Che

Years back, on New Year’s Eve, in a crowded and cramped apartment in downtown Havana, my then wife and I partied with a family of Cubans that covered about three generations. They loved dancing. The spread put out by a big-butted matriarch was comprised of okay-tasting beans and yucca and expensive chicken and enough rum to forget just how untasty the beans were. As anyone who’s been there knows, you didn’t really go to Cuba to eat. You went to Cuba to smoke their cigars. You went to Cuba, too, to bring it up. To learn about it firsthand. “It” meaning the revolution. Castro. Che. And not necessarily in that order.

Cuba and its’ revolution was an area of keen interest for me ever since I took a college class in Latin American studies. I wouldn’t dive in voluntarily on my own in bookstores and libraries until a few years after graduating, but somewhere in that time an antipathy rooted and grew. The more I read about our imperialistic policies in Latin America, the more I despised my country. We did some pretty shitty things down there that made it hard to look at it any other way.

Meeting a seductive Che Guevara one day in a college library only fueled that antipathy. He was handsome and manly in pictures. He smoked cigars. His writings were cogent. Che was, in the words of Sartre, the most complete man of our time. Warrior and Poet. He was the main reason I wanted to visit Cuba.

I couldn’t tell you what all was talked about that New Year’s Eve. I remember the old patriarch sitting in the back and thinking to myself, man the stories this guy can tell. But then my wife and I were getting plowed off the rum. I kept getting dragged on to the kitchen floor that doubled as the dance floor to dance my usual stupid gringo moves. I forgot about Che then, the armed struggle he waxed about his entire adult life, his self sacrifice, his bravery.

And just reveled in what would be the best New Year’s Eve ever. Thanks to a violent revolutionary.