However, every time that someone lets me know that Che Guevara was a cruel guerrilla fighter (the summary executions that took place during the first year of the Cuban Revolution are completely unjustifiable), I take it as one historical fact among many others. Not all of them are like Posada Carriles. I’ve never been a communist, nor have I worn a Che-styled beret, nor do I think that dissident Cubans are a bunch of gusanos (worms) just because they voice their disagreement and aren’t able to do so in their own country.
I feel that it is a crime to interpret it out of context, and I never dreamed that its own author might be capable of doing such a thing, as can be inferred from each of the opportunistic articles that followed. I never was particularly crazy about that book, and I even wrote a pretty harsh paper on it, but in my view it was nonetheless still one of the most courageous books of its era, if not the most. When I read the first articles about the author’s recent statements in Brazil, I had a few words with Galeano himself about them. Clearly, too much was being read into all of this. It seemed that we were witnessing, along with the corresponding euphoria of conservatives, the suicide of radical Latin American literary criticism. For some days and weeks, gloomy articles and commentaries were popping up. Similar examples abound in several languages, above all in the Spanish-language press. In a recent Washington Post article entitled “Latin Americans Are Embracing Globalization and Their Former Colonial Masters,” written by a political science professor from the University of Colorado, the author begins with the following sentence: “Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano recently renounced his 1971 classic, Open Veins of Latin America, one of a few books admitted into the Latin American left’s pantheon.” Some days before, the New York Times had fired off an article entitled “Eduardo Galeano Disavows His Book The Open Veins,” etc.
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