I met Che Guevara in November 1963 at a reception in the gardens of the Soviet Embassy in Havana, one of those diplomatic occasions held every year to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution. He strode in after midnight, accompanied by a coterie of friends, bodyguards and hangers-on, wearing his trademark black beret, his shirt open to the waist. He was unbelievably beautiful. People stopped whatever they were doing and stared at the Revolution made flesh. 'He had an incalculable enchantment that came completely naturally,' Julia Costenla, an Argentine journalist told Jon Lee Anderson when he was researching his biography of Guevara. 'If he entered a room, everything began revolving around him.'

LRB 21 August 1997 | PDF Download