Book review: Remembering Che by Aleida March

By GAVIN BOWD
Published on 13/05/2012 00:00

THE heroes of Cuba’s Rebel Army had their needs too. In this memoir, Aleida March, widow of Che Guevara, recounts her relationship with the revolutionary icons.

Remembering Che

Aleida March

Ocean Press, £10.99

From being a young provincial girl addicted to romantic literature, March joins the opposition to the Batista regime before encountering Guevara in the Escombray Mountains. They first touch when he helps off a package strapped to her torso.

Soon the Revolution is victorious, and her “Fortress” “surrenders without resistance” to the subversive from Argentina. What follows, in child-like and earnest prose, contains petty feminine rivalries and insights into domesticity that are at best touchingly banal: Guevara liked a very hot bath and breakfast served to him; he was a terrible dancer with no ear for music. That said, March shows the strains put on the man Jean-Paul Sartre described as “the most complete human being of our age” and the woman who bore four of his children.

Guevara’s internationalist vocation, and his heroic but hopeless attempts at replicating the Cuban insurgency in Congo then, fatally, Bolivia, put paid to any private bliss. Guevara’s postcards, poems and fiction express deep love for wife and family, but also a growing sense of crisis and doom: “We will continue together until the road vanishes.” In a remarkable short story, The Stone, written in Congo two years before his murder by the CIA, Guevara predicts: “I would decompose on the grass or they might exhibit me; maybe I would even appear in Life magazine.” As for his children, he already considers himself “just a foreign body that occasionally disturbs their peaceful existence”. His last encounter with them will be in disguise, as a bald and aged “Uncle Ramon”.

This little book, illustrated with photographs from the author’s collection, adds another layer to our knowledge of Guevara and his legend. But beyond the hagiography and ritual declarations of “Hasta la victoria siempre”, Guevara emerges above all as a beautiful loser who, in the midst of another tropical battlefield, feels “a physical need for my mother to be here”. «