Description

This, the first of a proposed three volumes on the life of Ernesto Che

Guevara de la Serna by Asoke Bhattacharya, offers a skillfully crafted
account of the man commonly known by his nickname, “Che,” during his formative years before becoming the fully-formed revolutionary known and admired throughout the world. Che afficianados will be immediately drawn to the meticulous, granular detail of what is now known about Che’s life before he disembarked shortly after midnight on 25 November 1956, from the Mexican port of Tuxpan, Veracruz, in a diesel-powered
cabin cruiser named the Granma, as a part of a contingent of 82 fighters
of the 26th of July movement of the Cuban Revolution. This storied
contingent– that included Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and Camilo Cienfuegos-was on its way to Cuba and set to land at Playa de Las Colorads in an attempt to overthrow the regime of Fulgencio Batista.The outcome of the heroic efforts exercised by this small band of
revolutionaries represents one of the greatest victories against a barbaric
capitalist regime and against the imperial machinations of the United States in the twentieth century. And while this book is rich in description,it is far from a flat, antiseptic account. The information presented is conveyed in a lyrical style, that neither sentimentalizes the early life of Che, nor attempts to over interpret for the reader by hindsight what must
have been going on in the mind of the young Che during what the author
calls his “colorful life.” Only in the two volumes to follow will the author
be able to reconcile some of the most dramatic and world-shaking events
of Che’s life as a revolutionary with his formative development as the eldest son of the five children born to Celia de la Serna y Llosa and Ernesto Guevara Lynch in Rosario, Argentina in 1928. Che: A Colorful Life and Struggle details Che’s early life through adolescence, and into his early twenties. It captures the history of an extraordinary personality who grew up in a middle class Argentine household, and who very early in his development was exposed to numerous political perspectives, primarily leftist, and who was a voracious reader familiar at an early age with such thinkers as Karl Marx, William Faulkner, Andre Gide, Emilio Salgari,Jules Verne, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jack London, Emile Zola and Albert Camus. This volume is not an antiseptic anatomization of Che’s early history. Far from it. With the flair and lyricism of a seasoned storyteller, Bhattacharya narrates rather than simply catalogues Che’s life, including his 4500km long solo journey on bicycle through the rural provinces of Northern Argentina in 1950, and in 1951, his nine-month, 8,000-kilometer journey by motorcycle across numerous countries in South America with his friend Alberto Granado, to his brief tenure as a ship’s nurse on a petrol tanker that sailed to Trinidad, Tobago, British Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil, and his work at an allergy clinic in Buenos Aires. After graduating with a degree in medicine in 1953, Che begins a second momentous journey from Argentina throughout most of South America.