Hero, lover, demon, fool: fictional appropriations of Che Guevara

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, visiting Cuba in 1960, met Ernesto Guevara and were struck by his personal and political presence. Sartre praised Guevara as the embodiment of existential freedom, referring to his ability to be led by his own assertive will, and not by the will of others, and allegedly described him as 'the most complete human being of our age' (Anderson 1997a: 468). From the time of his death until the present, Guevara has been cast in a wide array of historical reconstructions with varying degrees of fi ctional distance from biographical historicity. In particular, he has repeatedly appeared as a fi ctional character in novels, sometimes showing an alarming degree of poetic licence, betraying strong ideological motivations behind the fi ction. Th is article analyses the ironic relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre's praise of Guevara as someone who has fully embraced the freedom of being and the fi ctionalization or categorization of Guevara as a novelistic character.