W
hen we look at the iconic photograph of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, his flowing hair
stuffed under a rakish beret, soulful eyes fixed on a distant horizon, who exactly
are we seeing? The romantic, poetry-loving, freedom fighter who lived and died for a
noble cause? Or the bloodthirsty thug who directed summary executions puffing
on a fat cigar?
All these years after Che was killed in the Bolivian jungle, the jury is still out on
the self-styled 'man of action' who embodied the Cuban revolution to the outside
world even more symbolically than Fidel Castro.
The 40th anniversary on October 9 will provide further proof of his undiminished ability to arouse passionate and diametrically opposed emotions - as well as selling shedloads of T-shirts and posters.
While the solemn remembrance ceremonies are being staged in
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
Forty years after his death, philip jacobson asks if we really know the revolutionary icon |
| |
Havana's Plaza de la
Revolucion, Cuban exiles in Miami's Little Havana will be parading that famous image
on banners proclaiming "murdering communist bastard".
In his native Argentina, Che was recently voted the country's greatest ever
historical and political figure, yet his efforts to spread the gospel of socialist
liberation elsewhere in Latin America and beyond are generally held to have failed
dismally.
So where do we go to discover the 'real' Che? Most of the serious accounts of his
life and times deliver profoundly conflicting judgments.
At one end of the scale there is the American author Jon Lee Anderson, whose hefty tome, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, was written with the co-operation of the Guevara family and unprecedented access to secret material in Cuban state archives (the film of the book, starring the smouldering Benicio del Toro, is due for release next year). 
|
The life of Che Guevara
Pros and cons of communism in Cuba
Castro's death party
