BOOKS

...In the mountains, Che serves as an all-purpose officer, advising Fidel, planning the ambushes, treating the wounded, building the field hospitals, and executing the traitors...

...Still, there is much to recommend in Real Majority, Madia Minority...

...Anderson weaves Che's chaotic personal life, which he subordinated to his politics, in and out of the historical action...

...If current merger plans go ahead, soon two out of three of the world's richest television networks would be controlled by nuclear-power companies, both of which have the U.S...

...An inspiring young lawyer, Fidel Castro, recruits him as doctor for an improbable military expedition to establish a guerrilla base in the eastern mountains of Cuba and then take on a 50,000-man army, equipped by the United States...

...by Eleanor J. Bader Laura Flanders is the director of the women's desk at the media-watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and the co-host of the radio show Counterspin...

...I hated to put down this War and Peace-sized tome because, like others who reflect on our lives and passions during that bizarre period, the 1960s, I strive to understand what drove this Poe-like character who was inspirational to so many radicals...

...Thirty years later we have a readable biography of this socialist icon who died trying to spark an uprising in Bolivia that was supposed to lead to "two, three, many Vietnams," the fall of imperialism, and the onset of the world socialist order...

...For Fidel, Che's death meant more than the loss of a beloved comrade...

...That book remains unwritten...

...Che made history in the days when it appeared do-able...

...His newest film is "The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas...

...Fidel still spoke passionately about Che...

...whom Jean-Paul Sartre called "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age...

...In fifty-five pithy essays (that originally appeared as columns in EXTRA!, FAIR's newsletter, and other progressive publications) and in interviews with female experts on topics ranging from incarceration patterns, to welfare reform, to sex crimes, to menopause, Flanders lambastes the media's bias...

...journalists have investigated the impact of war on those Iraqis who continue to live on contaminated land...

...reporter as saying...

...Saul Landau is a fellow at the Washington, D. C, Institute for Policy Studies and the Amsterdam Transnational Institute...

...Che had "the coldly analytical mind of the medical researcher and chess player," writes Anderson...

...In the 1970s, the Cuban government began to evolve into a Soviet-style bureaucracy and by the mid-1980s the inherent fraud of that system had begun to eat away at the society and the economy...

...In 1955, Che drifts north to Mexico...

...And the Haitians...

...Fidel still showed signs of grief and rage—against the Bolivian Communist Party leaders and their Soviet directors, whom he believed had betrayed Che...

...It meant the defeat of the overarching Cuban strategy for world revolution through guerrilla war...

...Among the stresses that every soldier feels is the shock of seeing Haiti's poverty," she quotes one U.S...

...But something kept gnawing at me as I read Flanders's critique, for her assessment of media malfeasance seems akin to expecting the master's tools to dismantle the master's house...

...After their first meeting, Che realizes he has found the man who will show him the road to self-realization...

...Fidel called for "rectification," meaning that each citizen should return to Che's version of socialism...

...Not surprisingly, most of us remain oblivious to the havoc caused by America's obsession with Saddam Hussein...

...Some have estimated that before the end of the century, an oligarchy of about half a dozen hugely profitable giant firms will have consolidated control of the mass media worldwide...

...After seeing the misery of workers and peasants in Chile and Peru and witnessing the brutal extractive policies of imperial companies, Che becomes anti-American...

...In July 1968, Fidel Castro had just finished writing his introduction to Che Guevara's Bolivian diary when I began a week-long film trip with him in Oriente, Cuba's eastern province...

...Why not instead look to the alternative press and strategize about ways to get the word out...

...16.95...

...He had wholeheartedly embraced 'la revolu-cion' as the ultimate embodiment of history's lessons and the correct path to the future," Anderson writes...

...They were ignored, Flanders writes...

...Look," he tells a horrified friend who criticizes him for commanding execution squads of counter-revolutionaries, "in this thing either you kill first or else you get killed...

...Disarmed, wounded in several places, suffering the effects of prolonged asthma attacks, "Che," the stoic apostle of modern revolution, surrendered to a troop of Bolivian Rangers who were under the supervision of a U.S...

...I could not help but wonder why Flanders persists in looking to the corporate media Eleanor J. Bader is a freelance writer and teacher from Brooklyn, New York...

