One of the most powerful scenes in the huge biography, "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life," describes the guerrilla's feelings on the night after he personally executed the first traitor among the Cuban rebels. "The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio]," Che wrote, "so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 [-caliber] pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the left temporal [lobe]. He gasped a little while and then was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn't get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: 'Yank it off, boy, what does it matter ...' I did so and his possessions were now mine. We slept badly, wet and I with something of asthma."
The next day he wrote in his diary about the arrival of a pretty activist from the July 26 Movement: "[She is a] great admirer of the Movement who seems to me to want to fuck more than anything else." These texts were made public for the first time by the biography's author, Jon Lee Anderson, an investigative reporter and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Last month, in a meeting with students at Tel Aviv University, Anderson related that he was pressured by Cuba not to publish the texts, because they cast Che in a cold, compassionless light. "I quoted the diary word for word," Anderson told me when we met the next day in the lobby of the Tel Aviv hotel where he was staying, "even though I knew it would anger a great many people."
That's Anderson in a nutshell: in love with the drama of revolution, determined to present the facts without embellishment. By the time he was 18, he had lived in eight different countries, including Liberia, Indonesia, Colombia and South Korea - his father was a diplomat. Anderson is the very archetype of the American liberal: clear, a man of the world, identifies with minorities, believes uncompromisingly in democracy and capitalism. It is ironic that a gringo like him contributed more than anyone else to transforming the Argentine revolutionary, who played a major role in the Cuban revolution, into a global icon of resistance.
After an impressive journalistic career of more than three decades, Anderson is most closely identified with the in-depth, highly detailed biography of the most famous revolutionary of the 20th century, Ernesto Che Guevara, from his birth to an aristocratic family in Argentina, to his execution in the jungles of Bolivia by local forces under the auspices of the United States. (The biography was published in 1997; a Hebrew translation appeared this year. )
On a visit to the Anna Lulu Bar in Jaffa, Anderson met Noa Amrami, who is clerking in a law firm that specializes in human rights. She was so thrilled when she found out who he was that she asked him to take as a souvenir a lighter bearing a portrait of Che Guevara she had bought in Sinai. Anderson laughed and thanked her for the gesture.
I asked him if he often encountered this kind of behavior. He smiled and admitted that he did. In his travels across the globe, he said, people he meets by chance often want to share what Che means to them. For those whose imagination is fired by Che Guevara, a meeting with Anderson is apparently the closest thing to an encounter with the real-life figure.
Understanding the dictator
Since starting to write for The New Yorker in 1998, Anderson has reported from, among other places, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Angola. He has researched and written about many leaders, all of whom have one thing in common: they are hated in the West. Besides Che, they include Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the deceased leaders of Chile and Libya, Augusto Pinochet and Muammar Gadhafi. He will soon start researching a book about Fidel Castro. His specialty is portraits; he has also written about the king of Spain and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for The New Yorker.
I ask him, half in jest and half seriously, if one of our leaders will also have that honor. "Who, Bibi?" he replies skeptically. He really doesn't like Benjamin Netanyahu, he says, though on the other hand, "He is so disagreeable, he might make a very interesting portrait." He has met Netanyahu once, he notes, while he was researching a piece for The New Yorker on the king of Spain. Netanyahu, who was prime minister at the time, visited the king while Anderson was there.
"I was fairly shocked by his behavior. He was really rude, his body language was really rude," Anderson says. It was a red-carpet reception, with dignitaries, all of whom behaved according to protocol. "Netanyahu came with a couple of goons, and it was their presence and his body language which set them apart from everybody else. The best bodyguards learn how to be part of the wallpaper, but they weren't, it was like having Dobermans. [Netanyahu] was like that, too, he was kind of hulking, very physical, and he had this kind of thuggish look. I remember thinking that he holds himself like someone ready for a fight. His chin was out, he wasn't deferential, he didn't smile, he didn't try to be a nice guy, and he didn't go by protocol.
"I was really surprised to see that in a leader," Anderson continues. "I only saw two other people behave like that. One was Daniel Ortega [the president of Nicaragua], in a conference at which Fidel was present, in Cuba, with the whole of the left there, everyone who was still around from the revolution. Ortega arrived late, dressed completely in black and escorted by some goons. It was totally inappropriate. He held himself in the same way. And Bush. Remember when Bush started swaggering after the Iraq war? Revolting character. When he became really a macho. It was the same kind of body language."
