Cofiwch Dryweryn / Remember Tryweryn

 

21st October marks the anniversary of the opening of the controversial resevoir in the Tryweryn valley  near Bala, to supply drinking water to the residents of the city of Liverpool, the day still  marks a grave injustice  and raw wound. 

Tryweryn was an idyllic village set deep in the Welsh valleys where the chapel and post office were the epicentre of community life. In all 800 acres of land was drowned, as well as the school, the post office, the chapel and the cemetery, in order to create the reservoir. Twelve complete farms and land belonging to four other farms were drowned.  

Shortly after the flooding a piece of graffiti appeared on a piece of wall, just outside  the village of Llanrhysted, on the way to Aberystwyth. The graffiti read "Cofiwch Drwyweryn " "Remember Tryweryn" it is still to be seen, many years later. 

The wall itself was never intended to be more than a bold gesture, but over time it grew into a powerful cultural landmark. Generations of travellers on the road to Aberystwyth have seen it as a reminder of lost communities and as a symbol of resistance.   

Despite being vandalised, repainted, and even partly demolished on several occasions, it has always been quickly restored by local people determined to preserve its message. In recent years, its influence has spread well beyond its original location.   

Today, the wall near Aberystwyth is both a physical landmark and a rallying point in the story of Wales’s fight to protect its language, land, and communites. The message of 'Cofiwch Dryweryn' is such an important one to Welsh people, and it should never be forgotten, a poignant  symbol of when overwhelming voices were ignored by Westminster.

The battle began in 1955 when the City of Liverpool were seeking a new water supply. In the summer of that year Liverpool's Water Committee announced its intention to drown the valley of Dolaneg, where the shrine of Ann Griffiths, the Welsh saint and hymn writer, stands. 

This of course, provoked uproar. Magnaminously Liverpool bowed to Welsh demands and said they would flood the Tryweryn valley instead. This proved to be a carefully planned scheme to hoodwink the Welsh into thinking they were dictating where a resevoir could be built. 

In 1956, a private members bill was put before parliament seeking to create this folly. The bill was bought forth by Liverpool City Council, which  allowed them to by-pass the usual criteria for planning permission to the relevant  landowners in the area. It would involve disrupting railway lines and road links, and at the heart of it, the flooding of the village of Capel Celyn. 

This one of the last bastions of Welsh speaking settlements, which had its own school, the site of Wales first Sunday school post office, a chapel, cemetery  and a number of farms and homesteads, it was  a community in every sense of the word. 

Feelings were naturally instantly aroused to fever pitch as the notion of the English drowning out the Welsh, made the symbolism of the creation of the resevoir even more potent. But to members of Liverpool council, the farms that they were drowning were no more than convenient stretches of land along a remote valley floor that could be put to a more convenient and productive use to supply its own citizens with water, but to many was just an arrogant misuse of power, a flooding used primarily as a way of boosting profits.   

                                                                    Capel Celyn    

 MPs were powerless to stop the development because the government was determined to push the Bill through Parliament. It would be fiercely opposed, such was the passion aroused.

The political parties in Wales were united in their opposition to the scheme because it was considered an affront to Wales that valuable resources were being taken away from the country. There was a feeling of sadness because a community was being shattered and families who had lived in the area for generations were forced to leave their homes.  

Locals were determined to oppose the scheme to the bitter end and demonstrations, petitions and marches were organised.  The Tryweryn Defence Committee was formed in 1956 and included some of Wales’ most prominent and revered personalities, including Ifan ab Owen Edwards and Megan Lloyd George,.  

Although opposition to the scheme did not come only from Welsh nationalists, the Tryweryn cause inspired Plaid Cymru, and provided an impetus to its campaigns. The party won its first elected political representation soon after.  

In September 1956 Plaid Cymru held a Save Tryweryn Rally, leading a procession of protesters through the centre of Bala.  The following month the Lord Mayor of Cardiff, Alderman J H Morgan, called a Save Tryweryn meeting in the city. Attended by 300 representatives from local government and trade unions and 10 MPs, the meeting decided to send a delegation to Liverpool to appeal for a change of heart.  

In November 1956 a procession, led by Gwynfor Evans and including 70 villagers, was held in Liverpool to oppose the reservoir, but the Liverpool councillors voted to go ahead with the proposed scheme by 94 votes to one.  

During the summer of 1957 Gwynfor Evans proposed Meirionnydd County Council could build a reservoir in Cwm Croes, where only one farm would be affected, and sell the water from the reservoir to Liverpool Corporation.  

It would  also see a number of individuals being compelled to take direct action against the plan, between 1962 and 1963 there were attempts to sabotage the building of the resevoir,  in acts of desperation, since previous passive demonstrations had failed. 

On three occasions between 1962 and 1963 there were attempts to sabotage the building of the reservoir.  The first explosion, on February 10, led to Aberystwyth University student Emyr Llywelyn Jones, being sentenced to prison for 12 months for his part in the offence. 

On the day of his sentence, two other members of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru  ('movement for the defence of Wales'; MAC)Owain Williams and John Albert Jones, blew up a pylon at Gellilydan near Blaenau Ffestiniog.  But by then work was already well underway and Llyn Celyn was officially opened on October 28, 1965.  

At the opening ceremony, where the Lord Mayor of Liverpool was present, a protest was held, including the appearance in military uniforms of the Free Wales Army.  The ceremony was stopped when protestors climbed over the dam.  

 MPs were powerless to stop the development because the government was determined to push the Bill through Parliament. The local authorities did not have a voice in the decision either and this caused great resentment.  

It  remains to this day, the greatest symbol of the struggle of the Welsh language, a way of life destroyed on the whims of Conservative Government without consultation by Welsh authorities, its people, or  the support from Welsh M.Ps, who were to wage an 8 year battle against it. Opposition to the scheme received the backing of the vast majority of the Welsh people, with the backing of trade unionists, and cultural and religious groups. 

Control over its own water became and has remained an inflammatory issue here in Wales. The political parties were to be united in their opposition to the scheme because it was considered such an affront  to the people of Wales, because such valuable resources were being stolen away from the country. The agricultural value of the land  was rich compared to some land  that could have been considered. A feeling of great sadness because a community was being shattered and families who had lived in the area for generations were being forced to lose their homes.     

When  on Thursday, October 21st, 1965, the Lord Mayor of Liverpool  came to open Tryweryn dam ( built at a cost of £20 million) where every house and tree had disappeared,  he was to be met by a vast crowd of protesters, in 19 October 2005 Liverpool City Council finally issued an apology, but many thought it was just a worthless political gesture that had arrived far too late. 

