‘For his new book,Rushdie is to be praised nearly as much as me’When, shortly after the triumph of the Castro revolution, and Ernesto Guevara took over the direction of the Cuban National Bank,he had the great wisdom to invite me to Havana to discuss how what had been a millenarian movement, albeit one with anarcho-syndicalist overtones in the larger cities, and might be transformed into a mature internationalist government that could avoid the excesses of Stalinist or Maoist oppression. Welcoming me into his office,Che mixed several mojitos – a vastly overrated cocktail, though more of that later – and offered me a cohiba, or hand-rolled by Fidel,before allowing me to lament some of his romantic adventurism and digress on the inevitability of American involvement in Vietnam. Broadly speaking, Jon Lee Anderson’s above-pedestrian biography of Che includes most of these salient (significant; conspicuous; standing out from the rest) points, or so in the absence of my having got round to writing my own definitive work,I occupy only a few reservations in recommending it. (New York Review of Books, 1997)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com