Remebering Che in Four Periods

BY HECTOR ARTURO
FIRST PERIOD 

Che was born in the intense cold of Rosario, Argentina and had his first asthma attack as a small child. There he took his first steps, rode a velocipede, played with his dog, and learned the vowels, consonants and numbers with Don Ernesto and Doña Celia and some rural teacher. His asthma was always present, choking the boy who refused to yield to the lack to breath, wanting to do everything other people do, without knowing he would become better. 

The family moved to Buenos Aires hoping his health would improve, and he would grow up playing soccer, climbing mountains, and constantly studying literature and science. 

The small bicycle was replaced with a motorcycle as a defiant adolescent. With it he toured the Americas and saw with his own eyes how people lived from the Rio Grande to the Patagonia.  

He studied medicine and graduated as a doctor not to open a private clinic but to put himself at the service of lepers, who none of his colleagues dared serve. 

He rowed up and down on board a rustic boat, taking pictures of landscapes and people, writing letters and some poems. How’s the Asthma? OK, thanks! 

 

SECOND PERIOD 

In Guatemala, a people’s government was in danger, and there he was with a bufo, which is the way Argentineans call a revolver, to defend the few advances the United States didn’t allow President Jacobo Arbenz to continue. Mexico opens its doors to the tireless traveller and, at Maria Antonia’s house, in barely one night’s conversation with another young dreamer like him named Fidel Castro, he became the first on the list of the expeditionary force of a pleasure yacht, that was converted into a war ship amid the stormy seas to free Cuba. 

 

A shipwreck rather than a landing brought him to Cuba. A surprise by the enemy and a baptism of gunfire. A dilemma: to carry the backpack of medicines or the rifle. He chooses the latter to save a people from the social evils consuming them, which were worse than diseases and bullet wounds. Once again home became the mountains, where he climb between battles, later to descend and then spearhead the invasion from East to West, with which he cut Cuba into two parts to unite it even more, after stopping the advance of the enemy in Santa Clara and speed up the dawn of January 1, 1959. 

 

THIRD PERIOD 

In the period he was a commander and an economist; a minister and a cane cutter. A Cuban citizen, a politician and a builder. He was also a scholar and a critic and the chief promoter of voluntary work. He was builder of inventiveness, an accelerator of ideas, a revolutionary, a communist and an internationalist.  

 

"I leave here the purest of my hopes as a builder and the dearest of those I hold dear. And I leave a people who received me as a son. That wounds a part of my spirit…. Nothing legal binds me to Cuba. The only ties are of another nature — those that cannot be broken as can appointments to posts… Other nations of the world summon my modest efforts of assistance…" And his path led to other lands of Africa and Latin America, with the leather shield on his shoulder to create two, three, many Vietnams with the rattling of machine guns and new cries of war and victory. 

 

FOURTH PERIOD 

It’s October 9, 1967. He had been taken prisoner and locked up in the small and unknown school of La Higuera the day before. There he gave his best class on history. The confessed terrorists that assassinated him following direct orders from Washington never imagined that a man of only 39 years of age could multiply so many times to be born every second in the farthest corners of the world.. 

 

And there he is, in marble, stone, bronze and graffiti to call upon workers to strike and demonstrate; on posters and photographs filling avenues, streets, parks, plazas, schools and factories around the planet; in poems and songs sung by millions of people in all languages. 

We always talk of Che in the present and future, and not in the past, because he continues to draw receptive ears to this united march, in which you can hear nothing but his phrase resounding with the strength of a universal and unanimous echo: ¡Hasta la victoria siempre...! (Forever onward to victory)

(Source : periodico26.com )