Do you like everyone you write about?
"I want to write about leaders as they are and let the reader make up his own mind. I have always been interested in figures who have been overly mythologized, like Che, deified, or demonized, because I want to see them for myself and re-explore them. I refuse to accept demonization. So what one tries to do is to demystify, but to a certain degree they create their own mythology as well.
"I remember after the Che book came out," he continues, "I went to Chile and interviewed Pinochet. People couldn't understand how I could write what they viewed as a sympathetic biography of Che - though in my book you can find whatever you want about Che - and then do a profile of Pinochet. That really angered people, even though I tell the whole Pinochet story, including the fact that he killed 3,000 people. But I didn't paint him as a caricature, dripping blood.
"Most of the portraits I do are uncomfortable. Chavez is sympathetic. He is fun to be with and, personally, I like him. But he is also a nutcase, like a Tasmanian devil: wherever he goes he creates chaos and destruction. I don't say that so much as show it. You see it and you draw your own conclusions."
The West has demonized the leaders you have written about. What's your take on that?
"There is no doubt that there is a campaign, which comes and goes, depending on who is in power in the West, of demonizing their perceived political enemies. In Iran it started with [Ayatollah] Khomeini. If you ask Americans about that, they will say it's in response to events that happened. Khomeini became a demonized figure after the American hostages were taken and held for a year. Bush branded Gadhafi a 'mad dog' after he sponsored bombing attacks in Europe which killed Americans. The caricaturizing evolves over time. There was actually an attempt a few years back to help Gadhafi transform his image, but he didn't help himself by coming to the UN and behaving like a mad transgender character. Same with Mugabe. He is actually pretty good on his feet and he is a very artful speaker, capable of convincing people that white is black. Chavez is like a hero in his own comic book.
"These leaders create their own self-mythology, but the only way to stop demonization is if you don't have a free press. Some tabloids portray leaders like Mugabe with a kind of veiled racism, but that is the price of a free press."
Even though Anderson espouses a liberal viewpoint, he seems to have a warm place in his heart for tyrants and is sensitive to the postcolonial climate in which they rose to power. "In the last 50 years, Fidel has become a new model of a leader - maybe there was [Egyptian President Gamal Abdel] Nasser before him - anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist," he says. "They created the possibility to be an angry Arab, an angry African, and be openly rebellious against big powers that could squash you tomorrow. That trope has persisted ever since. We can see how, without Fidel, there would be no Chavez, or even Ahmadinejad."
All in the pose
For millions of people around the world, Che's portrait, especially when emblazoned on T-shirts, is a symbol of resistance and of a desire to protest against perceived injustices. "There is a bookstore near NYU, Shakespeare & Co., and when the Che biography was published they put a big poster in the window. They invited me to come down and told me that they had been bombarded. They had so many kids come in who said 'I want that,' and pointed to the poster. Some of them didn't even know who he was. His face is immediately recognized and exemplifies a certain kind of defiance: That is what they see and that is what they want."
So Che's portrait has become a signifier without signifying anything? People don't know who he was. "Yes, it's somehow been emptied of content and meaning, for some of the wearers. Youngsters wearing a Che T-shirt are saying, 'I'm in your face, I'm young and I'm not in agreement with the status quo.' That can raise the whole question of how shallow modern-day culture is, and how you are what you wear. Maybe your pose, your attitude, is as far as you can go in your political involvement. To a degree that's true. If you think about 30 or 50 years ago, there was no idea of groups of people being identified as rebellious by what they wore. It's a form of a freedom of expression that didn't exist before. The trick is to get beyond it."
Maybe it's the shallowness, maybe it's something else, but Che's portrait cuts across the political spectrum and does not remain only on the left. "A friend of mine did a film about the use of the Che symbol around the world," Anderson says. "He found neo-Nazis in Germany using Che, also a soccer team in Milan, and Italian fascists. The neo-Nazi who was interviewed didn't really know who he was, he just said 'He's ours, he's a nationalist hero.' The appropriation is fascinating."
