Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
By Jon Lee Anderson
Grove Press, 814 pages, $35

A stern visage stares out from the cover of this book; it belongs to the avenging angel of mindless sixties radicalism. As Karl Marx should have said, history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as pop culture. We are coming up on the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Argentine-cum-Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara in the Bolivian rainforest, and this book is the first large stone in what promises to be an avalanche. The New Press has already come out with Guevara's tedious diary of his trip around South America as a student, and we are further threatened with a "major new biography" by Mexican leftist Jorge Castaneda, Jr.

Just why this or other biographies of Guevara are needed now is far from clear. After the revolutionary's death at the hands of Bolivian rangers and the CIA in 1967, literally dozens of volumes about him, almost all of them adoring, appeared in many languages. Hollywood even produced a potboiler film-biography, starring the appropriately charmless Jack Palance in the title role. Since then , however, like most of his contemporaries, Guevara has slipped through the memory hole. Jon Lee Anderson seems to think this is a deficiency which calls for remedy. More than 800 pages in length, written in frothy People magazine prose, this new biography tells us far more about its subject than any of us could ever possibly want to know. Here is the spoiled and wild son of a family of impoverished Argentine aristocrats who grew up in the beautiful foothills of Cordoba province. The senior Guevaras were fashionable deadbeats; though perennially short of rent money, their lifestyle nonetheless included elegant "dinner parties . . . a riding trap . . . summer holidays [in the watering places of the Argentine rich, and] three servants." Stricken with asthma as a child, young Ernesto (the "Che" came later) was initially drawn towards the study of medicine, and he eventually specialized in allergies. However, like another martyred Marxist physician, Chilean President Salvador Allende, Guevara never actually practiced his profession. Instead, from the moment of receiving his degree he was perpetually in search of revolutionary upheaval.

It was not to be found in his native Argentina, at least in any Marxist version, since the country was then under the firm (and largely popular) grip of General Juan Peron. As a result, young Guevara took off for Bolivia, where in 1952 a revolutionary government had nationalized the country's tin mines and decreed a radical land reform. Quickly disillusioned with the pragmatism and relative moderation of Bolivia's leaders, Guevara relocated to Guatemala, where President Jacobo Arbenz had a heartier appetite for direct confrontation--in this case, with the United States government, United Fruit Company, and his country's military. After Arbenz was overthrown in 1954 by a CIA-organized coup , Guevara took refuge in Mexico, where he met a young Cuban by the name of Fidel Castro.

Castro had just been released from prison by dictator Fulgencio Batista after serving only three years of a much longer sentence; his crime was to lead an abortive putsch in which most of the participants were killed. With Fidel and his brother Raul, Guevara underwent instruction in guerrilla warfare in the Mexican countryside, the maestro in this case being a former general in the Spanish Republican army. He subsequently accompanied the Castro brothers and several dozen confederates on their clandestine return to Cuba in 1956.

For nearly three years Guevara commanded a "column" of Castro's guerrilla army based in Cuba's Sierra Maestra range, but the warfare was really more political than military. It included outflanking other, more broadly representative (but more dangerously exposed) elements of the civic opposition in Cuba's cities, particularly Havana. Cuban history--and indeed, that of the world--would have been radically different if a brilliant attempt to assassinate Batista had not failed. The subsequent slaughter of so many leaders of the civic resistance eliminated the most important alternative pole of political attraction to Castro. This is what Batista expected and hoped, but he was wrong in his fundamental assumption that if the center were narrowed down to a choice between Castro and himself, he would be the beneficiary. In fact, quite the opposite happened.

The real break for Castro and Guevara came not from any success on the battlefield, but from the decision of the United States to suspend arms shipments to Batista. This led to a failure of nerve in the Cuban high command; within a matter of weeks the dictator was jumping ship (actually, boarding a plane with his wife, his closest confederates, and several suitcases full of hundred-dollar bills), leaving the road to absolute power open to Castro and his bearded band.

Guevara played several roles in the new revolutionary regime. First, he was in charge of purging (in the most literal sense) the Cuban army and police, as well as hunting down (and eliminating) hundreds of Batistiano small fry. Then he became more or less simultaneously president of the Cuban National Bank, director of the Land Reform Institute, and minister of industries. In between his duties as Lord High Executioner and government minister, Guevara wrote theoretical articles on Marxism for various government outlets. From the beginning he was one of those around Castro who favored the absorption of Cuban Communist cadres into the former's 26th of July Movement, and--what amounts to the same thing--a policy of active alignment with the Soviet Union.

The decision to ally Cuba with the Soviets led directly to a nuclear crisis, in which Premier Nikita Khrushchev was eventually forced by the United States to withdraw atomic missiles from the island. In the long run, the Soviets actually came out ahead, inasmuch as President Kennedy pledged never to invade Cuba, and also secretly agreed at the same time to retire U.S. Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey. But the entire episode was deeply humiliating to Moscow's new Cuban client: Castro was revealed to be virtually irrelevant to the ultimate fate of his own country. As for Guevara, he never forgave the Soviets for their "cowardice"; as Anderson points out, he was anxious to fire the missiles at the United States, which he continually referred to as "the great enemy of mankind" and "the most barbarous nation on earth."

Though Guevara had come to Marxism through the writings of Stalin (surely an experience unique even in the annals of international Communism), after the missile crisis his relationship with the Soviets turned sour, and vice-versa. For one thing, the Cuban Communists and the bloated Soviet economic mission in Havana did not have much use for Guevara's ideas about "moral incentives" to increase worker productivity. For another, Moscow did not appreciate his pointed criticism of Latin American Communist parties for their embrace of the "peaceful road" to power, and their lack of enthusiasm for replicating what Guevara believed had been the Cuban experience--victory through "armed struggle."

