Che Guevara remembered

...An East German secret-police prospect, Tamara Bunke, who had lived in Argentina while being groomed for infiltration into the United States, was killed in his band...

...Anderson's book should end these illusions once and for all...

...But today he is nearly forgotten, known primarily in his native Argentina and among a fringe of enthusiasts in the West...

...It could be that she and others, under instruction from Havana or Moscow, betrayed him...

...Guevara had a longstanding relationship with a top Soviet operative named Nikolai Leonov—the kind of arrangement that puts him in the category of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg rather than that of, for example, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata...

...In this early period, a serious propaganda effort was organized to present Castroism as precisely what it was not: a species of radicalism independent of, and even opposed to, the Soviet Union...

...His appeal grew out of the "anti-imperialism" directed against the democracies, particularly the United States...

...After the Castroites gained total control over the island, they killed countless of their adversaries in reprisals...

...The end of Guevara-ism was visible in Peru on April 22, when the hugely unpopular Tupac Amaru movement of narcoguerrillas saw its latest grab for global notoriety, the seizure of hostages at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, crushed by President Alberto Fujimori...

...He became the world's best known theoretician of "guerrilla warfare," the forms of irregular or "low-intensity" combat that, in the past, had been viewed as little more than adjuncts to regular military operations...

...He commuted from one radical "front" to another, unsuccessful in fomenting revolutions in Argentina, Africa, and, finally, Bolivia...

...While training to be a doctor, he traveled widely in South America and Central America, even as far as the United States...

...These trips allowed him to refine his socialist and revolutionary views, and they also led him into contacts with KGB agents that marked out a path he would always pursue: alliance with Moscow against Washington...

...Guevara acquired a ferocious case of Yanqui-hatred early on, and it never left him...

...It would be nice for Latin America if Che's memory were to remain a quaint regional phenomenon, like devotion to the Perons...

...When he, Castro, and others in the Cuban revolution burst onto the scene, their primary attraction was their youth, their looks, and their sense of style...

...The next year he met Castro, the leading figure in a group of Cuban revolutionary adventurists he had encountered in Guatemala...

...Che's group was eventually tracked down by the Bolivian army and wiped out...

...They were standard Latin American leftists—anti-clerical, favorable to the Republicans during the Spanish civil war, and active in support of the Allies during World War II, when Peron and his cohort, melding traditional Argentine dislike of "British imperialism" with admiration for the fascist "new order," tilted the country toward the Axis...

...Few who worshiped him, as 1967 turned into the climactic year 1968, knew much about his real life or ideas...

...Che's father worked in various enterprises, including construction contracting...

...Che was executed in 1967...

...Or the tango...

...He once wrote, "I am not Christ or a philanthropist . . . I am all the contrary of a Christ . . . Not only am I not moderate, I shall try not ever to be...

...The same idiotic lies were purveyed in defense of the Sandinista party-state...

...His evanescence illustrates many of the less understood aspects of the '60s Left, above all the ephemeral quality of the period and its protagonists...

...Castro dictatorship, in which Che played a major, early role, is clearly intended to revive interest in him...

...Soon, Guevara grew restless...

...Like Castro, he was disappointed that the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 had not ended in nuclear conflict...

...By the time Che reached manhood, Brit-baiting was somewhat old hat among the Argentine young...

...She became famous as "Comrade Tania, Che's woman in Bolivia...

...Their challenge to established society was neither intellectual nor abstract, but hormonal—it was, in the Latin American tradition, macho...

...His features were then the symbol of revolution, launching a thousand insurrections...

...For some 15 years after his death, the cult of Guevara spurred thousands of young people, in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World, as well as in Italy and other European countries, to take up arms in guerrilla adventures, usually manipulated from Moscow...

...Guevara and his comrades, the claim goes, were anything but Communists, but rather agrarian reformers, in the style of Mao and his comrades in the '40s, or nationalists in the mold of Nasser or Sukarno, or unorthodox demi-Marxists closer to Trotsky than to Stalin...

