Dimensions
129 x 198 x 28mm
This is an account of Che Guevara, a man who became a cultural icon to a generation.
In thinking of Che Guevara, one picture that comes to mind is the Christ-like image captured by Freddy Alborta of the revolutionary as martyr. The Bolivian army, who had executed the cornered and dejected Guevara the day before that photo was taken at Vallegrande, had not reckoned on his beatification as the emblem of courage and political sacrifice by a whole generation of students and activists. In an age when the death of young heroes was a leitmotif - from James Dean to Malcolm X- no one symbolised 'The Revolution' more compellingly than Che. Drawing on archives in Argentina, Mexico, Cuba and Russia and interviewing Che Guevara's associates and family, Jorge Castaneda has rescued Che from the mists of hippie mythology, Cuban hagiography and historical gloss. In his early life we find a middle-class Argentinian doctor, afflicted with asthma and politically indifferent but possessing an indefatigable wanderlust, enormous personal will-power and a loathing of injustice. We trace his first trip to Bolivia and his misreading of their 1952 revolution, and his political baptism during eight months in Guatemala while the US tried ruthlessly to intervene. Openly pro-Soviet at 26, Che spent two years in Mexico, taking photos of US tourists for money, then discovering Fidel Castro in 1955 and thereby his path to glory and death.
Castaneda provides a spellbinding account of Castro's campaign and defeat of Batista and Che's emergence as an invaluable strategist and a leader respected for his egalitarian decency and honesty with his troops. From the 1959 triumph in Havana, Che embarks on a trip to the Middle East, India and Japan, the first in a long series of missions around the world. He also plays a role in the revolutionary movements in Panama, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Haiti and, fatally, of Bolivia.
This is both a reassessment of Che's career and an enlightened portrait of the man: his mother, his marriages, his narcissism, his wilful determination, his rage. Above all, he emerges as an idealist of unique historical timing, who most closely embodied the deeper meaning of the 1968 student rising, whose last call for a modern Utopia still resonates at the close of a century bereft of Utopias.