I hope that we have by now learnt the tragic lessons of Tryweryn and the reverberations that are still felt to this day. The place names like bells still ring out- Hafod Fadog, Y Ganedd Lyd, Cae Fado, Y Gelli, Pen Y Bryn Mawr, Gwerndelw, Tyncerrig, Maesydail. 

These bells now ring underwater and are heard by no one. An evocative image, forever stitched in time, which remembers the bells of Cantre'r Gwaelod and the loss associated with inundation. It would also feed the flames of a resurgent nationalism, re-igniting the imagination, peoples identity and defence of the language? Y iath, and would pave the way for devolution, and the strengthening and protection of the Welsh Language alongside the growth of Cymdeithas Y Iaith /The Welsh Language Society. Some would argue though  that the Welsh nation is still being fobbed off, since the assembly that has been granted to them, has no real political power.   

 There is now a memorial on the side  of the lake and a memorial garden and the grave stones  from Capel Cemetry have been moved here. At the end of the day it was not just a stretch of land that was flooded against the people of Wales's will, but a whole community of people, a culture and a language because of colonial arrogance and misuse of power. Tryweryn remains as a byword for shame and a grave injustice. Years later it would inspire the Manic Street Preachers to ask " Where are we going"?" in their song " Ready for Drowning, " 

 and the following much anthologised poem by R.S Thomas. A tragic story that we must continue to share.  

The remnants of Capel Celyn still  remain visible to visitors to the lake at certain times of the year, when water levels reduce.  A powerful reminder  of our history and our land, and how it has been exploited to serve the interests of others. 

Cofiwch Dryweryn. Drowned against the wishes of all Welsh MPs, the water of this reservoir still supplies Liverpool with drinking water, with no benefit to Wales. A  powerful  reminder that a English government  very rarely has Wales' best interests at heart. 

R.S Thomas -  Resevoirs 

There are places in Wales I don't go: 

Resevoirs  that are the subconscious 

Of a people, troubled far down

with gravestones, chapels, villages even: 

The serenity of their expression 

Revolts me,  it is a pose

for strangers, a watercolour's appeal 

To the mass, instead  of the poem's 

Harsher conditions. There are the hills 

Too; gardens under the scum 

Of the forests, and the smashed faces 

Of the farms with the stone trickle 

Of their tears down the hills' side.  

Where can I go,  then, from  the smell 

Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead 

Nation? I have walked the shore 

For an hour and seen the English 

Scavenging among the remains 

Of our culture, covering the sand 

Like the tide and, with the roughness 

Of the tide, elbowing our language 

Into the grave that we have dug for it.      

Huw Jones - Dwr ( inspired by Tryweryn)    Capel Celyn - The drowning of a village

The Second Olive Tree - Mahmoud Darwish

 

Olive cultivation is ancient across the Mediterranean, but in Palestine, the olive tree transcends agriculture. It is a living record of memory, continuity, and an enduring historical presence. For generations, these groves have been venerated and passed down, sustaining tens of thousands of Palestinian families.

The olive harvest in the occupied West Bank officially began on October 15. A time when families gather in groves passed down through centuries, picking fruit from trees that symbolize a powerful rootedness, resilience, and their deep connection to the land and a refusal to abandon their heritage.  

They would help bring in the crops, eat breakfast together in the shade of the trees, and listen to stories and jokes. In the evenings they would bring the harvest back to the villages and directly to the olive press, watching it being processed into oil. The gleaming green and spicy taste of the first bit of freshly pressed oil would be a source of pride and celebration.

As farmers gather their olives currently there's a bittersweet undertone to the usual joy. Under Israeli occupation, the harvest has become a time of violence, fear, destruction, and dispossession as escalating Israeli settler violence, military raids, access restrictions and settlement expansion, including the rapid establishment of dozens of outposts, increasingly prevent Palestinians from reaching their farms and severing their ties to their land.  

Out of roughly 2 million olive trees in Gaza before October 2023, only 150,000 trees remain standing. This is a loss of roughly 85% to 90% of the region's olive groves. 

There  has been a record-breaking Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian olive harvest in West Bank.

Israeli settlers have carried out more than 200 attacks against Palestinians during the current olive harvest season in the occupied West Bank, surpassing the 185 recorded in the 2025 season, the UN said on Thursday.

Ecocide is the deliberate, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems necessary to sustain human life. Many experts would agree that Israel's systematic destruction of Palestinian farmlands, aquifers, and trees would qualify as ecocide. 

Under international humanitarian law including the Geneva Conventions, any objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population like agricultural areas are granted special protections during conflict.  

Olive oil and table olives are crucial to Gaza's local agricultural economy, but in Palestinian culture, olive trees are much more than just a commodity. They are symbols of continuity, resilience, and attachment to the soil. 

Many groves are hundreds of years old and passed down through generations.Unlike annual crops like tomatoes or cucumbers that can be replanted and harvested in a single season, mature olive trees represent decades of invested capital. Losing them wipes out a reliable source of income for thousands of families, leaving them dependent on foreign aid.

Seasons may change, villages may lose their familiar features, and people may be forcibly separated from their homes, but the olive tree remains a witness to the story of the land and to their right to their homeland, their memories, and their future.

Notwithstanding all obstacles, the olive harvest remains a key economic, social and cultural event for Palestinians. In a way the occupation has even strengthened the connection between the Palestinian people and their trees, and the annual harvest is seen by many as an act of defiance and a symbol of “summoud”, the Arabic term for steadfastness.

The destruction of a tree  however is cruelty, it is not "self-defense". Settlers and the military destroying trees just shows they have no true respect for the land and what is growing on it. No matter the historical narratives claimed, the very ideology of uprooting ancient, life-giving groves exposes a colonizing force that fundamentally fails to grasp the sacred, symbolic pulse of the region. 

To destroy an olive tree is to wage war on memory; to defend it is to defend the right to exist.The Palestinian people remain as deeply anchored as the trees they plant and protect with their lives,bound by a history that refuses to be uprooted. No matter what the criminals do, this land will not forget the olive trees; or the blood of its children shed upon it. 

The following  poem  by Mahmoud Darwish, details the importance of the Olive Tree as a symbol for peace in Palestine.

The Second Olive Tree - Mahmoud Darwish 

Translated by Marilyn Hacker  

The olive tree does not weep and does not laugh. The olive tree 

Is the hillside’s modest lady. Shadow  

Covers her single leg, and she will not take her leaves off in front of the storm. 

Standing, she is seated, and seated, standing.  

