A Personal Che from Around the World

• Date: 01 May 2020
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19869602
• Subject Matter: Film Reviews

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19869602

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 232, Vol. 47 No. 3, May 2020, 253–255

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19869602

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

253

Film Review

A Personal Che from Around the World

by

David Kunzle

Adriana Merino and Douglas Duarte Personal Che, Skyview Films, ca. 2012.

Che Guevara has his mausoleum in Cuba after his bones, in an epic investigation and

exhumation, were finally located in the airstrip at Vallegrande, Bolivia. Identified

beyond the shadow of a doubt, they were returned (against much local protest) in 1997

to Cuba. The ceremonies of his return have been described as militaristic, but the mau-

soleum in Santa Clara where the bones reside is discreet, subterranean, and silent. This

discretion is fitting for a man of legendary modesty, while, for all his years of effort to

create a socialist Cuba from his positions as minister of various key government depart-

ments, the last year of his life, waging a forlorn guerrilla war in Bolivia with an interna-

tional handful of comrades, may certainly be described as militaristic, guerrilla-style.

His murder by a CIA-trained Bolivian soldier on orders from above (apparently from

the Bolivian government) after his capture near the village of La Higuera is today

regarded as a shameful crime. The semipublic exhibition of the body to journalists and

photographers in Vallegrande immediately after the execution in October 1967 proved

perfectly counterproductive: instead of proclaiming a victory of the Bolivian army over

the world-famous “terrorist,” it laid the foundation for an enduring legend of a

Christlike martyr. Most of the many films on Che, including Personal Che, focus on the

tranquil corpse, the proud pointing fingers of the Bolivian officers, and the sacral rever-

ence of the Vallegrandinos filing past and especially of the nurses who washed the

“Christlike” (their word) body.

The display took place in the tiny laundry room of the hospital in Vallegrande, now

an eloquent popular memorial, long consecrated locally, and a tourist attraction. In a

great irony of history, the bigger, permanent victory turned out to be Che’s when the

legend became myth and Che immortalized. The laundry room is a shrine marked by

a dense palimpsest of hand-scrawled messages, the permanent, well-preserved mani-

festation of the love and homage paid to a sacred presence by pilgrims from all over the

world in the years since 1967. This is indeed “Personal Che”—the title words of the film,

inscribed at the opening as if as the latest addition to the forest of graffiti, with the cred-

its likewise located as graffiti at the end.

The celebration (the word is appropriate) of the body found its nodal point in a pho-

tograph by the Bolivian Freddy Alborta, endlessly reproduced since and compared

very early on, in an essay by the British critic John Berger, to Mantegna’s Dead Christ. (It

is a pity that none of the many documentaries on Che include interviews with the reclu-

sive novelist and critic; the present film does not use his essay or the famous Alborta

photograph.) Independently of the Berger essay that they cannot have known, the

Vallegrande hospital nurses spontaneously told reporters that they saw Jesus in the

dead Che.

To complete or extend the perceived resemblance, especially as it affected Vallegrande

and Bolivians, the film reports that Che, postmortem, works miracles among the local

population, from simply bringing luck to a student facing exams to curing a sick cow.

David Kunzle is emeritus distinguished professor of art history at the University of California,

Los Angeles, and the author of Che Guevara: Icon, Myth, and Message (1997) and Chesucristo: The

Fusion in Word and Image of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ (2016).

869602LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19869602Latin American PerspectivesKunzle / Film Review

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