Zoom through 145;The Motorcycle Diaries146;

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favoured a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution8217;s first firing squads. He founded Cuba8217;s 8220;labour camp8221; system 8212; the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims8230;

The present-day cult of Che 8212; the T-shirts, the bars, the posters 8212; has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles8217; movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford8217;s Sundance film festival Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles8217; Motorcycle Diaries.

The film follows the young Che and his friend Alberto Granado on a vagabond tour of South America in 1951-52 8212; which Che described in a book published under the title Motorcycle Diaries, and Granado in a book of his own. Che was a medical student in those days, and Granado a biochemist, and in real life, as in the movie, the two men spent a few weeks toiling as volunteers in a Peruvian leper colony. These weeks at the leper colony constitute the dramatic core of the movie8230;

The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison8230; These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. Vaclav Havel has organised a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians.

Excerpted from an article by Paul Berman at http://www.slate.com