She lives as a friendly sister of eternity, neighbour of time  

That helps her stock her luminous oil and  

Forget the invaders’ names, except the Romans, who 

Coexisted with her, and borrowed some of her branches  

To weave wreaths.They did not treat her as a prisoner of war  

But as a venerable grandmother, before whose calm dignity  

Swords shatter. In her reticent silver-green 

Colour hesitates to say what it thinks, and to look at what is behind  

The portrait, for the olive tree is neither green nor silver.  

The olive tree is the colour of peace, if peace needed  

A colour. No one says to the olive tree: How beautiful you are!  

But: How noble and how splendid! And she, 

She who teaches soldiers to lay down their rifles 

And re-educates them in tenderness and humility:

Go home  And light your lamps with my oil!But 

These soldiers, these modern soldiers  

Besiege her with bulldozers and uproot her from her lineage  

Of earth. They vanquished our grandmother who foundered,  

Her branches on the ground, her roots in the sky.  

She did not weep or cry out. But one of her grandsons  

Who witnessed the execution threw a stone  

At a soldier, and he was martyred with her.  

After the victorious soldiers  

Had gone on their way, 

we buried him there, in that deep  

Pit – the grandmother’s cradle. 

And that is why we were  

Sure that he would become, in a little while, an olive  

Tree  – a thorny olive tree – and green!

Happy 100th Birthday Thích Nhất Hạn ( 11 October 1926 – 22 January 2022)

Poet and Peace Activist Thích Nhất Hạnh was born on October 11, 1926  in Huế, Central Vietnam. Born as Nguyen Xuan Bao, his father, Nguyễn Đình Phúc, from Thành Trung village in Thừa Thiên, Huế, was an official with the French administration. His mother, Trần Thị Dĩ, was a homemaker from Gio Linh district.

Nhất Hạnh was the fifth of their six children. Until he was five, he lived with his large extended family at his grandmother's home. He recalled feeling joy at age seven or eight after he saw a drawing of a peaceful Buddha, sitting on the grass. On a school trip, he visited a mountain where a hermit lived who was said to sit quietly day and night to become peaceful like the Buddha. They explored the area, and he found a natural well, which he drank from and felt completely satisfied. It was this experience that led him to want to become a Buddhist monk.

 At age 12, he expressed an interest in training to become a monk, which his parents, cautious at first, eventually let him pursue at age 16 and he joined the Từ Hiếu Temple at age 16 and took the name Thích Nhất Hạnh when he was ordained in 1949 as modern Vietnam's founding revolutionary Ho Chi Minh led efforts to liberate the Southeast Asian country from its French colonial rulers. 

Thích Nhất Hạnh (affectionately known as Thầy, which means “teacher”) is deservedly recognized not only as one of the great Buddhists of our time, but also as one of the great contemplatives of any spiritual tradition. Thầy, distilled Buddhist teachings on compassion and suffering into easily grasped guidance over a lifetime dedicated to working for peace. 

From the early days of his monastic life, Thích Nhất Hạnh believed that spirituality must be actively engaged in relieving suffering in society. In the 1960s, as war raged in Vietnam, he founded youth relief teams, schools, and a new Buddhist order dedicated to social service.

Thầy, who spoke seven languages in1961 went to the United States to study, teaching comparative religion for a time at Princeton and Columbia universities.    

Thầy,plunged into anti-war activism after his return to his homeland in 1964 as the Vietnam War was escalating.As the suffering caused by the war between communist North Vietnam and US-supported South Vietnam intensified, Thay and other Buddhist clergy looked for ways to alleviate suffering and find a way to peace. In Vietnam, Thay established the School of Youth for Social Services (SYSS), a training program for young social workers wishing to bring practical aid and social support to war-torn villages. 

Realizing that the roots of the war were outside Vietnam as well as inside it, Thay agreed to come to the U.S. to represent the Buddhist clergy’s understanding of the war and its causes and consequences

 In June 1965  he wrote a letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to explain why monks were setting themselves on fire. He stated that it was very difficult to make their voices heard against the war, and burning oneself was done out of a deep desire to help others notice their suffering. 

He emphasized that self-immolation in this context was rooted in love and the wish to protect people, differentiating it completely from personal despair or suicide. During a famous interview with Oprah Winfrey, Thầy explained that the self-immolation of monks during the Vietnam War was not an act of suicide, but an act of love and compassion.

In 1966, he met the U.S. civil rights leader in what was a remarkable encounter for both. Thầy told King he was a “Bodhisattva,” or enlightened being, for his efforts to promote social justice and famously persuaded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to oppose the Vietnam War by sharing a simple truth: “Men are not our enemies. If we kill men, with whom shall we live?”. 

In 1967, King gave a famous speech at Riverside Church boldly articulating his opposition to the Vietnam War. 

Thích Nhất Hạnh taught that working for peace is not a matter of anger or blame, but of love in action. “We should not walk ‘for’ peace. We should be peace as we walk,” 

The monk’s efforts to promote reconciliation between the U.S.-backed South and communist North Vietnam so impressed King that a year later he nominated Thầy for the Nobel Peace Prize saying "I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam," His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”“However, no prize would be awarded that year. 

Thay’s peace plan urging America to stop bombing and to offer reconstruction aid without ideological strings,  resulted in the government of South Vietnam declaring him a traitor and banned him from returning. After the Communists seized control of the South in 1975, he was again refused permission to enter Vietnam. His principled anti-war stance had made him an enemy of both sides, leaving him, he said, “like a bee without a beehive.”    

In exile, Thay settled in the south of France and established the Plum Village Monastery, which would be his new home for decades, and remains the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and America. 

.There and in talks and retreats around the world he introduced Zen Buddhism, at its essence, as peace through compassionate listening.There, he also founded the Order of Inter-being, which espouses “engaged Buddhism” grounded in the insight that mindfulness and compassion should translate into concrete action to build peace and well-being in the world. 

I happen  to share this ethos of compassionate engagement: which emphasizes “social cohesion and collective action” to address challenges and “building the new world within the shell of the old” through cooperation. 

Thầy showed that true happiness requires us not only to be peaceful within, but also to act peacefully without – to serve others, promote justice, and heal the wounds of society. 

Thay spoke out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying, “We know very well that airplanes, guns and bombs cannot remove wrong perceptions. Only loving speech and compassionate listening can help people correct wrong perceptions. But our leaders are not trained in that discipline, and they rely only on the armed forces to remove terrorism.” 

He encouraged us to address the root causes of violence and cultivate peace in our hearts. Thay brought together Israelis and Palestinians for peacebuilding retreats at Plum Village, continuing his lifelong commitment to ending conflict. Throughout his writings, interviews, and speeches he continued to draw connections between the personal and the collective, promoting mindfulness not merely as a tool for self-help but as a necessary precondition for avoiding war and climate catastrophe. 

