REVOLUTION THEN

A NEW BIOGRAPHY TRIES TO FIND THE MAN ERNESTO GUEVARA IN THE MYTH OF CHE, THE EVITA OF SOCIALISM

Author: By Philip Bennett, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, May 11, 1997

Page: D16

Section: Books

This is true in a particular way in the United States. Despite Guevara's bona fide celebrity (Sartre eulogized him as ``the most complete human being of our age'') and his profound influence on US-Latin American relations, he has been little more in this country than a face on a dorm-room poster. Among the remarkable things about Jon Lee Anderson's monumental biography, ``Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,'' is its distinction as the first serious attempt in English to chronicle Guevara's life. In this the book is an enduring achievement. Other biographies are in the works, but it is hard to imagine that any will match the volume and detail of the research here. More important, Anderson has rescued Guevara as an essentially American figure, in the hemispheric sense of the word, one whose victories and failures, equally spectacular, are part of our common history.

Although he was widely read as a theorist after helping lead the Cuban revolution, Guevara's most influential legacy was his own life. It was an improbable one from the start. Born into a family of fallen Argentine aristocrats, the son of an inconstant, philandering father and a bohemian mother, he was diagnosed in boyhood with severe asthma. The disease, which confined him to bed for weeks at a time, was the central personal challenge of his life. Rebelling against his physical limitation, he was aided by a biting intelligence, wanderlust, dashing looks, a medical degree, and a complete freedom from convention or material aspirations. Discipline also led him to write volumes of journals and letters, some of which (with the permission of his widow, Aleida March) appear for the first time in this book. As asthma prepared him to see wider injustice, travel and books set it before him. After medical school, he launched himself on an odyssey through the Americas that would last his life, measuring himself against experience like a scientist testing a cure by inoculating himself.

Two years later, in 1955, he would write to his mother, ``I am a complete bum.'' He had been driven from Guatemala by the CIA-engineered overthrow of the leftist Arbenz government, an episode that would harden his nascent faith in Marxism and his opposition to the United States, a struggle he called ``my true destiny.'' Ironically, the Guatemala coup pushed Guevara to Mexico City and his fateful first encounter with Fidel Castro. The two men were in their mid-20s, and each was a professional (a doctor and a lawyer) committed to radical change. But they came from opposite ends not only of the hemisphere but also of emotional and physical range; Castro's volcanic personality and stature complemented Guevara's cool detachment and sickliness. Within hours they formed a permanent bond. In little more than a year they would be leading about two dozen guerrillas (a number reduced to 12 in some later accounts, to encourage a biblical analogy) encamped in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains, facing impossible odds against the army of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Miraculously, within two years they would be in power.

Guerrilla warfare was an epiphany for Guevara from his first moments in Cuba, when he was wounded in an ambush and famously chose to save not his medical kit but a box of ammunition. Anderson provides a gripping account of this transformation. Guerrilla war was the means by which Guevara ``became Che,'' finding himself through sacrifice to a cause. The discovery would be at the heart of his later writing. Dismissing orthodox Marxist theory that placed the Communist Party at the head of revolution, he argued that a small group of guerrilla fighters could create ``shortcuts to victory.'' By the same formula, these guerrillas, by virtue of absolute discipline, commitment, and ``love of humanity,'' would be transformed into socialism's ``New Men.''

This uncompromising faith had a dark side. Anderson shows that Guevara participated coldly and almost casually in executions of several accused traitors during the war. He would go on to be Cuba's ``supreme prosecutor,'' passing judgment on accused war criminals and presiding over a system in which about 500 former Batista officials and others were executed. Even the brutality of the Batista regime and threats from the United States are not enough to explain the lack of mercy or self-doubt with which Guevara dispatched the enemies of the revolution. Nor are his own words, that in a revolution ``one wins or dies.''

Anderson makes a persuasive case that Guevara, who had pushed Castro toward communism, was the vital link in the early alliance between Cuba and the Soviet Union. In some ways, his role seems inspired less by communist faith than by what he saw as inevitable conflict against the United States. In fact, Guevara would soon sour on the Soviet model as corrupt and bureaucratic. What fully engaged him, even as he presided over Cuba's National Bank, was the project of exporting revolution, especially to Latin America. In 1965, he resigned his government posts and titles, said goodbye to his wife and five children, wrote a farewell missive to Castro, and disappeared from public view.

There has long been speculation that Castro, under pressure from the Soviet Union or to consolidate his own power, forced Guevara out. Anderson rejects this view. Unfortunately, we do not have the versions of Castro or his brother, Raul, probably the two men closest to Guevara. The Castro brothers' refusal to be interviewed by Anderson, a journalist with long experience in Latin America who gained access to many other Cuban sources, keeps this from being a definitive biography. But it is not hard to guess why the Castros didn't speak: Cuba still needs Che more as a myth than as a man.

By leaving Cuba, Guevara emulated the pan-American ideals of the 19th-century ``liberators'' who dreamed of uniting Latin America. In reality, his efforts to sow international revolution, first in the Congo (where he was unimpressed by a rebel leader named Laurent Kabila), and then in Bolivia, were a fiasco. During 11 months in Bolivia, Guevara was betrayed by the Communist Party and his own ideas about revolution: He had failed to recruit a single local peasant by the time his small band was hunted down by the Bolivian army and the CIA. He died a foreigner and an outsider, his body tossed in an unmarked grave (which Anderson believes he located) to deter worshipers.

In the decades after his death, revolutionary movements spread across Latin America, consuming hundreds of thousands of lives and drawing some of the best and brightest of a generation into conflict with the United States. None gave birth to a ``New Man.'' In many other prescriptions Guevara was also proven terribly mistaken. Yet one suspects that inasmuch as the diseases that moved him go untreated, Che lives, not only in this book but in the world.