Published Monday, October 30, 2000, in the
Miami Herald
Castro, Chávez host show on radio, sing ballad together
VALENCIA, Venezuela -- (AP) -- Fidel Castro appeared on President Hugo Chávez's
radio talk show Sunday, praising Chávez's efforts to change Venezuelan
society and joining his host in a sing-along to a popular ballad.
Decidedly off-key, the two leaders sang the chorus of Venezuela at the end
of a four-hour program that was by turns jocular and studious, mournful and
combative. It was a demonstrative show of the close friendship between the
74-year-old Cuban president and the 46-year-old Chávez.
"I have confidence in you,'' Castro told Chávez. "At this
moment, in this country, you have no substitute.''
Castro has been on a visit to Venezuela since Friday. He and Chávez
were to sign an oil assistance pact today before he returns home.
Hello President, Chávez's weekly call-in show, became Hello
Presidents Sunday in a studio broadcast to Cuba and Venezuela from a place dear
to both leaders: the Carabobo Battlefield where South American liberator Simón
Bolívar defeated the Spanish colonial army in 1821.
Fielding calls from Cuba and Venezuela, the two leaders denounced the
Spanish colonialism of the past and a present-day economic colonialism they
attribute to a "unipolar'' economic order dominated by the United States.
They demanded that Latin Americans work together to confront that order.
"The only way we can fight neoliberalism . . . is to unite,'' declared
Chávez, who dominated much of the show.
As an army paratrooper, Chávez led a failed 1992 coup here and was
imprisoned for two years.
After dying for revolution, Cuban lives as dollar magnet
Paul Brinkley-Rogers. pbrinkley-rogers@herald.com
Rebels of the world, borrowing a Cuban revolutionary slogan, say that
Ernesto "Ché'' Guevara lives and indeed he does, although not in the
way he intended.
Thirty-three years after Ché was killed trying to start an uprising
in Bolivia, his face is a buck-making image -- for beer brewers, ski
fabricators, mouse pad manufacturers, record companies, T-shirt peddlers,
women's underwear designers and other capitalists who have turned Fidel Castro's
comrade-in-arms into a salesman to the wide-eyed youth of the world.
Even Cuba, which enshrined the remains of the Argentine-born doctor-warrior
in 1997 with a ceremony worthy of a saint, has made him a dollar magnet.
State-run "artisan markets'' sell Ché puppets, and state-owned
travel agencies offer tours to the sites of Ché's legendary exploits --
not including, of course, the wall at La Cabaña fortress where his firing
squads shot the revolution's enemies.
Some of this commercial exploitation -- for example, Smirnoff's attempt last
year to market a spicy Vodka with an ad campaign using Ché's likeness and
a chili pepper replacing the sickle in the communist party emblem -- has
prompted outrage.
LATEST TWIST
But no one has complained yet about the latest twist, however.
In fact, Canadian John Trigiani's online supermarket of Ché products
has resulted in hundreds of orders from the United States for trinkets, and a
flurry of interest by some of his youthful customers in the short life of a man
who died before they were born.
Ché smiles enigmatically from made-in-Cuba alarm clocks and from
collector plates pictured in Trigiani's catalog. Clad in fatigues and wearing a
beret, Ché strikes a fighting pose in kitschy figurines.
Swatch watches unearthed by Trigiani in a Havana warehouse -- part of a
shipment of 10,000 bought by Cuba's government -- use Ché's face to tell
time.
"My site is not a political site,'' says Trigiani, a Toronto
photographer who travels frequently to Cuba to mine for memorabilia and who said
he became interested in Ché when he began dating a Cuban woman who went
to university with one of Ché's sons.
Trigiani says he is just satisfying collector curiosity, and interest among
young people for whom Ché is an icon of the rebellious '60s. He gets 25
to 30 e-mail requests a day, mostly from the United States. He turns aside
demands for rum and cigars.
Some things are sacred, Trigiani said.
He knows old timers in Havana who have photos and letters signed by Ché
and he has not tried to buy them. A woman offered him four Cuban 3 peso bank
notes she claimed were personally signed by Ché for $2,750 each, but he
declined.
ROLE DEPLORED
For left-leaning idealists, the use of Che's visage in commercial products
can be jarring. They deplore guest book comments by T-shirt buyers on sites like
che-lives.com such as "Who is and what happened to the revolutionary?''
West Palm Beach-born Aaron Shuman, 28, a social critic for counter-culture
publications, said he went to see a Rage Against the Machine concert last year
and was amazed at how many people wore Ché T-shirts. The group used Ché's
image for its "Bombtrack'' single.
This month Shuman visited an executive of the chic Urban Outfitters chain
and found the man using a mouse pad with Ché's face on it.
The negative effects of commercial exploitation are, Shuman said, outweighed
by the fact that some people may go beyond wearing a T-shirt or buying souvenirs
and actually read one of Ché's books on making revolution.
"I think that is happening,'' he said.
For many members of South Florida's Cuban-American population, the subject
of Ché is not a welcome one.
"I don't think anyone wearing a Ché Guevara T-shirt would be
welcome in Dade County,'' community activist Armando Gutiérrez said. "Not
even at the flea market have I seen anything with Che's face on it.''
