Objects of Fascination: The Latin American Icons
Allende and Guevara. They cannot be separated – they are both heroes of Kapuściński’s love affair with revolution. He profiles them, paying tribute to the heroes of the common cause of socialism.
Guevara drops his ministerial post, he leaves his desk and goes off to Bolivia, where he organizes a guerrilla unit. He dies commanding this unit. Allende is the opposite – he dies defending his desk, his presidential office, from which – as he always predicted – ‘they’ll only remove me in wooden pyjamas’, i.e., in his coffin.
So on the surface these are very different deaths, but in reality the only differences are the place, time and outer circumstances. Allende and Guevara give up their lives for the people’s power. The former while defending it, and the latter while fighting for it . . .
Can one say which of them was right? They were both right. They operated in different circumstances, but the aim of their activities was the same.1
The essay about Allende and Guevara is like a profession of faith by a revolutionary. Like any faith, this one, too, has its saints. What does he find so captivating? What makes these saints so impressive?
Allende wants to preserve moral honesty.
Guevara acts in the same way.
Now and then Guevara’s unit takes prisoners, ordinary ones and officers, who will be released at once . . . ‘You’re free,’ they’re told, ‘we revolutionaries are morally honest people, we’re not going to bully a defenceless enemy.’
This principle of moral honesty is a characteristic of the Latin American left. It is the frequent cause of its defeats in politics and in battle. But we have to understand the situation. A young person in Latin America grows up surrounded by a corrupt world. This is a world of policies formed in exchange for money and for the sake of money, a world of dissolute demagogy, a world of assassinations and police terror, the world of a prodigal, ruthless plutocracy, of a bourgeoisie greedy for everything, of cynical exploiters, vapid, depraved money-grubbers and girls who go from one man to another. The young revolutionary wants to reject this world, he wants to destroy it, but before he will be capable of doing that he wants to contrast it with another world, pure and honest; he wants to contrast it with himself.
The rebellion of the Latin American left always features this factor of moral purification, this sense of moral superiority, caring about maintaining a moral advantage over the enemy. I will lose, I will die, but no one will be able to say I broke the rules of the fight, that I betrayed them or let them down, or that my hands are dirty.2
Almost from the start of his work in Latin America, Kapuściński plans to write a big book about Guevara, but owing to the daily grind, his dream dissolves, recedes into the background and fizzles out.
He never does write a book about his hero of those years. There isn’t enough time, what with the daily run-around, the treadmill, the constant trips abroad. In any case, another era sets in, and Guevara is not quite so sexy, not so cool anymore. To the very end, Kapuściński never loses his fondness for his old idol, and will never make a single remark to imply that he has changed his attitude or agrees with the anti-communist anti-legend about the ruthless revolutionary.
In the final years of his life, Kapuściński’s nostalgia for Che’s ideals manifests itself in enthusiasm for his continuator – in other circumstances, a different time and place – leader of the Indian rebellion in Chiapas, Subcomandante Marcos.
About Fidel Castro he writes next to nothing. While working as a correspondent in Latin America, he is not free to enter Cuba. A Cuban stamp in his passport will close the door to other countries in the region, excluding Mexico. Yet the Mexicans stamp ‘arrived from Cuba’ in his passport, which comes to the same thing.
He travels to the island only once, shortly after returning from his Mexican posting. He turns up at the Nowaks for Izabella’s name day, and after a good few vodkas there is a fierce argument about Fidel and his revolution. Someone makes some nasty remarks about Castro, and Kapuściński is filled with revolutionary fury. He delivers a fiery defence of Cuban socialism and its leader, saying: ‘What do you know about it all? Maybe they are making some mistakes, but those are their own mistakes! They are looking for their own, original way, but what are we doing? We’ve gone stagnant, we’re not doing a thing, we’ve stopped bothering to look for anything!’
‘I once had a fierce argument with Rysiek about Cuba,’ recalls Izabella Nowak. ‘His tendency to romanticize and his need for strong passions sometimes blinkered him.’
And from Jerzy Nowak: ‘He wanted to believe it would be different in Cuba than in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, different than in Eastern Europe, where socialism was brought in on Soviet bayonets. When in the early 1970s Fidel Castro visited Poland, he said to Edward Gierek, “We make mistakes, but they’re our mistakes, not someone else’s.” That convinced Rysiek. It took him a few years to understand that his revolutionary idols in Cuba had moved away from revolutionary integrity. His fascination with Fidel Castro lasted until the end of the 1980s.’
Later on as well, however, Kapuściński dislikes the ahistorical condemnation and score-settling that becomes fashionable after the collapse of socialism. It is not his style, not his way of thinking. Only once does he speak critically – but without hate-filled embellishment – about the Cuban leader.
It is March 2001, at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City, during a conference running concurrently with workshops for reporters from Latin America.
Question from the audience: ‘What do you think of Fidel Castro?’
Reply from Kapuściński: ‘Castro is one of the world’s few representatives and creators of authoritarian, dictatorial power. Someone who belongs to the past, as we are now living in an era of democratization on a global scale, though it is often just declarative democracy. Nonetheless, the democratic tendency is evident, and in the times ahead it is not dictators, not “single parties” that are going to do the ruling. That era is now coming to an end.’
‘You didn’t say the most important thing!’
When in the late 1990s I wrote a two-part feature on liberation theology for Gazeta Wyborcza, after the first part was published Kapuściński called with a friendly reprimand.
‘You focus on disputes within the Church, but you don’t say that liberation theology was an expression of emancipation for the Latino “lower-middle” level: teachers, petty tradesmen, small entrepreneurs, students, workers . . . Without them, liberation theology would have been nothing but a doctrinal dispute, which no one would have remembered, either then or now. Have you got time to add that in the second part?’
‘Of course, Maestro.’
Liberation theology fascinates Kapuściński as a political movement, as yet another current of revolution.
Kapuściński’s number-one hero from the sphere of liberation theology is Archbishop Hélder Câmara, ‘the Brazilian Gandhi’. The archbishop’s thoughts on the origins of violence in politics are spot on: ‘Violence no. 1 – the mother of all violence – is social injustice.’ Armed rebellion is just a reaction, violence no. 2, which people resort to in desperation. In preaching the principle of non-violence, Câmara does not approve the path of armed struggle taken by revolutionaries such as Che Guevara; however, rather than attacking the hordes of young Guevaras who take up arms, he attacks the source of the problem, the cause of their desperate choice.3