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Published: January 20th 2015
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Today I spent the day in Alta Gracia – a town about one hour away from Cordoba by bus. It’s a beautiful town at the foothills of the mountains with a little river running through it where lots of holidaymakers were camping, sunbathing and kids were playing in the stream. I’d gone to Alta Gracia specifically to visit Che Guevara’s childhood home. I walked over a bridge and up a hill through winding and shady streets lined with houses on either side (many were made in the French style) until I found Che Guevara’s house and the museum of Che which was one of them.
Once I got there I went to look for something to eat before taking in the history of Che. Whilst looking for a place to eat I asked an Argentinian man the way and he walked me to a restaurant whilst telling me his reasons for being at the house of Che, telling me more about the cities in Argentina and Argentina’s difficult history, how the British constructed all trains and railway in Argentina and enthusiatically elaborating on the information I would later find in the museum of Che. We sat down in
a restaurant, ordered a big bottle of cold coca cola and I ordered rather appropriately a Guevara salad – we joked that it must have been called that because one of the seven ingredients were tomatoes and red is the colour asosociaed with Che.
It turns out this man, a man from Cordoba probably in his forties was there looking for a base to run his anti-violence course. He was part of a group and their plan was to run courses against violence in all countries in South America and Central America. He felt that the house of Che would be a good landmark for the attendees to find. His plan was then to carry out a similar trip to Che’s – to head up through Chile, Bolivia (where he claimed people were too passive and needed to be more aggressive), Venezuela and Colombia (countries with very high levels of violence) and up through Guatemala, Panama towards Mexico (another country which he claimed to be very violent especially towards women) and end up in Cuba after having provided his ‘assertiveness’ course in each of these countries.
Inspired by his cause and impressed by his
knowledge, I was happy for him to accompany me to Che Guevara’s house where I was given a booklet to read through in English by the staff as I had missed the guided tour. I made my way through each of the rooms of the house with photos and relics preserved from Che’s early childhood. After we had left the museum of Che where I had paid $6 to enter the museum as a Brit and he had paid $1 to enter for being Argentinian, the kind man insisted on giving me money so that we had both paid the same entry fee. He said
‘Che wouldn’t have wanted things to be this way – different nationalities paying different entry fees for his museum. This is discrimination.’
Read the next blog if you want to find out what Che wanted instead...
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