I haven’t seen Steven Soderbergh’s epic, four hour, two part biopic on Ernesto Che Guevara : “El Argentino” and “Guerrilla”. I’ll see it eventually (if anyone wants to watch two kids for day so I can see it, that would rock). Pero, even without seeing it, there’s enough internet reading on it and it seems like even a dead revolutionary can’t escape Latino stereotyping.

I’ll admit I’m an admirer of Che. Before people start jumping on me in the comments section, I will state clearly that I am not a pacifist and understand the use of political violence. So yes, I know he was responsible for people dying but so is President Bush and most other national leaders.

So with that out of the way, I am enough of an admirer of el Che that when my older daughter was a toddler she once confused el Che for her father. So I am going into the film with a bias I am aware of and ok with.

It’s really interesting to read and compare two very different perspectives on the film and Che’s legacy. Liza over at Culture Kitchen paints Che as more than just a fighter, but as a hot fighter, lover, papi and friend cuz yes Latino men can be multi-faceted and complicated.

You know the measure of a man by the way he loves his woman and cares for his children. The tender hugging, the kiss on the neck, the voracious looks, everything adds a whole different dimension to a man. Especially with men who like Guevara, lived to be a “man’s man”. It’s important to know how “a man loves woman” because it gives us a different side to the kind of guy for whom virility was taken to be an expression of their commitment to the revolution and for whom machismo was a natural by-product of a soul constantly at war.

Meanwhile over at The Huffington Post Johann Hari pulls out every scary stereotype of the Latino man, painting Guevara as violent and a machista.

Of course, Che’s defenders act as if this was the only choice confronted by Latin Americans: you were either for US-imposed market fundamentalism, or for Maoist Communism. But you don’t have to look very far in Che’s life to see that this is a lie. His diaries show that he was constantly appalled to discover that almost everyone around him, including the revolutionaries fighting by his side, did not share his Maoist vision for the future. His first wife, Hilda Gadea, was a social democrat. She wanted to depose the US-backed tyrants – and then replace them with moderate, Swedish-style mixed economies. Che ridiculed and pilloried her as “bourgeois”, before abandoning both her and their child. The ordinary Cubans he fought alongside on the Sierra Maestre also wanted to create a democracy with a mixed economy. Disgusted, Che noted in his diary: “I discovered the evident anti-communist inclinations of most of them.”

Chances are the truth is somewhere in between.

Have any of you seen the film? What did/do you think?