[In the following review, Gall analyzes several works by Guevara, tracing the development of his ideological position as revealed in his political essays.]

The capture and murder last October in Bolivia of Ernesto "Che" Guevara was the most significant consequence of his own botched guerrilla insurgency. The story of his death—still subject to final refinement of detail—adds new mythic material to the reverence most Latin Americans feel for martyred guerrilla saints like Mexico's Emiliano Zapata. Nicaragua's Augusto Sandino and Colombia's rebel priest, Father Camilo Torres. Moreover, in Guevara's case, the flame of publicity has lighted candles in the literary salons of New York and Paris, as well as in the official eulogies of the Cuban Revolution and in the imagination of revolutionary youth throughout the world. The shadow, of course, has dwarfed the man; it has been enlarged by canonization and official tribute of the kind easily turned into a lean and flashy song.

The lacquered image of Che Guevara will not be beautified by the anemic spurt of quickie books issuing from his death [Venceremos!, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Episodes of the Revolutionary War and Che Guevara Speaks]. Nor, as a result of their publication, will we understand more clearly the mystery of his restless romanticism, which has become an ideal for some of the more dynamic and concerned youth of both Americas. Offered here are diverse collections of the hero's wooden words, yielding little of Che's affecting presence and charm, and even less food for the nourishment of romantic illusion. Instead, human warmth gives way to the stilted, humorless prose of his official pronouncements, articles and speeches published by the Castro regime since 1959.

There are no unguarded moments here, only occasional signs of a momentous intellectual pilgrimage by a wanderer with the noble obsession of forming a pure and just human society, at whatever cost. Unfortunately, no independent editor or scholar has bothered to tell us of the origins and course of the pilgrimage, or of the intellectual milestones along the way. John Gerassi's introduction to Venceremos! is not what is needed. It merely provides a thin biographical sketch of the author, without any critical evaluation of his development or his political role.

The spirit shining through these hastily produced volumes is the fervent orthodoxy of the newly converted. They are full of exhortations for Cuban workers to work, to get organized, to produce, to correct the chaotic "errors" of the state-spawned bureaucracy that Che himself helped build to monster proportions. There is urgency throughout, as well as a healthy sense of vindication through the cyclonic social progress of the revolution.

Since Che was one of the key symbols and spokesmen of Cuba's revolutionary government, virtually every word in these books was uttered for its propaganda effect. His public personality shone strongest outside Cuba—and beyond the shadow of Fidel Castro—in cavalier appearances with beard and olive-green fatigues at international conferences such as the Punta del Este meeting of 1961 (when Cuba was expelled from the Organization of American States) and in Geneva at the 1964 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. On that occasion he offered a modest proposal that, given the declining terms of trade for the Third World, the underdeveloped nations suspend payments of dividends, interest and amortization "until such time as the prices for [their] exports reach a level which will reimburse them for the losses sustained over the past decade."

Until he landed in Cuba in late 1956 in Fidel Castro's confused but momentous guerrilla expedition, Ernesto Guevara was part of Latin America's permanent floating population of young political bohemians; he had shown scant interest in "Marxist-Leninist" teachings. Relatives report that since his early adolescence he was prodigious in both his sympathy for the unfortunate and in his fondness for the open road.

As a teen-ager, he took marathon bike trips to read poetry to the inmates of a leper colony. His absorbing interest in leprosy and its victims led him, both as a medical student and a young doctor, into extravagant wandering (from the time of his first motor-bike trip across the Andes in 1952) into remote parts of South America to visit leprosariums and participate in anti-leprosy campaigns. By the time he met the Castro brothers in 1955 in Mexico City, where he earned his living as sidewalk photographer, Che already had obtained a much broader knowledge of Latin America than any of Cuba's top revolutionary leaders were ever to achieve. He had traveled through Bolivia just after the profound and convulsive 1952 revolution, when the tin miners had crushed the Bolivian Army and, in effect, seized the mines, when Indian serfdom was abolished and land and the vote given the hacienda peons. He had wandered about Colombia in the years of the violencia, the savage civil war that claimed 200,000 lives, then drifted to Guatemala just in time to witness the C.I.A.-organized invasion of right-wing exiles (conniving with key Guatemala Army officers) that ended the agrarian revolution of President Jacobo Arbenz, whose Communist and other leftist supporters did not rise to his defense. The lessons of these wanderings were hardened in Che's exemplary career as a guerrilla column leader in Cuba's Sierra Maestra, and only after he descended from the hills did the attitudes formed by these experiences begin to take doctrinal shape.

