Cult of Che ignores apocalyptic vision of its hero

Buenos Aires Letter:Publishers are experts at the art of cashing in on anniversaries, writes Tom Hennigan.

Even so the glut of offerings in Buenos Aires bookshops to mark the 40th anniversary of the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara speaks to the enduring appeal of the Argentine revolutionary icon who shot to global superstardom with Fidel Castro when leading the Cuban revolution only to die a decade later trying to export it to the rest of Latin America.

Glossy coffee-table books that linger over his buccaneering good looks are stacked alongside dense Marxist analyses of his preference for the guerrilla option over traditional communist parties. In between the reissues of the brick-sized biographies you can find The Thought of Che alongside The Green Copybook of Che which republishes the poems he had gathered together to bring with him on his doomed Bolivian expedition, meticulously reconstructed in Che's Last Year.

This deluge of books testifies to the fact that Che's profile in the land of his birth is higher than at any time since the end of the period of revolutionary turmoil that the Cuban revolution sparked in Latin America. In a recent poll schoolchildren here were asked to nominate Argentinians from the past they admired, and most placed Che up with San Martin, the country's liberator.

It is not hard to see why Che is such an attractive figure for many, not just in the land of his birth but across much of Latin America.

His life was one of romantic adventure, first as an unknown bohemian travelling across South America, as recounted in the hugely popular Motorcycle Diaries, then helping lead a small band of rebels from the Sierra Maestra to improbable victory over Cuba's thuggish dictator Fulgencio Batista. His death at 39 meant he never aged with his revolution, unlike his old compañero Fidel. Then there is that picture. Did the camera ever love another rebel more? Che has become a kind of shorthand for rebel chic.

But it is remarkable just how divorced all this is from the historical man as opposed to the folk hero. His political legacy is one of total failure.

His main contribution to the revolutionary canon is his Guevarista theory that small bands of dedicated revolutionaries based in remote rural areas of Latin America could replicate the Cuban experience and spark popular wars that would lead them to power across the continent.

His doomed attempt to prove the validity of this deeply flawed theory led to his own death and the deaths of thousands of young idealists who followed him into what proved to be an abyss of torture, death and disappearance for a generation of the continent's left-wing activists.

Thousands rose to meet Fidel's challenge to "Be like Che!" and insurrections were launched across the region. Almost all were wiped out or collapsed under the weight of their own impending failure. Only in 1979 in Nicaragua did guerrillas manage to emulate the Cubans and take power. It is a pitiful return measured against the lives lost and marks a strategic blunder from which the Latin Left took decades to recover.

Even more curious is the fact that Che's current folk hero status has also managed to obscure something else about the man - his fanaticism.

He was, said great Mexican writer Alma Guillermoprieto, "a harsh angel" who "demanded that others follow his impossible example, and never understood how to combine what he wanted with what was achievable".

Che considered his theory about armed struggle a "scientific truth" and that implementing it would lead to the end of global inequality and injustice and give birth to a New Man.

And to achieve this, death - his own, his followers', anyone's - was a price worth paying. "The blood of the people is our most sacred treasure, but it must be used in order to save the blood of more people in the future."

His right to decide this sprang from his belief that revolutionaries like himself were "the highest rank in the human species".

His call to create "one, two, a thousand Vietnams" was nothing less than an attempt to spark a new world war in order to bring about the triumph of socialism. The atheist revolutionary was in fact a millennial prophet seeking to provoke apocalyptic conflicts in order to bring about his own version of Utopia.

And for all the power of the current Che myth, and despite the fact that the poverty, inequality and brutality that led him towards his vision are still all too widespread, the reality is that in today's Latin America few want to be like this Che.