Che Guevara´s & Diego Rivera´s: two Memorials in 2007

Next october the 8th will be the 40th anniversary of Che´s murder by a bunch of yankee mercenaries named "CIA agents" and the following november 24th, the 50th of Diego´s by cancer. Shall "the media" remember them?
Fed up with Frida Kahlo´s image promoted everywhere by "global marketing" one is tempted to speculate: without Diego next to her, what could Frida by herself be capable of achieving? Apalled, we contemplate now how that global immoral marketing snatched Che´s image from the hands of youngsters that years ago used to display proudly Korda´s famous portrait of Che, now for purposes of ¡Holy Christ of the Blisters!... ¡auction of some hair tuft from his head!
In addition to Che´s inclination for speeches and texts (Gerassi,J., Venceremos, the Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara, ed. Macmillan Co., NY, 1968) we present you next with two little known samples of Guevara´s literature, to me very moving. The first, date unknown to this blogger:

"Dear Hildita, Aleidita, Camilo, Celia and Ernesto: if you have the occasion to read this letter, it will be because I won´t be among you. You almost shall not remember me and the youngest ones shall not remember anything of me. Your father has been a man that acts as he thinks and surely has been loyal to his own convictions. Grow like good revolutionaires. Study a lot so as to be able to control the technology that allows the control of Nature. Remember that the Revolution is very important and that each one of us, by oneself, is worthless. Above all be always deeply sensible to injustices perpetrated against anyone in any place of the world, it´s the nicest quality of a revolutionaire."
"Until forever my children, I look forward to seing you again yet..."
"A big kiss and a great hug, Father"

And the second one...

"Christ, I love you -not because you came down from a star- but because you revealed to me that man has tears and sorrows, keys for unlocking the closed gates of Light. Yes... you taught me that the name of God -a poor God crucified like You- and the one that was next to Your left at the Golgotha- the bad thieve, is also a God..."
Published first in the daily "Los Tiempos", Cochabamba, Bolivia, september 3,1969

By the end of 1968, the authoritarian government in Mexico, censored two products of free world culture, no doubt considering they were a bad influence for the mexicans (surely you remember the saying of the time: "what´s bad for Chrysler Corp. is bad for the world"). One was the film "Z Lives" by Costa Gavras with very good music by Mikis Theodorakis; it was allowed to the public only a few years after the world premiere. The other was a text in Diego Rivera´s Museum-Stone-House named "Anahuacalli", south of México City, that the painter constructed "a la Aztec mode" in the borough of Tepetlapa, Coyoacán. It showed a trapezoidal wall on the first floor, entering right, Rivera´s personnal "manifesto" on why he was a communist. It was then rudely re-painted over to prevent Museum´s visitors from reading it, altough you can still be able to find the original phrases by carefully following the masked letters on the painted wall´s edges. Yes, this was a primitive case of museum censorship in Mexico, that has contributed to transform a lot of mexican citizens into something like brainwashed acritical conformists. By a lucky chance I found a second hand book regarding the last interviews made to the great mexican painter, before he died (Suarez, L., Confesiones de Diego Rivera, ed. Grijalbo,1962); it contains the text of Rivera's own personal manifesto, censored previously from the Anahuacalli´s wall and considered it worth reproducing here:

"I am a communist for personal interest, because I love pleasure and rejoice and I feel more of it if I am surrounded by rejoice and happy people. I want to say along with the great checoslovaquian patriot Julius Fucik: "I have lived for rejoice; for rejoicement I have gone to combat For rejoice I die. May sadness never be linked to my name."