On the other hand, ignorance also has other aspects, to Anderson's chagrin. "In the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that increasing numbers of young people are calling Che a killer," he says with frustration. "This is really not thought through. What do they think? Did they think he was just a T-shirt? What do people do in war? Is it a kind of a meeting of elders when you just talk things out and carry guns? No, you kill each other, that's what war is, that's what revolution is. Why are they so shocked? Didn't they know it before? And why this anger about it, this eruption of indignation that he was a killer? Well, he wasn't, he was a soldier, he was a revolutionary soldier. The fact that he personally executed a few people is what you do in war. If you have been betrayed, if someone's a spy, you have to kill them, that's what you do. Do I say it's a good thing? No, it's circumstance. All societies used to execute spies. We don't anymore, we just stick them in prison, or trade them."
Is Che still relevant in a world where the revolution is what you wear? Can revolutions still happen?
"The West, which should be triumphant, is undergoing a period of great questioning. People, particularly youngsters, are looking for symbols with meaning and content. To the extent that Che has a backstory and is not just a face on a T-shirt, there's potentially something to extract from his message. I think it is probably an outdated message, but you can never write anything off in this world; everything seems to be very cyclical. Whether we are going to go back to a period where people are going to be really angry and start burning things and be willing to sacrifice their lives, I don't know. I was surprised to see that in a couple of societies I know - Iran, for one. I was really stunned by the Green Revolution, though the regime didn't have to kill many people before it died.
"In Libya, where I spent quite a bit of time with the revolutionaries, I was very surprised to see these youngsters, hipsters, fighting, not really knowing how to fight. Twenty-something Twitter users, more used to standing around looking cool in jeans and sunglasses. But suddenly they were fighting. So, yes, revolutions can happen."
In New York, too?
"Somehow I don't think so. Our societies have a huge amount of wealth running through them. The youth of the West will not die for a cause. They have reached such a level of enlightenment," Anderson says sarcastically, "that they understand that dying for an ideology is a primitive state of being. Dying for a cause is from yesteryear, it's retro. Why do that when you can have an iPod and an iPad, and go on cool vacations? Everything is about how you feel in the moment. It's the ultimate existentialism, as long as you can afford it."
Nevertheless, he adds, "Younger people are yearning for substance and meaning. They want to find solid anchors. They have grown up in a time of such rapid change, they are aware that everything is ephemeral, they want grounding. I am very aware of that when I talk to people in their early twenties. Life for them is like a whirlwind, and sometimes they don't have a place in it, and I don't know how they are going to find one."
Do you find the new social protest movement in the United States - the "occupy" movement - to be of interest?
"Not really. What are they doing? Sitting in parks. I went down to Zuccotti Square [in New York] and they were doing Tai Chi. I tried not to be too condescending, I thought maybe it was an age thing - but there they were, doing Tai Chi! And I was like, oh, please ... oh, 'Long live the revolution,' they are really going to get far doing this. They should be burning down Goldman Sachs right now. Let's see how long it survives."
He goes back to the young people in Libya, whom he holds in far higher regard. "You know, they are from the same generation and they are fighting. I asked one of them where he learned how to operate a missile launcher. He said it was from playing war games on his computer. He was really shocked when he was fired on, though, really angry. I said, 'But you're shooting at them - what did you think they would do?'"
Drugs and globalization
Anderson started his journalistic career in Latin America, and it remains the continent he knows best. He speaks fluent Spanish with a Cuban accent, and his three children attended Cuban schools while he was researching the biography of Che Guevara.
What has changed in Latin America since Che's time?
"Until the 1980s, there were feudal economies. If you were born a peasant, to peasant parents, your future was peasantry, and if they worked on a plantation they were earning $2 a day. There was nowhere to go. Even immigration to the United States was a Mexican phenomenon. And there were no drug economies back then. The narco economy has replaced and disfigured the old ways and has engendered a kind of globalization in much of the Third World.
"Sixty years ago, when Che and Fidel came on the scene, there were easy-to-read political economies. United Fruit - they own this, they own that. You had the rich, you had a small urban middle class and a lot of poor people in the countryside. Now, though, you can join a gang and get rich.
