed to be right-wing supporters. I learned that he had also been brutal to many of his own men as they fought beside him when he carried the revolution on to the Congo and then into Bolivia. When a man who’d been fighting through the jungles alongside Che for a long time decided he wanted to quit and “fight no more” in these harum-scarum battles – Che summarily shot him in the head and snatched the watch off the wrist of the dying man.

By the time we were ushered up the steps of Che’s Memorial in Santa Clara, I was thinking it best I take his poster down when I got home, as meaningless as that pin-up had been to me in the first place. But there wasn’t much time to consider my altered opinion of Che then. We were hurried along into the Memorial. No cameras, umbrellas, purses, or bags, were allowed inside, so we loaded all these accessories onto our tour guide. He ended up looking incongruously like a roving peddler standing out there at the entrance to the Mausoleum, weighed and bulging with hot items for sale.

The interior of the Memorial was designed like a grotto. It was dimly lit. A fountain provided the soothing sound of trickling water. There was an eternal flame. The walls were of stone and brick and I immediately saw the names of many men inscribed on them – men who had fought alongside Che in one place or another. But where were the remains of Che himself? Our tour guide had told us to “look for the star.”

Finally I saw it, just as the guards were hurrying us along to make way for other admirers, or curiosity seekers. The star was a small light projected near the top of one column of names. It confused me at first. Then I realized Che’s full name was inscribed as it had been given to him when he was born in Argentina in 1928 – “Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.”

His bones had only been found relatively recently in Bolivia after what many say was a combined decision made by the CIA and Bolivian officials to shoot him after capture in 1969. His burial spot was left a secret, presumably to prevent just what has happened – to prevent his martyrdom.

From the grotto we went into an adjacent room that was a Museum of his artifacts. People were allowed to linger there. So I took my time puzzling over his early family photos, over the instruments he’d used as a medical student in Argentina, over the books he’d read as a youth. Tom Sawyer was the most prominent among these. How could such benign beginnings lead to such a cruel character? That’s the eternal question.

                                 

However, seeing him personalized this way made me waver in my decision to rip down his poster from my wall when I got home. In fact, he’s still there. But his persistence in my field of vision is more the result of my lethargy and indifference to all home decorating projects than it is the result of my having given him a reprieve for his crimes against humanity.

This trip was to offer up one more small spotlight of humor. It wasn’t quite the guffaw of cow suicides, but it has given me an occasional chuckle. I started to do some follow-up research on Cuba when I got home. I viewed U-Tube interviews with Castro that spanned the decades, starting with his fervent avowals to Mike Wallace shortly after he took power that he was NOT a Communist and would certainly NOT lead Cuba in the direction of Communism. There were also some video of Che himself.

But the YouTube interview that has given me pause to laugh along the way was one with actor Benecio del Toro. Del Toro played Che in a film meant to be an epic re-enactment of Che’s post Motorcycle Diaries struggles. In reality the picture struck me as being a sort of flat account of fighting, fighting, fighting… But Benecio del Toro had just come off the high of this movie’s release when he did the interview I saw.

The interview was in Spanish, intended for a Spanish language TV station. But I was able to make out enough of what was said. The show’s host was a young woman who went on the attack the moment del Toro sat down opposite her. She asked him how he could possibly have lent himself to such a project – validating, glamorizing such a ruthless dictator as Che Guevara. She asked how del Toro could live with himself after so roundly betraying the public’s trust in him as an international star by sympathetically portraying such a monster as Che.

Del Toro began to fidget in his chair, in obvious disbelief that he was being challenged this way. He began to roll his eyes around, likely trying to search out the person responsible for booking him into this ambush. I imagined that his agent was summarily fired as soon as the show went off the air. But del Toro soldiered on for a while, talking about how it’s an actor’s job to portray all kinds of people, not just those whom the actor agrees with or those who are likeable. However, it was obvious that del Toro was at least somewhat well disposed towards Che and his revolutionary ideals.

The interviewer wouldn’t let up though. She was not appeased by any of del Toro’s vague answers about the role of an actor. She kept pounding home her objections. However, before he unclipped his mike and walked off the set, del Toro got in the rejoinder that has stayed with me, a model of unintended humor. When the show’s host demanded once more to know how he could portray a murderer, he responded:

                           “Che was not a murderer. He was just pro-capital punishment.”

So there it was – a motto I could live by. The next time someone displeases me, I can eliminate him with impunity. When they try to convict me of murder, I will protest, “No, you can’t do that. I am not a murderer. I was just exercising my Constitutional right to be pro-capital punishment.”

One small victory of absurdity over absolutism; one small star-shine of humor in the melancholy of Cuba’s blues.