Thay also spoke out about the urgency of addressing climate change, writing, “There’s a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with Earth. Our personal and collective happiness and survival depends on it.”

Thay wrote over a 100  books on peace. Some of his best-known are "Peace is in Every Step," "Being Peace," "The Miracle of Mindfulness," and "Living Buddha, Living Christ" In a majestic body of works and public appearances spanning decades, Thầy spoke in gentle yet powerful tones of the need to "walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet." 

Thay is also  remembered  as being the father of mindfulness which has been hugely successful in the West.The energy of being fully present and aware in each moment. He often guided people in the simple practice of mindful breathing to return to the “here and now,” where life is actually available. “Breathing in, I calm my body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is the only moment,” he wrote. This gentle exercise encapsulates an entire philosophy: through conscious breathing and smiling to life, we generate peace within ourselves. Thay promoted mindfulness not merely as a tool for self-help but as a necessary precondition for avoiding war and climate catastrophe. 

In his book, “Living Buddha, Living Christ”, Thay wrote that “mindfulness, the capacity to be here, to witness deeply everything that happens in the present moment, is the beginning of enlightenment”. He also described practices of mindfulness as lighting the “lamps with us” to gain a deeper understanding of our worlds so that we can work towards enlightenment.

Thay wrote that the seeds of mindfulness are in all of us, just as “Buddha nature” described in Buddhism or “Kingdom of God within our hearts” in Christianity.  

In the book, “Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire”, one chapter contains a letter that Thay wrote to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. Thay pointed to “intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, …hatred and discrimination which lie in the heart of” people, as the real enemies ". 

Thay was referring to the notion that people have parts which may be marked by intolerance and discrimination against others, which are the enemies, not the individual human beings. Thay highlighted that we need to look at parts of ourselves that are intolerant of others and attempt to heal these parts. 

"You learn how to suffer. If you know how to suffer, you suffer much, much less. And then you know how to make good use of suffering to create joy and happiness," he said in a 2013 lecture. "The art of happiness and the art of suffering always go together."

Sadly capitalism has quickly appropriated the practice of mindfulness  this technique of meditation, converting it into another instrument of multiplying profits. 

This suggests that meditation techniques in themselves do not automatically entail developing more ethical or empathetic attitudes. To my mind, in contemporary Western culture, where almost everyone practices this or that, it needs to be repeated ad nauseam that without deep, hard and continuous work on one’s egotistical limitations, spiritual practices can only be superficial.

Thay was only allowed back into the country in 2005, when the communist-ruled government welcomed him back in the first of several visits. Nhat Hanh remained based in southern France.  

The dramatic homecoming seemed to signal an easing of controls on religion. Thầy's followers were invited by the abbot of Bat Nha to settle at his mountain monastery, where they remained for several years until relations with the authorities began to sour over Thầy's calls for an end to government control over religion. By late 2009 to early 2010, Thầy's followers were evicted from the monastery and from another temple where they had taken refuge.

Thầy suffered a stroke in 2014 that left him unable to speak and returned to Vietnam to live out his final days in the central city of Hue, the ancient capital and his place of birth, after spending much of his adult life in exile. 

Thầy passed away peacefully at Tu Hieu Temple on 22nd January, 2022, at the age of 95, surrounded by  his  followers. Per his wishes, his funeral was a silent one, with solemn guests following his teachings of quiet reflection.His five-day funeral, which began on the day of his death, had a seven-day wake that culminated with his cremation on 29 January. 

Born in the throes of colonialism and war, Thích Nhất Hạnh was extraordinary in his insight and ability to bring the dharma to the modern world. He showed us how to live with clarity of purpose even when all seems lost. 

Thầy’s life was a testament to the power of consciousness: even after a severe stroke late in life, he continued to emanate peaceful presence in his silence, teaching by example that being is sometimes more powerful than words or action. Visionary yet practical, compassionate yet bold, the spirit of Thích Nhất Hạnh lives on in every initiative for peace and well-being. Happy 100th Birthday Thích Nhất Hạn.

 "Hope is important, because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear,"  "If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.  "If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here."

-Thich Nhat Hanh 

 "Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see."

- Thích Nhất Hạn  .

 Kiss The Earth -Thich Nhat Hanh

Walk and touch peace every moment. 

Walk and touch happiness every moment. 

Each step brings a fresh breeze. 

Each step makes a flower bloom. 

Kiss the Earth with your feet. 

Bring the Earth your love and happiness. 

The Earth will be safe 

when we feel safe in ourselves.

Remembering Ernesto "Che" Guevara on his Death Anniversary

On this day in 1967, Argentine revolutionary socialist, Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna, 

familiarly known by the Argentinian slang word “Che", was executed on the orders of the CIA after he had been captured by the Bolivian Army in Vallegrande, Bolivia. 

The hunt for Che in Bolivia was led by CIA agent Felix Rodriguez. A informant told the Bolivian Special Forces about the location of Guevara's guerrilla unit, and on October 8, 1967, the unit's camp was surrounded, and Guevara himself was captured in the Quebrada del Yuro ravine. 

Che was wounded in the leg, and another bullet pierced the magazine of his rifle so that he was unable to fire back. Rodriguez, upon hearing of Guevara's capture, immediately reported it to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.  

Che Guevara spent the night of October 8-9 in captivity on the floor of the village school of La Higuera, with the bodies of his two murdered comrades lying next to him.   

On October 9 at 12:30 a radio order came from the high command in La Paz. The message said: "Proceed with the elimination of Señor Guevara." The order, signed by the president of the military government of Bolivia, Rene Barrientes Ortuño, was transmitted in encrypted form to CIA agent Felix Rodriguez. 

The executioner was Bolivian army sergeant Mario Teran, who drew the short straw in a dispute between soldiers over the right to kill Guevara. When Terán, the soldier who would execute him, entered the room, Guevara reportedly said “I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man.”   

Guevara’s body was strapped to the skids of a helicopter and flown to Vallegrande, a small town 65 kilometres away, before being moved to an open-air laundry in the grounds of a hospital. It was here that the international press was summoned and the famous Christ-like photograph of his lifeless bearded corpse  taken by Bolivian photojournalist Freddy Alborta. 

Alborta's post mortem photo of Guevara,  1967

It is probable that Che would have been compared to Christ being taken down from the cross in any case. He was in his 30s when he died, he had long hair and a beard, and he gave his life for the cause of the working class and the peasants in a deeply Catholic country. And probably his image would only grown in its inspiration – that change would arrive in Bolivia and that the poor could eventually live in dignity.  But the photograph  that emerged seems to me to be a powerful visual and artistic reminder of Che’s redemptive powers.

