Revolutionaries are not normal people

"Che Guevara" is a book in Swedish by Dick Harrison, a professor of history. The title is self-explanatory. Yes, it´s a relatively short biography (about 200 pages in paperback format) of the Cuban revolutionary (who was originally from Argentina). 

For obvious reasons, it´s impossible to avoid politics when writing about Ernesto Guevara, but Harrison has tried to make the book as much as possible about Che the man, rather than Che the Guevarista. Harrison does manage to paint a compelling portrait of the Argentine radical, and follows Che from his childhood home in Argentina through Guatemala, Mexico and Cuba to the Congo, and the eventual defeat in Bolivia. Che comes across as an idealistic socialist of deep convictions, but also as a hard guerilla fighter, a brutal revolutionary, an impatient adventurist, and above all as a man who constantly pushed himself to the limits. I was surprised to learn that Che Guevara suffered heavily from asthma! He was also a womanizer of some standing. Another surprise was his intellectual side. He could probably have become a university teacher in another life. 

Che Guevara´s revolutionary career is too well known to be recounted here, yet there are still unresolved mysteries around him. Harrison retells the unconfirmed story that Guevara met former Argentine president Juan Perón in the latter´s Spanish exile. Perón supposedly warned him not to foment socialist revolutions in Latin America, since this was simply impossible! A strange tale *not* discussed in the book is Che´s supposed relations with the kook-Trotskyist "Posadistas" in Cuba. Harrison believes that it was Régis Debray rather than Ciro Bustos who revealed that Che was in Bolivia when Debray and Bustos had been captured and were interrogated by the Bolivian military. (Bustos subsequently moved to Sweden. I don´t know if the author ever met him.)  

Inevitably, "Che Guevara" also discusses the virtual cult of Che after his death by execution in Bolivia. One aspect I wasn´t aware of is that Che is literally worshipped as a saint by the peasants in the area where he was captured and killed. They call him San Ernesto de la Higuera and compare him to both Jesus and John the Baptist. San Ernesto is said to work miracles, and sometimes walks the mountain paths as an ordinary mortal. There are bizarre similarities between the famous or infamous picture of a dead Che in Vallegrande and old paintings of the dead Christ taken down from the cross. There is also a legend that could perhaps be called "the curse of Che", which claims (or points out) that many of the people responsible for his death met violent ends. 

It seems revolutionaries aren´t normal people, after all...

If Swedish is your first language, perhaps recommended.