ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 2004
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

The icon of revolution takes centre stage in Ana Menéndez`s novel of Cuba past and present,Loving Che.

Autor:Ana Menéndez.
Izdavač:Headline Book Publishing,2004.
Format:20cm x 14cm.
Broj Strana:320 strana,tvrd povez,zaštitni omot.

Jean-Paul Satre called him `the most complete human being of our age`. His face, in garish Warhol colours, has been Blutacked above the beds of countless students in their first flush of political awakening. His image, as the nameless narrator of Ana Menéndez`s first novel notes, is used to hawk products as diverse as cereals and vodka, yet remains synonymous with the purest socialist zeal. In the famous Alberto Korda portrait - beret askew, yearning gaze fixed on an unseen horizon - Ernesto `Che` Guevara continues to be the embodiment of idealistic longing, nearly 40 years after his execution; how much more so must the man himself have been for the hopeful men and women of a newborn Cuba in the last years of the Fifties?
This national love affair with the Argentinian revolutionary is the starting point for Meneédez`s story, but, like the story of Cuba itself, it is ultimately a history of disillusion, the pain of exile, and the continuing search for a credible sense of identity and a place in history.

Her narrator, a woman whom we come to understand was born in Havana on the cusp of the Sixties, has been raised in Miami by her grandfather, who has told her almost nothing of her parents. After several fruitless trips to Cuba in search of some family background, she receives an anonymous package from Spain, containing a narrative and a collection of photographs.

This narrative, the novel-within-a-novel, is the account of an old woman, Teresa de la Landre, written as a letter to her lost daughter; the account of a passionate and earthy affair with Che that begins in the immediate aftermath of Batista`s overthrow in 1959 and is snatched at greedily through the turbulent months that follow.
Teresa`s account aspires to, and very often achieves, that peculiarly Spanish blend of poetic luxury and economy of expression perfected by Lorca; she is an artist, and feels and thinks in vivid colours. She marries her husband, an academic concerned with theories of language, because she falls in love with his voice: `A blue voice, I thought, with flecks of gold. This was the way I always knew love would come, like a burst of colour in the throat.` Of her lover, she writes: `Loving Che was like palest sea foam, like wind through the stars. Saviour, murderer, brutal love of my own creation.`

Teresa`s version of history is allusive, rarely furnished with exact dates; despite her involvement with Che, her recollections of the end of Batista`s regime and the unrest that followed are captured not in the grand deeds of comandantes and soldiers, but in bright shards of physical detail; the looting of a fashionable department store, or the broken windows of a jeweller`s: `I stood for a long time in front of the shattered glass, staring at a necklace adorned with a row of red rubies, like little drops of blood.`
The implications of Teresa`s sensual story are clear; she is claiming the narrator as her lost daughter and allowing her to believe that Che was her father. The second half of the novel is the narrator`s account of returning to present-day Havana, a city of extreme poverty and corruption, caught between two worlds, where both the socialist dream and the American dream have been doomed to failure. There is enough truth and fantasy in Teresa`s account to leave its veracity ambiguous, but the narrator`s quest for her past in an uneasy city where too many people`s histories have been erased and forgotten is double-edged; does she really want to learn the truth or would she rather hold to the romantic dream contained in a photograph?

The reader may miss the elliptical beauty of Teresa`s account when the narrative shifts to the present. Menéndez recreates the frustration of empty days wandering in a strange city but her prose here is flatter and closer to reportage, furnished with vignettes of Cuban life clearly drawn from experience: the small boy who befriends the narrator in a market, persuades her to buy bags of food and takes her home to his mother, who invites her to lunch (consisting of the food she has just bought), or the hospitality of strangers in homes of decaying elegance. But she remains nameless and insubstantial, a disembodied voice in the shadow of Teresa`s vivacity and colour.
Loving Che is a song in a minor key, coloured with loss and regret, both collective and personal. But the most haunting moment is an old comrade`s recollection of the moment the revolution failed: `All up and down that road, Jacinto said, the people shouted for Fidel. Fidel, you are our saviour. Fidel, this is your house. Thank you, Fidel. Fidel, our redeemer. By the time we reached Bayamo, I noted, for the first time, a change in Fidel. I am convinced that it was on that day he began to believe these things about himself.` Even icons are human, the novel reminds us, and there is a danger in turning men into heroes.