An Unintentional Irony in "Evita"
A great irony of the musical Evita is that it was meant to be anti-Peronist and pro-Communist, but in picking Che Guevera as the spokesman for the auctorial POV, the writers unintentionally subverted their own message. The Peronists, especially during the period shown, were far less destructive to Argentina than Castro was to Cuba (and Che was associated with some of the most destructive of Castro's actions, the ones which specifically resulted in the American embargo).
The section of their duet in which Evita scornfully admonishes Che:
So whip up your hate
In some tottering state
But not HERE, dear.
Is that CLEAR, dear?
is especially funny because it's meant to make us see Evita's essential political shallowness (she doesn't grasp the transcendent importance of Communist revolution to Latin America) but in fact she comes off as protective of her mother country. Che really was all about whipping up "hate," and he did in fact go to a "tottering state" -- Batista's Cuba -- where he proceeded to slaughter people on a scale which would have horrified Eva Peron. (Though perhaps not Juan Peron, especially later on (after Eva's death) when he went insane, something never mentioned in the fictional work).
The big irony here is that the movie thus unintentionally highlights the one positive achievement of Juan Peron -- suppressing the Communists. A lesser irony is that it argues that Peron's anti-capitalism was an achievement, when in fact this was what destroyed the Argentine economy, and counts as probably his most severe error of administration.
The fictional work correctly notes that Eva Duarte was born in poverty. What it does not note is a greater irony: Che Guevara, like most Communist revolutionary leaders, came from a middle-class family. In other words, Che is lecturing both Eva, and the Argentine workers and peasants in general, on what a Marxist would call "false consciousness."
Which is another way of saying that the Marxists want to tell the "proletariat" what they should be thinking.
(and btw: I'm well aware that the Peronist regime was politically-oppressive, economically-damaging, and led inexorably to the 1970's wave of terrorism and the "dirty war" of the "disappearances." I'm not trying to defend the Perons. Merely pointing out that Che, and Castro, were worse).
The section of their duet in which Evita scornfully admonishes Che:
So whip up your hate
In some tottering state
But not HERE, dear.
Is that CLEAR, dear?
is especially funny because it's meant to make us see Evita's essential political shallowness (she doesn't grasp the transcendent importance of Communist revolution to Latin America) but in fact she comes off as protective of her mother country. Che really was all about whipping up "hate," and he did in fact go to a "tottering state" -- Batista's Cuba -- where he proceeded to slaughter people on a scale which would have horrified Eva Peron. (Though perhaps not Juan Peron, especially later on (after Eva's death) when he went insane, something never mentioned in the fictional work).
The big irony here is that the movie thus unintentionally highlights the one positive achievement of Juan Peron -- suppressing the Communists. A lesser irony is that it argues that Peron's anti-capitalism was an achievement, when in fact this was what destroyed the Argentine economy, and counts as probably his most severe error of administration.
The fictional work correctly notes that Eva Duarte was born in poverty. What it does not note is a greater irony: Che Guevara, like most Communist revolutionary leaders, came from a middle-class family. In other words, Che is lecturing both Eva, and the Argentine workers and peasants in general, on what a Marxist would call "false consciousness."
Which is another way of saying that the Marxists want to tell the "proletariat" what they should be thinking.
(and btw: I'm well aware that the Peronist regime was politically-oppressive, economically-damaging, and led inexorably to the 1970's wave of terrorism and the "dirty war" of the "disappearances." I'm not trying to defend the Perons. Merely pointing out that Che, and Castro, were worse).