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  • Globalizing Che
  • David William Foster (bio)
Che Guevara: A Manga Biography
Chie Shimano (artist)
Kiyoshi Konno (author)
Penguin Books
http://www.penguin.com/
192 Pages; Print, $16.00

Chie Shimano and Kiyoshi Konno’s Che Guevara: A Manga Biography was written originally in Japanese and first published in the US in 2008 by Emotional Content. For the 2010 Penguin edition, it was translated into English. While Shimamo is well known for her manga illustration work, this is Konno’s first venture as the writer of manga.

Shimano and Konno’s volume may be considered an example of the globalized interest in Che Guevara. Five chronological chapters tell the story of Ernesto Guevara, popularly known as Che Guevara or just El Che, from the time of his solid middle class birth in Argentina to his execution as a captured guerrilla fighter in the Bolivian mountains in 1967. The trajectory adheres closely to known facts about Guevara’s career as a political activist, armed rebel, and revolutionary plenipotentiary of the 1959 Fidel Castro coup that overthrew, with considerable success and enormous international attention, the US-backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba.

Guevara was both an intellectual and a spiritual force of the revolution, and his middle class Argentine formation contributed well to his international stature as second-in-command, the fabled and favored Comandante, who was very much paired with Castro until Guevara’s allegedly ill-considered decision to strike out on his own—first in the attempt to forge revolution in the Congo in 1965 and then to promote peasant uprisings in 1966-67 in Bolivia. The circumstances surrounding the massacre of Guevara and his men in the Bolivian highlands (the US-backed military regime was abetted by CIA operatives), while they underscored fissures in the Argentine’s revolutionary ideology and the failure to take into account local sociohistorical circumstances, contributed immeasurably to the solidification of his mythic stature.


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The repatriation of Guevara’s body to his adoptive Cuba in 1997 was a major political event that served to provide new political legitimacy for, if not the abiding Castro regime, at the very least for the transcendent value of the principles Guevara embodied. The very existence of a manga on Guevara, rather than, say, a corresponding effort devoted to Castro, speaks eloquently to the way in which—at least in the ahistorical realm of patriotic heroes—it is Guevara’s image that will prevail materially (certainly this is so with the millions of circulated copies of Alfredo Korda’s famous photograph of Guevara) and heroically. It was Che who was murdered by the CIA in revolutionary action and not Castro. While Castro had the dignity of leading his nation with a steady hand for over fifty years as an elder statesman, it was not the stuff of popular manga writing.

Shimano and Konno adhere very much and quite reverentially to the received mythology surrounding Guevara’s origins, commitments, articulated values, and overall exemplary revolutionary conduct. This means there is little room for any cracks in the façade of the prevailing complex of mythic dimensions, although some are insinuated: his machista stance toward women and his lack of quality time for his children, as well as the unavoidable implication of miscalculations in the Congo and Bolivia. A recurring motif is El Che’s stubbornness, which keeps him true to his ideals but which interferes—we are given to understand—in some interpersonal relations. His utter lack of preparedness to lead a program of industrialization and to direct the Cuban National is probably the most direct indication of serious personal shortcomings.

Because the purpose of the manga is to promote the validity of the myth of Guevara, no reference is made to the shame of the UMAP camps, which essentially functioned as forced agricultural labor venues for those accused of sociosexual indecency (i.e., homosexuality, however it was specifically understood to whomever it was specifically applied). One understands that a manga has a little room for sociohistorical detail, particularly one that has become such a major political flaw of the revolution, albeit one that has been overcome by subsequent revisionist policies. However...

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