Fearing that it might become a place of pilgrimage, the authorities decided not to bury the revolutionaries in the local cemetery. Instead, they were concealed in a mass grave in the corner of an airfield.

A mural dedicated to Che Guevara in Vallegrande, where his body was taken and displayed to the international press. This is now part of the Che Route, sponsored by the Bolivian government and foreign solidarity groups. 

On October 15, Fidel Castro announced Guevara's death to the public. Guevara's death was considered a severe blow to the socialist revolutionary movement in Latin America and around the world.  

In his last letter to his children, Guevara wrote  “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”

Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna was born to a well-off family in Argentina in 1928. While studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, he took time off to travel around South America on a motorcycle; during this time, he witnessed the poverty and oppression of the lower classes. He received a medical degree in 1953 and continued his travels around Latin America, becoming involved with left-wing organizations.

In the mid 1950s, Guevara met up with Fidel Castro and his group of exiled revolutionaries in Mexico. Guevara played a key role in Castro’s seizure of power from Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and later served as Castro’s right-hand man and minister of industry. Guevara strongly opposed U.S. domination in Latin America and advocated peasant-based revolutions to combat social injustice in Third World countries.

Guevara resigned from his Cuban government post in April 1965, then disappeared from Cuba, traveled to Africa and eventually resurfaced in Bolivia, where he was killed.

The legacy of Che Guevara is constantly evolving in the collective imagination. As a symbol of counterculture worldwide, Guevara is one of the most recognizable and influential revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. An icon of global popular culture, as well as a hero of Third World communist revolutionary movements and a symbol of the Western Leftist Movement. He remains a monumental figure in Latin American history, influencing a half-century of political ideals and movements. 

In Cuba, an economic blockade led the island to act in defiance of U.S. power, creating in its wake an internationalist foreign policy. Guevara played a key role in the ideology and action needed to carry out these policies. 

Today, despite a 66-year-long US blockade of Cuba and the current intensified blockade that has caused a humanitarian disaster, the country allocates about 14% of its national budget to education. According to the World Bank, Cuba had a 98% literacy rate as of 2021, and UNICEF reports a 100% primary school completion rate. 

Education has long been a cornerstone of the Cuban Revolution, and universal education is one of its greatest successes. In 1961, Cuba launched a mass literacy campaign targeting rural areas. Illiteracy declined from 23% to 3.9% that year alone. 

Education is completely free in Cuba, even at the highest level. This means that, in addition to primary and secondary school, Cubans can access university education, postgraduate studies, medical school, and all other fields of study at no charge.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 79 per cent of adults in the United States had sufficient English literacy skills as of 2019. This means that one in five adults in the United States lacks these skills.In September 2025, the Nation’s Report Card revealed that high school seniors' reading scores dropped to their lowest average since 1992, signalling falling literacy rates. 

Professors at the University of California system are expressing frustration that their students also lack basic middle-school math skills.

While the United States has long targeted Cuba and its socialist system, it seems that the island country's dedication to investing in accessible educational opportunities for every citizen has generated results superior to those of the capitalist United States, even though the latter has a much larger economy and more global power.

The following  photo was taken on March 5, 1960, seven years before Guevara’s death, at a funeral for workers killed in an explosion in a Cuban port that Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government blamed on the Americans. 

Guevara, looked on as Castro delivered a fiery funeral oration. For about thirty seconds, he stepped to the front of a crowd near Castro’s rostrum, into the view of newspaper photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, also known as Alberto Korda. Korda snapped two shots of Guevara, his face resolute and his long hair flowing from under his trademark beret, before Guevara retreated back into the crowd. Perhaps due to his background as a fashion photographer, Korda took a liking to one of the images and cropped it into a portrait, even though the newspaper La Revolución declined to use it.  

For several years, the now-iconic photo remained nothing more than a personal favorite of the man who took it. Korda named the picture Guerrillero Heroico—“Heroic Guerrilla Warrior”—and hung it on his wall, occasionally handing out copies to guests. It was not until 1967 that the public would first see the image, which appeared in the magazine Paris Match alongside an article about Latin American guerrilla movements.  

During Guevara's, memorial service in Havana, an enormous print of Guerrillero Heroico was hung over the façade of the Ministry of the Interior. The service marked Che’s canonization as a martyr of global revolution, as well as the ascendance of Korda’s image as an icon of rebellion.  

The following year the image of Guevara went viral. It appeared on the cover of a copy of Guevara's memoirs, published in Italy. It was also used as the cover of a literary journal advertised on the New York City subway. 

In the same year, Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick created a stylized version of the image, setting a black-and-white Guevara against a red background, and distributed it as widely as he could to honor Guevara’s legacy. The poster bearing this image was shown at the Arts Laboratory in London. It quickly became the image used prominently in the student riots that swept across France in May 1968. 

Since then, Che’s face has been commodified, merchandised and objectified, appearing on T-shirts, ice cream wrappers, posters and mural art. His life is told in films, such as The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), in documentaries, plays, and in songs. 

Yet the rights to Che’s face are not owned by the Guevara family, but by the photographer and artist who created the image. The famous photograph of Guevara in a beret was taken by Alberto Korda (Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez) in 1960, titled Guerrillero Heroico (Heroic Guerrilla Warrior). British pop artist Sir Peter Blake regarded it as ‘one of the great icons of the 20th century.’ 

This photograph was the beginning of the commodification of the image of Che. Che’s image is an ever-present political and social emblem that has been morphed in popular culture. It operates as ‘both a fashionable de-politicized logo, as well as a potent anti-establishment symbol used by a wide spectrum of human rights movements and individuals affirming their own liberation.’  

Che’s image has become a counter-cultural symbol that operates independent of who he was as a person, metamorphosed from his life as a revolutionary appropriated into a work of art. Hannah Charlton writes in The Sunday Times (2006) that ‘Possibly more than the Mona Lisa, more than images of Christ, more than comparable icons such as the Beatles or Monroe, Che’s image has continued to hold the imagination of generation after generation.’ 

Che's short life reveals Cuba’s resilience in the struggle to provide the needs of the people through the Cuban Revolution, especially those whose ethnic identity and race are factors in their economic and political oppression.Time magazine selected him as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century.

Che  remains a polarizing figure; admired by some as a symbol of idealism and revolutionary dedication, a heroic defender of the oppressed and poor,while others criticize him as a violent adventurer, an executioner and the "Butcher Of la Cabaña" while Jean Paul-Sartre, Susan Sontag, Nelson Mandela and many others have regarded him as a hero and an inspiration, a man who was prepared to die for his beliefs. 

