CHE GUEVARA: A Revolutionary Life.<i> By Jon Lee Anderson</i> .<i> Grove Press: 814 pp., $35</i>

In 1961, shortly after the failure of the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by a brigade of exiles, President Kennedy read Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s manual on guerrilla warfare (he had it translated from Spanish on a crash basis). His next step was to order the United States Army to establish a counterinsurgency school at Ft. Bragg, N.C. At the same time, Guevara’s portrait began to appear on the walls of homes of many parish priests in appallingly impoverished villages across Latin America, next to the image of Jesus Christ. And for at least a generation or more, Guevara, wearing his famous black beret with the comandante star of the Rebel Army, symbolized the romance of revolution to millions of young people everywhere, even more than the guerrilla’s supreme leader, Fidel Castro.

Thirty years after his death, Guevara remains a mystical, revolutionary legend, probably better remembered than most of the dramatic figures of the second half of the 20th century. In Cuba, 1997 is observed as “The Year of the 30th Anniversary of the Death in Combat of the Heroic Guerrilla and His Comrades.” On Oct. 9, 1967, Guevara was executed in the mud-walled schoolhouse in the village of La Higuera in mountainous south-central Bolivia, the day after his capture in a canyon by Bolivian army rangers. His death marked the end of a tragically ill-conceived 11-month guerrilla operation led by Guevara, who, rather improbably, had convinced himself that the Cuban revolution could be repeated in Bolivia to serve as the spearhead for the implantation of “socialism” in his native Argentina next door and the rest of Latin America. But there are huge ironies in this year’s commemorations.

That Guevara, then 39 and still a “pure revolutionary,” really believed that socialist revolutions were both possible and inevitable across the Third World is absolutely credible to me. I make this statement on the basis of long conversations I had with him in Havana during the opening years of the Cuban revolution and in New York in December 1964, shortly before he vanished forever from public view. Guevara was the most totally honest political leader of any persuasion I had met in half a century of journalism (his views are another matter) and, in the end, this obsessive honesty cost him his life.

I agree with Jon Lee Anderson, the author of “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,” an excellent (if too long) new biography, that “Che’s unshakable faith in his beliefs was made even more powerful by his unusual combination of romantic passion and coldly analytical mind” and that “this paradoxical blend . . . seems also to have been the source of his inherent weaknesses--hubris and naivete.” Anderson, who himself is admirably honest in his staggeringly researched book (it includes studies of Guevara’s diaries), emphasizes that this Argentine “revolutionary doctor” was “ ‘Che the Implacable,’ Cuba’s revolutionary avenging angel and ultimate political commissar, demanding the impossible of those around him but above reproach himself, because he lived up to his own severe dictates . . . respected and admired, despised and feared.” It was all part of Guevara’s uncompromising honesty.

Indeed, Guevara was Torquemada, Robespierre and Trotsky, all wrapped in his fragile, asthma-ravaged body, as he personally executed “traitors” and “spies,” even members of the guerrilla forces he helped Castro direct in the Sierra Maestra between 1956 and 1958, believing that, in Anderson’s words, “desertion, insubordination and defeatism were capital offenses” and that the rebels had to practice “swift revolutionary justice.” During his tenure as commandant of La Cabana prison in Havana immediately after the revolution’s victory, 55 executions of suspected “war criminals” were carried out in about a hundred days, and Anderson writes that “Che, as Supreme Prosecutor, took to his task with a singular determination.” Finally, like Trotsky, Guevara advocated permanent revolution everywhere, increasingly shifting his ideological allegiances from the Moscow brand of communism to the radical stance of China’s Mao Tse-tung.

This shift appears to have caused deepening differences between Guevara and Castro as early as 1964--the fifth year of the Cuban revolution--over a whole spectrum of themes that mirrored the conflict between Moscow and Beijing. To Guevara, as Anderson points out, the Soviets’ policies of “peaceful coexistence” toward the West were “anathema” and “appeasement of the imperialist system,” and he could not forgive Moscow and its subservient Latin American Communist parties for objecting to the guerrilla wars throughout the hemisphere that he (encouraged by the Chinese) was propounding. The Soviets, of course, were keeping Cuba literally alive, economically and militarily.

Anderson’s basic conclusion, reached earlier by other writers but particularly well-developed in this biography, is that “for the moment, he [Che] kept his mouth shut, but there was no longer any doubt that his and Fidel’s paths had begun to diverge. His [Fidel’s] goal was to consolidate Cuba’s economic well-being and his own political survival, and for that he was willing to compromise. Che’s mission was to spread the socialist revolution. The time for him to leave Cuba was drawing near.”

Moreover, Guevara (who served at that stage as head of the national bank and the new industrialization program) and Castro were at odds over fundamental economic policy. Guevara, for example, pushed rapid industrialization to render Cuba more independent economically, but he lacked adequate resources. The work force was unprepared; the program was unrealistically ambitious and, ultimately, Cuba was forced to return to its traditional dependence on sugar production. “This,” Anderson writes, “seriously undercut Che’s dream of creating the new Socialist Man.” Likewise, Guevara and Castro clashed over the former’s insistence on “moral incentives,” in addition to “material incentives,” as a means of developing a “communist consciousness.” At the same time, according to Anderson, Guevara’s relations with Castro’s brother Raul--the No. 2 man of the Cuban regime--had “steadily deteriorated to the point of becoming adversarial.”

