La face cahée du Che

Countless intellectuals have sung the praises of Che, without having read a single line of his writing, projecting their own fantasies onto a personage who has been reduced to two photos: the one of a man in a beret with a single star, looking into a distant future which he doubtless imagined would be radiant, and the one of a bare-chested corpse bearing a vague resemblance to the recumbent Christ in the painting by the Italian Quattrocento artist Andrea Mantegna. These images of Che Guevara aim, above all, to overshadow his words. Jacobo Machover chose to steep himself in the most secretive aspects of Che’s life, his deepest thoughts, through an in-depth analysis of his texts, as well as the accounts of certain people who were close to him, in an attempt to bring his contradictions to light. In this way, he shows both the revolutionary’s utopian dimension and his quotidian cruelty and lack of sensitivity. By turns rebel, evildoer and victim. Never univocal, this book dismantles the immense misunderstanding that has been grafted onto this larger-than-life character. We discover, behind the romantic libertarian, the fanatic Stalinist, just another pawn on Castro’s chessboard. Che revealed by his own texts and the accounts of those who knew him.