Tom Standich, a famous writer, said: "Food plays a catalytic role in the transformation process of social transformation, social organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion." Focusing this angle from human society to individuals often leads to unexpected gains. In this paper, we choose ernesto guevara, a world-famous red idol, to explore how he walked through his short but dazzling life step by step along "America on the tip of his tongue".
The young master in yerba mate manor
The birth of Ernesto Guevara is closely related to Argentine national drink-yerba mate. On the South American continent, yerba mate has the reputation of "Argentine national treasure". Its charm comes from the yerba mate tree, which is also the Paraguayan holly. Argentines often take off its leaves, put it in a small gourd and soak it in boiling water of about 90 degrees, and then suck it with a straw. This is a drink that Argentines like both rich and poor, and it is even known as "green gold".
Yerba mate tree, which brought great wealth to Guevara’s family.
Like Messi, a modern football star, Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, because his father Guevara Lynch wanted to buy a wind mill for his family’s yerba mate estate in this city. Guevara’s parents came from the upper class in Argentina. With the dowry of his mother Cecilia, Guevara’s father bought 200 hectares of yerba mate Manor back and forth, which brought endless wealth to the family.
Like all local tyrants and billionaires, Guevara’s father carefully designed his own manor, but the Guevara family did not live in this manor. This is because Guevara suffered from asthma when he was a teenager, and the whole family had to move to the Argentine resort of Alta gracia. Although far away from yerba mate Manor, Guevara’s hobby for yerba mate was formed in his childhood and became his lifelong hobby.
Guevara personally demonstrated the yerba mate drinking method, and the gourd is an essential object for drinking yerba mate.
Guevara’s star hometown will show you.
For many years, yerba mate has been the favorite drink of Argentine upper class, with a set of drinking manners and ways. Yerba mate, which Guevara loved since childhood, is commonly known as sweet yerba mate. The specific modulation method is to add sugar, honey, oranges and other fruits when drinking yerba mate. The production process is quite elegant and the price is relatively expensive. As an adult, Guevara traveled in northern Argentina in 1951. He found that the local Indians drank ordinary pure yerba mate, that is, the cheapest bitter yerba mate without any seasoning. In this way, the class differences were presented to Guevara through yerba mate.
Political Enlightenment of Banana Republic
On December 29th, 1951, Guevara and his boyhood partner Alberto rode a Norton500 motorcycle and started their trip to Latin America with yerba mate. This trip made Guevara lose his first love, Chichina, and made him completely draw a line with his original class. During his travels in Argentina, Guevara used his personal charm to deal with all kinds of people, and made a trip to Argentina on the tip of his tongue in various ways. Before he left the motherland, his greatest achievement was probably that he learned to cook the famous Argentine barbecue. When he was short of money, Guevara had to help the barbecue chef in exchange for three meals a day. After eating the barbecue, Guevara also "took away" several bottles of Argentine wine by dancing. In Argentina, Guevara is charming, almost like Beckham in the tramp. People enthusiastically help him and laugh at his stealing wine.
Argentine barbecue is Guevara’s specialty, and China people will not be unfamiliar with all kinds of Latin barbecue.
During his wandering journey, Guevara became more and more sympathetic to the people at the bottom-especially in Peru. Because of his asthma, Guevara didn’t eat freshwater fish. However, when wandering in the Amazon valley of Peru, he ate a lot of river fish to maintain his physical strength, so he became seriously ill and had to stay in the Sao Paulo Leprosy Hospital in Iquitos for a while. There, he took care of a large number of leprosy patients and learned that lack of food is one of the main reasons for the prevalence of leprosy in the local area. Because most of Peru’s land is in the hands of landlords, the food problem in Peru is very serious, and the local civilians lack food and are forced to feed on unclean wild animals such as armadillos, which has caused physical disorders. This made Guevara realize that poverty and injustice can cause diseases more.
On June 14th, 1952, all the patients and doctors in the leprosy hospital held a 24th birthday party for Guevara, and presented him with Pisco, a specialty of Peru. This is a distilled wine, which is the national wine of Peru. Different from brandy, the brewing of Pisco wine needs one more process of grape peeling, and it depends entirely on grape juice fermentation. Pisco can be drunk alone or mixed with cola, cocoa and other drinks. Guevara thinks this kind of wine tastes similar to gin. With the strength of Pisco, Guevara expressed his political ideal for the first time, that is, to change the political structure of the American continent and realize the ideals of Bolí var and San Martin!
Perhaps Guevara got inspiration from the famous Pisco wine.
It is a common thing to sleep in the wind during the trip. Guevara walked a lot and tasted the food of the bottom people in South America. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, he had to live on bananas every day. Banana, a fruit in Chinese’s eyes, is the staple food of many civilians in Central American countries, and it is also the main commodity of United Fruit Company of the United States. This multinational company regards Central American countries as its own banana garden, occupies more than 3 million acres of land in Central America, has judicial power in its own banana garden, and is willing to wage war in order to keep its privileges. From the end of 1953 to the summer of 1954, Guevara wandered to Guatemala, the "Banana Republic", witnessing the changes brought by the land reform and the crazy revenge of American capital. Changing Latin American countries’ dependence on American capital and joining the Latin American revolution became Guevara’s main idea after his second trip to Latin America.
Bananas, as a specialty of South America, influenced Guevara’s revolutionary road to some extent.
Weicastro barbecue
During his travels in Latin America, Guevara made contact with leftists in Latin American countries and met Cuban revolutionaries. In Mexico, he and Castro had a historic meeting. Castro also attended Guevara’s first wedding. On August 18th, 1955, in a suburb 40km away from Mexico City, Guevara and Hilda formally married, and Castro became the most distinguished guest. After the wedding ceremony, Guevara showed off his cooking skills and made a barbecue with Argentine flavor to entertain Castro. Castro, who has always been competitive, commented: "It tastes good, but my craft should be better than him."
