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| Ernesto "Che" Guevara |
Jon Lee Anderson
ERNESTO "CHE" GUEVARA
For nearly 30 years now, Ernesto “Che” Guevara has been a figure of myth. Although his name remains celebrated, and the image of his bearded, haunting face continues to resonate from beneath its ubiquitous beret, little is known about his life. According to his biographer Jon Lee Anderson, “Che was this glaring omission. He was not only a ‘60s figure, but he had a full effect on our time. His life had really never been looked at. It was cloaked in mysteries and legends. I realized the only way I could seriously propose to do a proper life’s biography was to unearth the secrets that had lain dormant all that time.”
In Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Grove Press), Anderson attempts to do just that, looking beyond the myth and resurrecting Che Guevara the human being. Che was the essence of the self-made man. A middle-class Argentine who became one of the heroes of the Cuban revolution; an unrelenting Marxist who loved his family but refused them the privileges of leadership—even when it meant his wife taking one of their children to the hospital by bus. In his early twenties, Che gave in to youthful wanderlust and traveled throughout Latin America by motorcycle. The Motorcycle Diaries, published in 1995, is the account of one such journey. Later, having passed his medical degree and resolved to work with lepers, he then discovered the draw of political insurgency. After meeting Fidel Castro in Mexico City in 1955, Che became part of the small revolutionary force that invaded Cuba in late 1956 and fought the army of President Fulgencio Batista. Upon liberation, he took the post of Minister of Industry, but his heart was on the battlefield, and in 1965 Che left Cuba to foment revolution in the Congo and Bolivia. These latter campaigns were less than successful, and on October 8, 1967 Che was captured by the Bolivian Army. He was executed the next day.
