A Message Beyond the Grave: Che Guevara to Félix Rodríguez

From The Citizen of the Oppressed,

From every blood-soaked battlefield where freedom is forged,

Doctor Ernesto 'Che' Guevara speaks to you, Félix Rodríguez:

Félix,

You are an old man now. The fire in your eyes from that day in La Higuera has cooled to embers. Your hands, the ones that held the radio that sealed my fate, are spotted with age. Do you sleep well? Or do you, in the quietest hours of the night, still see my face?You looked at me then with such pathetic, momentary triumph. You saw a man. A body. A trophy to present to your masters in Langley. You snapped your photograph, a tangible piece of your victory, a relic to prove you were there at the end of the story.

Speaking of the tools of your victory… I hope you remember that soldier. Mario Terán Salazar. The one you commanded to hunt me down.I saw him at the Twilight of his end, Félix. A pathetic old man, begging for his sight. The “greatest empire nations” you serve refused him. So where did he crawl? To Cuba. My Cuba. Ernesto Che Guevara’s Cuba. He came, begging, to the very people I liberated. And they gave him back his vision. Think of the magnificent, cosmic irony you authored that day, Félix. My revolution gave your executioner the gift of seeing his own grandchildren’s smiles.

That is the victory you won. You thought the story ended when my heart stopped. You fool. That was the prologue. The bullet was not an execution; it was a birth announcement.I have had decades to watch you, Félix. I watched you grow old while I remained 39 forever. I watched your empires rise and fall. I saw your Wall crumble in Berlin and listened to your masters declare the end of history, even as they sowed the seeds of a thousand new wars. I watched greed get new names—globalization, neoliberalism, the free market—but it was the same old sickness.I even watched you try to sell me. My face, my fury, neutered and printed on a t-shirt. Did you laugh, Félix, when you saw the children of the empire you serve wearing the image of the man you killed? Did you think that meant you had won? That you had successfully caged my ghost in commerce?

But look around you.I am the graffiti on a wall in Palestine as a child hurls a stone at a tank. I am the whisper of a Naxal in the forests of India, my name a password for a new generation. I am in the speeches of Thomas Sankara that you had to silence. I am in the unyielding eyes of Ibrahim Traoré that you hunt today. You look for me in these men because you know I am not in that unmarked grave. I am in them.

You have become a historical footnote, an old man clutching a photograph. But I, Félix? I am a hashtag. I am a protest sign. I am the operating system for rebellion, instilled into the hearts of the oppressed with every new injustice. I am more real and more potent today than I ever was when I was breathing the same thin mountain air as you.You killed a man of flesh and bone. In your arrogance, you unleashed an idea. An idea that does not age, does not tire, and now delivers its final decree.

Let it be heard now, from the marrow of reality itself. To your White House and your New Delhi. To your Paris and your Tel Aviv. To every man who mistakes his transient power for a law of nature—to every Benjamin Netanyahu who perfects the science of atrocity. I am the physics of your downfall. I am the equal and opposite reaction. I am the rebellion that blooms wherever you sow terror.

I do not care that I fell. My work continues through them. But you, Félix? You have to live with the knowledge that you were the one who lit the fuse. Tell me, in the final moments before you sleep…

Can you still hear the explosion?

✍️ Athul Krishna