El Che linked to Sharon
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Could former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon be a distant cousin of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara?
Maariv, an Israeli daily, recently reported its improbable finding that the pair were related. Scholars of the iconic Argentine revolutionary are dubious.
Efraim Davidi, an Israeli journalist and historian who wrote a biography of Guevara, emphatically denies the Guevara-Sharon link, says the Argentine daily Clarin.
The Maariv article says Guevara’s mother, Celia de la Serna, was a Russian Jewish emigre related to Sharon. Mom supposedly informed her son of this secret. Guevara himself was reported to have traveled to Israel in clandestine fashion to meet with Sharon.
No way, says Davidi. Guevara’s mother had Spanish Catholic roots, not Russian Jewish. (El Che’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, was of Spanish and Irish stock.) And Guevara is never known to have entered Israel, though he did visit several Palestinian refugee camps.
El Che was executed in 1967 during an ill-fated guerrilla campaign in Bolivia. Sharon remains in a coma from a stroke suffered in 2006.
Guevara is more popular than ever, the subject of a new biopic project directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Che look-alike Benicio Del Toro as the middle-class Argentine physician who met Fidel Castro in Mexico. The rest, as they say, is history.
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires
Photos: Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (Couturier Gallery), left, and Ariel Sharon (AP)