Che, My Brother by Juan Martin Guevara & Armelle Vincent

2017, Polity Books, hardback.

Juan, brother of Che, was imprisoned in Argentina for 8 years under the military dictatorship, and brings a new angle on Guevara, and the impact he had on their whole family.

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Che, My Brother

By Juan Martin Guevara & Armelle Vincent, Polity Books, 2017, hardback

In this year of the 50th anniversary of Che’s death even more books will undoubtedly appear about this outstanding revolutionary figure. But is there anything else to say? Juan, the 74 year old brother of Ernesto Guevara (Che) who has “an unwavering support for the Cuban revolutionary process” thinks there is.  

Although there are many biographers of Che, Juan offers an account that only a sibling could write, about the considerable impact Che had on the Guevara family itself. Its members carried “the burden of Ernesto’s commitment”, as well as the recognition from “his growing popularity”. Juan presents a portrait of a family whose eccentric parents, “always short of money”, raised four extraordinary children who each charted a course in their lives that seemed to revolve around Che’s actions, often measuring themselves against his ideals as they became more politicised.

Juan notes that even in Argentina where Ernesto grew up, most people don’t know his two brothers and a sister live in Buenos Aires - a second sister died in Cuba in 1990. These four siblings agreed to keep private their memories of Che at the time of his death. However during Argentina’s catastrophic crisis in 2001 he saw that many young people were rediscovering Che. “I felt I had a responsibility to him, a duty of memory that requires me to talk about him”.

Many anecdotes in the book are familiar. But Juan offers more than these. There are accounts of Che as a caring, older brother on Juan’s visit to Cuba in 1959 as the revolution was unfolding; of his mother as a dedicated campaigner in support of the 26 July movement; as well as the later horrors of Argentina’s military dictatorship when it wasn’t safe to be related to Ernesto Guevara. It was a time when Juan was imprisoned for over eight years and the rest of the increasingly politicised family escaped to Cuba.  

Sharing his views on Cuba and its people today as US-Cuban relations are changing, Juan insists above all that it is necessary to “recover and study Che’s ideas”, such as his volunteer work programme, a “conscience generator” as Juan calls it. The ultimate goal is to humanise Che beyond the myth that serves big business - in the spirit of the youth, the Palestinians, and others who today identify with his “integrity, struggle, justice and idealism”.

Doreen Weppler for CubaSi Spring 2017 issue.