The Guevara effect

POOR Che Guevara. Born Argentine, in 1956-59 he helps Fidel Castro to destroy the then Cuban dictatorship—and to put a new one in its place. He tries and fails to launch uprisings in Argentina, then Bolivia, where in 1967 government troops shoot him dead and bury him with neither ceremony nor hands, in order to prove, with fingerprints, that they got their man. And now, 30 years later, a new Bolivian government, in a new Latin America, finds his grave, digs him up and returns him, in a plastic box, for reburial in a grand mausoleum in Cuba. And what achievements—beside his image on a zillion T-shirts, and the memory of a young man of feeling, social conscience and determination—has Che left behind? Not much—and much of that bad.