Fifty years after Che Guevara’s death, his youngest brother offers a poignant view of having a family member who has become a legend. Photograph by Elliott Erwitt / Magnum

On October 9, 1967, just over fifty years ago, the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara was shot to death by a Bolivian Army sergeant in a schoolroom in a tiny hamlet in southeastern Bolivia. The Bolivians had hunted him down with the assistance of the C.I.A., which hoped to bring an early end to his role as a symbol of the struggle against the ravages of capitalism. But, after the execution, Che’s body was flown to Vallegrande, the nearest air base, sixty kilometres away, where it was put on display in the laundry room of a local hospital, and almost immediately the corpse began to take on a life of its own. In his biography of Che, my colleague Jon Lee Anderson writes that nuns working at the hospital swore that the open eyes of Che’s cadaver followed them around the room. Local peasants, who as a group had been reluctant to support Che’s insurgency, began to snip off locks of his hair to use as talismans; gradually, he was transformed into San Ernesto de La Higuera, a santo with special powers to assist the poor. When photographs of Che’s carefully laid-out corpse began to circulate more widely, the art critic John Berger pointed out the striking similarity between Che’s body and the body of Jesus as portrayed by the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna in “Lamentation of Christ.”

One person who doesn’t believe in what he refers to as these “idiotic stories” is Che’s youngest brother, Juan Martin Guevara. In his recently published book, “Che, My Brother,” (written with the French journalist Armelle Vincent), Juan Martin observes that all these anecdotes “tend towards the same goal: to turn Che into a myth.” Since Che’s death, the Guevara family has, for the most part, avoided speaking publicly, and Juan Martin’s professed intention, in breaking his silence, is both to counteract the degree to which Che’s image has been co-opted (in 2012, for example, Mercedes-Benz designed an advertising campaign that replaced the star on Che’s beret with the Mercedes logo) and also to explicate Che’s ideas as “a thinker and a social innovator.” “I share his ideas,” Juan Martin writes. “I am a Marxist-Leninist, a Guevarist.” In actuality, though, “Che, My Brother” is light on ideology and, instead, succeeds remarkably well as a personal and family memoir, benefitted by the authority of a writer who indisputably knows his subject well.

While biographers have described Che’s family as coming from the Argentine aristocracy, Juan Martin observes wryly that this formulation “always makes me smile. The oligarchy has two components: power and money. My parents had neither.” Che and Juan Martin’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, was the charming but feckless son of a “good family,” with no degree and a life-long tendency to involve himself in failing enterprises. Juan Martin describes his father in his youth as a “seasoned seducer” who, “at nightfall, headed off, carrying a weapon, to dance tango in the disreputable suburbs of Barracas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.” At the time, Juan Martin writes, Argentina’s national dance was the “exclusive domain of the working classes and immigrants.” “Decent folk” of the sort his father and mother came from “believed that this erotic pas de deux, which mimicked the motions of love so closely, was completely depraved.” When Ernesto met Che’s mother, Celia de la Serna y Llosa, she was the impressionable daughter of an old and wealthy family and was just emerging from the Convent of the Sacred Heart. During her schooling, she had considered taking the veil, but, after the nuns forced her to recite the Lord’s Prayer “10,000 times over” and mortify herself by putting ground glass in her shoes and kneeling on corn kernels, she decided that she no longer believed in God. Celia and Ernesto dated for only a few months before marrying. Her family boycotted the wedding.

After marrying, the young couple made a whimsical attempt to carve a yerba-maté plantation out of the jungle—on a “narrow stretch of lava and mud hemmed in between Brazil and Paraguay,” Juan Martin writes. Ernesto started by building a chalet on stilts, overlooking the Parana River. By the time the plantation failed, Celia had given birth to Che, the first of the couple’s five children (Juan Martin is the youngest). The infant Che suffered from severe asthma, and so the Guevaras chose to move to a more salubrious climate. They eventually arrived, very short on cash, in the mountainous province of Córdoba. There they settled in the spa town of Alta Gracia, where Ernesto took occasional jobs renovating hotels. The Guevara family moved regularly within Alta Gracia and, as Juan Martin puts it, each house they inhabited was invariably “transformed into a shambles.”

In this way and others, the Guevaras had a distinctive style. Unlike other residents of Alta Gracia, they supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and didn’t go to church. Celia scandalized the neighbors by cutting her hair short, wearing trousers, and driving a car. The Guevara kids came and went as they pleased and hung around with “proletarians and peasants”—anyone they liked. The family collected books, which they lent freely to friends. Juan Martin described it as a “hyper-politicized atheist environment.”

Che was perhaps the wildest member of the family. He was always handsome—with “large expressive, laughing eyes, a thick black mop of hair, and an easy smile,” Juan Martin writes—but he was indifferent to his appearance, wearing “the same shirt of threadbare nylon, hanging half out of his trousers, with mismatched shoes picked up in a jumble sale.” Che was the oldest, but, Juan Martin writes, “he didn’t play the role of the bossy and overbearing big brother; instead, he was protective. For him, knowledge and learning were essential and, like my parents, he never tried to impose things.”

From an early age, Che developed a strong sense of social justice.The Guevaras moved back to Buenos Aires, in the early nineteen-fifties, by which time Ernesto and Celia had split, and the family employed a Bolivian maid, Sabina, a Quechua-speaking Aymara Indian from the highlands who spoke little Spanish. She and Che became very close, and despite the maid’s lack of Spanish, the two spent hours talking. Che was curious about her life, her origins, and her people. At this point, Che was in medical school. As soon as he graduated, he took off on his famous motorcycle ride to explore South and Central America. His first objective was to visit the Bolivian highlands, where he hoped to become familiar with the hardships experienced by the Aymara people.

Che’s trip up the spine of South America—to a Peruvian leper colony, to Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala (where he experienced the 1954 U.S.-supported right-wing coup), and Mexico (where he met Fidel Castro)—is a trip from which, from his family’s point of view, he never returned. During the six years of his wanderings, his communication was erratic and depended, in part, on when he could afford a postage stamp. His parents and siblings worried about him, feared he might be killed, and missed him terribly. “Whether he wrote to us personally or not, the result was the same,” Juan Martin writes. “Each letter was an event around which the whole family gathered. Everyone’s efforts were required: his handwriting was illegible and sometimes took hours to decipher.”

Meeting Fidel, of course, got Che involved in the Cuban Revolution. The Guevara family viewed Cuba as a kind of quaint, distant Illyria, and their son’s involvement there was an inexplicable curiosity. But, as the struggle in the Sierra Maestra grew in intensity, the infrequent communication from Che made them take the conflict more seriously, and it became a source of intense anxiety. In early January of 1959, only a few days after the Cuban rebels succeeded in ousting President Fulgencio Batista from power, the phone rang at the Guevara house and Celia answered. “Hola vieja. It’s your son Ernestito,” Che said. Two days later, Castro flew the Guevara family to Cuba, to celebrate the success of the revolution. They were received there with open arms—“I was strutting about in the three-piece suit my parents had bought me for the occasion,” Juan Martin writes—and Celia Guevara, especially, became immensely proud.