Carta Maior: Honoring the Memory of the Immortal Che!

Eduardo Galeano says when he met Che Guevara, he was a man who said exactly what he thought, and lived exactly what he said. There aren't many men carved in this wood, and there isn't much of that wood in the world! Then, there are the dead who never die, like Che. On the day they executed Che Guevara in La Hiuera, a hamlet lost in the wilds of Bolivia, Julio Cortazar, who was then working as a translator for UNESCO, was in Algiers. It took more than a day to travel around the world, and still more to get to Algiers from La Higuera. Twenty days later, back in Paris, where he lived, Cortazar wrote a letter to Cuban poet Roberto Fernandez Retamar, telling what he felt: "I let the days go by in a nightmare, buying one newspaper after another, without wanting them to convince me, looking at these pictures that we all look at, reading the same words and entering, one hour after another, in the hardest conformity. It is the truth that I am writing today, and before that, it seems to me the most banal of the arts, a kind of refuge, almost of pretense, replacing the irreplaceable. Che died, and I have nothing more than silence."