"Che:" Bad Movie About A Bad Guy

It would take sixteen hours to even begin to inventory the problems of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” a bad movie about a bad guy, the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The “Roadshow Edition” that I endured at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, clocks in at 4 hrs, 23 minutes in length. The film is divided into two overlong parts, the first dealing with the Cuban Revolutionary War, the second dealing with Guevara’s Bolivian disaster.

An hour of this movie is tedious; four hours of it sends one into a coma deeper than that of Fidel himself. The guy sitting behind me at the Nuart who, judging from his intermission cell-phone conversation is an enthusiastic Che lover, snored during Che’s Bolivian martyrdom. So historical questions aside, does the movie succeed as entertainment? No. It bores.

Let me say some nice things about the film. There is some lovely cinematography. There are nifty opening graphics of a map pointing out the various provinces of Cuba, although when the graphics re-appear after intermission and proceed to point out every single country in South America, it feels like a fourth grade geography lesson. Soderbergh seems to think that his audience is composed of idiots. I’m finished being nice, by the way.

Benicio Del Toro, a talented actor, is miscast as Ernesto Guevara; he has none of the cocky swagger and sarcastic humor of the real Che. He looks chronically depressed throughout the film. No one would follow Del Toro’s Che, except to a pharmacy to make sure he refilled his Zoloft.

At times the other actors, who unlike Del Toro are portraying Cubans, don’t even seem remotely Cuban; at other times the attempts of these same actors to behave and sound Cubanazo, chico, are hokey and forced.

But “Che” fails on a much deeper level. It attempts to depict actual historical events, the effects of which still play out today and affect millions of people. Does the movie tell the truth? It barely even tries. It is in this failure to connect with historic truth that the film sinks from being a mere failure to being an ugly lie.

By way of full disclosure, let me tell you a little about my background on this issue. My father comes from Cuba. Dad was an ardent Revolutionary as a young man, and as late as the summer of 1960 as a college student in Louisiana was still defending Castro, even insisting, in an interview published in Baton Rouge’s State Times, that Castro was not a Communist. Abuelo and Abuela, my grandparents, and Jorge and Ricardo, my uncles, all lived in Cuba in 1958, in Las Villas Province, at the Ingenio Escambray sugar factory, which my grandfather managed. All initially believed in the Revolution. Abuelo worked clandestinely for the anti-Batista group Directorio Estudiantil, through which he met a 30-year-old Argentine named Ernesto Guevara Serna, nicknamed “el Che.” Las Villas Province proved to be vital to the success of the Revolution, as it was where the various feuding anti-Batista groups, among them the Directorio, hammered out their differences. When Guevara needed to meet with Rolando Cubelas, head of the Directorio, Che asked Abuelo to arrange the meeting. The meeting of Guevara and Cubelas is briefly depicted in this film. Uncle Jorge snapped a photograph of Abuelo standing next to Guevara, taken in the crucial month of October 1958, in the mountains of Escambray (see below):

In an interview, Soderbergh quoted Che’s Castro-approved biographer Jon Lee Anderson as saying, “there are a million Ches. He means something different to everyone.” This is not only wrong, it is nonsense, and it perfectly sums up the kind of divorced-from-reality magical thinking that plagues Hollywood today and results in so many bad movies. There are a million STORIES about “el Che,” but there was only one living, breathing Ernesto Guevara.

There was also only one Villaya. Who was Villaya, you ask? Villaya does not appear in this film. He was not an important figure in Cuban history, but his death symbolizes for me the troubled nature of the Cuban Revolution, so please indulge my digression.

In late December 1958, the day after Che’s column, Columna Ocho Ciro Redondo, took the city of Santa Clara, Abuelo told the family that he needed to go see Che Guevara. Uncle Ricardo, then twelve, asked to go along. They drove the hour or so from Escambray sugar mill to Santa Clara in the mill’s Willys Jeep and pulled into the rebel-occupied army barracks, near the stables, parking behind a flatbed truck. As they parked, they heard the sound of rifle fire. Abuelo and Ricardo turned to their left, toward the stables, to see four men with Springfield .30 caliber rifles. It was a Revolutionary firing squad, and they had just done their job. There was a body on the hay-covered dirt floor of the stables. There was no need for a “tiro de gracia,” a mercy shot, to finish the victim off, as they had all fired at the head; the head was gone. They heaved the body up onto the flatbed truck, the body still jerking. “I must have been white with shock,” Tio Ricardo told me. Abuelo, hoping to minimize the trauma of this atrocity on his boy, asked one of the executioners, “who was that man you killed?” The rebel answered, “Villaya. He was the head chivato for the town of Santa Clara.” “Chivato” is Cuban for “snitch.” “A bad guy,” Abuelo told Tio Ricardo, hoping to help the boy make peace with what he had just seen. They walked toward the barracks where Guevara and Abuelo had their meeting, and the truck drove away with Villaya.

