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It’s easy in Cuba to find critics of the ageing but authoritarian Castro brothers, but Che Guevara is still revered, writes CONOR POPE
THE HOWLS of outrage that have greeted tentative proposals to erect a memorial to Che Guevara in Galway have been both predictable and misplaced. It is entirely fitting that a sculpture honouring the most instantly recognisable, socially aware revolutionary of the 20th century be given a little space in the city.
The family of Che’s grandmother, Ana Lynch y Ortiz, fled Galway in search of a better life in South America in the mid-18th century. By the time their most famous son was born in 1928, the Lynches of Argentina had become comfortably middle class.
It is not simply because of loose family ties to the west of Ireland that a memorial to “El Che” would sit comfortably there.
Galway has long welcomed radicals. Noel Browne settled there after he was ostracised by the establishment for swimming against the tide, and through four decades the city repeatedly chose Michael D Higgins as its representative and watched with some satisfaction as he spent his pre-Áras career tormenting the right wing, challenging orthodoxies and supporting oppressed peoples at home and abroad.
There were furious protests against the visit to the city of US president Ronald Regan in the mid-1980s because of the US role in toppling democratically elected left-wing governments and propping up right-wing dictatorships across Central America. Galway has always been a haven for idealists, poets and dreamers.
Che, despite his flaws, was all three.
He was radicalised in his 20s by exposure to widespread poverty and corruption on a post-university road trip across Central America and quickly recognised that such inequities were a consequence of capitalism at its most crass and cruel.
He joined Guatemala’s social reform movement, but it was crushed in its infancy by the CIA, an organisation that developed a pathological fear and loathing of him. One former agent, Philip Agee, famously said there was “no person more feared by the Company [CIA] than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America”.
Nearly 45 years after his death at the hands of the Company, he is still hated by some, and there have been dire warnings that the Guevara monument, if erected, would do untold damage to Galway’s reputation in the US. It won’t. Most Americans have far more important things on their minds and couldn’t care less if the city honours, in a low-key way, a long-dead revolutionary.
That does not stop the hysteria, however. It was turned up a notch this week on RTÉ’s Liveline programme. In the red corner was artist Jim Fitzpatrick, who was calm and lucid, while in the blue corner stood Declan Ganley, who labelled the revolutionary a “murdering psychopath”. Not to be outdone, Yale history professor and Cuban emigrant Carlos Eire compared him to Adolf Hitler.
A caller by the name of Eleanor, meanwhile, told Joe Duffy she had visited Cuba on six occasions and she suggested it was a utopian paradise.
Her comments were risible and utterly wrong. Cuba is by no means a socialist paradise – far from it. Political oppression and censorship are rife, travel is restricted, the regime spies on its citizens with an amateurish zeal that would be comical were it not so criminally repressive. State-sanctioned homophobia is rampant and a burgeoning sex trade sees wealthy tourists prey on those impoverished by a fatally wounded system.
But Ganley and Eire were wrong, too. For an Ivy League history professor to compare Guevara to Hitler is, frankly, ridiculous. Ridiculous but unsurprising. The far right in the US, particularly Cuban-Americans living in Florida, have long viewed Guevara as a monster and they rarely let facts get in the way of a good rant.
Nelson Mandela does not see him that way. He has described him as “an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom” and few people living in Cuba today will hear a word against him. It is easy to find critics of the ageing but still authoritarian Castro brothers – as long as the spies are out of earshot – but Guevara remains revered.
And so he should be. Cuba in the 1950s was bloated, corrupt and becoming a playground for wealthy US gangsters. There were huge disparities between rich and poor, and Guevara sought to end such inequities.
He tried and, while he did not succeed, and Castro’s Cuba never worked as it might have, things did improve significantly for its most oppressed people. It is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century that the country was never allowed to fulfil its great potential because of internal paranoia brought on, at least in part, by an unjust and malicious US blockade that has been widely condemned by governments of all hues across the world.
The longer the Castros have clung to power and the longer the US embargo has been in place, the more its people have suffered and the more desperate many have been to flee.
Cuba is a long way from where it should be, but that is not Che Guevara’s fault. He dreamed an entirely different dream for countries in the western hemisphere – and he should be remembered in Galway as its most famous and most influential son.
