Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life.

• Author: Landau, Saul

By Jon Lee Anderson Grove Press. 800 pages. $35.00.

In October 1967, forty-year-old Ernesto Guevara and a small band of haggard guerrilla warriors, serving as Fidel Castro's international emissaries of revolution, fell victim to an ambush in the inhospitable mountains of Bolivia, not far from the site where Sucre, Simon Bolivar's lieutenant, met his fate trying to spread the war for liberation in the nineteenth century.

Disarmed, wounded in several places, suffering the effects of prolonged asthma attacks, "Che," the stoic apostle of modern revolution, surrendered to a troop of Bolivian Rangers who were under the supervision of a U.S. Special Forces contingent.

Someone took Che's picture after he was executed. In the photo of the dead Guevara reprinted in Jon Lee Anderson's book, a Bolivian officer points to the corpse below him, as if to teach the assembled onlookers--including a nearby CIA man--an important medical lesson.

Che became an instant martyr. Painter Raul Martinez soon created the image of the haloed radical prince. This Che survives, a decoration on the side of the Cuban Ministry of Interior and a face on Cuban-made T-shirts sold at Havana's airport.

In July 1968, Fidel Castro had just finished writing his introduction to Che Guevara's Bolivian diary when I began a week-long film trip with him in Oriente, Cuba's eastern province. Fidel still showed signs of grief and rage--against the Bolivian Communist Party leaders and their Soviet directors, whom he believed had betrayed Che.

For Fidel, Che's death meant more than the loss of a beloved comrade. It meant the defeat of the overarching Cuban strategy for world revolution through guerrilla war. The Soviet Union, Fidel insisted, had turned its back on Che and the cause of socialism.

In the summer of 1974, we drove together again, this time through the outskirts of Havana. Fidel still spoke passionately about Che. But this time, Fidel was more critical. "she was reckless," he said. "I had warned him on several occasions during our guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestre that he was too valuable to lose. I was worried because of his intemperate behavior, because he had no fear of death and would expose himself heedlessly to mortal danger."

A brilliant doctor, and a courageous and impulsive warrior, Ernesto Guevara Serna became the last enduring romantic myth of twentieth-century revolution. In a letter to his mother he describes himself as a servant of the poor. "Yet, I am not Christ...