Saturday, October 20, 2007

Che Guevara

When I was a teenager I used to have a poster of Che Guevara on my wall. Even then, almost 30 years ago, I thought that Fidel Castro was a bloody dictator who threw dissidents and gays in prison and had orchestrated an ugly cult of personality, but that Che, who had died young, had been an idealist who would never have approved of the dictatorial turn the Cuban revolution took in the 1970s if not before. Last year, I enjoyed and was moved by the movie The Motorcycle Diaries.

Jacobo Machover, author of the recently published "La face cachée du Che," has convinced me that I should have known then that this was too good to be true. (I've read a lot about the Chinese revolution, starting with Simon Leys' Chinese Shadows, which I read in 1981, a year before I started studying Chinese. Reading Chinese history is, or ought to be, a good inoculation against political propaganda of any sort.). Machover argues persuasively that Che Guevara not only ordered the execution of hundreds of prisoners but personally murdered several with his own hands (or gun). Not surprisingly, the rightwing press, which has never been keen to write about the Pinochets and Videlas of this world, has lapped up this book.

From a Sunday Times review: <http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22428134-36235,00.html>

A prolific diarist, Guevara wrote vividly of his role as an executioner.

In one passage, he described the execution of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. "I fired a .32-calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain, which came out through his left temple," was Guevara's clinical description of the killing. "He moaned for a few moments, then died."

"I carried out a very summary inquiry and then the peasant Aristidio was executed," he wrote about another killing. "It is not possible to tolerate even the suspicion of treason."

Guevara found particularly "interesting" the case of one of his victims, a man who, just before being executed, penned a letter to his mother in which he acknowledged "the justice of the punishment that was being dealt out to him" and asked her "to be faithful to the revolution".

A couple of weeks ago, L'Express published a shocking article (shocking to me, still shocking, even after having read quite a bit about this recently):

http://www.lexpress.fr/info/monde/dossier/cuba/dossier.asp?ida=460199

An excerpt:

Luciano Medina, d'abord. A 81 ans, robuste, volubile et enjoué, il reste ce guajiro (paysan) qu'il fut au temps de la révolution quand il était le facteur personnel de Fidel Castro. Dans la sierra Maestra, en 1957 et 1958, c'est lui qui acheminait les messages du comandante en jefe à travers les lignes ennemies aux autres comandantes: Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos ou encore Ernesto «Che» Guevara. «C'est simple, je les ai tous connus», lance l'ex-coursier, dont la voix rocailleuse retentit dans le deux-pièces exigu de Miami (Floride) qu'il occupe depuis les années 1970. «Guevara? Il traitait mal les gens. Très mal», insiste Medina. Les deux hommes se sont fréquentés, deux mois durant, en avril-mai 1958, dans le campement de La Otilia, près de Las Minas de Bueycito. «Un jour que je lisais Sélection du Reader's Digest, peinard dans mon hamac, le Che, furieux, m'arrache la revue des mains et s'écrie: "Pas de journaux impérialistes ici! " Mais surtout, il tuait comme on avale un verre d'eau. Avec lui, c'était vite vu, vite réglé. Un matin, vers 9 heures, nous déboulons au Rancho Claro, une petite exploitation de café appartenant à un certain Juan Perez. Aussitôt, le Che accuse le fermier d'être un mouchard à la solde de la dictature de Batista. En réalité, le seul tort de ce pauvre homme était de dire haut et fort qu'il n'adhérait pas à la révolution.» Une heure plus tard, le malheureux caféiculteur est passé par les armes devant sa femme et ses trois enfants de 1, 3 et 4 ans. «Les voisins étaient traumatisés, indignés. Et nous, la troupe, nous étions écoeurés. Avec trois autres compañeros, nous avons ensuite quitté le Che pour rejoindre un autre campement.» A l'image de Juan Perez, 15 «traîtres», «mouchards», ou supposés tels, devaient pareillement être liquidés sur ordre de Guevara, entre 1957 et 1958. Et ce n'était qu'un début.

And another article in French:

http://www.stephane.info/show.php?code=che_guevara&lg=fr

Che Guevara staged public executions and carried out mock executions on prisoners. Having known Chileans who were tortured with mock executions (and many other ways), I'm ashamed I ever had a poster of Che Guevara on my wall.

Yesterday I heard an interview (in French) on Espace 2 with Jacobo Machover. He's what in Cuba they call a "gusano" but he's persuaded me that he is not making this stuff up and he's opened my eyes a bit wider (just as Simon Leys opened my eyes when I first started reading about China). Click on the link next to "JEUDI 18 OCTOBRE 2007" and above "L'image d'un malentendu" to hear the interview with him: <http://www.rsr.ch/espace-2/les-temps-qui-courent#jeudi>.

World Digital Library

Source: Washington Post (10/18/07):
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702260.html>

Checking Out Tomorrow's Library

In Paris, an International Working Group Shows Off the Prototype For a
Multilingual 'Intellectual Cathedral' of Digitized Knowledge
By John Ward Anderson

PARIS, Oct. 17 -- As ideas go, they don't come much bigger: Digitize the
accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the
Internet in seven languages.

