I went to Che Guevara´s hometown, Alta Gracia, the other day. It is a pleasant little town about an hour away from Cordoba. I liked it. There is a museum in one of the houses Che grew up in. I have to admit that the museum puzzled me. Here is this quaint little town, clean streets, tourist office by a park with a grand lake, a big ole hotel with a garden park area open to all, a seemingly middle class, rather straight-laced place paying homage to their most famous citizen, who happens to have been a revolutionary who essentially rejected his hometown and native country. I wondered what Che would´ve thought. There are photos of Che with Fidel Castro, Che in military garb in the factories of Cuba, in the Congo, in the jungles. There are copies of letters he wrote to his children (did you know he had 6, I didn´t) telling them to be good little revolutionaries and there are photos of Fidel himself and Huga Chavez visiting the museum at its opening. I found myself wondering how Che became the figure, the face plastered on so many shirts and displayed in so many college dorm rooms. Is it because he was killed by the CIA in Bolivia (I can´t find the question mark on this keyboard). I have a hard time picturing the same people who put up a poster of Che putting one up of Fidel but why wouldn´t they. I mean, Che was just as, if not more, radical than Fidel. He helped Fidel come to power in Cuba, he was an integral part of Fidel´s early government in Cuba. Do the people who wear his face on their shirts know that. And while Fidel stayed in his own country (please note that che was not Cuban) to rule and govern his own people Che went off to fight in a jungle of another country he wasn´t from. No matter what you think of Fidel´s politics you have to admit that staying to govern the country you were born in, grew up, and care about is far more conventional than a doctor becoming a soldier and fighting revoutions in countries that weren´t his own. (I should state here that I do not believe in the pan-latin americanism that Che espoused so, yes, in my eyes he was fighting in foreign countries. In my uneducated opinion a middle class argentinian has as much to do with the struggle for indigenous rights in bolivia as I do in the rights of a native navajo, less actually). So, yeah. those were my thoughts after visiting the che guevara museum.
I will be leaving Argentina in a few days. I am in Mendoza currently, a location I added to my itinerary at the last minute. It was probably a silly idea, but oh well. I am headed to Salta in Northern Argentina tonight and then on to Bolivia. I have been thinking about Argentinian men during my last few days here. Following with the stereotype of latino men they cat call, but there is something different about Argentinian cat calling that I´m not sure I´ve quite put my finger on. There is little threatening about their cat calling. It isn´t the whistling or the "hey pretty baby" that you associate with the cat calls of construction workers, for example. No, its more that when you walk past them they murmer a few sentences about how beautiful you and your friends are (I´ve noticed that this tends to happen more when I´m not alone, this may be because groups of women attract more attention or I´m just not to the tastes of most Argentinian men). Cars will honk their horns or guys will call out to you as they pass, but its almost always a complete phrase. Its innocent and annoying all at the same time and I wonder how its tied to other things I´ve noticed. For example, yesterday I overheard a woman try to get the attention of a waiter by calling out "flaco!" (aka "skinny!") Today I was buying some stuff and the first shop attendant asked me what I needed by calling me "hermosa" (pretty) a few minutes later another shop keeper questioned if I´d been helped and refered to by "linda" (another way of saying pretty). There is nothing meant by these comments, these men weren´t hitting on me and the woman mentioned above wasn´t being rude. This is just the Argentinian version of sir or madam I guess.
That is all for now. I´ve got a bag to pack and a bus to catch.
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