Che Guevara

...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...

...As for Guevara, he never forgave the Soviets for their "cowardice...

...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...

...That, too, however, is a moment which has largely passed...

...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...

...The subsequent slaughter of so many leaders of the civic resistance eliminated the most important alternative pole of political attraction to Castro...

...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...

...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 Carnal Abdul Nasser, who warned Guevara against assuming the role of a "Tarzan, a white man amongst blacks, leading and protecting them...

...The book is pock-marked with errors of fact...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW He Thinks We Still Care Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life Jon Lee Anderson Grove Press / 84 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Mark Falcoff Astern visage stares out from the cover of this book...

...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...

...It included outflanking other, more broadly representative (but more dangerously exposed) elements of the civic opposition in Cuba's cities, particularly Havana...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...The real problem with the book, other than excessive length and an irritating fascination with unimportant details, is aninability to see the forest for the trees...

...He seems not to know that those parties, whether traditional or not, represented the overwhelming majority of the Cuban electorate...

...Then he became more or less simultaneously president of the Cuban National Bank, director of the Land Reform Institute, and minister of industries...

...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...

...Hollywood even produced a potboiler film-biography, starring the appropriately charmless Jack Palance in the title role...

...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 belongs to the avenging angel of mindless sixties radicalism...

...Instead, he went to Africa, where he hoped to build a Cuban-led "grand foco" in—of all places—the eastern Congo...

...But Che's principal quarrel with the Soviets was their failure to finance the Cuban revolution (and by extension, all44 Che was anxious to fire the missiles at the U.S., which he continually referred to as "the great enemy of mankind...

...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...

...Just why this or other biographies of Guevara are needed now is far from clear...

...hough Guevara had come T 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...

...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 anus shipments to Batista...

...This led to a failure of nerve in the Cuban high command...

...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...

...Cuban history—and indeed, that of the world—would have been radically different if a brilliant attempt to assassinate Batista had not failed...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...What could ever have led Guevara to imagine such a thing...

...ly of impoverished Argentine aristocrats who grew up in the beautiful foothills of Cordoba province...

...Revolutionaries, particularly those who achieve power, cannot be judged only by their intentions or ideals...

...The American Spectator Jun e 1997 69 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 loco to the authorities...

...Since then, however, like most of his contemporaries, Guevara has slipped through the memory hole...

...Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey...

...What Allende did was to tear up existing agreements for compensation...

...On the other hand, Anderson betrays astounding ignorance or misunderstanding of Argentine, Chilean, Bolivian, and Cuban history...

...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...

...his crime was to lead an abortive putsch in which most of the participants were killed...

...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...

...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...

...After months of frustration, Guevara returned incognito to Cuba to prepare for his next mission—to Bolivia...

...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...

...they have to be evaluated in terms of their accomplishments...

...It is not as if nothing has happened these last three decades to establish once and forall which political and economic systems are more likely to produce abundance and freedom...

...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...

...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...

...Here is the spoiled and wild son of a famiMARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...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...

...However, like another martyred Marxist physician, Chilean President Salvador Allende, Guevara never actually practiced his profession...

...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...

...Anderson attaches a sinister significance to U.S...

...The Rio Treaty did not, as Anderson seems to think, give Washington the right to intervene militarily in Latin America...

...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...

...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...

...Anderson writes these lines with a perfectly straight face...

...And so it goes...

...Jon Lee Anderson seems to think this is a deficiency which calls for remedy...

...True, Bolivia shares a common boundary with five other Latin American nations, including Brazil...

...In between his duties as Lord High Execu68 Ju n e 1997 • The American Spectator tioner and government minister, Guevara wrote theoretical articles on Marxism for various government outlets...

...Chilean President Salvador Allende did not nationalize the copper mines...

...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...

...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 senior Guevaras were fashionable deadbeats...

...Instead, from the moment of receiving his degree he was perpetually in search of revolutionary upheaval...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...support for free elections in Batista's Cuba, since it would return to power "traditional" parties...

...At...

...1 such regimes in the Third World) in the measure he felt appropriate...

...Perhaps in all the celebrations marking the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara's death, someone will have the wit to write a book about that...

...Peron did not enhance Argentina's economic self-sufficiency...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...As Karl Marx should have said, history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as pop culture...

...Castro had just been released from prison by dictator Fulgencio Batista after serving only three years of a much longer sentence...

...that was accomplished by his predecessor, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei...

...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...

...But unlike Batista's Cuba, it was not a largely urban society unified against a hated dictator...

...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...

...With Fidel and his brother Raul, Guevara underwent instruction in guerrilla warfare in the Mexican countryside, the maestro in this case being a formergeneral in the Spanish Republican army...

...He subsequently accompanied the Castro brothers and several dozen confederates on their clandestine return to Cuba in 1956...

...In fact, quite the opposite happened...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Guevara played several roles in the new revolutionary regime...