Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Viva Maria Conchita

"Chavez welcomes actor and director Sean Penn aboard the presidential plane"

‘Shut up about Chavez the killer’ Venezuelan co-star tells Sean Penn

The saccharine conventions of showbusiness were thrown out of the window last week, when the Hollywood actress Maria Conchita Alonso was collared by paparazzi and asked if she was pleased about her former co-star Sean Penn’s recent Oscar victory.

“He’s an amazing actor. I can’t take that away from him,” she said of Penn, who worked with her on the 1988 cop film Colors. “It’s just that he has no clue at all what’s going on in Venezuela. He’s been praising Hugo Chavez, who is a dictator and a killer. He should shut up about what he doesn’t know.” Alonso, who was raised in Venezuela, was apparently upset by a glowing article that Penn had written for The Nation magazine about her homeland’s charismatic but increasingly dictatorial left-wing President.

In normal circumstances, Alonso’s interview might have been brushed under the carpet. But for the first time a Hollywood insider was saying what much of America thinks: left-wing luvvies in the movie business should wake up to the real nature of their hero. For one thing, Mr Chavez throughout his career has criticised Hollywood as a medium of American “cultural imperialism”. And Penn, who since his Oscar-winning performance in Milk has become a vociferous gay rights activist, is also open to allegations of hypocrisy.

The article came out in the UK’s Independent, which, unlike US newspapers dares point out,

The Venezuelan leader’s political hero, Fidel Castro, imprisoned and executed gay men, and once declared: “In this country [Cuba] there are no homosexuals.”

Benicio, unlike Maria Conchita, continued to display his characteristic cluelessness:

On Thursday, Benicio del Toro made headlines when he took tea with Mr Chavez at his palace in Caracas. The actor, in Venezuela to promote Steven Soderbergh’s film Che, told journalists that his host was “nice” and that he’d “had a good time”. Del Toro’s comments caused apoplexy on the political right in the US, but lately even Democrats have been perturbed by Mr Chavez’s intolerance of media criticism and political opposition.

Not that Benicio and Penn are alone: Danny Glover’s already fed at the petrodollar trough, receiving $18 million to make 2 movies; Oliver Stone’s making a biopic of Chavez, and Harry Belafonte schoomzes with Chavez as often as he can. Maybe they should all get together and make an Ocean’s 11 with Hugo as the casino owner?

Readers of this blog know Maria Conchita has spoken the truth about Venezuela in the past.

Special thanks to Larwyn and Don Surber.

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Mark Groubert saw Che so you won’t have to


At Crooks and Liars, Mark Groubert writes a C&L Movie Review: Che by Steven Soderbergh,

Slated to be released to theatres in January as two separate films, the revolution will indeed be televised. Soderbergh has also made a pay-TV deal to show Che to Americans on demand in their living rooms. How fitting.

Suits me fine. Unlike the Cubans in the island prison, who thanks to Che and Fidel have no choice in what they can watch on TV or read in newspapers, we live in a free country, and if you want to waste your time and money watching this “masterpiece”, by all means, you can.

I’ll bet that Benicio will get an Oscar, too (he already won Best Actor at Cannes), even when, as you can see from the preview, he played Che with a Cuban/Caribbean accent instead of Che’s characteristic Argentinian accent, which is the reason why he was nicknamed Che in the first place.

Groubert sat through the entire 4 ½ hours propaganda piece and came back quoting Che at the start of his review,

Silence is argument carried out by other means.
Che Guevara

A telling quote, indeed.

Nowhere in the review, and I asume in the film, is there a mention of the 216 people that Che Guevara himself killed between 1957 and 1959 in Cuba that The Cuba Archive has documented.


Silence also as to Che’s murderous nature, which Alvaro Vargas Llosa documents in his book The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty (emphasis added to Che’s actual words):

Guevara might have been enamored of his own death, but he was much more enamored of other people’s deaths. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his “Message to the Tricontinental”: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.” His earlier writings are also peppered with this rhetorical and ideological violence. Although his former girlfriend Chichina Ferreyra doubts that the original version of the diaries of his motorcycle trip contains the observation that “I feel my nostrils dilate savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood of the enemy,” Guevara did share with Granado at that very young age this exclamation: “Revolution without firing a shot? You’re crazy.” At other times the young bohemian seemed unable to distinguish between the levity of death as a spectacle and the tragedy of a revolution’s victims. In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote: “It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in.”

Guevara’s disposition when he traveled with Castro from Mexico to Cuba aboard the Granma is captured in a phrase in a letter to his wife that he penned on January 28, 1957, not long after disembarking, which was published in her book Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra: “Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty.” This mentality had been reinforced by his conviction that Arbenz had lost power because he had failed to execute his potential enemies. An earlier letter to his former girlfriend Tita Infante had observed that “if there had been some executions, the government would have maintained the capacity to return the blows.” It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people—proven enemies, suspected enemies, and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain…. His belongings were now mine.” Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim “was really guilty enough to deserve death,” he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: “He had to pay the price.” At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.