...I am the contrary of Christ...

...This Che survives, a decoration on the side of the Cuban Ministry of Interior and a face on Cuban-made T-shirts sold at Havana's airport...

...As Flanders reminds her media peers, "Reporting on the world as if women matter is not only right—it's good journalism...

...Nonetheless, Real Majority, Media Minority feels incomplete...

...I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to the cross or any other place...

...Flanders documents the Department of Defense's complicity in ignoring women in prewar tests of widely administered anti-nerve-gas medicines...

...Yet, I am not Christ or a philanthropist...

...By the end of 1993, the number was down to twenty...

...To write Che's biography is a monumental challenge, one which Gabriel Garcia Marquez declared would "take me a thousand years and a million pages...

...Flanders is terrific at documenting the way the media slight women...

...I had warned him on several occasions during our guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestre that he was too valuable to lose...

...Flanders digs deep and is a witty, polished writer...

...He adds, "This comforts and more than heals the deepest wounds...

...But this time, Fidel was more critical...

...Her first book, Real Majority, Media Minority, scrutinizes the ways that media skew public opinion by ignoring women, the working classes, and most critics of popular culture and conventional political thought...

...Does it seem like a million years ago?B The Invisible Sex Real Majority, Media Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting by Laura Flanders Common Courage Press...

...She presents a strong argument in favor of recognizing sexual assault as an act of torture...

...Be like Che" is the slogan in today's Cuba...

...In 1987,1 was again filming with Fidel...

...The Soviet Union, Fidel insisted, had turned its back on Che and the cause of socialism...

...Che leaves her, saying he must fulfill "the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever one may be...

...293 pages...

...Flanders also criticizes the few media women who have made it to the top—ABC's Diane Sawyer, whose estimated salary is $7 million, comes in for a particular drubbing— for relying on male authorities and for ignoring the many women who helped them to get there...

...Unfortunately, for the author and the readers, neither Fidel Castro nor his younger brother Raul granted Anderson interviews...

...to right wrongs and give voice to those on the margins...

...In the photo of the dead Guevara reprinted in Jon Lee Anderson's book, a Bolivian officer points to the corpse below him, as if to teach the assembled onlookers—including a nearby CIA man—an important medical lesson...

...She also analyzes what happened to veterans of several Mississippi military units that served in the Gulf and quotes a Veterans Administration report that revealed that "thirty-six of fifty-six babies born to members of four [Mississippi] units have birth defects, including missing eyes and ears, malformed lungs, and kidney and liver problems...

...While it is important to point out media bias, it is naive to expect Disney, General Electric, or TCI to do anything but protect their fiscal and ideological interests...

...He eventuallyl^: comes the military hero of the war% leading his small rag-tag troop to defeat an enormously superior Batista force at Santa Clara...

...Though marred by some literary weakness and a less-than-solid knowledge of Marxist theory, Anderson offers the first comprehensive portrait of Che...

...But if they are mistaken, and in the end even the gods make mistakes, then I believe I can say like a poet whom you don't know: T will take to my grave/the nightmare of the unfinished song.'" After Che died, Cuba moved away from Che's ideal to build the "new socialist man," free of pecuniary and full of moral incentive...

...His odyssey ends in 1954 in Guatemala, where he watches in impotence and frustration as the left fails to organize resistance to the CIA-backed military coup...

...Che was reckless," he said...

...Despite these crucial missing sources, Anderson has written a serious and information-filled book...

...by Saul Landau In October 1967, forty-year-old Ernesto Guevara and a small band of haggard guerrilla warriors, serving as Fidel Castro's international emissaries of revolution, fell victim to an ambush in the inhospitable mountains of Bolivia, not far from the site where Sucre, Simon Bolivar's lieutenant, met his fate trying to spread the war for liberation in the nineteenth century...

...Here is the man the CIA found so threatening that they launched operations to track and eliminate him...

...The skies have not turned black, the constellations have not come out of their orbits, nor have there been floods or overly insolent hurricanes...

...Other essays in the anthology home in on neglected subjects, from the exploitation of workers in New York's Chinatown, to the connection between anti-abortion violence and rightwing militias, to the media's short-lived fascination with an upscale population dubbed "lesbian chic...

...She also reminds us that, to date, no U.S...

