Book review - "Che Guevera: A Revolutionary Life"

Reading this makes me understand in a way why Che is so popular with students, both in his prime and today (his picture's on T shits in Herbie: Fully Loaded and Shooter) - he's that cool kid you knew at school, the good looking moody one who maybe rode a motorcycle and had lots of sex - not sex with skanks but like elder women or other unobtainable species. He would be enigmatic, and know poetry, maybe even write it. Other boys would have man-crushes on him. He would make these statements with clarity and certainty and be able to charm when he set his mind to it. A wanker, basically - until you chatted to him yourself and was charmed. Such blokes are often found in the arts world and the backpacking trail - so its not surprising that Che wrote often, mostly diaries and poetry, and was a voracious reader and traveller.

Four incidents leap off the page as potential movies

1) Che's motorcycle trips across the US, and I'm not saying that just because of The Motorcycle Diaries (which I haven't seen yet), there's other reasons:it's self contained, starts with Che getting dumped by a woman whose parents don't want to see him, has comedy with them pretending to be leprosy experts, gets serious with encounters with the poor - and finishes with him visiting the US (which I understand wasn't in the film).

2) The second is when Che arrives in Cuba to lead the revolt - its incredibly exciting, constant last minute escapes, the revolution being one step forward and two steps back (one of the biggest early fillips was surprisingly some positive press in the New York Times), Che discovering his courage and capacity for ruthlessness.

3) The third would be the travails of Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban who left after the revolution and subsequently became a noted anti-Castro fighter, training in the Dominican Republic, sent to kill Castro then winding up in Bolivia at Che's death.

4) The final segment of the book would also make a good film - his attempt to raise rebellion in Bolivia (which could be subtitled "suppose they try to overthrow a government but nobody came"). This started badly for Che and went from bad to worse to the ultimate tragedy. The Bolivians were determined not to bury him but wanted to prove he was dead - so as a compromise (!) they cut off his hands.

There are many words to describe Che: brave, asthmatic, indomitable,charismatic, ambitious. One word not used enough is "wanker". I'm sorry,but he was - he lacked humour, he spent his Sunday mornings in Havana volunteering cutting cane (you cannot negotiate with people like that they are too hard core). People poo-poo the idea of communists wanting to take over the world, but that was Che's goal. While the USSR were happy to go along in peaceful co-existence, Che was pushing for war everywhere - Africa, Asia, even global. In South America the local communist parties wanted to achieve power (gasp) peacefully but not Che,oh, no. Having said that the Yanks can take a deal of blame for making a bad situation worse, i.e. overthrowing a properly elected govt in Guatemala in 1954, and knocking back Fidel's overtures of friendship in the 1960s. (When will this silly country learn that it's better to stand for something than against something - "oh, we're anti-communist",as if there aren't better things to be.)

Why do people wear his face on T-shirts? Don't they know what he stood for? No elections, rule of the gun, no jokes, lots and lots of talk about the revolution. I think people just love charismatic martyrs, especially people who always seem so sure about everything. A dangerous, dangerous man, whose legacy is a poor one.

Oh and this book is brilliant - superbly researched, written, fair, not biased unless you're a political nutter. Surely it would have to be definitive. The main problem is unavoidable - sometimes you lose track of who is who.