The news of Che’s death felt colossal and yet almost expected. For my generation, Che had incarnated the heroic social being most of us knew we could never become. The curious mix of resoluteness and recklessness that appealed so strongly to my generation, and even to the one that followed, found in Che the perfect incarnation. In our eyes he was in life already a legendary figure, whose heroism we were certain would somehow survive beyond the grave. It did not surprise us to learn that after Che’s death, Rodríguez, the treacherous CIA agent, suddenly began to suffer from asthma, as if he had inherited the dead man’s malady.
Che had seen what we had seen, he had felt, as we had felt, outrage at the fundamental injustices of “the human condition,” but unlike us, he had done something about it. That his methods were dubious, his political philosophy superficial, his morality ruthless, his ultimate success impossible seemed (perhaps still seems) less important than the fact that he had taken upon himself to fight against what he believed was wrong even though he was never quite certain what in its stead would be right.
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (to give him his full name before fame reduced it to a simple “Che”) was born in the city of Rosario, in Argentina, on 14 May 1928, though the birth certificate stated “June” to hide the reason for his parents’ hasty marriage. His father, whose ancestors first arrived in Argentina with the conquistadores, owned a plantation in the subtropical province of Misiones. Because of Ernesto’s asthma, which plagued him throughout his life, the family moved to the more salubrious climate of Córdoba and later, in 1947, to Buenos Aires. There Ernesto studied at the faculty of medicine and, armed with a doctor’s title, set off to explore the Latin American continent “in all its terrible wonder.” He was enthralled by what he saw and found it hard to give up the wandering life: from Ecuador he wrote to his mother announcing that he had become “a 100 percent adventurer.”
Among the many people he met on this Grand Tour, one in particular seemed to haunt him: an old Marxist refugee from Stalin’s pogroms whom Ernesto came across in Guatemala. “You will die with the fist clenched and the jaw tense,” said this far-flung Tiresias, “in perfect demonstration of hate and of combat, because you are not a symbol, you are an authentic member of a society that is crumbling: the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and moves in your actions; you are as useful as I, but you don’t know the usefulness of the help you give to the society that sacrifices you.” Ernesto could not have known that the old man had given him his epitaph.
In Guatemala, Ernesto became acutely aware of political strife and identified for the first time with the revolutionary cause. There, and in Mexico soon afterward, he became acquainted with the Cuban émigrés who were leading the struggle against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose corrupt regime had so fascinated and repelled Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. With a canny nose for troublemakers, the CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, appointed at the time to Central America, opened a file on the young Argentinean doctor—a file that over the years was to become one of the thickest in the CIA’s records. In July 1955 the first meeting between Ernesto Guevara and Fidel Castro took place in Mexico. Castro, who as far back as 1948, as a twenty-one-year-old law student, had begun plotting against Batista’s regime, took an immediate liking to the Argentinean whom the other Cubans had started calling “Che” after the Argentinean colloquial address. “I think there is a mutual sympathy between us,” wrote Che in his diaries. He was right.
After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Che sought an ambitious sequel. We do not know whether he would have lent his support, out of loyalty to the revolution, to the tyrannical measures Castro was to take in the years to come in order to protect his regime. Che’s sights were far in the future. After the war in Cuba, Che believed, the revolutionaries would spread to neighboring nations (Bolivia was the first chosen). Here they would wage war against the oligarchy and their imperialist bosses, wars that would finally force the arch-enemy, the United States, to step into the fray. As a result, Latin America would unite against “the foreign invader” and defeat imperialism on the continent. Che’s battle was not against all forms of power, nor was it even against the notion of a tiered society. He was certainly not an anarchist: he believed in the need for organized leadership and he imagined a pan-American state under a strong-handed but moral government. In a small book on the Greek idea of liberty, La Grèce antique à la découverte de la liberté, the French historian Jacqueline de Romilly pointed out that Antigone’s revolt stemmed not from a rejection of authority itself but, on the contrary, from obedience to a moral law rather than to an arbitrary edict. Che too felt compelled to obey such moral laws, and it was for them that he was willing to sacrifice everything and everyone, including, of course, himself. As we know, events never proceeded beyond the Bolivian campaign. Whether Che ever learned what the usefulness of his sacrifice was is a question that remains unanswered.
And yet something of Che’s ideal survives beyond the political defeat, even in these days when greed has almost acquired the quality of a virtue and corporate ambition overrides mere social (let alone socialist) considerations. In part, he has become another colorful Latin American figure, like Emiliano Zapata or Pancho Villa, used to decorate T-shirts and shopping bags: in Bolivia, the National Tourist Board now conducts tours to the site of Che’s final campaign and the hospital where his body was displayed. But that is not all that remains. The face of Che — alive with his starred beret, or dead, staring as if his eyes could see into a point beyond our shoulder — still seems to encompass a vast and heroic view of men and women’s role in the world, a role that may seem to us today utterly beyond our capabilities or our interest.
No doubt he had the physique du rôle. Epic literature requires an iconography. Zorro and Robin Hood (via Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn) lent the live Che their features, and in the popular imagination he was a younger Don Quixote, a Latin American Garibaldi. Dead, as the nuns at the Vallegrande hospital noted when they surreptitiously snipped off locks of his hair to keep inside reliquaries, he resembled the deposed Christ, dark uniformed men surrounding him like Roman soldiers in modern costume. Up to a point, the dead face superseded the live one. A notorious passage in Fernando Solanas’s four-hour documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), which brilliantly chronicles Argentinean history from its earliest days to the death of Che, held the camera for several minutes on that lifeless face, forcing the audience to pay visual homage to the man who carried for us our urge for action in the face of injustice, who bore for us our bothersome agenbite of inwit. We stare at that face and wonder, At what point did he pass from lamenting the sorrows of this world, pitying the fate of the poor, and conversationally condemning the ruthless greed of those in power, to doing something about it, taking action against the unjust tide?