Brigid Dempsey, married name Clarke was born beside the River Shannon
in Ireland, in a village called Meelick (Milic) where she was also reared. A lot of her family on her mother's Kelly side, originated in Belfast and south Armagh. She was laid to rest in
Meelick in Galway, beside the River Shannon last week in the
graveyard of the old Fransiscan monastery, which was once part of the
Old Celtic Church before the Roman Catholic and British landgrabbers
came.
They say she was a beautiful woman, she certainly was strong minded
and an independent woman, in a time when women were under the jackboot of a male dominated Church and a civil service, that was compliant with
its creators, the chauvinist British Empire, itself a relic of its predecessor the Roman Empire. Empires are organized with great cruelty and occupations consist not just of crucifxions of the Judea-Christian kind but the slow heartless grind of occupied peasantry and slavery. Invasions and occupations are a crime against humanity, justified with the hypocritcal veneers of so called plunderous civilizations. Brigid's sensitive nature experienced that cruelty and it created her rebellious spirit.
The war that has gone on in Ireland for 800 years was played out in
her married life. Her husband was a blue shirt who spent many years in
England with poverty enforced emigration since he was a teenager. She
was sent to a mental hospital in Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, called St.
Brigids after many brutal fights with her husband. St. Brigids is
also a cold heartless place of great cruelty, which like Ireland's
older prisons are Victorian relics of British occupation. She
recieved consistent electric shock treatment and for a long time,
non-appropriate medication which aggravated her sensitive nervous
condition. Aside from her husband Michael a hardworking man, all of
the decision makers, the parish priest, police sergeant and doctor,
were all males, who were reared in general isolation from women and simply did not understand.
I watched this eternal war as the eldest of 6 children played out in
our home growing up. As a child I threw cups of water on
my mother's unconscious face, whom I believed dead, on my father's
orders. As the eldest boy I was particularly close to
my mother and was distraught. I struggled to emotionally distance
myself from my mother. I grew up hating my father and all forms of
authoritarian dictatorship. Like most oppressed cultures and a lot of
my fellow countrymen and women, I turned to drink as a relief from the
insanity and contradiction of this reality.
Its twenty two years since I had my last drink, so I should be sober
but it has taken many years, to come to terms with the
demons of my past. I received a lot of help from people all over the
world, with similar experiences and a Big Spirit that is loving,
caring and nurturing and of no particular religious persuasion. I
learned in the process, that life is difficult for most people, as it
particularly was for Brigid. I had to change but I also realize this
society has to change. It has taken and will take a lot of mother's
children to change it.
Brigid or her husband Michael Clarke never got the opportunities in
life I got to liberate themselves. Brigid or Biddy is now at rest
beside her beloved River Shannon in the old monastery grounds which
she loved as she played and worked growing up as a young woman.
Her religion gave her some peace of mind in her personal battles with
her reality. Biddy was judged as mad by some people but she was loved
by many as evidenced by her typical Irish funeral.
Biddy was my Mother and my own processor is a bit scattered as result
of her passing. Some say its always scattered.
Please excuse me while I take a break from this blog.
"Tony MacMahon, knowing that Cooley was dying from cancer, arranged this famous recording session in Lahiffe's Bar in Peterswell, County Galway on November 29, 1973. Accompanying Cooley was his brother Jack on bodhran and banjo player Des Mulkere from Crusheen in Co Clare. Joe Cooley died a month later, in St Luke's Hospital, Dublin, on December 20, 1973. This clip is precious to me. Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar a anam."
Written by the bannerman for youtube
"There must be more of these around somewhere. The man was a master at emphasizing certain notes which gave him his excellent tempo. He played at a lively tempo, yet not so fast as to destroy the melody."
"Perfect celebratory affirmation of LIFE!"
"What's most interesting to me about this video is the look on the faces of those in the audience, the pure enjoyment they are getting from the music and the performers. It's such a contrast to now. Thanks for posting this insight into a time, a people and their music."
"The obvious love of this music is so strong, that I doubt Mr Cooley would let a little thing like his passing stop him from playing, he rests in peace, but I suspect, not in silence."
Written for bannerman and youtube.
Wherever Irish Music is played Joe Cooley is never far away. He composed great Irish music that is played at most seisuins and his name an essential part of that tradition, still spoken with love among the ordinary people's heritage. - Brian Clarke
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