On winning

The Cuba trip got me all excited about the Cuban revolution and I started reading as well as ordering "Che", a movie starring Bencio del Toro.  It impresses me that Fidel and Che, with so little in terms of money or equipment, were able to take over the country which they did by helping the peasants and winning them over.  In that sense it was a a revolution of love as Che points out.  There were executions which he was in charge of after the victory.   They killed and advocated violence.  There's no way to avoid looking at that.  Yet there were not enormous amounts of bloodshed in that war because the populous was behind them and Batista fled and the USA was not yet concerned.  By the time Che went to Bolivia, the US was concerned and helped Bolivia kill Che.

At the end of disk one of the movie "Che", there is a scene that says so much about the revolution and about humans.   The war is won, Batista has fled, they are driving their jeeps toward Havana to enter the city victoriously.   A very shiny new red convertible zips past the jeeps and Che recognizes one of his men driving the car and he has his driver chase and stop them.  He gets out and asks his soldier where he got the car and the guy admits to confiscating it.  Che tells him he can't go the to victory celebration in a stolen car and makes him turn around and take it back.  Then he gets back in his jeep and slams the door, saying, "Unbelievable!" and the movie ends.

Supposedly the movie is taken from Che's diaries.  That story may be apocryphal but it says so much about human nature, it might as well be true.  We humans love birght and shiny objects.  Maybe 3 million years of wandering around the earth in shades of green and brown with a blue sky and thrunderclouds and rainbows for exictement does that to you.   I remember once in Morocco watching the sparrows on our balcony peck at the bread crumbs but never pay the slightest attention to the bright pink piece of paper in their midst which had caught my eye.  I had the realization of the millions of year of evolution that had taught the sparrow the pink paper wasn't important and made me attracted to it.

So my blog about Cuba was in part, seeing how that shiny red convertable speeding into this egalitarian country is in the form of tourists and  the internet, where one can hold a connection to the whole world in one's hand--now that's bright and shiny.  I love humans.  Everything that disgusts me about them and evrrything that I love about them is in me and I am both the soldier in the convertible and Che slaming the door, "Unbelieveable!"  And the question is, how are we all going to live together and be fair to each other?   We've gotten a lot of advice from aaints and messiahs but, still, wouldn't I like to ride to a victory in a shiny red onvertible to celebrate my overwhelming sense of having won.