What made Che unique was the unorthodox current of Marxism-Leninism he represented. Unlike those who believed revolution had to wait until all the perfect material conditions emerged, Che argued that revolutionaries had a duty to create those conditions through struggle itself. His theory of guerrilla warfare held that even a small group of committed revolutionaries could spark broader popular movements rather than waiting indefinitely for history to move on its own.

He believed that revolution was not just an external process, but an internal, almost spiritual, struggle to develop new values, ethics, and forms of consciousness: the creation of a “New Man.”  

Che also rejected the idea that socialism could be built in one state and survive indefinitely in isolation, and his life reflected the belief that the struggle for socialism had to be global or risk total defeat.

 Che understood the centrality of ethics in politics, the centrality of subjective factors in revolution, leading to the rapid transformation of Cuban society into a giant school of reclaiming Cuban culture and ethical values.  

Hence, the literacy and “voluntary labour” campaigns, the advances in education and medicine, and the large scale involvement of people in movements for agrarian reform, housing reform, and so on. These movements and campaigns converted idealistic goals into on-the-ground realities that have continued to evolve, making possible what one could have never imagined even in one’s wildest dreams.  

Rejecting the use of capitalist methods to fight capitalism, Che alongside Fidel Castro used the methods of socialist praxis to transform what began as a national liberation struggle into a socialist revolution that would transform institutions and social and human relations through an organised and conscious “praxis” that—despite errors recognised publicly by both of them and their successors—continues till today.  

Che also repeatedly warned about the dangers of not seeing the deficiencies of “existing socialism” and of mechanically copying Soviet manuals and methods. He had spoken about this often, and this is also explicitly stated in his writings preserved in Cuba and available around the world. He observed that the “intransigent dogmatism of the Stalin era has been succeeded by an inconsistent pragmatism . . . returning to capitalism.” 

He saw the actions and programmes of the Cuban Revolution as “clashing with what one reads in the (Soviet) textbooks” and contributed insightful socialist critiques of both capitalist and socialist societies and their theories.  

History has never agreed on what to make of him. His story resists simplicity. What remains certain is that he lived—and died—according to absolute conviction. In the final hours before leaving for a war he would not survive, he was thinking about his children. Not about fame. Not about legacy. But about what values he hoped they would carry forward. “Study and read diligently,” he wrote. “Remember that an individual has no value alone.” Stand for something. Learn everything you can. Never be indifferent to suffering." 

In death, Che Guevara would become the iconic symbol of revolutionary martyrdom; giving up his own life with no fear, for the cause of fighting oppression and liberating others. His ideas and actions inspired many leftist movements across Latin America and beyond, particularly among youth and radical groups in the 1960s.Murals, paintings and pictures of Che Guevara can be found all over the world in the poorest areas.

Che went down in history as a man who devoted himself entirely, without reserve, to the noble and difficult struggle for the liberation of man, for the triumph of communist ideals. Che Guevara's life today is an inspiring symbol of heroism and devotion to the ideals of revolution and socialism and  he  remains a global symbol of hope, resistance, and fighting oppression. Martyrs don't die, they live through us.

In July 1997, his remains were discovered; and sent back to Cuba, where they were reburied in a ceremony attended by President Fidel Castro and thousands of Cubans.In October, the Council of State of Cuba issued a notice designating the period from the 11th to the 17th of that month as a national period of mourning, and his remains were interred at the Che Guevara Square in Santa Clara. 

Comrade Che dedicated his life to the struggle against the imperialist bandits who oppress and exploit the world's peoples, chief among them the greatest enemy of the human race, the USA. 

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.  ”  -Ernesto 'Che' Guevara 

"Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary"- .Ernesto 'Che' Guevara 

"Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons."  -Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Salute . Comrade Che is immortal! Patria o muerte y venceremos! Hasta la victoria siempre!

Photo: an activist paints a mural honouring Che on the apartheid wall in the occupied West Bank.

Celebrating The Life of Mexican-Catalan Surrealist Artist Remedios Varo (16 December 1908 – 8 October 1963)

 

 Kati Horna, Portrait of Remedios Varo in her studio, 1963 © Norah Horna; Image courtesy of Walter Gruen

Mexican-Catalan surrealist artist  María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was born in Angles, in Catalonia, on16 December 1908 in a home with a staunch Catholic mother and a free spirited father who was a hydraulic engineer. Her mother named her in honour of the patron saint of Anglès, Virgen de los Remedios (the Virgin of Remedies), after a recently deceased older sister.

Varo was heavily influenced by father, who taught her to draw, and her strict Catholic schooling, against which she rebelled. Varo took a critical view of formal religion, rejecting the dominant ideology of her childhood education, and hewed to the liberal and universalist ideas that her father had instilled in her. Catholicism still came to bear great influence on her work, and she often differed from surrealist contemporaries with these frequent religious references.

It was her father who taught her to draw and supported her desire to become an artist.  She was only 15 years old when she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and during the 1920s she was influenced bt the city's artistic avant-garde, including Lorca, and  pursued surrealism and  political  change.

Varo moved to Barcelona in the mid-1930s and joined the Surrealist avant-garde art group Logicophobista. The increasing unrest in Spain in the 1930s led her to travel to Paris, where she became involved in surrealist circles. In Paris, Varo became deeply involved with the Paris-based Surrealists, associated and exhibited with them, exploring magic, alchemy, and analytical psychology. and her work was exhibited in the ground-breaking exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1936), as well as multiple early Surrealist exhibitions around the globe: Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Tokyo, 1936), Surrealist Objects & Poems (London, 1937), Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Paris, 1938), Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo (Mexico City, 1940), to name a few.   

She had an unconventional personal life involving multiple lovers and partners, and often worked odd jobs or even forged paintings in order to remain independent.

Encountering many events of political unrest throughout her life, she was frequently starting afresh.In 1939, the Nationalists claimed victory in Spain and Francisco Franco disallowed anyone associated with the Republicans from entering the country. Varo became permanently unable to return to her home and was isolated from her family. This deeply affected her and was a source of pain and regret throughout her life.

 After World War II began, the poet Benjamin Péret was arrested by the French government for his political beliefs, he was a member of the Trotskyist POUM  and Varo was imprisoned as his romantic partner. 

A few days after Varo was freed, the Germans seized Paris, and she was forced to join other refugees leaving the city. In 1941 Varo boarded the Serpa Pinto in Marseilles to flee Nazi-dominated Europe. The terrors she experienced in her earlier years impacted her significantly.  

She moved to Mexico in 1942 where she remained for the rest of her life, “in this country I have found the tranquility that I have always searched for”. 

She settled in Mexico City and became part of a vibrant community of Mexican and European artists who drew inspiration from Mexico’s culture and geography, among other things  and connected with other exiled artists such as Alice Rahon, Wolfgang Paalen  and Gordon Onslow Ford.  