...Che, when he was 14 or 15, lost his virginity in a typical upper-middle-class way: with the servant of a friend...

...It is hard to imagine that someone like, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton did not own a poster of Che in the late '60s and early '70s...

...But Guevara's tactics could not be exported from Cuba, where rural warfare was traditional...

...There, his band of terrorists made mistake after mistake, surrounded by Indian peasants who viewed them first with indifference and then with hostility...

...Yet his entire career as a world-historical figure lasted no more than nine years, from 1959 to 1967, and his legacy, if it exists at all, is meager...

...But the main thing to say about him is that he dripped charisma and physical magnetism...

...Masses from Mexico to Argentina now look to liberal democracy and the free market for solutions to their problems...

...Non-conformists like "Ernestito" gravitated toward Marxian socialism and regarded the United States as the enemy...

...His parents had left Buenos Aires for the hinterland almost immediately after their marriage, to avoid gossip...

...The future revolutionary was born in 1928, conceived out of wedlock, his birth certificate correspondingly falsified...

...Castro's brother Raul was especially nasty, a sadist, as close observers of the regime have long known...

...Had this criminality been widely known in the '60s, it might have disgusted some of the young partisans who, around the world, flocked to Cuba's defense...

...In the aftermath of his death, 30 years ago this year, his image was among the most famous in the world...

...Few of his admirers, outside the top ranks of the Cuban and Russian state parties, knew the extent of his bloodlust and indifference to human feelings...

...Nevertheless, we have been told repeatedly that Castro did not begin as a Communist but was pushed toward Moscow by an arrogant and obtuse President Eisenhower...

...From then on, Che was instrumental in the rise of Cuban communism and its projection as a global force...

...The University of Buenos Aires has just announced a department of Che Guevara studies, which will analyze the future of "liberation" in Latin America...

...Che, as an idol of youth, was more than a man—he seemed omnipresent, his impact permanent...

...They had more in common with Elvis, Brando, and Kerouac than with Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky...

...When Castro announced this news to the world, some who knew the depth of rivalries within the Cuban regime wondered whether Che had not been deliberately sent to his death...

...The Guevara family was not at all poor...

...In any event, Che was more useful to the international Left as a martyr than he had been alive...

...A new biography by Jon Lee Anderson, written with official support from the Stephen Schwartz of the San Francisco Chronicle writes often on Hispanic affairs...

...Still, Che will not be forgotten entirely...

...Chilling, too, is Anderson's account of the Castroites' gratuitous bloodletting, which began as soon as their insurrectionary movement became serious...

...Posters of his sensitive-looking face and flowing hair blossomed on the walls of university dormitories and lecture halls from Paris to Pasadena...

...One after another, these attempted uprisings turned into massacres, with students and other naifs sent heedlessly into battle against superior military forces...

...The main significance of Anderson's book is its admission, supported by present Cuban authorities, that the Castro movement, Guevara included, entered the grip of Soviet intelligence long before the movement triumphed over the Batista dictatorship in 1959...

...Throughout the revolution, he demanded the execution of "spies" and "informers" as if ordering dinner...

...In 1954, the 26-year-old Guevara defended Guatemala's Soviet-influenced regime, fighting on the losing side...

...As Anderson notes, ambiguities about Che's life would persist until the end: His death certificate, after his execution in Bolivia following his last, failed campaign, was also faked...

...Che was bored by administrative duties in Havana and remained beholden to the allure of a continuing world upheaval based on guerrilla methods...

...Today, Latin America has recognized the futility of the guerrilla utopia and has moved far beyond the leftist dreams of the '60s and '70s...

...Che (who had taken the Hippocratic oath as a physician) ordered killings on short notice and without reflection...

...Though this was the era of Juan Peron and his hysterical wife Eva, the elder Guevaras were not Peronistas...

...Guevara infused the term "guerrilla" with romance, providing an antidote to the isolation of radical movements...