Anderson does not say in so many words that Castro had decided that time had come to be rid of Guevara for Cuban (as well as Soviet) reasons, but he makes it obvious that the Argentine had outlived his usefulness to Cubans in Cuba. He observes that “in Cuba, he [Che] was no longer indispensable.” Guevara had enemies throughout the Havana establishment, he had proved himself totally incompetent as economic czar and his compulsive drive for organizing guerrilla wars abroad with Cuban human and military resources, no longer Castro’s priority, were creating serious problems for the revolutionary regime. Anderson’s discussion of the Guevara-Castro relationship and the ultimate consequences are the most historically important and interesting parts of his book.

Obviously, nobody is privy to Castro’s conversations with Guevara during that crucial summer of 1964 (after the collapse of a Guevara-guided guerrilla enterprise in Argentina), but they must have been a shattering personal experience for both men. They had formed a very special kind of friendship--in Mexico when they met in 1955, then in Sierra Maestra where Guevara was a superb guerrilla commander--and my own impression is that it was the best and deepest friendship that either man had ever had. Unquestionably, Guevara was the only interlocutor on Castro’s intellectual level in the whole guerrilla movement--and vice versa. The only other person who could speak freely and openly to Castro was Celia Sanchez, his revolutionary companion, advisor and lover, an extraordinary woman.

Neither Castro nor Guevara ever hinted publicly at the major differences that separated them. But they must have agreed, in some fashion, that there was no more room for Guevara in the leadership of the Cuban revolution--he could not have been simply put out to pasture on the island without exposing the deep strains inside the revolutionary command--and that he must go away. Respecting Guevara’s commitment to creating Third World revolutions, Castro evidently assured him of material support in these endeavors, and he lived up to it. Their agreement to part had to be one of the most dramatic moments in the history of the Cuban revolution, one that will never be fully revealed.

But as pragmatically as Castro explains his own decisions, his aid to Guevara’s planned revolutionary adventures, limited as it was, represented a wise investment. As Anderson puts it, “Che remained convinced that in the long-term, Cuba’s independence depended not on Soviet subsidies, but on the success of the Latin American revolution. Sharing their collective resources, a fraternal community of revolutionary Latin American states could reduce their country’s traditional dependencies on external forces, including Moscow, and usher in a new socialist era in the developing world.”

This may have been fantasy, even in Castro’s mind, but if, miraculously, Guevara were proved right, Cuba stood to gain everything and he could have been left to run all these revolutions as a triumphant hero. If he failed, he still could be portrayed as an inspiring revolutionary martyr. In fact, Anderson quotes a “veteran Cuban intelligence officer” that Guevara “knew his death would become an example in the cause of Latin American revolutions, and he was right. We would have preferred him to remain alive, with us here in Cuba, but the truth is that his death helped us tremendously. It’s unlikely we would have had all the revolutionary solidarity we have had over the years if it weren’t for Che dying the way he did.”

This is why, naturally, the anniversary of Guevara’s death has special significance in Cuba. His huge portraits adorn Havana, and he safely resides in the pantheon of Cuban revolutionary heroes. But I suspect that the supremely honest, ideological Guevara would wince at the course wisely taken by Castro in recent years: the “dollarization” of the economy (United States dollars being freely accepted in dealings inside Cuba), the incentives for foreign capital to invest in the island, the friendly relations with most Latin America’s democratically elected presidents (a notion Guevara abhorred) and, next January, the first visit by Pope John Paul II.

Thirty years after his death, Guevara is an icon in the history of 20th century revolutions but is no longer a model for those revolutions. I think Anderson is wrong in detecting a rebirth of the spirit of Guevara in the Zapatista movement in Mexico; in the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which has bombed banks and kidnapped people in Lima, Peru; and in the current anti-Mobutu rebellion in Zaire, led by Laurent Kabila, whom Guevara tried to help in 1965--with catastrophic results. The world has changed enormously over the last three decades or so and, with it, historical judgments are changing as well.

What is history to say of Guevara, apart from more or less admiring narratives of his triumphs and defeats? Anderson’s meticulous research is a good first draft of historical assessments. But as he makes clear, there were many aspects of Guevara--indeed, many Guevaras--and, in the end, one is tempted to come up with the impression that the pluses did not quite compensate for the minuses in his personality and life. As commendable as his commitment to social justice and equality was, it too easily became an intellectual abstraction and a personal obsession--a danger to peoples and nations. His sentiments hardly justified his determination, as cited by Anderson, that “Bolivia will be sacrificed for the cause of creating another Vietnam in the Americas with its center in Bolivia.” And, Anderson adds, “to Che, what happened in Bolivia was to be no less than an opening shot in a new world war that would ultimately determine whether the planet was to be socialist or capitalist.”

Lethal fantasies aside, Guevara never was the great strategist that Castro is. He was a vital supporting player in the Sierra Maestra guerrilla effort, but the grand vision was Castro’s. Guevara was an exceptional commander in the war but a fiasco as a peacetime civilian planner and administrator. Guevara was crushed in the Congo in 1965 and in Bolivia in 1967 mainly because of his disastrous choices of battlefields and his appalling ignorance of local conditions and people (including the Bolivian communists who betrayed him). As I noted earlier, Guevara was a man of astonishing (in our political age) probity and intellectual honesty. He had charm and towering intellect. He had incredible courage. But commitment to the revolution twisted him into too much of a Torquemada and a Robespierre. It is unlikely that after Anderson’s exhaustive contribution, much more will be learned about Guevara. But this is more than a revolutionary dramatic tale. Although today’s world is different than in Guevara’s time, it is still torn asunder by hunger, poverty, disease, injustice and hatred. In this sense, Guevara’s final offering may be found in the lessons of his short life.