Intelligence

Profile: Che Guevara: The killer staring down in a bedsit near you

Even before his squalid death in 1967, Che Guevara was the face that launched a thousand beards. By burying his bullet-riddled body in a secret place, Bolivian army officers hoped the myth of the charismatic Argentine revolutionary would end. Instead, it spiralled out of control, his image becoming the ultimate icon of youthful revolt on a billion posters.

His executioners would have been astonished if they knew that 37 years later Guevara’s immortality is being burnished in an acclaimed road movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, which brings to life his vivid journals of the epic journey he took across South America as a young man. The slogan “Che vive” — “Che lives” — seems to be as true as ever.

The film, directed by Walter Salles and released later this month, is a cross between Jack Kerouac in the Amazon and Easy Rider in the Andes. Unburdened by the ideology that would turn him into Fidel Castro’s zealous lieutenant in the “liberation” of Cuba, the 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara sets off with his older buddy on a Norton 500 named La Poderosa (the Mighty One) on a jaunt of wine, women and song that becomes a life-changing odyssey around Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela.

Here are the beguiling elements that make Guevara more potent in death than he was in life — the handsome visage and insouciant air that made him irresistible to women, his self-belief and fearlessness overlaid by intimations of the early death that would turn him into a martyr for left-wing movements worldwide.

There is no hint of the firing squads that Guevara would command, the concentration camps he would establish, his intolerance of failings among the common people he professed to love or his failure to export the Cuban revolution to the Congo and Bolivia. These blemishes have been airbrushed from his romantic image which became the message on everything from protest banners and T-shirts to skis and watches.

Che sells and he still stirs, but why? His famous portrait — beret askew and gaze focused on a distant horizon — makes him the embodiment of idealistic longing for succeeding generations. For little-travelled “political pilgrims”, once encouraged to believe that Albania or Mao’s China were the perfect societies, Guevara symbolises the purity of political commitment in far-off lands that contrasts with the decadence of their own societies.

History is not so kind. His ideological heritage has suffered wholesale rejection, just as Cuba’s revolution stutters, purveying Che mementos for tourist dollars.

Hugh Thomas, the most eminent historian of Cuba, is blunt: “He dignified the idea of violence to an unacceptable degree. He said that in Latin America he hoped there would be 10 or 20 Vietnams; that was wholly irresponsible. For about 20 years his idea of violent revolution was thought of as a possible way forward.”

Who was the man behind the trademark beret and cigar? The eldest of five children, he was christened Ernesto Guevara de la Serna in 1928 at Rosario, an Argentine river port. His father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna, could boast of noble Spanish and Irish ancestors, but most of the family fortune was lost and he became a planter of mate, a herbal tea. But his wife, Celia, was an Argentine blue blood.

The nickname “Che” would come later — his greeting to friends, meaning “Hey you” in Guarani. As a youngster he was dubbed “Baldy”, a comment on his close-cropped hair. But it was his chronic asthma that defined his childhood, forcing the family to move to the dry climate of Alta Gracia, a small spa town near Cordoba.

Unable to attend school until he was nine years old, he was tutored by his mother at home, creating a bond that continued in Guevara’s soul-baring correspondence until her death in 1965. Often confined to bed, he read voraciously and learnt to play chess with his father.

In healthy spells he played sport including rugby, learnt to ride and shoot, swam in the local streams and was given flying lessons by his uncle. He finally attended school where his headmistress, Elba Rossi de Oviedo Zelaya, recalled him as “a mischievous, bright boy”, undistinguished in class but with “leadership qualities”. He was a show-off, drinking ink from a bottle and eating chalk in class to get attention.

At 14 his sexual initiation was arranged by friends who supplied a household maid. They watched through a keyhole, giggling when he interrupted his coupling to take his asthma medicine.

In 1947 he went to study medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, dreaming of becoming “a famous investigator” who would benefit mankind with medical discoveries. He already stood out from his peers, rejecting their impeccable dress in favour of grimy windbreakers and cheap shoes.

Three years later he set off on a motorised bicycle into Argentina’s interior in the first of several trips that would culminate in his epic “diaries” journey with his friend Alberto Granado in 1952. Many of their exploits were hilarious. They were consummate freeloaders, shamelessly begging food and hospitality. One night, hearing a scratching at the door, Guevara fired his father’s Smith & Wesson at what he thought was a jaguar, only to discover the next morning that he had shot his host’s pet alsatian.

The wretchedness and poverty they encountered made a deep impression. Returning to Argentina he recorded in his diary: “The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentinian soil.”

After graduating in 1953 as a doctor he went to Guatemala, where the overthrow of its progressive leftist government in a CIA-backed coup convinced him that social progress was impossible without violent revolution. By the mid-1950s he was a Marxist and married to Hilda Gadea, an exiled Peruvian militant, with whom he had a daughter.

In 1956 he met Castro, who was looking for a doctor to tend his tiny guerrilla force. “A young Cuban leader has asked me to join the armed liberation movement of his country and, of course, I have accepted,” Guevara wrote to his father from Mexico City.

Eighty men sailed to Cuba’s Oriente province in November 1956. “It wasn’t a landing,” Guevara wrote later. “It was a shipwreck.”

Superficially wounded in the neck but believing it to be fatal, he pondered “the best way to die”. But far from dying, Guevara became a courageous guerrilla leader and his unit of 220 men spearheaded the final attack that caused the dictator Fulgencio Batista to flee.

Castro and Guevara had much in common. They were sexually voracious, contemptuous of homosexuals and identified America as the enemy. Castro appointed him supreme prosecutor in charge of the “cleansing commission” that exacted justice on “war criminals”. He sent dozens before firing squads, shocking friends with his mercilessness. “Either you kill first or else you get killed,” he said unconvincingly.

The photograph that immortalised him was taken by Alberto Korda, a Cuban photographer who was struck by his “absolute look of steely defiance” at a memorial service for victims of an explosion on March 5, 1960. “I managed to shoot two frames and then he was gone,” said Korda, whose refusal to collect royalties for the picture helped its dissemination.

Guevara served briefly as minister of industry and president of the National Bank of Cuba. Having split with Gadea, he married Aleida March de la Torre, with whom he had another four children. But he was growing restless and in 1965 he led a covert and unsuccessful Cuban intervention in the civil war in the former Belgian Congo, from which he was evacuated sick with asthma and dysentery.

He emerged the following year in Bolivia to spread the revolution. Guevara’s Argentine cockiness was resented by many Bolivian peasants, who rejected his revolution. Dishevelled and defeated, he was caught near the village of Vallegrande. He was tied up, shot four times, then laid on a slab and photographed to prove he was dead.

“Many think of me as an adventurer,” Guevara had written to his parents, “and I am one, but of a different type, those who risk their skin to prove their truths.”

Thirty years later Che’s grave was discovered and his body was transferred to Cuba, where the revolutionary was laid to rest with great state pomp.

With time the details of Che’s life and suicidal missions have blurred. Ultimately it is his image that remains and fascinates.

August 22, 2004 at 01:25 AM in Cold War | Permalink | TrackBack (134) | Top of page | Blog Home