The first phase of that simple yet outlandishly ambitious dream is about a
year away from being realized, according to a group of international
librarians, computer technicians and U.N. officials who unveiled a prototype
for the project, called the World Digital Library, in Paris on Wednesday.

Its creators see it as the ultimate multilingual, multicultural tool for
researching and retrieving information about knowledge and creativity from
any era or place. The WDL Web site (http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org) will
provide access to original documents, films, maps, photographs, manuscripts,
musical scores and recordings, architectural drawings and other primary
resources through a variety of search methods.

"The capacity to search in the various ways that will be possible in the
World Digital Library will promote all kinds of cross-cultural perspectives
and understanding," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who
proposed the project two years ago. The ability to cross-reference
information pulled from "the deep memories" of cultures is "an exciting
frontier possibility for the world," he said in an interview.

"In essence, what they are doing is building an intellectual cathedral, and
it may never get finished," said Paul Saffo, a long-time Silicon Valley
technology forecaster. "But this is a good effort even if it fails, because
it is going to inspire a lot of other efforts, and if it succeeds it will be
a wonderful resource."

"The challenges here aren't technological," Saffo said. Financial hurdles
might be considerable, and the project could be criticized as too grandiose,
or its model might be considered too closed. But all those problems will
probably be resolved, he said. "For me, the issue is the will to make it
happen. The people involved in this -- will they really see this through?"

With entrenched interests starting to gain control of the Internet, he
added, "it seems like the right thing at the right time, and the most
important thing is that we try to do it."

The prototype introduced Wednesday allowed searches by time, geographical
location, topic and format, with the ability to narrow results by limiting
them to books, photographs, movies or recordings. For written materials, the
same content was simultaneously available in seven languages, and expert
analysis by site "curators" was either translated or available in subtitles.

"If you really, truly want to understand and respect other cultures, you
have to be able to access their materials in their own languages," said
Ismail Serageldin, head of Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina, one of the
partners in the project. A key goal of the WDL is to make the site
user-friendly and widely available, he said, to help break down the digital
divide between rich and poor countries.

The different search techniques permit a user to retrieve information for
certain years and countries, so that in addition to being able to browse the
collected knowledge of the world in the 1400s, for instance, a user could
also limit a search to a topic such as art in Egypt and China in the 3rd
century B.C.

Similarly, a user could specify a medium -- for example, only photographs
from New York and Paris in the 1920s.

"The memory of different cultures is preserved in different ways,"
Billington explained. "This is an attempt to take the defining primary
documents of a culture" and make them interactive with other cultures, he
said.

The site "has an enormous educational potential," Billington said, noting
that its content is being designed particularly with children in mind. "It
has the capacity both to inspire respect for other cultures and their
histories and stories, but at the same time to establish critical thinking."

The WDL is being developed by the Library of Congress in partnership with
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), which officials said would broaden the program's reach and appeal.

The general model for the WDL is the Library of Congress's National Digital
Library Program, which was launched in the mid-1990s. That program's
flagship is the American Memory Web site ( http://www.memory.loc.gov), which
offers 11 million digital files culled from U.S. historical records -- from
the Declaration of Independence and Civil War photographs to early Thomas
Edison movies and recordings of interviews with former slaves.

Billington said the United States was offering its experiences in creating
American Memory as a guide to help the 190 other member states of UNESCO
explore and digitally archive their own national and cultural memories for
the WDL. The site will be accessible in the six official languages of the
United Nations (English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic) plus
Portuguese.

The WDL will begin offering content on its site in late 2008 or early 2009,
Billington said, with the ability to "rapidly ramp up" as countries digitize
their archives and make them available. The site will have a few hundred
thousand items to begin with, officials said.

The Library of Congress holdings, which include millions of items from
around the world, will form the backbone of the initial WDL collection, with
other digital content provided by six other libraries, including the
national libraries of Egypt, Brazil and Russia.

The start-up cost of American Memory was $60 million, about $45 million of
which came from private sponsors. WDL officials could not estimate how much
it would cost to fully fund the creation of their site, but they said they
hoped much of the money would come from private sources. Google gave $3
million to launch the project and develop the prototype displayed Wednesday.

The United States has often been criticized, particularly here in France and
in the developing world, for its dominance of the Internet and for the
global spread of its culture. But WDL officials called the project an
example of how the United States could use its vast resources and know-how
to bridge those differences.

"This is the best counter to that view of the U.S. . . . muscling its way in
and forcing other countries to do what it wants," said Serageldin, the
Egyptian library head. "The Library of Congress is the biggest library in
the world by far, and it has stretched out its hand to invite partners from
all over the world to participate. This is a wonderful way to show how true
U.S. leadership is being exercised by a great cultural institution and
bringing about a wonderful reaction from everybody."

Friday, October 12, 2007

Reaper

I've just heard on American National Public Radio that most of the fixed-wing US Air Force missions currently flown over Iraq are unmanned and controlled by pilots at an air base in Las Vegas. In a few weeks, the Air Force will deploy its first generation of unmanned bombers. The plane is appositely called "Reaper" and its payload of bombs will be dropped over Iraq and other countries by pilots sitting at desks in Nevada.

Brave new world.