"Book ordered out of print." That was the code to announce that Fidel Castro, a Jesuit-educated lawyer and unusually talented basketball player, had launched his revolution. In November 1956, he sailed from the tiny Mexican port of Tuxpán on a clapped-out boat with 82 men, including an out-of-breath Argentine doctor, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Ever since that coded telegram, there has been no break in the torrent of books about Castro and the man who became his "most dependable comrade" and second in command. This latest, on the 50th anniversary of their triumphant entry into Havana, purports to be the first to tell at full length the story between two men whom President Nasser dismissed as "a bunch of Errol Flynns". Simon Reid-Henry, however, puts their relationship up there with Marx and Engels, not to say Trotsky and Lenin, and calls it, with reliable hyperbole, "one of the most remarkable political friendships of the 20th century".
There is no reason that they should meet or turn out as they do. They come from opposite ends of the continent, one the bastard son of a prosperous Cuban rancher and his housemaid; the other, descended from a Spanish viceroy on his doting mother's side and, on his father's, from one of Latin America's richest men. Che's father, an expander of golf courses, in particular "could not understand why Ernesto had to get involved in a revolution which had nothing to do with his homeland".
A prodigious early reader, like Byron, Che grows up a bored, asthmatic beatnik, whose life is nothing so exciting as what he reads about in the periods when recovering his breath. "At one time I wanted to be one of Pizarro's soldiers." He writes dreadful free verse which anticipates his end:
Die, yes, but riddled with
bullets, destroyed by the bayonets, if not no.
His ascent mirrors that of Evita, the small-town sensualist who becomes an ascetic mouthpiece for oppressed people everywhere. In fact, Che's only direct link with Evita is a letter requesting a jeep so he could travel around Latin America. His letter unanswered, he takes off on a rickety Norton 500, later planning a revolution to liberate those countries visited on his holidays. One explanation for his fame – Alberto Korda's photograph of him has been "reproduced perhaps more than any other image in the world" – is that he gave an ideology to the hippy trail. His popularity has as much to do with Jack Kerouac and John Lennon as it has to do with Simón Bolívar or Karl Marx, of whose Das Kapital he admitted that he "hadn't understood a thing" – Castro as well gave up after the first few chapters.
They meet over a seafood pasta in Mexico City, the scene of Roberto Bolaño's masterpiece The Savage Detectives, one nitro to the other's glycerine. Che, the introspective and silent sloppy dresser, nicknamed Chancho the Pig, after boasting how seldom he bathed ("It's been 25 weeks since I washed this rugby shirt"); Fidel is a blue-suited dandy, opportunistic, power-hungry, pragmatic and magnetic ("all I could do was listen to him," says one woman). Che pants after their first conversation: "It's only someone like him I could go all out for." Quite soon, under the masochistic tutelage of General Bayo, another of those one-eyed veterans of Spanish North Africa, they are rowing up and down Chapultepec Lake, being pounded into shape for the invasion of Cuba; an invasion in the conscious tradition of Pizarro, Cortés, San Martín, and demonstrating how effectively a small group supported by the general population can overcome a disciplined army and make "a socialist revolution", as Castro put it, "in the very nostrils of the United States".
Reid-Henry, a geography lecturer at London University, makes a decent fist of obtaining as much first-hand material as he can, particularly from British diplomats and Russian sources, but is handicapped by the silence of his principal subjects on the topic of each other. Castro's family has not been forthcoming, while the Great Man, ordinarily an unstoppable orator who approaches everything with an open mouth, delivering a four-hour sermon when a sentence will do, has maintained a notorious tight-lip regarding Che. "I dream of Che a lot," is one of his few pronouncements. "I dream he is alive, in his uniform, I dream that we talk" – though about what, Fidel never reveals.
And Che's feelings about Fidel, in the years following the Cuban Missile Crisis until the time when he leaves Cuba disguised as a bald businessman for his farcical and Byronic finale in Bolivia? "No comments on his thoughts crop up in any of the private memoranda of his conversations from this period." This makes the author's task, as he describes it, "one of interpretation and contextualisation; there is little especially new material to unearth". In other words, he has to reheat an awful lot of red cabbage.
Fidel & Che is better written than, say, Jon Lee Anderson's biography of Che, but not always as interesting. It is bound to a see-saw structure that obliges the author to seek parallels and significances that can sound tinny ("Ernesto, meanwhile…"). None the less, Reid-Henry is right to see Che as the manifestation of Fidel's "deepest and most bellicose instincts" and at his best when tracking how, once in power, the two men swap roles: "Fidel wanted to strategise, Che wanted to act."
He convincingly portrays Fidel as seeking on stage to "maximise the theatre of everything", while behind the scenes Che plots their next performance; his own last act, covered in faeces and semi-delirious, most closely resembling an unhappy revival of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Che was shot dead in 1967. Without him, Fidel – much like Robert Mugabe (also Jesuit trained) without Joshua Nkomo – turned into the very dictator that his younger self fought against. Fidel became, as he himself once wrote of President Batista, "ruling as now by the use of terror and crime and ignoring the patience of the Cuban people".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book ... eview.html
