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Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. By Jorge G. Castaneda. Trans. by Marina Castaneda. (New York: Knopf, 1997. xviii, 456 pp. Cloth, $30.00, ISBN 0-679-44034-8. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 0-679-75940-9.)
The Fall of Che Guevara: A Story of Soldiers, Spies and Diplomats. By Henry Butterfield Ryan. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xvi, 224 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-19-511879-0.)
Companero and The Fall of Che Guevara are two fruits within a very large intellectual harvest of almost a dozen books recently published about the Cuban-Argentine doctor and guerrilla fighter. The former, authored by the Mexican political scientist Jorge G. Castaneda, takes a controversial and intellectually well developed approach to its subject; the latter, written by Henry Butterfield Ryan, an American and former diplomat, reflects a less-- controversial yet well-documented approach.
Castaneda's biography can be read as a Greek tragedy: It describes the pilgrimage of a hero who advances toward a fatal destiny like a modern Oedipus, obsessed by feelings of guilt and his own inability to deal with contradictions. The hero is frustrated as a man, a warrior, and a statesman, marching blindly toward the mortal destiny that has waited for him since his birth. This book tells the story of a man who mistakes his own wishes for reality, who is unable to deal with human nature, a very gifted strategist but a poor tactician, a statesman who forgets the real substance of human beings. After looking at such a portrait, one wonders to what extent the remarkable figure of Che Guevara may be just a myth of the 1960s political culture, a conflation of the actual human being and the construct created by a culture and a political ideology that were left behind thirty years ago.
This retelling of the history of the 1960s offers us the following interpretations: (a) The revolutionary projects of Latin America resulted solely from attempts to export the Cuban revolution. (b) Che is ultimately responsible for the...