Fidel & Che: A Revolutionary Friendship;
By Simon Reid-Henry; Sceptre
Pages: 467 , Price: Rs 695
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Fidel & Che: A Revolutionary Friendship by Simon Reid-Henry is a little known-story of friendship between the two comrades who were born in different families, a little less than two years apart, and at opposite ends of a vastly unequal continent. It was revolution that brought them together. For Che Guevara it was another long friendship that started towards the end of his motorcycle journey, which again is the story of his friendship with Alberto Granado. He met Fidel Castro in 1955 while both were in exile in Mexico. Their friendship lives on even after their death.
Fidel had fled Cuba fearing for his life. At the outset the book appears to be an epic dual-biography. But, Reid-Henry takes an economic, insightful and compassionate look at the lives of these two soldiers before, during, and after their best known exploit – the Cuban revolution. It is a lucid, tight and even–handed account of their partnership and mangled aspirations of both men.
Simon Reid-Henry claims that Castro had been very silent about his friendship with Che. However, this is not entirely correct as his admiration for Che is evident in his autobiography, first published in Spain in 2006, and was documented in recent biographies of Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson and Jorge Castaneda. Reid-Henry offers a synthesis of these sources, tracing Guevara's political awakening to his student days in Buenos Aires, where he took a medical degree in 1953. Obsessed with finding a cure for his chronic asthma, he wanted to remedy the social injustices of Latin America - at first through preventive medicine, later through armed rebellion.
Two men were united in purpose and their primary adult relationship was with each other, though not physically so, since machismo has a horror of homosexuality. Both were privileged, spoilt in childhood and overflowing with self-belief. Both were sexually predatory, with serial relationships and many children. And for both the comrades the political mission was what counted. Each had a sense of destiny that was, at best, a mixed blessing in power.
Guevara devoted more than 10 years of his brief life to Castro's cause. Yet, he was a very different revolutionary from Castro. While Castro was the paunchy epicure, Guevara was an ascetic soul who cared little for wine or dance. (His real passion was chess.) He had been Castro's left-hand man in the nationalist revolt that toppled the Cuban dictator Batista in 1959, and was subsequently appointed director of the Cuban national bank. In his combat fatigues and beret, however, Guevara was not born to be a banker. He set up Cuba's first labour camps, and supervised an estimated 550 executions in post-Batista Havana. However, he was unhappy with Fidel's reforms and excessive paperwork and left Cuba in 1965 to champion revolutionary causes in Zaire and Bolivia. However, Reid-Henry dismisses the notion that Guevara went to fight in Bolivia of his own will. He claims that it was Fidel who sent Guevara (already the father of five children) to Bolivia in the spring of 1966. And the decision led to his death during a half-baked guerrilla insurrection.
Fidel was a revolutionary in exile, the Jesuit-educated illegitimate son of a landowner from Cuba's Oriente province. When he met Che, he had one military debacle to his name (the assault on the Moncada barracks in 1953) and another in the planning stages (the Granma landing). Both disasters proved useful in the serious work of constructing a revolutionary myth that starred Fidel.
The book also has some interesting and rare pictures of the protagonists. One among those deserves a special mention --- the first known photo of Castro and Che taken during their period of incarceration in the Mexican Interior Ministry’s detain centre in 1956.
Reid-Henry, unfortunately, does not take the analysis of this key relationship beyond just the synthesis of events that unfolded half-a-century back, After Che's death, Fidel embraced first the USSR, then China. Guevara's Robin Hood glamour continues to have a universal appeal. Tourists to Cuba come home with Che-themed T-shirts and ashtrays, and feature films re-mythologise his story for new generations. Fidel died recently after he presided over decades of stagnation in Cuba. The ghost of Che is honoured everywhere - the ageless revolutionary and embodiment of high moral principle and self-sacrifice, not withered by the passage of time or the less-than-heroic reality. The book captures a twisted and tangled tale of probably the most infamous brothers-in-arms of world history.
A version of this review was published in the Businessworld Issue Dated 12-18 May 2009.
Book Reviews 
Fidel & Che: A Revolutionary Friendship;
