Che, My Brother by Juan Martin Guevara review – the making of a revolutionary

One could argue that sufficient ink has been expended on Che Guevara. Those who fought with him, including Fidel Castro, have written memoirs, and there’s a definitive biography by the reporter who located Che’s body, Jon Lee Anderson. But, as Anderson himself says, wherever there is revolt or resistance, there is still that face: of the hero-revolutionary Bolivian nuns called “San Ernesto”. And there still exists an insatiable desire for more about the man behind the T-shirt or poster, especially when it comes from his family.

Ernesto Guevara, “El Che”, was 15 when his younger brother Juan Martin was born, about to set off on the first of his adventures, by electrically powered bicycle, then motorbike, then the boat Granma, on which he sailed from Mexico to help ignite and lead the Cuban revolution.

“Being the brother of Che has never been a trivial matter,” says Juan Martin, in an opening understatement.

The brothers were born into the lineage of “a family of intellectuals, bound to the land, anti-clerical free thinkers” and grew up in homesteads “inevitably transformed into shambles”, he writes. Sisters were treated the same as brothers, but the children divided between those loyal to the father and to the mother, Che and Juan Martin among the latter.

The descriptions of home life are irresistible: Juan Martin describes his father, Ernesto Snr, as “an ambitious man who was incapable of persevering, a poet who wrote no poetry”. His mother, Celia, appears as both a dynamo of a woman and caring guide, arrested on a street demonstration when Juan Martin was 10.

Young Che would “take a book into the toilet, and stay there for ever… If you asked him to come out, he’d start to declaim Gustave Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas or Charles Baudelaire”, in French. But rather like Albert Camus in Algiers, “the fact that he had rubbed shoulders with the sons of the proletarians and peasants… had consolidated my brother’s visceral intolerance for injustice”.

“Work, study, learn, he kept telling me”, but then: “He taught me reams of saucy poetry, which I eagerly repeated to the girlfriends of my sisters. I told Ernesto, he burst out laughing.”

Che is fascinated by a Quechua-speaking Amerindian girl who is hired to keep house: “He liked nothing better than to spend long periods of time with her; he was curious about her life, her origins, her people.”

Throughout, though, “I grew up in the shadow of Ernest. I could never escape it”, writes Juan Martin and this is what makes his book interesting. The family, at home in Argentina, take a phone call from Che in Havana during 1959, invited by their long-lost son and brother to join the revolutionary victory celebrations. Juan Martin is a teenager, drop-jawed – “it was one intoxicating whirlwind”. But their father exploits El Commandante’s fame with such vulgarity that he is sent packing, home.

Thereafter, Juan Martin and the rest of the family follow Che’s career, aghast, from afar. We do not really need his accounts of Che’s campaigns in Cuba, Africa and – fatally – Bolivia, since they are by definition hearsay, well documented; though the letters home and Celia Guevara’s anxieties are poignantly recorded.

What takes his book into a high gear towards its denouement is, oddly, not Juan Martin’s account of his brother, but himself, in that “shadow”. He refused graduate school to become a truck driver, then a militant with the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores – Workers’ Revolutionary party – during Argentina’s “years of lead”: repression, mass “disappearances”, murder, imprisonment and torture, between 1976 and 1984.

Juan Martin spends eight traumatic and brutal years in various appalling prisons, lucky, he says himself, to have been among the first to be incarcerated, thereby missing the worst of the savagery that “disappeared” 30,000 people. He recounts the nightmare humbly, in moving detail: upon arrival at the La Plata prison, for instance, “we were greeted with a hail of blows. It was a place of torture and detention for ‘the disappeared’.”

Juan Martin had ceased using his family name, because “it was dangerous to be associated with Che Guevara”. But once jailed, he is visited by a counterinsurgency officer who has spent his life hunting leftist guerrillas, but who says: “What an incredible guy, that fantastic brother of yours.” Upon release, Juan Martin is reunited with his beloved, Viviana, who had “spent eight years [in a cell] without ever seeing the sun or the moon”.

So, at the end, when 74-year-old Juan Martin Guevara casts a judicious eye over the present state of 21st-century capitalism – in crisis, but brutal and “not about to commit suicide” – it is his past that charges his view with cogency, as well as that of his endlessly compelling brother.

If you want to read one book about Che, that should be Anderson’s, not this. But if you want to delve deeper into how Che the man became Che the icon, and the intimacy of his influence over the boy who knew him as a blood brother rather than a comrade, add this to the rewarding – and, in stupid times, ever more pressing – collection.