But Che's principal quarrel with the Soviets was their failure to finance the Cuban revolution (and by extension, all such regimes in the Third World) in the measure he felt appropriate. In a famous speech at a conference of Afro-Asian nations in Algiers in 1963, he criticized the "developed" socialist nations openly, and made no secret of his ambitions to form a bloc of African, Asian, and Latin American countries that would be independent of both the West and the Soviets.

By 1964 Guevara was finished in Cuban revolutionary politics, and although Anderson denies there was a falling out with Castro, most students of the subject agree that Guevara had by then recognized he had no further role to play on the island. Instead, he went to Africa, where he hoped to build a Cuban -led "grand foco" in--of all places--the eastern Congo. The idea was to establish a perimeter where "guerrillas of surrounding countries would come, and by helping in the war to 'liberate' the Congo, gain fighting and organizational experience to do battle in their own countries."

If this sounds a bit bizarre in light of everything we know today about African politics, it sounded no less so at the time to Egypt's dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser, who warned Guevara against assuming the role of a "Tarzan, a white man amongst blacks, leading and protecting them." Guevara proved impervious to such counsels, and so was led to discover for himself some home truths about Africans who style themselves revolutionaries--their brutality, their indiscipline, their lack of serious focus. After months of frustration, Guevara returned incognito to Cuba to prepare for his next mission--to Bolivia.

There he expected to fire "the opening shot in a new world war that would ultimately determine whether the planet was to be socialist or capitalist." (Anderson writes these lines with a perfectly straight face.) What could ever have led Guevara to imagine such a thing? True, Bolivia shares a common boundary with five other Latin American nations, including Brazil. But unlike Batista's Cuba, it was not a largely urban society unified against a hated dictator. Had Guevara taken the Bolivian revolution of 1952 more seriously, he would have noticed that, whatever its deficiencies, it had in fact enfranchised its Indian population, both politically and economically. (This explains why even now, Bolivia has nothing similar to the vicious Sendero Luminoso movement in neighboring Peru, a country with which it otherwise shares many ethnographic and cultural similarities.)

Hence tracking down Guevara's guerrilla band in Bolivia turned out to be a relatively simple business for its military forces, all the more so since the local Communist party was anything but enthusiastic about its presence in the country and may even have betrayed the location of Guevara's foco to the authorities. Guevara did surrender to government troops with a certain elegance , and he had the good fortune in death, stretched out on a slab in a makeshift morgue, to resemble many native images of Christ crucified. These dramatic mortuary photographs, flashed around the world, combined with the irresistible appeal of a beautiful loser, are the stuff of Guevara's legend, such as it is.

In writing the book, Anderson had the close cooperation of the Cuban government and also of Guevara's widow in Cuba, as well as access to the Guevara archives on the island. (He spent three years there, and even sent his children to Cuban state schools.) These give his biography a superficially authoritative gloss, since no other writer has been so privileged. On the other hand, Anderson betrays astounding ignorance or misunderstanding of Argentine, Chilean, Bolivian, and Cuban history. The book is pock-marked with errors of fact. Peron did not enhance Argentina's economic self-sufficiency; there was a big difference between buying up his country's decrepit railroad system from the British and investing seriously in transportation infrastructure, as anyone who has ever ridden Argentina's trains will attest. The Rio Treaty did not, as Anderson seems to think, give Washington the right to intervene militarily in Latin America. Chilean President Salvador Allende did not nationalize the copper mines; that was accomplished by his predecessor, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei. (What Allende did was to tear up existing agreements for compensation.) Anderson attaches a sinister significance to U.S. support for free elections in Batista's Cuba, since it would return to power "traditional" parties. He seems not to know that those parties, whether traditional or not, represented the overwhelming majority of the Cuban electorate. And so it goes.

The real problem with the book, other than excessive length and an irritating fascination with unimportant details, is an inability to see the forest for the trees. Revolutionaries, particularly those who achieve power, cannot be judged only by their intentions or ideals; they have to be evaluated in terms of their accomplishments. In the case of Guevara, we have a minister of industries who succeeds only in producing toothpaste that turns to cement once it leaves the tube, and a land reformer whose policies generate food shortages, disorder, and hunger. Anderson tries to skirt this problem by blaming shoddy Soviet equipment or improperly trained cadres, when in fact it was the whole concept of central planning--the core of Guevara's economic philosophy--which did not and could not work. This is Guevara's legacy to Cuba, where today, thirty years after his death, the main topic of conversation is where to find food, and the dream of all young people is to emigrate.

It is not as if nothing has happened these last three decades to establish once and for all which political and economic systems are more likely to produce abundance and freedom. There is a strangely ahistorical quality to Anderson's conclusion, as if every effort to challenge the status quo in some way ratifies the life and work of Che Guevara. The persistence in the Third World of revolutionism--as opposed to revolution--is an interesting subject , but largely irrelevant to Guevara's life and work.

What has made Guevara a cultural icon is not his example for poor countries, but his capacity to provoke empathy among the spoiled youth of the affluent West. That, too, however, is a moment which has largely passed. The niche market for this book is, then, middle-aged people afflicted by sixties nostalgia, or such young people as may be found these days suffering from sixties envy. Perhaps in all the celebrations marking the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara's death, someone will have the wit to write a book about that.