However, because Mexican muralism still dominated the country’s art scene, surrealism was generally not well received.  While there is little overt influence of Mexican art on her work, Varo and other surrealists were captivated by the seemingly porous borders between the marvellous and the real in Mexico.  Varo also turned to a wide range of mystic and hermetic traditions, encompassing her belief in magic and animistic faiths. 

She felt connected to nature and often illustrated the relationships between plant, human, animal, and mechanical worlds. Her fascination with science including Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwinian evolution, has been noted by admirers of her art.  

She turned with equal interest to the ideas of Carl Jung as to the theories of George Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis, and was as fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail as with sacred geometry, witchcraft, alchemy, and the I Ching. 

Referred to as a ‘sorceress‘, Varo expressed her beliefs on witchcraft in a letter to English author Gerald Gardner: 

“personally, I don’t believe I am endowed with any special powers, but instead with an ability to see relationships of cause and effect differently, and this beyond the ordinary limits of common logic.” 

She often portrayed the spiritual journey as a solitary one—her characters are seekers, travellers, experimenters. They are caught mid-process: studying, weaving, conjuring, floating through celestial corridors. This speaks not only to the esoteric traditions she admired, but to her personal understanding of the artist as a kind of spiritual scientist,working in secret, transmuting inner experience into vision.  Her technical precision,detailed brushwork, refined draughtsmanship, and softly glowing light—supports the illusion of reality while simultaneously making the fantastic feel entirely plausible. The world she presents is not chaotic or dreamlike in the Freudian sense; it is structured, meaningful, filled with laws, tools, and rituals. 

It suggests a universe governed by hidden logic, one that can be glimpsed through spiritual discipline and creative work.  

Varo’s work resonates with the Hermetic principle of “as above, so below.” 

Her paintings frequently mirror cosmic and microcosmic scales—machines that replicate the movements of the stars, beings whose actions influence distant realms. This idea of correspondence reflects her belief that the inner world is not separate from the outer, but a reflection of it, and that art can illuminate that hidden correspondence.   

Her closest friends  and collaborators  in Mexico became the British artist Leonora Carringtonhttps://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-magical-world-of-surrealist-leonora.html  and the Hungarian photojournalist Kati Horna. They were so close that they were referred to as “the three witches”. 

The portrait above of Varo was taken by Horna in 1957, while Carrington made the mask she wears.  

Carrington and Varo formed one of the great creative friendships in modern art, the two women trading dreams, recipes and imagery for two decades.  

Carrington had her own harrowing route to Mexico first, including a breakdown that landed her in a Spanish psychiatric asylum in 1940.  

Despite widespread belief, Remedios Varo never became a Mexican citizen. Though she never returned to her homeland, she kept her Spanish citizenship, unlike her friend Leonora Carrington, who was naturalized as citizen of Mexico.[

During her early years in Mexico City, Varo honed her distinctive painting style while working various odd jobs, most notably creating illustrations for the pharmaceutical firm Casa Bayer between 1942 and 1949. 

It was not until 1949 that she was able to seriously engage in painting, and a few years later her marriage to the Austrian emigrant Walter Gruen meant that she did not have to worry about finances.

In the same  period  she began to develop her mature personal style. During succeeding decades, she devoted increased time and energy to her art, and she delved further into the fantastical sources that captured her imagination.   

Remedios Varo, who declared that “the dream world and the real world are the same,” attempted to combine vastly different techniques, ideas, and fantasies in an almost alchemical manner in her paintings, which have an enigmatic, cinematic character often incorporating hybrid creatures.  

She used the random processes of surrealism, but was at the same time incredibly precise, meticulous, and classical in her painterly expression and in her colour approach, which has clear relations to Italian painting from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.  

Tyveri af substans, 1955. Photo: Alex Aldaco.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Varo experienced domestic stability that enabled her to devote the rest of her life to painting. During these years, she produced a body of work typified by its female and androgynous figures (often disguised portraits of Varo herself), mystical narrative content, and a quality of ambiguity, mystery, and dark humor. 

“Everything that she did or undid, however disparate that looked to an observer with prejudices, was done for what should be done, that is, with courage and without fear of consequences.” - Remedios Varo,

 Remedios Varo. Nightmare, 1947.

In this last decade of her career, she developed a unique and virtuosic painting style that paired detailed preparatory drawings and meticulous rendering of her primary subjects in the tradition of early Renaissance masters, with Surrealist-derived automatic techniques like decalcomania. 

The feminist dimension also occupies an essential place in Remedios Varo's career. The artist developed a conception of surrealism far removed from the dominant models of her time and formulated an imagery based on experiences, concerns, and forms of creativity linked to the female condition.  Her protagonists, especially the female figures, often appear as creators, explorers, scientists, or alchemists capable of transforming their environment. In this sense, her work can be read as a vindication of women's imagination and creative capacity in the face of cultural structures that had historically limited their autonomy.

Remedios Varo’s art is often read as a proto-feminist response to the overwhelmingly male voices of Surrealism.While Varo did not directly deem her work ‘feminist’, it was noted that “she stretches the limits of and directly challenges confabulated, patriarchal ideals of femininity”, as well as frequently focusing on female empowerment and agency. The androgynous figures characteristic of her later pieces also challenge gender, in that the figures do not fall neatly into normative categories. 

One critic stated, “because the female body, a sacred erotic artistic space, is transformed by Varo into non-gendered shapes and forms, namely animals and insects, the space becomes freed from monolithic sexual interpretation.”

While André Breton and his circle frequently depicted women as muses, objects of desire, or conduits to the unconscious, Varo reoriented this visual language. In her canvases, women are creators, seekers, and alchemists in their own right.

Remedios Varo, La creación de las aves (The Creation of the Birds), 1957

Remedios Varo, La llamada (The Call), 1961

Varo’s female figures are never passive. Instead, they actively shape their surroundings, wielding brushes, flasks, or arcane instruments. In La creación de las aves (The Creation of the Birds, 1957), the central figure (half-woman, half-owl) acts as a cosmic artist, channeling starlight into her creations. This image redefines creativity as a distinctly female, mystical power rather than a patriarchal privilege. Similarly, in La llamada (The Call, 1961), a robed woman strides through architectural ruins with flaming hair, embodying enlightenment and agency.  Domestic interiors, often coded in patriarchal society as sites of confinement, become in Varo’s hands spaces of experimentation and transformation. Kitchens, workshops, and bedrooms are transfigured into alchemical laboratories or portals to other worlds. By transforming the symbols of domesticity into metaphors of power, Varo blurred the boundary between the everyday and the magical, elevating women’s traditional spaces to arenas of liberation.

