Volume 44, Number 12 · July 17, 1997
Goodbye to All That
By Christopher Hitchens
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
by Jon Lee Anderson
Grove Press, 814 pp., $35.00
The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America
by Ernesto Che Guevara, translated by Ann Wright
Verso, 155 pp., $11.00 (paper)
When, shortly after the triumph of the Castro revolution, Ernesto Guevara took over the direction of the Cuban National Bank, it became his duty to sign the newly minted ten- and twenty-peso notes. This he did with a contemptuous flourish, scrawling the bold nom de guerre 'Che' on both denominations. By that gesture, which made those bills a collectors' item in some quarters of the left, he expressed an ambition to move beyond the money economy and what used to be termed 'the cash nexus.' It was a stroke, at once Utopian and puritanical, that seemed to sum up his gift both for the improvised and the determined.
Review, 5663 words
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