Che Guevara and Magical Realism
3.0
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His detractors often compare him to Hitler while many of his admirers see in him a saint and a martyr like Jesus Christ. Cuban school children are taught to be like him. Che was killed in 1967, the same year in which Gabriel García Márquez published Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitute). We will study Guevara's life as a militant revolutionary through his own writings and the exorbitant style known as realismo mágico, crafted by García Márquez, one of Che's great admirers. Four movies will anchor our visual take on the myth and the man: Los diarios de motocicleta* (Walter Salles, 2004), Che I** and Che II** (Steven Soderbergh, 2008), and Wall Street** (Oliver Stone, 1987). The nineteen-eighties narcotraffic boom in Colombia and the cocaine-driven financial high times during the late Reagan years will frame our study.