Tag Archives: cigar

Castro vs. Guevara…

It was hard to decide a nominal primacy in the title; as hard as any attempt to do “justice” in times when simple concepts as “justice” have long lost their original meaning, if at any moment of their history, any… In the end, I left it to my musical ear to decide, and it looks like some “justice” has been done, to the alphabetical order as well.

For those of you with an interest in this foremost classical example of mediasaur-free politics, who have never seen Steven Soderbergh’s “Che”, starring Benicio Del Toro, please do so, if you would want to emotionally grasp my tittle’s depth of what same-ideology adversity means… Because the lives of these two ideology giants were so identical, yet completely different, like the life of a Cuban cigar…

You see, a Cuban cigar (or any other cigar, even if no other tobacco leaf roll seems to be worth truly of the “cigar” title) has two, vitally important ingredients: Cuban tobacco leafs and fire; and while both are necessary for the rich smoke to tickle the smoker’s fancies, it’s only the leaves which would ever come into an intimate contact with the addicted lips, leaving the passionately burning tip at a desirable safe distance.
This has been the case for Castro and Guevara: both burnt passionately, yet only one of them remained to kiss as long as allowed, their beloved island country’s battled shore-lips.
Of course, a comparison is not, and it should never be an end in a political profiler’s tool box, being nevertheless -if properly managed- a versatile ally, in our case a means of understanding a core issue of -probably- one of the world’s most socio-politically controversial countries.

It is very unfortunate for any nation’s historical future, that their most passionate ideologists seem to never learn the use of sanity-dictated limitations to their burning, either because they may think such limitations could quench the driving force of their dedication, or simply because they are incapable of such. It’s always them who will fall victims to the inescapable cleansing/purging mechanisms of any revolutionary process, either by internal means, as it was the case of the French or Russian events, or external, as in Guevara’s case, because one of the seldom to be found qualities of a revolutionary genius -so badly- should be some self-imposed limitations, without which their passion turns into an all-consuming, ultimately destroying blaze.
Revolutions are mighty fires, and fires must be controlled in order to remain useful. Otherwise they will invariably destroy the very achievements their passionate heat have ushered in.
What do I understand by limitations? Well, exactly what “limitation” conceptually covers, a deliberate set of boundaries, implemented in order to make the difference between order and chaos, sanity and anarchy.

Would the Cuban revolution have been the same without any of it’s two giants?

I don’t know, but if you’ve got the privilege of holding with your mortal lips a Cuban cigar, never forget asking for the fire…