The more the Che's message is watered down the more insignificant he becomes. Who cares.
You might . . . when The Motorcycle Diaries reaches cable. If you strip away the myth from the man, you will see where we all soon will be," sang Carl Anderson in "Jesus Christ Superstar." Perhaps this is an inappropriate comparison when talking about a communist legend like Ché Guevara, but nonetheless, that's the very strategy Brazilian director Walter Salles uses in his latest movie, "The Motorcycle Diaries." The film tells how 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and his roguish friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) embark on a road trip across Latin America in the early '50s before facing adulthood. What starts as a college-student adventure trip soon becomes a rich and life-changing experience of self-discovery. Their journey takes them across Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. Traveling more than 10,000 kilometers in eight months, the two young friends witness the terrible misery and injustice suffered by the good-hearted, hard-working, simple folk of South America. Their encounters make them question the value of progress as defined by an economy-based world that leaves so many people aside. "The Motorcycle Diaries" offers an unusual vision of the communist revolutionary, an objective and apolitical account of the series of events that inexorably shaped Ernesto into the man he would become.
Alber Pineda
Oregon State University
The Daily Barometer
But then, recent movies, documentaries, haven't done much for Fidel . . .
The thousands of Cubans executed without trial for thinking for themselves will surely be comforted by your words.
Communists believe that we capitalists will sell them the tools that they will use to bury us, but this is ridiculous.