Feeling Superior - All Day, Every Day

TV psychologists and the counseling professions in general attribute a lot to feelings of inferiority. They lay both timidity and aggression at the door of an inferiority complex. Whether you punch or cringe or do anything in-between, it’s because, at heart, you are feeling inferior. Whether clients have arachnophobia, agoraphobia, or anorexia – or at the other end of the alphabet, xenophobia - doctors will blame the condition at least in part on the fact that these individuals were made to feel inferior.

But I wonder about that. In many respects, I think just the opposite is true. I think most of us, myself included, leapfrog through our days animated by one little jolt after another of our sense of superiority.

It’s not that we often stop and consider ourselves to be superior in an overall, global sense. It’s that we feel superior to others in all our little choices and conditions. We feel assured of our superiority in all the daily details of the way we lead our lives.

The person who goes to a gym feels superior to the couch potato, while the couch potato usually feels superior to that eager beaver who’s up and out there running every morning. Every time one of these runners would overtake us on the sidewalk, a portlier friend of mine would scoff, “He’s worshipping the Great God Jog.”

The man in the mansion feels superior to the homeless bum. The homeless man feels superior to that toff in the mansion. By comparison to the coddled wealthy man, the homeless man feels his life on the streets to be gritty and “real.” The man in the Ferrari feels superior to the man in the old Chevy. But the man in the old Chevy knows how much better he is for the ecology because he’s not gas-guzzling around the streets in a phallic status symbol.

Cat owners feel superior to dog owners, and vice versa. The sixth grader feels superior to the fifth grader; the senior feels superior to the freshman. The thin feel superior to the fat. The husky feel superior to the scrawny. The one who reads books on philosophy feels superior to the one who reads comic books – and vice versa. The one who has no TV or computer feels superior to those who are connected – and vice versa. Beatles fans feel superior to Shania Twain fans. Fans of Toby Keith feel superior to fans of The Pet Shop Boys. The fans of every sports team feel superior to the fans of all other teams. People who recycle feel superior to everyone.

The one who buys brown eggs feels superior to the one who buys the boringly standard white eggs. Anyone who has a Picasso print hanging on his wall feels superior to anyone who has pictures of dogs playing poker. People who relish their home thermostat set at a bracing 65 degrees feel superior to those hot house plants who need the thermostat set to 74 degrees.

Those who are awake feel superior to those who are asleep. Those who are well feel superior those who are sick. The young feel superior to the old, but the old know they know more. The living feel superior to the dead.

Most of all, the man who drinks his coffee black knows he’s superior to the man who’s pouring in the cream and sugar.

I Have No McGuffin

Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “McGuffin.” It’s the thing that sets the characters in a drama in motion. It’s the diamond that the thieves plan their heist in order to get. It’s the Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones risks everything to find. It can be a lost dog or the Holy Grail. It’s whatever the characters want that makes them pull together (or pull apart) and launches them off on their adventures.

The problem is – I have no McGuffin. I’m not sure that I ever had one. Well yes, come to think of it, I did have one once. When I was younger, my McGuffin was love. I went out and met the day in hopes that I would find love. I knew that there must be some golden thread out there somewhere, trailing along, spooled off from someone else’s seeking. In fact I thought there might be many such threads, all leading back to a matrix of love, a matrix from which all sorts of good and wondrous people sprung. I pictured this secret society of enchantment out there somewhere, and I followed every possible lead. Whenever someone would smile at me, or seem kindly disposed, I took that to be a thread. I’d pick it up and follow it a long way, through dark woods, along mean city streets. I’d follow it to meetings of old car clubs and to political rallies. I’d follow it to poetry readings and rugby games.

But none of those threads ever led to love. They led to people who had completely different McGuffins from mine. They led to people who wanted sex or money, action, excitement, or titillation. They led to people who just wanted to sell me insurance. They led to people who wanted me to cater to their partialities, or to merely tend them through some oncoming down time. They never led to anyone whole and effulgent and luminous with the capacity for love. Our McGuffins never matched.

So, after a long time, I stopped following threads. I stopped even looking for them. I found myself without any McGuffin at all. And that’s all right, I guess. Except life does seem a little listless without any McGuffin to get me up in the morning. It’s like perennial early retirement for someone with no hobbies. I hate to admit this, because it makes me something of a hypocrite. I’m the one who had been spouting the Vedanta philosophy, maintaining that wanting is what makes you miserable – that the ideal is to live a life without desire or wanting.

