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8 tHe two ernestos The actual first name of Che Guevara, the legendary international political figure still most familiarly associated with mid-twentieth-century Cuba, was Ernesto. (According to one theory, in the street vernacular of his native Argentina, “Che” is a common nickname, translating as “pal” or “buddy;” according to another, it is a common conversational interjection, something like “hey” or “yeah.”) The first name of Ernest Hemingway, the legendary international literary figure still most familiarly associated with mid-twentieth-century Cuba, likewise translates into Spanish as Ernesto. (Though by the time he arrived in Cuba, a biographical detail not without importance, “Papa” seems to have been the preferred term of address.) These two pieces of information would be merely interesting as facts of linguistic curiosity were it not for the highly visible ways, at once startling and mystifying to the contemporary visitor, in which Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Ernest Hemingway continue to inhabit twenty-first-century Havana as strangely twinned icons of popular-culture myth. To be sure, despite coming from vastly different political eras and cultural backgrounds, the two share a number of distinctly visible traits. Both were renowned expatriates, heroic citizens of the world: the first an Argentine military and political adventurer enshrined as a revolutionary hero-saint; the second an American literary and cultural adventurer renowned as a creator of larger-than-life artistic legend. Both made their homes in places they sought out as the epicenters of the great cultural and geopolitical conflicts of their eras. Both were exemplars of the twentieth -century warrior intellectual, the man of action united with the man of thought; and both sought to invest their images as cultural cosmopolites with a hard edge of violent machismo. In early adulthood both eschewed traditional education—though Guevara eventually returned home long enough to complete his medical studies—to go off in quests after direct, firsthand knowledge of the world. With a fellow youthful adventurer, Alberto Granado, Guevara, as is now well known, set off to see the real Chapter Eight 100 conditions of human existence across South America in what became a life-changing motorcycle odyssey that committed him to a career of social and economic liberation. Hemingway volunteered for overseas World War I service with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was severely wounded and initiated into the mysteries of love and death. Both became obsessively attracted to involvement in the great military and political struggles of the century. Guevara, having played small roles in a failed revolution in Guatemala against a US-supported military dictatorship, wound up in Mexico, the site of his fated eventual meeting and alliance with Fidel Castro in the wake of the latter’s imprisonment following the 26 July 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks. He then found his larger revolutionary destiny in Cuba, home of the nation and people with whom he would be most permanently associated, in the 1956–59 war of revolutionary liberation. Hemingway, while cementing his career as a major literary and cultural celebrity, likewise pursued an adventurous migratory early existence as a newspaper and magazine correspondent, chronicling twentieth-century conflicts ranging from the Spanish Civil War to World War II in China and Europe. Meanwhile, after frequent periods of extended stay during the 1930s, he also established a more or less permanent home in Cuba from 1940 onward until his death two decades later. Accordingly, during their lifetimes, both in Cuba and in the larger world, the two may be seen to have developed a number of parallels as figures of popular-culture mythology. Both possessed a certain fatalistic glamour in their quest after dangerous geopolitical trials of personal bravery. Following experiences in Guatemala, Mexico, and Cuba, Guevara continued to serve as an apostle of revolution, first in the Congo and then in Bolivia, where he finally met his death. Hemingway followed journalistic assignments in the Spanish Civil War and Sino-Japanese War into World War II missions with the RAF bomber force, the Normandy invasion , and the infantry campaigns of Western Europe including the liberation of Paris and the battles of the Huertgen Forest and the Ardennes. Both developed carefully cultivated legends of military prowess. Moreover , both partook of the extra cachet of the irregular warrior, the figure of special knowledge and expertise standing outside conventional military doctrine and regimentation. Rightly or not, Guevara was always regarded as the irregular-warfare brains of the 1956–59 guerrilla campaigns that [3.143...

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