One of the most inspiring people I have ever met was Aleida Guevara. She wished to meet me as a fellow paediatrican, politician, writer and community activist and signed for me a copy of Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by her father Ernesto Che Guevara , with a foreword by Fidel Castro, Pelican, London, 1969.
The inscription reads –
Espero que te este libro pueda obtener la mejor informacion sobre mi padre.
Un abrazo
Aleida
21 03 02
I hope that this book may help you obtain the best information on my father.
A hug.
Aleida
21 March 2002
Images of Aleida‘s father are everywhere to be seen in Havana, recently visited by my Pretani colleague Helen Brooker and her friend Heather. Cuba has a cult of personality, except that it’s not of their living leader, but rather of the dead martyr. The photo is of an image of Che pictured beside his revolutionary comrade, Camillo Cienfuegos, at a bakery called La Victoria. The slogan underneath Hasta la Victoria Siempe (always until victory) is a famous quotation from Che.
Aleida, like everyone else in the world, loved the Queen. She felt that the Ulster Loyalist Strike of 1974 was the most successful political action carried out by any section of the European working class since the Second World War. And she thought that there would come a time when the Loyalists of Ulster would be finally betrayed by their politicians, subjected as they were to Irish-American cultural imperialism, which was promoted through a hostile media. Then, and only then, would the Loyalists of Ulster become the most progressive people of the British Isles. She thought this was inevitable. Meanwhile, those who claimed to be the socialist vanguard in both Ireland and Great Britain remained totally trapped in nationalist, essentially retrogressive and reactionary Gaelic nationalist, ideologies.