"These days, the gangster economy, the black-market economy, has replaced the ideological insurgency with essentially a criminal insurgency. In Mexico there is a criminal insurgency against the state, and the same in Guatemala and El Salvador. You can argue that what replaced Marxist ideology is criminal insurgency. Increasingly you have criminal societies all over the world. Look at Conakry, in Guinea: it's a narco state. Yet, Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah had utopian dreams of changing Africa."
Does that sadden you?
Anderson eyes me skeptically. "Don't presuppose that I am somehow a disciple of Che. I never adopted that dogma. I am merely reporting it as it is."You described the changes in Latin America objectively; now I am asking for your nonobjective opinion.
"Do I feel sad? Maybe a little. I mean, with many caveats, the Cold War and what happened until the end of it. On one hand you had this incredibly tragic backdrop of war around the world, lots of proxy conflicts. But seen historically, it was a simpler time; what replaced it is nihilistic by comparison. If those were confused or even wrongheaded ideologies, what replaced them is suicidal political ideologies, like radical Islam. The relative bloodshed of the old insurgencies, the Robin Hood time of Che, compared to what we have now, is as different as night and day. Not to mention this criminalization of the underclass that seems to have replaced the need for open political revolt.
"And I find it revolting - no pun intended - I find it disgusting that we coexist with that, because it is eroding the moral fabric of our society. The way we criminalize the youth in a way we didn't before; I find it sad that one out of every 200 Americans is in prison, it's no way to live. The cities of Latin America, in the continent Che wanted to revolutionize, are by and large the most dangerous in the world today."
A case in point is Hugo Chavez, he says. Anderson knows Chavez personally and has written about him twice for The New Yorker. "He's creating class struggle, which means that when he dies, he is going to leave a society that's vastly more polarized than it was when he came in. I fault equally the wealthy classes that dominated, and have always dominated Venezuelan life: they could have created a fairer playing field, created a cultured, educated, middle class. They could have invested in education and raised the standard of living of the poor. But they didn't give a damn about them. Despite 100 years of oil wealth, they just left the poor to live in slums and built higher walls around their mansions."
Black-and-white world
This was Anderson's first visit to Israel in 20 years - Israel interests him, but is not his highest priority. In Jaffa he met the human-rights lawyer Emily Schaeffer. She asked him whether anyone had asked him to boycott Israel and turn down the invitation to visit. Anderson had no idea what she was talking about. There's a movement calling for a cultural boycott and sanctions against Israel, she told him. No, he hasn't heard of it. As a journalist who has been to more than 80 countries, the local conflict here apparently doesn't knock him for a loop. Having written about the world's most controversial people, he knows that there is no absolute truth.
"When it comes to Israel, most of the world is extremely polarized, and with not many shades of gray," he says. "I believe that reality exists in the shades of gray. Things will be a lot better if people will be ready to see things the way they are. Unfortunately, we have an increasingly polarized world, and the more we know about the world, it seems, in the age of the information revolution, the more ignorant people are becoming and adopting more polarized positions. People move to black and white because it's simpler that way, it leaves them without doubt. This is why I piss people off all the time."
What do you think about U.S. support for Israel?
"What Israel and the U.S. have in common, and not just in terms of their historical relations, is this problem of an increasingly powerful right wing; not just conservative but fundamentalist, trying to make inroads. Look at what is happening with the Republican Party. This guy Jon Huntsman is the smartest of the lot. He's old-style, life of public service, speaks Mandarin, seems well intentioned, not a war monger. Then you see all these other Republican candidates, they can barely string a sentence together. A guy like Huntsman should be the decent face of American conservatism. Even if I don't agree with him philosophically, he is someone who can be president. But he has no chance in hell at the moment, and that is sad for the country. [Huntsman subsequently withdrew from the presidential race on January 16.]
"There is no consensus. I look at this right wing and I don't regard them as fellow Americans, I regard them as my enemy. I don't feel that we should share a country, and that's a new feeling."Toward the end of the conversation, the talk turns to President Obama. I put it to Anderson that Obama has also become an icon on T-shirts. Is he the American Che?
"The youth really went for him in a big way, and now there is apathy again, he is a huge disappointment. It's ridiculous that he won the Nobel Peace Prize. His presidency has meaning in racial terms. Unfortunately, right now it is not being valued in that way. Maybe by African-Americans. But there is a feeling of malaise, of disappointment."