THERE is an astonishing photographic self portrait in this book, taken by a bald, slightly overweight, middle aged Uruguayan economist, "Adolfo Mena Gonzalez", in a Latin American hotel room in 1966. The photographer has his camera on his knees, and is capturing his extremely undistinguished reflection in the long mirror on the wardrobe. It is astonishing because of the dramatic and intended, contrast with that other photograph of the same man, better known as Ernesto Che Guevara, in which the famous face is framed by unruly hair, a wispy beard, and a black beret, the eyes looking thoughtfully at some private vision in the middle distance - the photograph which became an icon of the Sixties, venerated in a million student residences around the globe like a talisman, a late 20th century secular equivalent of the Infant of Prague.
By 1966 Guevara, expertly disguised to avoid the attentions of the Bolivian authorities, was on the last stages of a journey which had brought him from a troubled and awkward childhood in Argentina, through voyages of self discovery and deepening political consciousness, to the crucible of the Cuban revolution and finally to a disastrous attempt to export that revolution to his own birth place. This story of his short life - he was 39 when he died - is enriched by the author's access to numerous individuals, friends as well as enemies of the charismatic revolutionary, and by references to documents which in some cases have been concealed for thirty years or more. It is also notably clear sighted: while the portrait is undoubtedly sympathetic, it stops well short of adulation, and gives the reader more than enough information on which to base an independent assessment of Guevara's personality, motivation, and ultimate failure.
Guevara's youth was marked off from those of the general run of his contemporaries, both physically and psychologically. Though never a loner, he was always different, verging on oddness, his legendary lack of attention to personal hygiene and his chronic asthma counterbalanced by his quick wit and extraordinary charm. He was in no undue rush to complete his medical studies, and his earliest political opinions were inchoate. He embarked on an early tour of various Latin American countries - many of them, then, as some of them are still, in a state of political chassis - and became slowly politically radicalised, in Guatemala and Mexico more than anywhere else.
A chance meeting with Castro in Mexico was to follow. Che was two years younger than the Cuban, and their relationship in the years that followed was characterised by an intense loyalty on Che's part, a loyalty that survived often substantial ideological differences. The Cuban revolution itself was far from being, the Communist takeover popularised in US, propaganda. Che was increasingly a hard line Marxist, but Castro was anxious not to alienate the United States. Man of the revolutionaries including those under Che's direct command were "viscerally anti Communist", and objected strenuously, for example, to Che's suggestion that they should finance their activities by robbing banks.
The role played in that victory by Che cannot be underestimated. It was founded, not just on tactical skill, but on a single minded ruthlessness which left nothing to chance and in which Che came second only to Raul Castro. "Che's trail through the Sierra Maestra was littered with the bodies of chivatos (traitors), deserters and delinquents, men whose deaths he had ordered and in some cases carried out himself.", Even after thiry years, the description of some of these executions makes the blood run cold; nor is it surprising that the relevant records have been buried for most of that time. Che's summary justice shaded, often enough, into summary injustice. Some of his companions, understandably unimpressed by his argument that injustice was acceptable if ti was "sanitary", left.
Winning the peace turned out to be much more difficult than winning the war. Che was attempting not only to create a new economy and a new society from the most unpromising building blocks, but to rewrite Marx, or at least the official version of Marx as promulgated in the Soviet Union. Che's experience persuaded him that the point of departure of socialism was the guerrilla war, and that the base for Marxist change was in the armed forces not among urban workers or the Party cadres.
Travel abroad opened Che's eyes, sometimes too wide. The Soviet Union was a disappointment, and not only because of its interpretation of Marx. Despite its intermittent and genuine offers of help, it was a pigsty, where top art cadres dined off French porcelain, and which Che prophesied would turn capitalist.
China was something else: an undoubtedly superficial acquaintance with Maoism persuaded the Argentinian (as well as many others, it must in fairness be admitted) that this was where the best hope lay for mankind. Rose tinted spectacles were equally evident in other quarters - Sartre thought that Che was the "new man of the future."
For the United States, of course, Che was the devil incarnate: It was a time (1959) when the National Security Council was already discussing as if it were the most natural thing in the world, "bringing another government, to power in Cuba". But by attacking Castro when he was strong (at the Bay of Pigs) and, by refusing to negotiate with him when Cuba was weak successive US administrations only case hardened Castro's and Che's convictions. But while Castro had the job of running the country, Che found the internal politics of the government oppressive, and felt increasingly impatient about the unfinished work in Argentina and elsewhere.
"Elsewhere" meant, first, the Congo, to which Guevera led a bizarre expedition which utterly failed to rescue its Prince Minister, Patrice Lumumba, from the pincer movement created by the European colonial powers and the Congolese Army under Joseph Mobutu. It is curiously satisfying that Mobutu's downfall is currently being engineered largely by Laurent Kabila, who was Guevara's comrade in aims in the Congo enterprise. Thirty years ago, however, not even this combination of talents could prevent Colonel Mike Hoare's mercenaries and Mobutu from driving Guevara, backwards, his own men blaming their defeat on bad dawa or witchcraft. For the next six weeks, the defeated guerrilla was holed up in a room in the Cuban Embassy in Dar Es Salaam, until a way could be found to spirit him out.
Bolivia was his last enterprise. It would have been his second last, if his original plan to use Bolivia as a springboard to liberate Argentina had been successful. By now, however, Guevara's grasp on political reality was slipping. If he had paused for a moment to consider the folly of battling the United States (actively engaged in its own forms of subversion for the control of Latin America, he might have paused. Again, he might not: his belief in the inevitability of victory blotted out all the obstacles - not least the calculated venality of the Bolivian Communist party, which left him spectacularly in the lurch.
Anderson's account of Che's last days in 1967 has all the vividness of a film script. It draws to considerable effect, not only on interviews, but on the detailed diaries which, incredibly, Che kept for many key periods of his life, even when he was being hunted like an animal. Racked by asthma and barely able to walk, Guevara fought his way through the Bolivian countryside with a tiny band of comrades. They were so hungry that they ate their horses; when their boots wore out, they hacked rough footcoverings from the hides of the dead beasts.
GUEVARA's gun jammed in the final firefight, and he was an unarmed prisoner when he was finished off, at the Bolivian president's insistence, by a triggerhappy sergeant bent on avenging the death of three of his men in an earlier engagement. The CIA agent present at his death would have preferred to spirit him away for interrogation in Panama, but left the final call to the Bolivians when his radio request for advice failed to evoke a reply from Washington in time.
Guevara drove everyone hard, but he drove himself harder than anyone else, his evident charm and warmth increasingly submerged by his obsession with the need for instantaneous military and political liberation. His energies and abilities were absorbed by hopeless causes. The idea that the Cuban revolution could be exported was a chimera: the only place the United States ever really lost was in Vietnam.
The cost in the end, not only to those who died in, his fruitless non Cuban campaigns, but to those close to him, was immense. Castro was so angry at Che's death that he rounded on his Russian paymasters in fury, at considerable cost to his small country. Che's widow and children still live modestly in Cuba. The revolution there remains unfinished and is still in some important, respects inimical to values which even Che, in his more reflective moments, might have accorded more weight than those which finally dominated his life.