Rocio Izaguirre, who sells T-shirts at her Little Havana store, said, "I
can't understand why young people would want to wear that man's face. What do
they know about history?
"It is like kids wearing a peace symbol because they think it is cute
-- so sad, so ignorant.''
The mere suggestion of Ché can also offend.
In 1998, many Cuban Americans objected when Taco Bell sold toy Chihuahuas
sporting Ché's trademark beret with the red star which, when squeezed,
said "Viva Gorditas'' -- a popular meal.
Other Hispanics voiced displeasure with the whole "Yo quiero Taco
Bell'' campaign, claiming it was offensive and that it stereotyped Latinos.
Alberto Korda, the 72-year-old Cuban photographer whose famous photo of a
fierce-eyed, long-haired Ché has been appropriated without his permission
for many commercial products, has led the fight to halt the practice.
He photographed Ché during a funeral for the 136 people killed when a
munitions ship exploded in Havana harbor in 1960 -- an incident Cuba still
blames on the United States.
SUED AND WON
Korda, who wears a Ché pendant around his neck, had remained silent
through the years. But he sued Smirnoff in a British court over its ad campaign.
Last month he won, getting a cash settlement and copyright protection for his
much-used image.
He told the court that using his photo, and his hero, to sell vodka was
disrespectful because Ché did not drink and, he said, the revolutionary
was "the greatest person in history, after Jesus Christ.''
Which is why, perhaps, a group of British churches last year at Easter dared
to substitute Ché's face for that of Jesus Christ in advertising designed
to reclaim the souls of disaffected rockers.
The revolutionary was pictured wearing a crown of thorns, with a slogan
reading, "Meek and Mild. As if. Discover the Real Jesus. Church!'' The Rev.
Tom Ambrose of Britain's Church Advertising Network explained at the time that "Jesus
was a revolutionary figure and more revolutionary than anyone in the 21st
Century.''
There was intense criticism. Conservative Christians claimed it was a
sacrilege. But it was a ploy, the churches said, that resulted in thousands of
young people finding religion again.
An old wound, a healing mission
Nearly four decades ago, an exile-piloted B-26 bomber mysteriously vanished
during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Miles from its bellicose mission, it crashed on
a mountain in northern Nicaragua, where impoverished residents would later
discover the debris.
That crash killed two Miami-based, CIA-trained pilots, Crispín García
and Juan de Mata González, members of a 54-pilot force that lent air
support to exile brigadiers during the April 1961 invasion. They were among 18
pilots killed during the ill-fated, three-day fight.
But while many of their surviving exiled compatriots cling to the painful
memory of that invasion, their fatal war path has led to an entirely different
kind of mission, one of peace, one that continues to bless that northern
mountain.
Now, as Miami exiles await the arrival of the two pilots' remains, to be
buried here on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, there is a larger story to tell than that
of a failed invasion.
PILOT'S DAUGHTER
We have Janet Ray Weininger, daughter of an American pilot shot down during
the Bay of Pigs invasion, to thank for this.
Years after she led a relentless campaign to recover her father's body,
which had been put on display in Cuba by Fidel Castro, Weininger turned her
efforts to bringing home the two pilots buried in Nicaragua's Jinotega province.
It was the Alabama-raised Weininger who lobbied the CIA, which had ditched
the case, leaving the dead on the mountain. Along with the son of one of the
dead pilots, Weininger trekked into the woods of Jinotega and located the crash
site near the town of San José de Bocay.
Finally, two years ago, the CIA gave in to her pressure, dispatching a
search mission to the mountain, then flying the remains to a U.S. Army lab in
Hawaii for positive identification.
MONTH AT SITE
In the meantime, a miracle occurred on the mountain. Weininger fell in love
with the people. She spent a month at the site, working with the U.S. Army team,
Nicaraguan army officials and former contra rebels.
She realized she had landed in a desperate place, a remote, poverty-choked
corner of Central America. And she knew she had not landed there by accident.
On that mountain, she began to make sense of her decades of pain. She
decided it would be a wasted opportunity to hold on to the scars of her
childhood.
She founded an organization called Wings of Valor and set up a website --
www.wingsofvalor.org -- to serve the
population upon which she had stumbled. Weininger travels there by rural bus or
pickup truck, toting supplies, medicine, wheelchairs, even Beanie Babies, to the
families.
POSITIVE TURN
"I've never forgotten the Cuban cause. None of us who endured that
period escaped the loss of Cuba's freedom without scars. But what you do with
your scars depends on you. I chose to turn mine into something positive,'' said
Weininger, who has organized teams of Nicaragua-bound volunteers to provide
everything from hurricane relief to community-building projects such as
scholastic, sports and music programs.
But as she plans the Veterans Day memorial, Weininger is resisting pressure
from some in the exile community to politicize the service at St. Michael the
Archangel Catholic Church and the burials at Dade South Memorial Park. She
envisions a dignified military service untarnished by political speeches.
Burying the dead means honoring memories and missions, she believes. But it
doesn't mean clinging to the past or losing the spirit of a cause, she insists.
"It is time to allow the phoenix to rise out of the ashes,'' she says. "We
cannot continue to live in the ashes.''
On a distant mountain, a population is comforted by her words and her deeds.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald | 