They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted "Alice in Wonderland." A place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward? Where people who protest the madness are sentenced to death themselves ?
Such a place rolled out the red carpet for Benicio del Toro this past weekend. I refer to Havana Cuba which put on the Havana Film Festival where the 4 ½ hour movie “Che,” was the main feature. In May del Toro won the Cannes Film Festiva'l's “best actor” award for his role as Che Guevara in the movie he co-produced and Steven Soderbergh directed.
While accepting the “best actor” award at Cannes Benicio del Toro gushed: "I'd like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara!" as the crowd erupted in a thunderous ovation."I wouldn't be here without Che Guevara, and through all the awards the movie gets you'll have to pay your respects to the man!"
In a flurry of subsequent interviews in Europe del Toro equated Che Guevara with Jesus Christ and told a Spanish interviewer, "Ideologically I feel very close to Che."
Alas, (outside Havana and Cannes) the movie has met with mostly scathing reviews. Variety's Todd McCarthy branded the movie “defiantly nondramatic” and “a commercial impossibility.” New York Magazine calls it, “something of a fiasco.”
Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro, actually had an intriguing and immensely amusing theme if only they'd known how to plumb it. Soderbergh hails Guevara as "one of the most fascinating lives in the last century."
Almost all who actually interacted with Ernesto Guevara (and are now free to express their views without fear of firing squads or torture chambers) know that the The Big Question regarding Ernesto, the most genuinely fascinating aspect of his life, is: how did such a dreadful bore, incurable doofus, sadist and and epic idiot attain such iconic status?
The answer is that this psychotic and thoroughly unimposing vagrant named Ernesto Guevara had the magnificent fortune of linking up with modern history's top press agent, Fidel Castro, who for going on half a century now, has had the mainstream media anxiously scurrying to his every beck and call and eating out of his hand like trained pigeons.
Had Ernesto Guevara De La Serna y Lynch not linked up with Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city that fateful summer of 1955--had he not linked up with a Cuban exile named Nico Lopez in Guatemala the year before who later introduced him to Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city — everything points to Ernesto continuing his life of a traveling hobo, panhandling, mooching off women, staying in flophouses and scribbling unreadable poetry.
Not to be outdone in the trained pigeon department, while making their film, Soderbergh and Del Toro repeatedly visited Havana to coo and peck away as anxiously as Herbert Matthews, Dan Rather or Barbara Walters while the regime tossed out its propaganda crumbs. Del Toro and Soderbergh , on top of relying on Che's diaries (published in Havana by Cuba's propaganda Ministry and edited by Fidel Castro who wrote the introduction) for the script, also obtained recollections from Che's widow and many of his former underling executioners. These all currently serve as ministers in a totalitarian regime. “We wanted to show the real character” boasts Soderbergh. Absolutely no chance of any hanky panky with the historical record from these sources!
"I met him [Fidel Castro] for about five minutes," Del Toro said. "He knew about the project and he said to me that he was very happy (I'll bet!) that we had spent so much time researching the subject. And why shouldn't Castro be ecstatic wth the film? Most of del Toro and Soderbergh's "research" time was spent with Cuba's propaganda Ministry.
“I'm here in Cuba's hills thirsting for blood,” Che wrote his abandoned wife in 1957. “Dear Papa, today I discovered I really like killing,” he wrote shortly afterwards. Alas, this killing very rarely involved combat, it come from the close-range murder of bound and blindfolded men and boys.
“When you saw the beaming look on Che's face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart,” said a former political prisoner to this writer, “you knew there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”
In fact the one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara's life was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys. Under his own gun dozens died. Under his orders thousands crumpled. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally, even comically. Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro skip over these fascinating quotes and Che's one genuine accomplishment as a revolutionary.
Alas, taking on Fidel Castro as agent has it's drawbacks, as former colleagues all attest: “Fidel only praises the dead.” So prior to whooping up his revolutionary sidekick, Fidel Castro sent him “to sleep with the fishes.”
“Most of the people I met that knew him,” says Del Toro, “when they spoke about him, there was a sense that they were talking about a family member that they cared about with infinite love."
Indeed, Fidel Castro's expressions of love for his former sidekick must have misted Del Toro's eyes.
Too bad Soderbergh and Del Toro didn't interview the former CIA officers who revealed to this writer how Fidel Castro himself, via the Bolivian Communist party, constantly fed the CIA info on Che's whereabouts in Bolivia. Including Fidel Castro's directive to the Bolivian Communists regarding Che and his merry band might have also added drama. “Not even an aspirin,” instructed Cuba's Maximum Leader to his Bolivian comrades, meaning that Bolivia's Communists were not to assist Che in any way “not even with an aspirin,” if Che complained of a headache.
But utterly starstruck by their subject and slavishly compliant to Fidel Castro's script and casting calls, all these fascinating plots and subplots flew right over Soderbergh and Del Toro's heads.
Fidel Castro's influence over the Western "intelligentsia" can only be described as magical, and renders any public evaluation of his regime among the smart set completely devoid of logic. To wit:
He jailed and tortured at a rate higher than Stalin and refuses (unlike Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet's Chile and Somoza's Nicaragua) to allow Amnesty International or the Red Cross to inspect his prisons. Yet Cuba sat on the U.N.'s Human Rights Committee and upon visiting New York as the U.N.'s keynote speaker in 1995, Newsweek magazine hailed Castro as "The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!" and Time as "The Toast of Manhattan!" referring to the social swirl that engulfed him and the autograph hounds who mobbed him from among New York’s smart set.
His legal code mandates 2 years in prison for anyone overheard cracking a joke about him. Yet Jack Nicholson and Chevy Chase sing his praises.
He abolished Habeas corpus while his chief hangman (Che Guevara himself) declared that "judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail." Yet Harvard Law School invited him as their guest of honor, then erupted in cheers and tumultuous ovations after his every third sentence.
He drove out a higher percentage of Jews from Cuba than Czar Nicholas drove from Russia. Yet Shoah Foundation Founder Stephen Spielberg, considered his dinner with Fidel Castro, "the eight most important hours of my life."
He's a lily-white European soldier's son who forcibly overthrew a Cuban government where Blacks served as President of the Senate, Minister of Agriculture, Chief of Army, and Head of State (Fulgencio Batista, the grandson of slaves, and born in a palm-roofed shack). Then jailed the longest suffering black political prisoner of modern history (Eusebio Penalver who suffered longer in Castro's dungeon's than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa's). Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 90 percent black while only 9 percent of the ruling Stalinist party is black. He sentenced other blacks (Dr. Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20-year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King in a public square. Yet he's a hero to the Congressional Black Caucus and receives frequent accolades and even passionate bear hugs from Charles Rangel and Jesse Jackson.
He converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels Haitians. Yet, Colin Powell and the London Times, (owned by Rupert Murdoch) have recognized "the Castro Revolution's achievements."
In brief, except among "right-wing crackpots," Cuba is ritually discussed, not with facts or reasoned observations, but with handy (and bogus) clichés.
Che Guevara's delight in slaughtering Cubans was made possible only because these Cubans were completely defenseless at the time. Bound and blindfolded was his preference. And in that very manner they were lined up in front of his firing squads. In other settings featuring firearms (held by others) the troubled Argentine quivered with fear.
On Oct. 8 1967, for instance, upon finally encountering armed and determined enemies, Che quickly dropped his fully-loaded weapons. "Don't shoot!" he whimpered. "I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!"
For some reason del Toro and Soderbergh's movie omits this scene.