Well, although I’d often recited this philosophy to myself as if I thoroughly believed it, as if I “owned” it - I actually only got a chance to spout it once. I was on an excursion train that takes tourists from Thunder Bay, Canada, up into the Algoma woods, a wonderland of fall foliage that September. It was a long ride there and back, and the people in my car soon formed a sort of closed companionship with some tacit bond, almost like the people on Christie’s Orient Express. We started to exchange dangerous confidences. The husband of a couple seated across the aisle from me became especially expansive about the things that most intimately drove him.

This couple was apparently very well-to-do. The man crowed about the expensive, exotic trips they had taken, about his membership in the best golf club at the best country club, about his refusal to take any second-rate room in the nearly fully-booked town that weekend. He’d insisted on the Hotel’s best suite – or nothing at all, and he was proud that his adamancy had eventually gotten them accommodated in the luxurious Honeymoon Suite. He’d had to spread some money around to get this accommodation, but he was triumphant that his bankroll allowed him to hold sway that way, in one situation after another.

He said he found that was the only way to go in life – first-class Or really, maintaining an interest in life demanded that he seek a successions of first-classes. He said that once he’d gotten the best of something of one kind, he always liked to move on and aspire to getting the best of something else. Once he had the best car, he set out to get the best sailboat. Once he had the best possible house, he set out to furnish it with the best, the most expensive furnishings. And so on. He said that’s what kept him moving and alive. There was always something more he wanted, always something more for him to go after and get by one means or another. He believed that’s the way human beings in general are built. He said that in order to be happy, a person has to want something, has to be driven by a desire to acquire the next thing – and the next.

This was too much for me. I rarely join in group conversation, but I felt this man had left me too wide an opening to ignore. I jumped in with the fact that most of the major religions of the world take an opposite view. The Hindu and Buddhist philosophies advise that the way to be happy is to be without craving, without wanting of any kind. I pointed out that the starving man can’t really enjoy anything, especially the aspect of the cow in front of him. He’s single-mindedly driven by his desire to get that cow’s meat. So he’ll be blind to the intrinsic beauty of the cow, to the intrinsic beauty of all his surroundings and the joy that this beauty could bring him. His wanting will enslave him rather than liberate him into any happy state. His wanting will foreclose him from ever achieving the higher happiness of bliss. Yes, I think I might actually have gone so far as to invoke “bliss.”

In any case, my outburst stunned the wealthy man into silence. I’m not sure if he was quelled by the shear outrageousness of my viewpoint, or whether he was just startled into seeing a possible deficiency in what he’d previously regarded as his own self-evident philosophy. Either way, he made no come-back. However, a young East Indian woman, who had earlier been regaling us with her dating misadventures, leapt into the fray with affirmation. My comments had sparked her to take an interest in me. It was rare for anyone to take an interest in me, and the woman’s subsequent respectful attentions made our trip into and out of the deep woods of Algoma a kind of surreal experience.

After we disembarked past twilight onto the platform of Thunder Bay’s eccentric little middle-of-the-mall train depot, the woman persisted in wanting to get to know me further. We spent our remaining day in town tooling around, seeing the sights, but mostly reinforcing our mutual appreciation of Eastern philosophy. She said she had never before in her life met any North American who understood about not-wanting. I found that a little strange in light of Deepak Chopra’s persistent appearance on bestseller lists. But I was glad to accept her view of my uniqueness, to bask in her glow for a while.

She said those very ideas had been the cornerstone of her life. She told me how she herself often went back to India to help establish an ashram. Everyone there understood her attitude. But where on earth had I, an American, ever acquired such a philosophy?

I hardly knew what to say. I’ve often suspected my attitude is not the result of any enlightenment, but inborn, a product of a natural indolence, of an abiding reluctance to move or exercise myself in any way. But I didn’t want to say that. I told her, truthfully, that I had studied Vedanta at the Vivekananda Center in Chicago. We chatted merrily away, supporting and amplifying each other’s commitment to not-wanting as we chatted. But all the while, there was lurking the suspicion in me that I was flying under false colors, that maybe there were times, more and more now that all hope of love had flown, that I felt the need of need.

Now especially that the challenges and distractions of travel are over, now that I’m back in my comfort zone of Chicago – I can wallow in my un-wanting. I have all the necessities - plenty to read, plenty to read. But frankly, I don’t find that has enabled me to appreciate the cow more keenly. I haven’t achieved bliss or ecstasy. I want for nothing. But there’s kind of a nothingness about this state. Now, without my eagerness to look for those threads of communion, I have no engine of enterprise at all. I’m just here.

I find myself almost envying that man on the train, almost thinking he might have been at least a little right. He had the empowerment of purpose. His ambitions gave him the zest for life that I lack.

I have to admit it. I miss having something to miss. I miss my McGuffin.