R.I.P., Che Guevara 

That long, flowing hair, that beret with the single star, those eyes fixed on a better future: the picture of Che Guevara has become the late twentieth century's image of revolt and revolution. In life an awe-inspiring leader, in death an icon for our times, Che - a whole generation thought they knew him - was the hallmark of all things new and radical.

Two recent biographies - Jon Lee Anderson's Che Guevara. A Revolutionary Life  (Bantam Press, 1997) and Jorge Castañeda's Companero. The Life and Death of Che Guevara  (Bloomsbury, 1997) do more to complete the picture of Che than we could have hoped for. Long established Latin Americanists, Guevara's new biographers have drawn fully on already established knowledge and combined this with exhaustive tappings of several previously unused sources of information.

The two biographies compliment each other nicely. The authors' different strategies and priorities have produced two significantly different versions of the same story. That, and the fact that both biographies are extremely well researched (if, in terms of style and composition, somewhat conventional examples of their genre) makes both well worth reading.

Lee Anderson writes that his sole loyalty is to Che Guevara himself, 'to write what I perceive to be his truth, not anyone else's.' But his work is not a hagiography. His most important sources are the people he befriended during his long stay in Havana. Among them were comrades, friends, and even some of Guevara's closest relatives, most notably his widow Aleida March. Yet Lee Anderson shows great integrity in drawing his own conclusions, frequently leaving his readers with quite unflattering or uncomfortable pictures of 'el Che'. By the end of his account, Lee Anderson makes us realise, therefore, that Guevara's failings only made his tragedy even larger. While Guevara's ambition couldn't have been bigger - stirring up one big revolution for the whole of Latin America - his death couldn't have been much smaller. Lee Anderson's strength is his tireless telling of detail and his straightforward way of reporting all this.

For political and philosophical depth of analysis, look instead to Castañeda. Despite being a little short on the patience required to write a biography of this kind, Castañeda displays a more critical and sophisticated understanding than Lee Anderson not only of Che the revolutionary, but also of the revolution he guided. He shows how the Cuban revolution inspired insurgencies throughout Central and South America, and locates them all within the entire ideological spirit of the time. The key to understanding Che's historical importance, he says, is recognising how perfectly suited the man was to his times. His legends lives, Castañeda argues, because Che embodied an almost mystical affinity with his era, a time when people believed justice was achievable and revolution excusable. Castañeda's real task is to explain how and why Guevara's example could lead so many thousands of young Latin Americans to their deaths. Even today, young rebels express their idealist ambition in the form of a prediction or even a premonition: 'Seré como el Che' - 'I will be like Che'. Alas, all too often, they get there.

More than thirty years after Guevara's death, such wishes seem hollow. Today one of the most uncompromising socialists the world has known can be merchandised as a red-hot commodity. In the course of those few October days in 1997 when his bones were first put on lit de parade  and then laid to rest in a purpose-built mausoleum in Santa Clara (the city where Guevara's unit won its most important victory against the Batista regime) it became clear to everyone that the vast majority of the Che cult followers were no longer committed communist soldiers but consumer-capitalist shoppers. Appropriately, the myth of Che is soon to become the subject of not one, but many major motion pictures. Celebrity investors, Mick Jagger amongst them, are busier than ever creating a new, fictional Che. While we wait for the films, we can walk la Ruta del Che , the route followed by Che's guerilla band, and observe the spots where they camped, fought, and died. En route - or anywhere else for that matter - Che can be listened to, worn, eaten, or drunk. He can be seen on the face of a Swatch. There is no 'Chez Guvara' nightclub, but there probably will be one before long. It has already featured in a recent episode of 'The Simpsons'.

The fact remains, though, that Che is dead, and Lee Anderson and are the ones who may have made it possible for him finally to lie down. Both tracked down people who were present both at his execution and his burial. In November 1995, Lee Anderson was interviewing Mario Vargas Salinas, a former junior officer of the Bolivian Army. He knew that Vargas had been part of the platoon that had captured and killed Guevara. But the interview was a formality. The story of Guevara's last days had already been established, in sufficient detail, years earlier. Towards the end of their conversation, however, after he had put his notebook away, Lee Anderson nevertheless asked if Vargas knew what happened to Guevara's body.

'I've been wanting to tell you', said Vargas. 'Che was buried, together with six others, in a mass grave near the Vallegrande air strip.' Lee Anderson wrote up the story for The New York Times . At this point all hell broke loose. The Bolivian army denounced Lee Anderson, claiming that he had got Vargas drunk and made up lies to promote his book. Lee Anderson produced the tape from the interview. Vargas, meanwhile, ran away, and is now apparently under 'house arrest' in Colombia. Under immense media pressure, the Bolivian president formed a commission to find the bodies. The Army, however, had other plans. Mainly thanks to them, digging only began a year later. After four weeks, four corpses had been found. All, however, had hands, while Guevara's, apparently, had been removed before his burial.

As patience was wearing thin, Cuban government forensic experts flew in to scan the entire area for 'anomalies', places where the earth had been disturbed. They found quite a few. After a six week break, digging was resumed, and, in late June 1997, a grave with the bones of seven bodies was unearthed. On one of them, 'number 2', the hands were missing.

Castañeda also found his gravedigger. Tracked down in his sports shop in Miami, the Cuban exile and former CIA stooge Gustavo Villoldo claimed that he had also been present. 'He was never cremated', said Villoldo, 'I didn't allow it, in the same manner I opposed the mutilation of his body.' From then on, all Castañeda had to do was to wait for the material evidence. It didn't take long.

And as it turned out, the story of the opening of the first grave and closing of the second coincided, not only with the build-up to the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara's death, but also with the publication of the two biographies. In death, as in life, Guevara's genius was his sense of timing.

Niels Jacob Harbitz is a PhD candidate at CSD.