The perils of depicting the life, character, and context of a public figure are all too familiar to us. In Latin American literary and cultural studies, important questions about testimonial writing have occupied the attention of scholars for several decades, sometimes leading to acrimonious debates about how best to critically approach the inherently hybrid testimonial mode. These debates have allowed scholars to explore not only the question of genre and its impact on how individuals and groups narrate their lives, but also how the role of the intellectual or educated mediator can change the subaltern speaking subject's account. This narrative by Juan Martín Guevara, the younger brother of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, which is described in the sleeve notes as a “unique autobiographical account,” does something much more effective: it enacts and celebrates the inherent value of generic hybridity as it moves among the often invisible borders of autobiography, memoir, testimonio, political history, and social history.
Indeed, the public persona of ‘El Che’ merits such hybridity. Beyond the immediate image of the ‘guerrillero heróico’ that now adorns tee shirts, bars, and souvenirs, his role as a philosopher, economist and statesman—as an organic intellectual—is less widely known. Equally, his reception in the public imagination has been polysemic, and, with late capitalism, his image has not only been commodified, but also co-opted to serve the interests of a vast range of political groups and philosophies. Juan Martín Guevara is abundantly aware of the colossal emotional, moral, political, and economic weight that lies behind the figure of ‘El Che’ and attempts in his account to resist any temptation to oversimplify, to create yet another hagiography, or to recognize the almost-empty signifier that is the over-saturated icon of his older brother. The result is a compelling, moving, and highly informative account, admirable for its genuine complexity and contradictions. It is also a highly personal narrative that is at times presented chronologically, but at others follows the movement of memory and emotion.
Most impressively, it is a story that does justice to the sheer breadth and depth of Che's contribution to social and political change, without constructing a simple image of the man and his life or reducing him to a single monolithic and hagiographic interpretation. It offers a fascinating account of his childhood, youth (including his several journeys though Latin America), and his involvement in the Cuban insurrection and Revolution. Following Che's political development, it narrates his subsequent attempts to “export” revolution to South Africa and, finally, Bolivia. This last section is where Juan Martín Guevara's account is most moving, as he describes his family's search for reliable information about a figure who was internationally ‘wanted’ and at the same time trying to hide their affiliation with Che for fear of political persecution in Argentina. His account of the family's reaction to Che Guevara's death is equally eloquent in its depiction of its complex emotions. However, keeping family and his own life trajectory at the center of the narrative, Juan Martín Guevara's account also provides a moving and fascinating insight into Argentina under Perón, a social history of the military dictatorship, and, crucially, a more personal but at no time sentimental depiction of his own eight-year imprisonment by the military junta and his attempts to re-adapt to life after being freed.
Notwithstanding some recurrent errors of presentation in Spanish, and some less accurate instances of translation, this book offers a fascinating insight that is subjective and personal, yet also provides compelling details of the relatively short life of a figure whose influence on his contemporaries and future generations is nonetheless impossible to measure.
