[Sokolov is a critic, novelist, and author of recipe and cooking books. In the following review, Sokolov offers a mixed assessment of Venceremos!]

Even before his mysterious death last October, the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara had become the patron saint of the Third World and the guerrilla guru of the U.S. New Left. Raised in comfort, trained as a physician, he gave himself up totally to the revolutionary ideal. From early adolescence Guevara was an impassioned wanderer among his people; the underclass of feudal Latin America. He knew his continent and carried its sorrows with him from country to country. With each bloated baby and exploited peasant he saw, Guevara's hatred of the Latin overlords and their Yankee senior partners deepened. It was inevitable that Che would link up with a rebel government.

In 1956, at the age of 28, he sailed from Mexico to Cuba with Fidel Castro and 80 others on an old yacht called Granma. Two years later, Che emerged from the hills, a seasoned commander and a key figure in the new revolutionary government. Doctor, soldier, diplomat, economist—the careers multiplied and the prestige grew as his embattled new Cuba stabilized herself in spite of a U.S.-led trade embargo and, of course, the eventual and bumbled invasion of the Bay of Pigs. By 1965, Cuba was still far from self-sufficient, but for Guevara it was time to move on to new adventures. For months on end he fell from view, only to turn up murdered in Bolivia, where he had been fighting with local guerrillas.

He left behind him a legend of activist bravery, an unpublished diary tangled in copyright haggling and a great mass of speeches and writing. Shortly after Che's death, John Gerassi and a number of translators went to work making his currently printable literary legacy available to Yanqui readers. For the gringo Guevarista it would be a chance to commune with his hero, and for the outsider such a book should explain the bearded leader's charisma.

It [Venceremos—The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara] doesn't. Charismatic he must have been, but on the printed page. Che's words don't even have the ring of Robert Taft's. "Let us go on now to Topic II of the Agenda," he says vibrantly to the leaders of the OAS at Punta del Este in 1961. Here he is wowing the cane cutters of Camagüey in 1963: "Under our agricultural conditions with 40,000 arrobas of cane to the caballería, six rows are needed to fill a cart. And a heavy cart that keeps getting heavier cannot be dragged along. A motor would be needed to move it."

Even at his most inspiring, Guevara does not really make the heart beat faster: "And you, comrades, you who are the vanguard of the vanguard, who have demonstrated your spirit of sacrifice toward work, your Communist spirit, your new attitude toward life, ought always to be worthy of Fidel's words, which you inserted in one of the boxes in this precinct: 'What we were at a time of mortal danger, may we also learn to be in production; may we learn to be workers of Liberty or Death!'"

Somehow the rhetoric comes unstrung; the over-all effect is turgid and flatfooted; and the message is repetitive. Like most pep talks, these harangues and pseudo-essays probably worked with the original audience but don't have much significance afterward except as historical documents in the archives of propaganda.

There are marginal exceptions to the general sweep of ennui. Che's personal account of the Cuban revolution is an engaging scenario; however, a fuller version was published three months ago by Monthly Review Press, as Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolution.

Che's knotty economics is hard for the non-Marxist to follow, but it led to Cuba's unorthodox but apparently workable substitution of moral for cash incentives. The Guevara myth is no fairy tale, but his talents were not on the printed page but as an activist exhorting peasants in the fields, leading irregulars in the mountains or improvising the structure of a new kind of state.