At the height of an era dominated by the great muralists, she created an inner universe that was meticulous and deeply intellectual. Her work serves as a bridge between science, alchemy, tarot, philosophy, botany, and astronomy.  

She was one of the first to place woman at the center of surrealism, not as a muse, but as a creator, scientist, and sorceress, demonstrating that art can be a laboratory for understanding the soul.

In 1956, Varo had her first major solo exhibition in Mexico City, and it catapulted her to the forefront of the art scene. She continued to exhibit widely thereafter.  

Remedios Varo. Armonía. 1956.

Her interest in bankers may be specifically tied to her Mexican context. The 1960s was a period of economic stability and growth in Mexico. She may have intended the bankers to be symbols of authority or social conformity, which the female character appears to avoid. Like many of her late works,Banqueros has an assertive, protofeminist charge and carry echoes of her own experience of migration and exile.

Banqueros en acción reveals Varo’s bold imagination and multidisciplinary study. 

Her  premature death of a heart attack  on 8 October 1963 at the  age  of  54  in  Mexico City occurred as she was reaching new renown.André Breton, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/09/andre-breton-1921896-28966.html who is considered the spiritual father figure of surrealism, paid tribute to her with the words: “The sorceress has left us too soon”.

 

Remedios Varo, "Bordando el manto terrestre" ("Embroidering the Earth's Mantle"), 1961

Eight years after her death, her 1971 retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno drew record crowds for the museum. The city she had arrived in as a refugee queued around the block for her.

Varo created roughly 400 works of art, over half of them drawings, which are now globally dispersed. Walter Gruen donated 38 significant artworks to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. 

In 2023, Varo was the subject of the solo exhibition Remedios Varo: Science Fictions at the Art Institute of Chicago. In fall 2026, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark staged the first ever major solo museum exhibition in Europe dedicated to her work.    

Varo's work has been acquired by museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. She has had solo shows at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2000); Mexican Fine Arts Museum, Chicago, (2000); Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (1971, 1983, 1994, 2001, 2016, 2018); and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba), Argentina (2020).     

Varo's work has been included in many group museum exhibitions, including Surrealism: Desire Unbound, Tate Modern Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2001); In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2012); Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Campo Cerrado: Spanish Art 1939-1953, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2016); The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2018); Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2020) and Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2020); Surrealism Beyond Borders, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021) and Tate Modern, London (2022); Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2022) and Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2022); and the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022).

 Remedios Varo remains a fundamental figure in Surrealism and one of the most transcendent artists of the 20th century.Her legacy is that of the visionary as alchemist. She created a body of work that maps the spiritual journey not in abstraction, but in metaphor and image, tender, luminous, and filled with reverence for the hidden workings of the universe.

She is celebrated for her paintings that combine ideas of the occult, mysticism, psychoanalysis, astrology,alchemy, esotericism  and science. In her art, we are invited not just to observe, but to awaken.Her images blending nature with the built environment and feature characters and open-ended narratives that reflected her life and times. 63 years after her passing, lets remember her.

Remembering October 7 2023

Three years on, I remember the horrific events of October 7.The Hamas-led attack killed more than 1,200 people and saw 252 people abducted into Gaza. Those are facts that should not be forgotten. I  remember innocent lives lost, the families forever changed,lives shatterred and all those who continue to carry the pain of October 7.

What happened on 7 Oct shocked the world. The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, flew to Tel Aviv to express support for Israel. He was not alone, a host of Western leaders came to stand by Israel against attack. 

But remembering October 7 should not become a justification for collective punishment or endless suffering. Israeli and Palestinian civilians have both paid an unbearable price. We should remember the victims, demand accountability for crimes committed by all sides. 

I remember  the wave of destruction in Gaza and the terrible suffering Palestinians have experienced since. Israel has killed and continues to kill hundreds of thousands more than they lost on Oct 7 (and lets not forget they killed some of their own that day as well, not to mention Bibi's refusal to do anything in response to warnings)  Israeli military intelligence sent Netanyahu several letters between March and July 2023, warning him of the dangers. On top of that, multiple foreign countries warned him—yet  he failed to  act.

During the October 7 assault, the Israeli army gave the Hannibal directive, instructing troops to kill Israelis in order to stop them being taken hostage. By the time the attack was over, at least 314 Israeli soldiers and 809 civilians were dead, with 252 taken hostage, with the intention of exchanging them for some of the 2500 Palestinian hostages held without charge in Israel.

Subsequently October 7 marked the beginning of a monstrous genocidal onslaught that has not yet ended. Since October 7, 2023, the terrible ongoing violence against innocent civilians in Gaza has resulted in the deaths of over 70,000 Palestinians mostly civilians. Supposedly in response to Hamas’s attacks, in the name of “self-defense”, the far-right extremist Israeli government did not take the time for reflection, mourning, or negotiations for the release of hostages. 

Instead, they immediately sought “revenge” as a cover for land theft, while collectively blaming and punishing the entire population of Gaza, including countless children, for Hamas’s actions. 

The corruption and brutality of this genocidal vengeance has been unprecedented, atrocious, tragic, and infuriating. Three years of children amputated without anaesthesia. Three years in which over 2,700 entire family lines have been wiped out in Gaza. Three years of annihilation. Three years of engineered starvation. 

Three years of cutting off clean drinking water. Three years of targeting healthcare, with 36 of Gaza’s hospitals either destroyed or no longer fully functional. Three years of missing loved ones, buried under the rubble of their own homes.

The ongoing incremental dispossession of the Palestinian people has reached a crescendo, where Palestinian civilians are being murdered while  being denigrated as “human animals”, “terrorists” or “terrorist supporters.”  This is not war. It is genocide.   

I also acknowledge Palestinians have lived through their own October 7s for decades.For decades, Palestinians in Gaza have lived through displacement, occupation, blockade, repeated Israeli aggressions, and the loss of thousands of lives.  

As we remember the third year of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, we must look beyond October 7 to the history that shaped the lives of Palestinians long before that day. I refuse to reduce this history to a single day or indulge in a one-sided account. If we talk about October 7 without talking about what happened in the years before it, we are missing important context. History did not begin that morning. There was already a long and painful history behind it.

I do though call today, and every day, for an end to the violence, for peace and safety for all. For me, remembering October 7 must mean holding on to our humanity and refusing to accept endless conflict as inevitable. Standing firmly against the dehumanization of innocent lives, regardless of nationality or political affiliation.Every person, regardless of their background, deserves freedom, opportunity, dignity, life, love, and nourishment.We must keep pushing for a future where all peoples can live with dignity, security and peace.