Venezuela Is an Old Story, But Some Have Not Discerned the Plot
Posted by Ginny on June 3rd, 2007 (All posts by Ginny)
In Black Dogs, a novel that describes the tenuous hold Westerners have on civilization and the nearness of our more primal selves, Ian McEwan sets a dramatic scene in Berlin; Berlin, of course, has been a setting for much real and fictional drama in the twentieth century and may in the twenty-first. In While Europe Slept, Bruce Bawer describes his anger at the parade of Che shirts as he sat in a Berlin Starbucks. He describes his reaction:
I should have been inured to Che’s ubiquity by now. But it angered me to see his face in Pariser Platz, where his cause had once won a nightmarish, and seemingly irreversible, victoria. Some would ague that his reduction to an image used to sell leisure wear represented a “commodification” of Communism, and therefore a victory for capitalism. But looking at those shirts, I felt no sense of triumph.(129-30)
He explains with the personal as well as political:
My own awareness of the reality of Communism dated back to junior high school. In ninth grade, I was friends with a Cuban boy named Jose. We were the top two students in Spanish, and as graduation approached, our grades were so close that it was unclear which of us would win the school’s Spanish prize. then one day our teacher announced that it would go to me. At the end of the hour, Jose graciously told me, “It’s right that you won. It’s my language, and you did as well as I did, so that means you did better.”
Jose’s language skills were in his blood. His father had been a journalist under Batista. When Castro and Guevara came to power, they arrested Jose’s father, tortured him, and put his eyes out. On the day I met him, in his modest ground-floor apartment, he sat in an upholstered chair in a book-lined room and spoke to me with a courtliness and respect to which I was not accustomed. Ever since then, every time I’ve seen a Che T-shirt on some clueless young person, I’ve thought of Jose’s father sitting in his living room, surrounded by books he could no longer read.
Such cruelties were par for the course for Che and his gang. Jose’s father was lucky–at least he got out alive. Many didn’t. Some were just teenagers when Che–having identified them, often capriciously, as enemies of the Revolution–blew their brains out...
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