Get a load of Loder on "Che"

Kurt Loder of MTV fame, who wrote a surprisingly critical review of Michael Moore's mockumentary (it would be mocking documentaries to call it a documentary) "Sicko" has written a review of Stephen Soderbergh's Che Guevara hagiography. He praises the performances and the film making but Loder proves he's no fool when it comes to the truth about Guevara and castro's Cuba:

Considering the length of this bipartite movie, a surprising amount of relevant information has been left out. Che's hatred of capitalism (ironic in a man who favored Rolex watches) and individualism generally pretty much guaranteed the messes he created in overseeing agrarian reform and the National Bank of Cuba. And there's only the most oblique reference to his tenure as commander of the notorious La Cabaña prison, where he presided over the "revolutionary justice" executions of hundreds, some have said thousands, of people — CIA stooges and traitors, in his view; children as young as 14, in the testimony of others. Also elided from the film is his failure to export Cuban-style insurrection to such other countries as the Congo, from which he departed in defeat with his beret between his legs.

Guevara's final failure — the subject of Part Two of "Che" — was his attempt to foment a communist revolution in Bolivia, where actual Bolivians looked upon him as a dodgy foreigner, and ultimately betrayed him to government troops and their CIA trainers. He was executed by Bolivian soldiers in October of 1967. He lives on, of course, as a T-shirt — the crowning capitalist irony — and as a symbol of romantic rebellion to many, many people, including all manner of wealthy musicians and actors: exactly the sort of capitalist lackeys who would find themselves either imprisoned or facing a firing squad under their hero's system of summary justice (along with many otherwise-blameless homosexuals of their acquaintance).

The most interesting thing about these two extraordinary films is how glancingly they deal with the troublesome (and now outmoded) political ideals of this supremely political man...

...we hear as much as we should about the odiousness of the Batista regime (although not of the Castro regime that followed it)...

Posted by Henry Louis Gomez at January 16, 2009 09:01 PM

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