SOURCE: "Che Guevara—the Loss Looms Larger," in Commonweal, Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 4, April 12, 1968, pp. 110-11.

Capouya is an American educator, editor, critic, and translator. In the following excerpt, he reviews Guevara's personal account of the Cuban revolution, focusing on Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and Guerrilla Warfare.

In order to arrive at a true estimate of men like Ernesto Guevara and his fellow-revolutionary, Fidel Castro, we should first of all have to wake up to the world in which we are living. In that world, there are two hundred million Latin Americans, most of whom are very hungry, and their hunger is a necessary feature of the political and economic arrangements that make us North Americans rich.

They are ruled for the most part by armed degenerates whose brutality bears an exact proportion to the misery over which they preside, and the degenerates in question are subsidized...