This is a fascinating collection which, arising from a 2006 workshop, attempts to build around the itineraries of Che Guevara's two famous journeys through Latin America (in 1951 and 1953) a series of snapshot pictures of the relevant countries of that time, judging both the extent of their impact on him and his subsequent impact on them.
On the latter, all contributors agree. The ‘new Left’ which his writings and efforts engendered fundamentally changed each country's politics, albeit, in some contributors' view, not always for the better. On the former, they also mostly agree. What we get here is a variegated picture of a young, white, middle-class Argentine tourist, whose emotional sympathies led him into an assumed identification with a largely romanticised peasantry, but whose failure to understand, or even recognise or be interested in, the politics or societies which he saw, or the urban poor, left him largely unchanged by the contact. Indeed, only the 1953 journey seems really to have changed his outlook, hinted at fleetingly in an immediately post-revolution Bolivia, but much more so in a Guatemala excited by the ‘October Revolution’ under Arbenz and then subjected to the counterrevolution under a CIA-backed Castillo Armas in 1954. All, including Che's reactions, are captured well in what is one of the best chapters of the collection, by Cindy Forster. While Che's Bolivian experience seems not to have included any real awareness of the militancy of the urban working class, in what had probably been Latin America's greatest display of proletarian social revolution, Guatemala clearly confirmed in him a number of conclusions of much later significance: notably the power and inevitability of reaction by ‘US imperialism’ against any real social reform, the need to arm and mobilise active support for any such strategies of deep reform, and the inability of the formal Left to act in a revolutionary way.
Other than that, we are given successive portraits of a persistently romantic Che who visited the ‘exotic’ countries in his path like any other touring traveller. Indeed, Patience Schell's chapter on Chile interestingly compares his account and approach with those offered by other visitors, earlier and contemporary. Che carried with him, and never really changed, preconceptions about the ‘natural’ peasantry, the ‘soul’ of the people and the ‘essential’ Latin America (glimpsed in its ancient history and long-suffering indigenous peoples), and even behaved like either a patronising European or an irresponsible sex tourist. While that is not necessarily the contributors' aim, although Malcolm Deas's chapter on Colombia carries little evident sympathy with Che, it is nonetheless the overriding image which the chapters collectively present.
Thus Eduardo Elena's chapter on Argentina gives us a Che who, blissfully unaware of the real social transformation enacted daily through mass migration, engaged in the luxury of a hedonistic, Kerouac-like ‘journey of the soul’, and showed no evident awareness of the complexity of Peronism. Schell's commentary on Che's own account of his visit to Chile shows us a self-deprecating wanderer who seems to have adopted the persona of a picaresque youth, largely unaffected by the evidence of the ‘real’ politics of an urban working class. Equally, Paulo Drinot, on Peru, gives us a Che curiously unaware of the continentally significant APRA and always essentialist in his interpretation of the Peruvian peasantry.
Between these commentaries on the mutual effect, or lack of effect, between Che and the several countries, we are given a series of often revealing and detailed portraits of the politics and society of each place. Some are excellent. Judith Ewell's exposition of the Venezuela of 1953 is clearly familiar territory and Deas's Colombia rich in detail, with Ann Zulawski's Bolivia and Eric Zolov's Mexico providing us with a welcome summary of the complexity and particularities of each country at that precise historical moment. Hence, we do, as a result, get a revealing and detailed, if not complete, picture of the Latin America of 1951–3.
However, if there is a fault in the collection, it lies in the absence of a clear ‘so what?’ factor to unify the very different, but strangely repeating, pictures. While each chapter holds together as a snapshot of each case at a particular moment, and while we eventually acquire an accumulated portrait of a Che largely uninterested in, and unchanged by, the politics or society of each country (until the final stages of a second ‘tour’), or an increasingly familiar account of 1960s radicalism and guerrilla activity, we are not given a conclusive overview of what this actually means for our interpretation of the time or of Che himself. Drinot's introduction partly achieves that but, after our reading of the detail in each country, we might well have benefited from some meaningful conclusions being drawn from so many disparate ‘cases’. Instead, rather than a book with a clear ‘message’, we have a richly detailed and always fascinating set of diffuse pictures. One suspects that what works well in a workshop, with discussion and active comparison, works a little less coherently in an edited collection, without such a concluding glue. It is a pity, as the quality of the treatment of each case is often excellent, and the collective contribution offers much to add to our understanding of Che and the post-1959 Latin American Left.
