Book Review - REMEMBERING CHE, by Aleida March

As I said in my last post, this is a first book by Aleida March and it evokes memories of her partner, Ernesto (Che) Guevara whom she married in 1959. He was assassinated in Bolivia by a CIA agent in 1967. March describes their romance and life together that began when they met as Cuban revolutionary guerillas and ended tragically when she, still in Cuba with their four children and his daughter from a previous marriage, learned of his assassination. March, as Guevara’s widow, writes of their shared political dreams for Cuba’s future and, indeed, that of all Latin America as well as shared dreams for the future of their family. Readers are provided an intimate insight into the man behind one of the political symbols of his time; an insight not offered in the many other literary works about Che Guevara.

March, in simple, but earnest prose, relates that Guevara liked a very hot bath and breakfast served to him; he was a terrible dancer with no ear for music. However, she also 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 five children.

Guevara’s internationalist vocation, and his heroic but hopeless attempts to replicate the Cuban insurgency in Congo then, fatally, Bolivia, ended hope of any private bliss. Expressing deep love for wife and family, March’s inclusion of Guevara’s writings

shows a growing sense of crisis and doom: “We will continue together until the road vanishes.”  The book includes intimate photos, taken from private family albums, of Che with Aleida and his children. It includes photos of Che and Aleida together when, with his head shaved bare as “Uncle Ramon”, he had disguised himself for his secret mission to Bolivia. It also contains facsimiles of postcards and letters that Che sent to his family from abroad, including poems written to Aleida. “The Stone”, a moving short story sent from Congo two years before his Bolivian assassination predicts: “I would decompose on the grass or they might exhibit me.” For his children, he very early considered himself “just a foreign body that occasionally disturbs their peaceful existence”. His last encounter with them was in disguise, as the bald and aging “Uncle Ramon”.  

The book reveals what can only be seen as the great strength of Aleida, coming to terms with her own private loss, under the international spotlight of millions of others, also mourning the death of a world-famous revolutionary. Her strength is also clearly seen in her efforts to raise her four children as ordinary Cuban children despite their father’s legendary status there and abroad. I repeat from my last post, Aleida March has been from its beginning and is currently director of the Che Guevara Studies Center, Cuba.

This book, adds another layer to our knowledge of the Guevara legend. Beyond the hagiography and ritual declarations, Guevara emerges as a beautiful loser who, in the midst of another tropical battlefield, feels “a physical need for my mother to be here".