Perhaps Villaya had been a bad guy, but he was merely a snitch. One day after Che Guevara took Santa Clara, he had a guy shot for being a snitch. I cannot comment on Villaya’s guilt or innocence. I simply wish to point out that the execution, with no due process, of Villaya was a worse crime than what Villaya was accused of in the first place. I don’t know if there was a trial, but 24 hours between arrest and execution is not enough time to prepare a defense. Most troubling for me is this: if being a snitch for a dictatorship merits execution, the mind boggles at how many bullets it would take to execute every snitch in Cuba today, where there is a chivato on every block, officially organized into “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution,” and where the snitches’ reports are collected and reviewed in the Ministry of the Interior, a big building in Havana with Che’s picture on it. It saddens me to report that at the time of this execution, Abuelo, an honorable, intelligent and compassionate man, condoned Villaya’s execution, as he initially condoned the executions of other Batistianos. Good people can fall for bad ideas, and Abuelo did, although he never fell for Communism. Abuelo was too trusting, perhaps, but he wasn’t a fool.

Villaya’s story brings home to me the fact that the Cuban Revolution was not The Three Musketeers, Star Wars, or the Magnificent Seven. Real people died.

THE UNASKED QUESTION: WAS THE WAR WORTH IT?

Soderbergh completely skips the issue of how Fidel, Raul and Che behaved in power, thus evading the question, what did all this killing accomplish? The movie makes much of the death at Santa Clara of the 23-year-old Captain Roberto Rodríguez Fernández, a rebel in Che’s column nicknamed “el Vaquerito,” “the little cowboy,” because he was short, and wore cowboy boots. Abuelo, Jorge and Ricardo briefly met El Vaquerito after the rebels took the town of Placetas. El Vaquerito was leader of Guevara’s “Suicide Squad,” the vanguard who went into combat first. He had a reputation for being fearless; Jorge remembers the boy as a guajiro, a country boy; amiable, humble. Some in the audience practically sobbed when Vaquerito died. His death was very painful for them, don’t you know. I suspect they have no idea just how sad Vaquerito’s death really is. Would el Vaquerito have approved of Cuba becoming a communist dictatorship because of his efforts? I don’t know. Maybe. But how many kids who announce at the age of 23, “hey everybody, I’m a communist!” still say that at 33? According to Anderson, Che himself wrote, “Vaquerito did not have a political idea in his head, nor did he seem to be anything other than a healthy, happy boy, who saw all of this as a marvelous adventure.” Doesn’t sound like a commie to me. Would he have joined the guerrillas if he knew that the Cuba he died at 23 to help create would be one in which the Castros ruled with absolute power into Fidel’s eighties and Raul’s seventies, that Cuba would have one of the highest suicide rates in Latin America, that people would be so desperate to leave that they would take to the shark-infested waters of the Gulf in rafts, inner tubes, even floating cars, just to get the hell out? The tragedy of el Vaquerito is not just that of a brave young man who was killed; it is the tragedy of a boy whose life was used by sinister men to seize power. One of those men was Che Guevara.

A LIE

Pre-Revolutionary Cuba is predictably presented in this film as a screamingly poor, fifth-world country. It seems that every other character is illiterate. People who were there remember it differently, and United Nations statistics from the period tell a different story: Cuba was in fact the fourth most literate country in Latin America. “A people that don’t know how to read and write are an easy people to fool,” scolds Del Toro, index finger in the air. Ironic, that, considering how the Castros have always used the written word to fool people in Cuba and all over the world, via surrogates like Anderson, who blandly parrot the official version of Cuban history. Furthermore, the 100% literacy rate that the Cuban government claims to have accomplished is accompanied by 100% censorship of what Cubans are allowed to read, and of what they are allowed to write. Another digression: statistics say that 28 percent of the State of Louisiana is functionally illiterate today. I’d like to ask Steven Soderbergh, whose father was once Dean of the College of Education at Louisiana State University, if the scandal of illiteracy in Louisiana would justify turning Louisiana into a communist dictatorship, shooting all the cops, and compelling teachers to teach the dictatorship’s version of history. Of course, it wouldn’t. But this is precisely the twisted rationale that the Cuban government uses to justify its now fifty-year stranglehold on power.

ANOTHER LIE

At the end of the first half of the film, Che orders a rebel to return a red convertible the rebel has plundered. Che was not a plunderer, you see. Even if this incident is factually true, its inclusion in this film is a lie, because the film neglects to tell us that shortly after the war, Guevara moved into an extravagant beachfront mansion in Tarara, a few miles outside of Havana (after kicking out the previous owner). In March of 1959, Che lamely explained in a letter to future exile Carlos Franqui, then editor of the newspaper Revolucion, that “I am ill…due to my revolutionary work…Doctors advised a house at a distance (from Havana), so as to avoid too many visitors and I was lent this one by the Ministry of Property Recovery…” *

I wonder if Che’s doctors also advised that Che wear that famous Rolex of his.

As I’ve previously mentioned, Soderbergh’s Che is a four-hour film. I’ll have more to say about it on Tuesday.

INTERMISSION

*The letter was reproduced in the English edition of Guevara’s “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War,” published in 1968 by Monthly Review Press and translated by Victoria Ortiz.