There isn’t much about Ernesto Ché Guevara that hasn’t been said a thousand times, but this ‘biblia pauperum’ approach to telling it all again as a strip cartoon is certainly exciting with fresh communication possibilities.
Manuel ‘Spain’ Rodriguez begun his career in the comics underground of Zed Comics along side Robert Crumb and has a deserved high reputation as a political artist.
The sharp editing by Paul Buhle, who believes comics started with cave paintings and sit somewhere between oral storytelling and written narratives, which they certainly preceded by millennia, produces a smooth, highly engaging tempo.
Rodriguez dynamic style with its film-camera like movement from frame to frame continuously engages the imagination with broad vistas as well as exquisite characterisation in close up.
All of the comic’s traditional graphic devices of onomatopoeic renditions, speech bubbles and background text work in perfect harmony, making the turning of pages irresitable.
Ché’s extraordinary appeal owes much to the present political emergence of mass popular movements in Latin America, lead, not by the traditional criollo elites, but for the first time the native Indians.
Ironically in Bolivia, Ché’s inability to speak Quechua or other local dialects would prove a major handicap. This is alluded to when on his first trip through the continent and travelling on the back of a lorry in Peru, he tried to unsuccessfully engage in conversation with fellow passengers – but none spoke Spanish.
In a postscript to The Motorcycle Diaries Guevara refers to a conversation he has had with a fellow traveller he though was East European. The man apparently told Ché with extraordinary foresight: “you will die with your fist clenched and your jaw tensed a perfect manifestation of struggle”.
His face pensive but hard, Ché’s last words to his executioner are “shoot, coward. You are only killing a man”.
The fear Ché put in the heart of his killer and that of every oppressor throughout the continent was such that his body was buried in an unmarked grave in the dead of the night.
But they couldn’t bury the aspirations that he embodied and which time has shown to have been correct all along.
Michal Boncza
(Originally appeared in Morning Star paper)
