An Irishman's Diary

It's a grim fate for a revolutionary who wanted to change the world. But 40 years to the day after he was executed, Che Guevara has achieved sainthood in the Bolivian province where he met his end. Not just secular sainthood, either, of the kind conferred on him elsewhere by a million teeshirts and posters. This is the fully religious kind.

The Observerrecently reported a church service in the town of Villagrande, during which the priest read prayers submitted by his parishioners to "Saint Ernesto". There was a note of reluctance in his delivery, but when interviewed about the cult the priest was resigned.

"For them he is just like any other saint," Father Agustin said. "One can do nothing." The same article reported how the hospital laundry where Guevara's body was displayed after his execution has become a place of pilgrimage; and that pictures of him hang beside those of Jesus and the Pope. It noted that a nurse who cleaned the guerrilla's body at the time now keeps an "altar" to him in her home. "He is very miraculous," she said.

NEVER MIND the arguments about his political legacy and the violence he espoused. Never mind even the romantic movie of a couple of years back: The Motorcyle Diaries. The saintly Che will be unrecognisable to anyone who has read the irreverent book that inspired that film: his own account of a formative trip around South America in 1952.

One reviewer said it revealed him to be "a Latin American James Dean or Jack Kerouac". But if he was a rebel without a cause then - he was a 23-year-old medical student - he was not without a sense of humour: much of it aimed at himself. The only miracle for which he could claim responsibility was the survival, despite a series of calamities, of the battered 500cc motorbike that carried him and a friend the length of the continent.

En route, it's true, there are glimpses of a troubled social conscience. In one moving passage, the author attempts to treat an old woman suffering from respiratory illness and heart problems. A month before she had still been earning a living as a waitress: suddenly she was a burden on a family already crushed by poverty and painfully conscious of this.

The young doctor saw in her the plight of the poor in general: "In those dying eyes there is a submissive appeal for forgiveness and also, often, a desperate plea for consolation which is lost to the void, just as their [ bodies] will soon be lost in the magnitude of mystery surrounding us." But the tone is rarely so serious. The book is more the story of two young men in constant search of women, drink, adventure and a bed for the night: all the while battling such problems as (in Guevara's case) asthma and "my inveterate bad breath".

THOSE WHO offered hospitality were not always rewarded. In a particularly memorable episode, Guevara describes suffering "a bad case of the runs" during the night and being too embarrassed to use the chamber pot in his bedroom. Instead he clambered onto the window ledge and, as he put it poetically, "gave up all my pain to the night and the blackness beyond".

This was not a good decision. "The next morning, I looked out to see the effect and saw that two metres below lay a big sheet of tin where [ the host family had been] sun-drying their peaches; the added spectacle was impressive. We beat it from there fast." Guevara (whose Irish ancestry was through his paternal grandmother, rather than his mother, as I suggested here last week) does not emerge from the book as a hero to anyone, least of all himself.

But the most impressive chapters describe a sojourn spent working with leprosy patients in Peru. The young doctors left such an impression there that, on their departure, the impoverished patients organised a small collection.

Guevara explained: "Their appreciation sprang from the fact that we never wore overalls or gloves, that we shook their hands as we would shake anybody's . . . that we played football with them. It may seem like pointless bravado, but the psychological lift it gives to these poor people - treating them as normal human beings instead of animals, as they are used to - is incalculable and the risk to us extremely unlikely." During the last moments of his life - on October 9th, 1967 - Guevara was himself a pitiable figure as he awaited execution, wounded and bound "like a piece of trash" on the floor of a schoolhouse in La Higeura, beside the bodies of his friends.

Even the Cuban-born CIA man who masterminded his capture found the scene "gruesome" and admitted mixed emotions: "Here was the man who had assassinated many of my countrymen. And nevertheless when I saw him, the way he looked . . . I felt really sorry for him."

A little over 15 years earlier, Guevara described his 24th birthday - celebrated near a leper colony in Lima - in idyllic terms. He went fishing in the morning, played football in the afternoon, and had a "delightful" dinner at the local doctor's house where, pleasantly drunk, he proposed a toast to a United Latin America. The chapter of the book is ironically titled: "El Dia de San Guevara" ("Saint Guevara's Day.")