The New Che Play: “School of the Americas”
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 07.10.06 | 2:12 PM ET
There’s no denying the romantic appeal of the image of Che Guevara. He is, at least as many like to think of him, a vagabonding traveler, a revolutionary, a tough biker and a swashbuckling philosopher, all rolled up into one Latin superhero. Thanks to the iconic Alberto Korda photo of him, he also looks cool on a T-shirt. All that helps explain, I think, why Lonely Planet placed a portion of that image on some banners across its Web site, and slipped advertisements for its guidebooks into DVD cases with the film “The Motorcycle Diaries.” The young, idealistic Che depicted in that film is one thing. (I loved the movie.) But something tells me Lonely Planet won’t be rushing to sponsor the new stage play, School of the Americas, written by “The “Motorcycle Diaries” screenwriter José Rivera. The Che depicted here is not the warm, fuzzy young traveler eager to play soccer with shunned lepers.
“School of the Americas,” playing at The Public Theater in New York City, focuses on the last two days of Che’s life, his final moments before he is killed in Bolivia. It deals, in part, with the sometimes dirty business of revolution, with regrets the real Che might have had about his life.
As Jason Zinoman writes in a review in the New York Times, the play is “something of a bookend” to the film. “[T]his time,” Zinoman writes, “the revolution will not be romanticized.”
According to Zinoman’s review, this is a Che who says, “I am a small, failed, stupid man. I thought I could export a world-shaking revolution north, south, east and west. All with a handful of scared young men!”
The play is getting mixed reviews. Zinoman calls it a “rickety piece of historical speculation.” He continues: “Mr. Rivera deserves credit for trying to humanize a mythic figure, but he ends up making Che smaller than life. He’s so ordinary that you might find yourself wondering what all the fuss was about.”
Writes Jeremy McCarter in New York Magazine:
If the play could detach the actual man from his romantic legend, Rivera—who wrote the screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries—would be doing a real public service. His Che argues passionately for social justice, particularly the need for education. But though he speaks frankly about his bloody deeds as a soldier, he skims over his bloody deeds as an apparatchik—the executions, collectivization, and labor camps that followed his march into Havana with Castro. The play’s not a total whitewash: Felix Rodrigues (a magnetic Felix Solis), a Cuban among his captors, says that Che “raped my country” and destroyed everything beautiful in it. Still, it’s too neat to show us Che at a sympathetic moment, soft-pedal his repressive brutality, and invite us to be inspired by his humanity. That the invitation is accepted so readily might say less about Che than it does about our own beleaguered liberalism.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
Daniel Buck 07.10.06 | 11:36 PM ET
The definitive biography is CHE GUEVARA: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE, by Jon Lee Anderson, which tips the scales at nearly 800 pages. Neither Che’s detractors nor devotees were happy with the life Anderson etched, which is to the writer’s credit in my view.
Another useful volume, THE FALL OF CHE GUEVARA: A STORY OF SOLDIERS, SPIES, AND DIPLOMATS, by Henry Butterfield Ryan, recounts the asthmatic revolutionary’s ill-advised and ineptly managed attempt to organize an insurgency in Bolivia and the Bolivian military’s relentless campaign against him.
Che makes an appearance in Andy Garcia’s recent movie THE LOST CITY. Here he is not Korda’s iconic Robin Hood of the Sierra Madre, but a crackbrained Robespierre. I think Garcia is closer to the mark.
Jim Benning 07.11.06 | 12:48 AM ET
Great suggestions, Daniel. I have the Jon Lee Anderson book and agree it’s terrific.
The Andy Garcia movie is definitely on my list of films to see. I didn’t know it included an appearance from Che. Interesting.
trade show 02.25.08 | 2:17 PM ET
great post! thanks for sharing!
C A Jones 03.27.08 | 4:12 PM ET
“He’s so ordinary that you might find yourself wondering what all the fuss was about.”—exactly!
Killer Commies are never cool.
MBA Colleges in India 10.01.08 | 2:13 PM ET
Whatever one thinks of the School of the Americas (and I’m inclined to think that it should be closed), it doesn’t seem at all clear that closing the place would improve the human rights record of Latin American countries (though perhaps the fact that a country is no longer willing to send officers there is itself a sign that things are improving). Hugo Banzer Suarez was a brutal thug and SOA graduate. Does anyone think that he would have been an upstanding citizen if only he hadn’t attended SOA?