Che, eventually

Published on January 13, 2008

The Young Che – Memories of Che Guevara
By Ernesto Guevara Lynch
Published by Vintage, 2007
Available at Asia Books, Bt495
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey
The Nation

The Young Che" is a rustic sandwich, a thick slice of sentiment on peasant bread, peppered with facts but not much fun to eat because of the taste of propaganda mayonnaise, which should not be acquired.

Che Guevara's father wrote this book in 1981 and it's just come out in English. The timing in both cases is puzzling, apart from 2007 having been the 40th anniversary of the Marxist freedom fighter's death.

That just makes it seem morbid because, outside of Cuba, Che hasn't been anyone's hero for decades. This is the main problem here: relevancy. Younger readers can learn from the saga of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, of course, but this book takes a long time getting to the point.

For the rest of the West, I guess there was some hoped-for tie-in with the success of "The Motorcycle Diaries", the movie about Guevara's wanderings around South America on a motorised bicycle.

Editor and translator Lucia Alvarez de Toledo spells out plainly in her introduction where she and Guevara Senior are taking us on this trip: "Very little was known about Che's early years." And then, having shown us some crumbs, "How did a sickly boy from a comfortable background become one of the great revolutionary heroes of the 20th century?"

And off we go in search of the answer, first to Cuba, then fading back to his dull, spoiled childhood, biking around Argentina, on to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico, and back (sandwich style) to Cuba. What happened after Cuba, and especially on his next trip to Bolivia in 1967, is of course not in this book.

For the most part it's all quite tedious. The Cuban revolution is by now template stuff - swamps, setbacks, foot sores and fatalism, followed by victory and vindication. Guevara is reported killed several times, but he's a cat with seven lives (cats have seven lives in Spanish, I've learned). The CIA prowls predictably about, but Battista is vanquished and everyone in the country cheers. Everyone. Coups used to be like that.

The subsequent (flashback) hitchhiking around South America is described through letters that take ages to suggest a revolutionary in the making. In La Paz, Guevara just misses witnessing a crucial agrarian reform, though in Guatemala he sees first-hand the plight of the farm labourers toiling for United Fruit.

He writes to an aunt, "I have sworn in front of an image of the old and much-lamented Comrade Stalin that I will not rest until I see the capitalists crushed." But the mucho gusto language is a put-on designed to shock the recipient, who abhors leftists.

The beacon in the book is finally lit toward the end, when the correspondence becomes quite moving as Guevara, writing from a Mexican jail where he and Fidel Castro are temporarily on ice, says goodbye to his family with the now-famous words, "My future is linked to the Cuban Revolution. Either I succeed with it or I die there."

There is real human emotion here as it at last becomes clear that "Chancho" - the adolescent Guevara's jocular Argentine nickname meaning "pig" - has been replaced with "Che", the moniker given him by Castro's men. (According to Che's father, it doesn't mean "friend" at all, as I'd previously read, but is a general term for people from Argentina, who tend to use it frequently as an interjection.)

Now a committed revolutionary, by any name, the young Guevara scorns his mother's pleas for moderation, vowing that his "sacred flame" will never be replaced with "a timid little votive light". He has been converted wholly by Saint Charles, as he calls Karl Marx. He has plucked the "v" from "vagabonding" and placed it with care in "revolution".