Silence also, here in the US – the NYT never did get around to reviewing Carlos Eire‘s magnificent memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana because of its truthful portrayal of Che’s and Fidel’s ruinous revolution. I believe this is the only book to win the National Book Award that the NYT Book Review has never reviewed.

Silence is argument carried out by other means, indeed.

Prior posts on Soderbergh’s tribute to Che, the murderous SOB, here

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Benicio wins the Cannes’ Best Actor award…

…for glorifying a psychopath mass murderer: Benicio Del Toro, ‘Latino Brad Pitt’, wins Cannes award as ‘Che’

“I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara,” said the actor, after accepting his second big award under the US director’s helmsmanship.

“I wouldn’t be here without Che Guevera, and through all the awards the movie gets you’ll have to pay your respects to the man.”

As if there was anything to respect about Che Guevara.

The article continues,

Some critics slammed the film shot in Spanish for its length and meticulous documentary-style presentation, as well as for failing to focus on the politically controversial aspects of the Cuban revolution.

Soderbergh needed to tighten it for average movie-goers, they said.

Benicio has his share of the blame for this aberration:

Del Toro, who has a quiet but immensely strong presence, was involved from the start on the “Che” film, which took nine years of research and 60 million dollars to complete.

Too bad he couldn’t spare fifteen minutes in the Cuba Archive.

I fully expect Benicio will get an Oscar for this movie. For now, he also got a Come Mierda Of the Week Award

Prior post: Benicio’s Che vs reality’s Che.

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Benicio’s Che vs reality’s Che

Maria sent me the link to the NYT’s review of the Cannes Film Festival review of the unfinished “saga” on the most romanticized serial murderer in the world, Che. (Erik skipped that one. It was a bore.)

There’s a couple of interesting things about this film review:

First, the title of the article: Soderbergh and Che, Provocateurs, which summarizes Soderbergh’s intention. Provocateur, being edgy, rhapsodizing about the revolution, and worshipping the idol of the bien pensant around the world. For that he is regarded as

one of the most protean and interesting of American filmmakers, exploring an astonishing range of genres and styles with consistent skill, intelligence and audacity

Protean indeed.
Soderbergh wasn’t audacious enough to show the names of the hundreds of people Che personally killed.

Then there’s the photo in the article,


Benicio in full Che drag, pistol in hand, being the very picture of the heroic bandido of popular lore.

And third, the reviewer, who gets paid to sit through the “four-and-a-half-hour exploration”, at least has the delicacy to mention that

There is a lot, however, that the audience will not learn from this big movie, which has some big problems as well as major virtues. In between the two periods covered in “Che,” Guevara was an important player in the Castro government, but his brutal role in turning a revolutionary movement into a dictatorship goes virtually unmentioned. This, along with Benicio Del Toro’s soulful and charismatic performance, allows Mr. Soderbergh to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an idealistic champion of the poor and oppressed. By now, though, this image seems at best naïve and incomplete, at worst sentimental and dishonest.

This is bad, not because preserving a romantic image of a mass murderer, but because “it is not very interesting.”

Now let’s examine the real Che as depicted by another interesting, skilled and intelligent man who I had the pleasure of meeting a few months ago, Carlos Eire. Carlos writes about Che the homophobe:

He thinks about that cruel ritual he has witnessed so many times, when the guards strip all the prisoners naked and parade the most handsome in front of the newly arrived inmates to find out who among them is gay. He thinks about how anyone who gets aroused is taken away for a special mandatory “rehabilitation” program that includes the application of electrical currents to the genitals.

The NYT photo from the movie gives you the impression that Che was heroic in battle, when instead

The “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” never reached Guevara’s nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged and blindfolded men. He was a true Chekist: “Always interrogate your prisoners at night,” Che commanded his prosecutorial goons. “A man is easier to cow at night, his mental resistance is always lower.”

Humberto Fontova writes about Che’s specialty:

Che specialized in psychological torture. Many prisoners were yanked out of their cells, bound, blindfolded and stood against The Wall. The seconds ticked off. The condemned could hear the rifle bolts snapping ….. finally – FUEGO!!

BLAM!! But the shots were blanks. In his book, “Tocayo,” Cuban freedom fighter Tony Navarro describes how he watched a man returned to his cell after such an ordeal. He’d left bravely, grim-faced as he shook hands with his fellow condemned. He came back mentally shattered, curling up in a corner of the squalid cell for days.

And the NYT article doesn’t show the firing squads of Cuban revolution:

No, the NYT writes up an unfinished movie. The same NYT which, to this day, won’t bother reviewing Carlos Eire’s book Waiting For Snow In Havana, even when the book won the National Book Award.

It’s all a matter of priorities.

UPDATE, Monday 26 May
Benicio wins Cannes best actor award…

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