...Although Flanders offers us a brilliant indictment of media collusion in keeping power in the hands of the few while the many scramble for their fifteen minutes of fame, she leaves us without the tools we need to end the corporate hold on information...

...The young allergy researcher finds some solace in a leper colony, and announces to the stunned lepers the inevitability of Latin American unification...

...His first wife, Hilda, helps educate him politically only to be deserted with their first-born when Che joins the Granma expedition to bring Castro's guerrillas to Cuba...

...Women find themselves squeezed into stories that the press associates with these categories...

...Che's battle with asthma is one of the book's leitmotifs...

...the signs are good...

...Then comes Aleida, the Cuban revolutionary who bears four of his children...

...military as their most important client...

...In a letter to his mother he describes himself as a servant of the poor...

...whom the Soviets called the eminence grise of the Cuban government...

...In the summer of 1974, we drove together again, this time through the outskirts of Havana...

...Remember that the Revolution is what is important and that each one of us, on our own, is worthless...

...Someone took Che's picture after he was executed...

...The terms he employs for individual humans are reductive and dehumanizing, while the value of their labor is idealized, rendered in lyrical and sympathetic description...

...In a commercial media fixated on sales, the three big sellers are sex, power, and death...

...From his post-teen adventures motorcycling penniless through Latin America to his guerrilla years in the moist forests of Cuba's Sierra Maestra, Che forces himself into a series of confrontations with his weaknesses...

...I was worried because of his intemperate behavior, because he had no fear of death and would expose himself heedlessly to mortal danger...

...Now, convinced he was correct, he looked around with an inquisitor's merciless eye for those who might endanger its survival...

...In casting her gaze on a repugnant television, radio, and print mainstream, she undervalues the work that she and her progressive, feminist colleagues are doing...

...They signal victory...

...Che discovers his identity as a warrior, in fraternal—albeit hierarchical—relationships with other men...

...In "J'accuse...

...Her passion for exposing the underside is inspiring and one leaves her book stuffed with hard-to-find facts and provocative viewpoints...

...Incredibly, American soldiers were presented as the victims of Haitian penury...

...Fidel makes Che into a man "at the ready whenever my services are necessary," Che said...

...Painter Raul Martinez soon created the image of the haloed radical prince...

...Che became an instant martyr...

...Haiti, and the poverty and repression found there, is of particular concern to her...

...Special Forces contingent...

...In 1986," she reports, "twenty-nine corporations dominated broadcasting, publishing, and cable...

...In another letter to his mother, he curses himself for "not having studied more of surgery to attend to a wounded man," but, he reminds her, he never "turned away from the tough part which I have always liked...

...Her gaze takes her to hot spots in every corner of the world...

...Study hard to be able to dominate the techniques that permit the domination of nature...

...the alternative is to be written out of the story altogether," she writes in "Whose Story Is It Anyway...

...In "Bringing the War Home," for example, she looks at the impact of petrochemical fires, pesticide spraying, and radioactive dust on the female GIs who served in the Gulf War...

...To his own children he delivered a goodbye revolutionary lecture: "Grow up to be good revolutionaries...

...Flanders looks at rape as a tool the Haitian military used to terrorize women...

...I witnessed his attempt to resurrect Che, this time as the symbol of socialist virtue to combat bureaucracy...

...In "Haitian Women Are out of the Frame," she looks back at 1994, when American soldiers intervened to restore President Aristide to power, and assesses the TV news coverage about it...

...Jon Lee Anderson has interviewed Che's family, friends, acquaintances, political contacts, and comrades, gone through letters, diaries, and archives in Washington and Havana, and devoured the secondary sources...

...Fidel realizes he has found in Che an angry anti-imperialist, ready to become an agent of radical history...

...The illness challenged Che into engaging in a constant character test...

...A brilliant doctor, and a courageous and impulsive warrior, Ernesto Guevara Serna became the last enduring romantic myth of twentieth-century revolution...

...Anderson tells of Che's Argentinean childhood with aristocratic, free-thinking parents, whose fortunes had gone to seed...

...Young Ernesto develops asthma, which gradually forces this daredevil child who "horrified his parents [by] leaping from high rocks into rivers, and bicycling along train tracks" to move from the capital to the dry air of Argentina's provinces...