The formal crystallization of his revolutionary belief began when he became a kind of alter ego and lightning rod in Fidel Castro's maneuvers to consolidate his power. The formalization of his ideal was dramatized best in his last published essay, the utopian "Man and Socialism in Cuba" (reprinted in Venceremos and Che Guevara Speaks), which appeared in Uruguay shortly after his widely publicized disappearance in March, 1965, and proposes a new moral motor for socialist society. It underscored a common feeling in the young Cuban leadership that a new kind of Communist is being formed by the revolution, far better in breeding and behavior than the Stalinist party hacks implicated in sordid bargains with the old Batista dictatorship.

Che's last visionary essay foresees the day when

man will begin to see himself mirrored in his work and to realize his full stature as a human being through the object created, the work accomplished. Work will no longer entail surrendering a part of his being in the form of labor-power sold, which no longer belongs to him, but will represent an emanation of himself reflecting his contribution to the common life, the fulfillment of his social duty. We are doing everything possible to give labor this new status of social duty and to link it on the one side with the development of a technology which will create the conditions for greater freedom, and on the other side with voluntary work based on a Marxist appreciation of the fact that man truly reaches a full human condition when he produces without being driven by the physical need to sell his labor as a commodity.

This is the glorification of the "moral incentives" to production—as opposed to material incentives of pay hikes pegged to economic performance advocated by Sovietoriented Marxists—which under Che's influence have come to dominate the Cuban production ethos. Indeed, this moral formula bears a striking resemblance to that of China's communes and the disastrous "Great Leap Forward," and the analogies between Cuban and Chinese Marxism do not end there.

Just as Mao Tse-tung has been responsible for the adaptation of Marx and Lenin to Chinese cultural traditions, Castro and Guevara have been attempting another major mutation—under Chinese influence—by designing a program of revolutionary armed struggle for Latin America. Curiously, neither Che nor Castro nor Mao made any systematic study of Marxism-Leninism until they had come to power or—in Mao's case—retreated to a secure guerrilla base area.

Mao's peasant origins always have inclined him to a profoundly popular and violent form of revolutionary struggle, which was fed and inflamed by peasant self-defense against the scourge of Japanese invasion in the 1930's. On the other hand, the guerrilla theories of Che and Fidel are more narrowly rooted in the radical student politics of Latin-American universities, and contain the "élitist" flaw of imposing the guerrilla movement—as Che did, fatally, in Bolivia—from outside the peasant area, often with little preparation and less regard for local conditions.

Unfortunately, the anthologies published since Che's death fail to include—and barely mention—his little handbook, Guerrilla Warfare, which is probably the most influential book published in Latin America since World War II, even though its strategic precepts may be wrong and the guerrilla movements it guided may have failed. While Che's strategic formulation has failed so far to change the outcome of Latin America's revolutionary struggle, it has profoundly altered its focus and tone.

Of the four volumes under consideration here, two are separate editions of Che's recollections of the Cuban guerrilla insurrection in the Sierra Maestra mountains of Oriente Province, while John Gerassi's Venceremos anthology contains most of this text. These "reminiscences" were first published as separate articles in the Cuban armed forces magazine, Verde Olivo, for the political orientation of the military establishment. It is a skeletal official history told in the first person, strangely shy of personal reflection or any departure from normative political requirements.

In contrast, for example, to George Orwell's graphic and introspective memoir, in Homage to Catalonia of boredom and filth and starvation in the trenches of Spain, Ernesto Guevara steers clear of the "subjective" literary material that would seem to be of greatest interest: the inner life of the guerrilla band, the doubts, the sufferings, the quarrels, the factions, the diverse strains of human character tied together in a struggle to survive, the give and take of winning the loyalty of frightened peasants and of outwitting Batista's brutal, stupid, pot-bellied army.

As a result, the skirmishes are all here but the war is missing. The soldier-author affects a kind of Hemingwayesque curtness and stoicism, with little interest in personality save for a monotonous and perhaps abnormal adulation of Fidel Castro. Of the spear-carriers we learn little, save that Juan was a peasant who joined the guerrillas and became a good fighter, while José sneaked away one night to betray his comrades to the army, and that Che always knew that Pedro, the quiet one, was also a traitor, since after Castro came to power he went into exile in Miami.

Of the two anthologies reviewed here, the slimmer one, Che Guevara Speaks, has by far the more incisive and luminous selection of Che's writings, and costs much less than the bulky, repetitious and carelessly assembled Gerassi collection. Che in print is important because of his influence on the Cuban Revolution (his public utterances consistently anticipated Fidel's future moves) and his symbolic meaning to much of Latin America. But the warmth and weight of his personality are muffled in his official words, and the evolution of his intellectual character still needs to be described.