Zina Saunders‘ illustration for “Guantanamo at Home” in The Nation magazine in which Jeanne Theoharis, with the proposed closing of Guantanamo, takes a hard look at the harsh treatment of terror suspects in prisons on American soil.
Read the article here.
'By the end of a Monday, I felt it was Friday' ... Benicio Del Toro in Che
by Philip French , The Observer, Sunday 4 January 2009
This month is the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and his replacement by Fidel Castro, who, sadly enough, was also to become a dictator. Shortly after the revolution, however, there emerged a more attractive and charismatic figure, his Argentinian lieutenant Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who became one of the great heroes of the 1960s counterculture and was murdered by the Bolivian army in association with the CIA in 1967. There was much talk at the time of a movie about Che’s life. Tony Richardson was going to make one from a screenplay by Alan Sillitoe and one of the greatest political film-makers, Italian Marxist Francesco Rosi, sent posters all over Europe announcing his search for an unknown Che lookalike.
In the event, Hollywood got in first with Richard Fleischer’s Che! (1969), co-scripted by the formerly black-listed Michael Wilson, co-author of Lawrence of Arabia, with Omar Sharif as a glamorous Che and Jack Palance as a villainous drunken Fidel. Told in flashback from Che’s death, it was a compromised work in almost every way that pleased neither his friends nor his enemies.
Now, partly, one supposes, as a reaction against the policies of the Bush administration, there has been a renewed interest in Che and he’s jumped off the T-shirts and back into the cinema, starting with The Motorcycle Diaries, produced by Robert Redford and directed by Brazilian Walter Salles. In that attractive film, the young Che (handsome Gael García Bernal), newly graduated from medical school in Buenos Aires, makes a lengthy journey around South America with a chum in the early 1950s and is politicised by the experience.
Steven Soderbergh‘s two-part film picks up from there. The first part opens with Che (Benicio Del Toro) meeting Fidel in Mexico City in 1955 (both clean shaven at the time) and joining the small invasion party that established a base in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba. It ends in January 1959 when the 30-year-old Che, cautioning against triumphalism and forbidding his men to indulge in looting, heads towards Havana to begin what he considers the really important part of the revolution, creating a new kind of society.
It’s an intelligent, fast-moving, well-researched film, based in part on Che’s posthumously published Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, offering both a convincing account of the bitter, hard-fought struggle and a portrait of a great and complex revolutionary. He was first valued for his medical skills, but soon became such an essential adviser that Fidel tried to keep him out of harm’s way.
Che stands alongside his fellow communist Leon Trotsky as a model of the intellectual as man of action. Like him, he was a writer, thinker, strategist and tactician. Ruthless men of honour, they made up in courage and willpower what they lacked in physique (Che suffered throughout his life from chronic asthma) and died violently in exile. All this comes out vividly in the course of an exciting, adventurous narrative with Guevara figuring in virtually every scene.
The war is shot in colour, into which Soderbergh, who also photographed the film, cuts black-and-white, newsreel-style footage of Che’s subsequent appearances in New York following the revolution. In these flash-forwards, he defends Cuban policy in private discussion and publicly before the United Nations, challenging a hostile America, represented by Adlai Stevenson, and representatives of right-wing Latin American countries. Del Toro shows Che growing through the challenges and privations of the struggle, and one looks forward to Che – Part 2 which opens towards the end of February.
I don’t know how well Esquire magazine is doing these days. I was a subscriber to the magazine in college and read it religiously long after I stopped subscribing. But those were the days when you could count on a Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, or a Truman Capote to regularly contribute a piece.
It was nearly sacrilegious when, as a newspaper reporter, I tried to submit my profile of Bill Bradley during the 2000 election to the magazine for publication. It was rejected outright and I’ve not had any occasion to pick up the magazine of late. Esquire might still be publishing first rate fiction and non-fiction. I would not know. I had simply stopped reading.
But a friend told me this week to read a piece about prisoners who tunneled out of a prison. And added, almost as an afterthought, that I should also read the first item that they have in a feature called “What it Feels Like . . .”
For such an august magazine, the Esquire magazine website is simply atrocious, unnavigable, and the search engine leaves a lot to be desired. Needless to say, the two pieces could not be found on the site. I tracked the magazine down some other way (I’m not saying).
I have not read “The Tunnel” yet but my friend was right. That first item that my friend mentioned is haunting.
Since Esquire has not made it available online, I could not provide a link. However, here’s a taste (you’ll either have to buy or borrow a copy to read the rest of the piece):
What it Feels Like . . . To Be a Prison Guard at Guantanamo Bay by CHRISTOPHER ARENDT, 24, student:
I like working night shifts, because whenever they were awake, I wanted to apologize to them. When they were sleeping, I didn’t have to worry about that. I could just walk up and down the blocks all night long.
There was usually one detainee who would lead the call to prayer at five in the morning. That person was in the very last cell. The detainees, they sang beautifully. It was so eerie to hear, because it was such a beautiful song, and to hear forty-eight detainees just get up in the morning and, in unison, sing this gorgeous song that I could never understand–because Arabic is way out of my range of possibility–it was really intense.
Camp Delta is on a cliff that overlooks the ocean. I had never been to the ocean before in my whole life. There have been a few times in the military when I’ve been so stricken by the juxtaposition of how awful what is happening inside the moment is, and how aesthetically beautiful it is at the same time. Seeing the first couple of detainees start preparing for prayer, and then at the same time the sun starting to come up over the cliff base–that was probably one of the most confusing moments of my life. . . .
Sen. Barack Obama offers a different vision for U.S.-Cuba relations and a new posture to the Americas.
Renewing U.S. Leadership in the Americas: Remarks of Senator Barack Obama before the Cuban American National Foundation, May 23, 2008 (as prepared for delivery)
It is my privilege to join in this week’s Independence Day celebration, and in honoring those who have stood up with courage and conviction for Cuban liberty. I’m going to take this opportunity to speak about Cuba, and also U.S. policy toward the Americas more broadly.
We meet here united in our unshakeable commitment to freedom. And it is fitting that we reaffirm that commitment here in Miami.
In many ways, Miami stands as a symbol of hope for what’s possible in the Americas. Miami’s promise of liberty and opportunity has drawn generations of immigrants to these shores, sometimes with nothing more than the clothes on their back. It was a similar hope that drew my own father across an ocean, in search of the same promise that our dreams need not be deferred because of who we are, what we look like, or where we come from.
Here, in Miami, that promise can join people together. We take common pride in a vibrant and diverse democracy, and a hard-earned prosperity. We find common pleasure in the crack of the bat, in the rhythms of our music, and the ease of voices shifting from Spanish or Creole or Portuguese to English.
These bonds are built on a foundation of shared history in our hemisphere. Colonized by empires, we share stories of liberation. Confronted by our own imperfections, we are joined in a desire to build a more perfect union. Rich in resources, we have yet to vanquish poverty.
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I guess William Glaberson of the New York Times has this story exclusive, that the Bush administration is about to fire up the Kangaroo court it set in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to finally try someone for the 9/11 attack.
This court is, of course, about the only place you could ever try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed after all the things we did to him. Because of George W. Bush’s immorality, America discarded its ideals; established “black sites” dungeons where we tortured detainees; we farmed out people for other nations to torture for us; we killed innocent people that we picked up; we violated international laws with impunity; and set up an outpost that we intended to be outside the law. And, after years of packing the courts, Bush may well now have a Supreme Court to rubber-stamp this charade in Guantanamo.
Because of Bush, the perpetrators of 9/11, killers of thousands of Americans, men like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, could never be brought to justice in a real court of law.