Robin Blackburn
CHE GUEVARA: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE by John Lee Anderson (Bantam Press, R182,95)
CHE GUEVARA helped Fidel Castro to topple Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and then masterminded Cuba’s break with the United States. These events established him as a revolutionary statesman of global reputation. With his subsequent renunciation of the fruits of power and martyr’s death in Bolivia in 1967, he became a legend.
The smouldering prose of his diaries and essays explained why the man in the iconic poster felt that it was necessary for him to sacrifice his life for the wretched of the earth. Until now, there has been no remotely adequate life of this extraordinary individual.
John Lee Anderson opens this book by declaring: “My sole loyalty is to Che Guevara himself,” adding that his concern is “his truth not anyone else’s”. My fear that this heralded a hagiography soon vanished. Anderson shows no hesitation in detailing episode after episode in which Guevara, or the causes he worked for, is shown in an uncomfortable or unattractive light. He has researched diligently and has had access to much unpublished documentation.
Anderson is not, in fact, notably sympathetic to Guevara’s politics, nor does he do more than sketch the appalling social conditions and political crimes which drove Guevara from medicine to revolutionary politics. Yet this biography is nevertheless absorbing and convincing because of its wealth of new information and willingness to let Guevara himself speak, in quotations from letters and diaries.
By the closing chapters the full tragedy and nobility of Guevara’s last actions are, if anything, heightened by our knowledge of his mistakes and failings.
Anderson punctures the romantic view of guerrilla war by detailing the draconian punishment meted out to deserters. Guevara was himself a stern disciplinarian, a trait rendered only somewhat more acceptable by the fact that he demanded even more of himself than of others.
On this account Guevara was already attracted to Marxism and Maoism before he joined up with the Cubans. In a remarkable text of 1956, quoted here, he wrote: “The future belongs to the people and little by little or in one fell swoop they will seize power, here and in the whole world. The bad thing is that they have to become civilised and this can’t happen before, but only after taking power.”
Guevara, the son of Argentine bourgeois, concluded that his mission was to become a sort of latterday Saint-Just who would submerge himself in what he called, in a typically arresting and disturbing phrase, “the bestial howling of the triumphant proletariat”.
In a continent afflicted by hunger and dictatorship, and with exorbitant rates of infant mortality, Guevara’s driven personality and longing for social redemption corresponded to palpable needs. But his apocalyptic streak would lead to grave misjudgment, as when he appeared willing to risk war in 1962 rather than accept that the Soviet missile withdrawal had reduced the danger of invasion.
Anderson reminds us that Guevara, while at times fanatically intolerant of real or supposed weakness in himself or others, was nevertheless strikingly broad-minded – his ministry became a refuge for stubborn liberals, anarchistic Trotskyists and other oddballs whose independence of mind he cherished.
Unsurprisingly, Guevara could be guilty of a crude machismo, but this complex individual was also capable of great tenderness and withering self-criticism. Anderson has written an indispensable work of contemporary history and conveyed much of his subject’s awkward grandeur.