Che: The Fleetingness of his Dead

Over 40 years transcended since the assassination of El Che. I was born in the 60's and the first Milton grew up comparing capitalism and socialism in the same way many students were doing it back then. Today, the Soviet Union does not exist anymore beyond its old capital Russia. The United Sates is not the imperial power I was said so.

I know many will disagree with me but Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, is the only Latin American leader with global appeal. His legacy has ascended to the quality of martyrs through the ages: A charismatic figure in prophetic conflict with the norms of society who lived fast, stayed faithful to his principles, and died young.⁽¹⁾

How Che influenced education? I will need for than one post to explain that. But certainly, there were a group of intellectuals, artists, journalist and writers who stood behind his practice and thousands of students wanted to emulate the complex and charismatic revolutionary. Two brilliant educators, I dare to say, were early influenced by immortal fighter: Paulo Freire and Domingo Sarmiento.

To Latin Americans, included poets like Ecuadorian Jorge Enrique Adoum (1997), believed that Che Guevara was betrayed by the Left and his own continent. In Che: The Fleetingness of his Dead, one of the 134 finest poems and song from 53 countries complied y translated by Gavin O'Toole and Georgina Jimenez in Che in Verse, says:

"thirty years already?
does this mean we continue to be useless after thirty years in a word without him?
does this mean there is a generation able to have been born grow and beget in a world for thirty years without him?
How does one conceive of the world without him for thirty years?
america without him?
...
he was doing for us what we should have been doing ourselves
he was doing what we knew had to be done but were not doing
what we wanted to do but we did not do
what inevitably we have to do but we are not doing
...
suddenly the bitch of history came
astonished we entered into something like an ideological vacation
and suddenly no one knew anything or believed in anything anymore
and instead of loathing and hating ourselves as if crying for our impotence
I went around asking what was done in which corner when in the entrails of america
...
when because they kill him they believed he had died and
announced the 'end of history'
as if we all now think the same with the disobedient exception of
chiapas and cuba..."
__________
(1) O'Toole, G. & Jimenez, G., Che in Verse (United Kigndom: Aflame Books, 2007), 60.