Castro and Guevara (left)
On Christmas Day in 1955, Castro invited Guevara to spend Christmas with him. Hilda wrote down the menu of this meal: roast pork, Cuban traditional black bean rice (rice made of black beans, peppers, onions, bacon, olive oil, etc.), traditional nut candy, apples, grapes, and even a bottle of wine. This is already a very rich meal for Castro, who has always been indifferent to eating, drinking and ostentation. You know, after Castro became a Cuban leader, the wedding banquet for his daughter was also the same standard.
Cuban black bean rice is deeply loved by revolutionaries and has also appeared in for whom the bell tolls.
"Bei Ye" in the revolutionary ranks
On November 25th, 1956, the Cuban Revolution began in the port of Tucson, Mexico. At two o’clock in the morning, 82 soldiers, including Guevara and Castro, boarded the yacht Granma with weapons and started their voyage to Cuba. This epic expedition was a logistical disaster. Because of the Oolong incident, the revolutionaries threw away a lot of supplies shortly after boarding the ship. According to the memory of participant Casli Garcí a, during the first three days on the ship, everyone was only given half a can of condensed milk; On the fourth day, the food became a piece of cheese and a few sausages for everyone; On the fifth day, the food became some rotten oranges … As for the food for the last three days, all the insurgents could only overcome their desire for the only food with perseverance.
On December 2, the revolutionaries landed in Cuba, and were besieged by government forces, so they had to disperse to Maestra Mountain. On the March, Guevara changed from "Beckham" to "Bei Ye". You know, the most luxurious dinner for revolutionaries at that time was crabs on the beach. Because there was no fire, everyone had to eat crabs alive. Apart from raw crabs, grass roots, raw corn and any kind of wild plants they know are spared. Although these "foods" are temporarily used to satisfy the stomach, water has become the biggest problem. Revolutionaries desperately searched for any plants that could get water, while Guevara came up with a new idea to draw water from rocks with his own asthma equipment.
In the Cuban revolutionary war, Guevara shared the same food with the soldiers. He took the lead in establishing a bread mill, confiscating the landlord’s cattle to improve the food for the soldiers. Thanks to Cuba’s natural conditions, Guevara also fell in love with mellow Cuban cigars, and smoking a cigar between battles became the best way for him to relax. It should be noted that the producer of these cigars is a cigar factory built by the revolutionary team itself, which is not a luxury in Cuba.
Cuban cigar
After the victory of the Cuban revolution, Guevara was keen to export the revolution all over the world. In his guerrilla works, canned food has become the most critical guerrilla food. This understanding comes from the experience of South America, that is, Guevara himself, and it is not operable in other parts of the world. Unlike guerrilla warfare in China, Guevara’s guerrilla warfare did not agree with the organization of agricultural production, so it failed in aiding Congo.
Canned food was Guevara’s ideal guerrilla ration, but it was unrealistic for the Third World in those days.
Then, Guevara made his last adventure in Bolivia, which completely turned him into Baye in guerrilla warfare. In the mountains of Bolivia, Guevara and his team lived by canning and hunting. Guevara’s team of 20 or 30 people includes five members of the Cuban Central Committee. They and Guevara went to strange Bolivia for revolution out of their ideals. Under the enemy’s encirclement and suppression, these revolutionaries also fell into a long quarrel because of the food problem. They often fought to win a little poor food that seems to be scarce today. Because there was no supply in the battle, the guerrillas, like Mr. Bei, ate whatever they caught on the road. They ate peacocks, poisonous snakes, monkeys, foxes and all kinds of birds. Because of hunger, many people’s limbs are swollen and they can’t even put on their shoes. Everyone, including Guevara, is dying.
On January 23, 1967, Guevara wrote in his diary: "For me, today is a black day. I spent it with my teeth clenched because I felt very tired. When I climbed to the top of the mountain, my head was dizzy. " Without food, Guevara and his team members can only catch some prey and eat it alive. On May 13th, they found some pork and braised bamboo shoots in a farmer’s house, and they were overjoyed. Unexpectedly, after a few months of hard life, the guerrillas’ stomachs and intestines have been unable to digest the normal food of ordinary people-after eating this meal, everyone is vomiting and diarrhea, which is miserable. In this miserable environment, Guevara and his team members fought hard for half a year.
Today, Bei Ye’s works are to show us survival skills, but Guevara and his party have to bear hundreds of times of enemy siege, not only to replenish energy like Bei Ye, but also to fight nonstop and struggle between life and death!
Guevara ushered in the curtain call of life in hunger and cold.
Finally, on October 7, 1967, Guevara was surrounded by Bolivian troops. Because there was no normal food supplement for a long time, Guevara not only had a relapse of asthma, but also contracted dysentery. On October 8, Guevara was unfortunately captured in the battle and died heroically in front of the enemy’s gun the next day.
Looking back on his 39-year life, Guevara’s road to the tip of the tongue is also an important part of his life journey. From the idol of the heartthrob "Beckham" to the top "Baye" in the food chain, Guevara showed us a unique "America on the tip of the tongue" and also completed the sublimation from a rich boy to a revolutionary.
This article was originally published on the WeChat WeChat official account "WarriorSalon" (micro-signal: Warrior Salon). The original title was "America on the tip of the tongue"-a short play of ernesto guevara’s life. Now the title and subtitle are drawn up by the editor, with a slight deletion.
