From Mass Murderer to Pin-Up ; a New Film Lionises Che Guevara -- The Cuban Revolutionary Whose Face Adorned Countless Seventies Student Bedsits -- As a Saintly Romantic Hero. The Truth Was Brutally Different . .

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LET US imagine that Che Guevara, that iconic poster-boy of the Left, the guerilla fighter whose face launched a thousand student minirebellions, was not captured and riddled with bullets in a South American jungle in 1967 but is still alive -- 'Che lives!', as the Sixties student revolutionaries used to chant.

He would be 81 years old, his thin moustache and beard grey with age, those famous lanky locks receded to baldness, his freedom fighter's black beret replaced by a sensible sun hat. He could be terminally ill, like his Cuban compadre Fidel Castro, or boring everyone who met him with endless lectures about the old days and how revolutions aren't what they used to be.

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From Mass Murderer to Pin-Up ; a New Film Lionises Che Guevara -- The Cuban Revolutionary Whose Face Adorned Countless Seventies Student Bedsits -- As a Saintly Romantic Hero. The Truth Was Brutally Different . .

The image is too appalling to contemplate. Che was never designed for old age. He encapsulated young people's dreams -- and their delusions. It is no coincidence that he was the darling of The Who generation -- 'Hope I die before I get old'.

And the fact he did is why the myth of his greatness persists.

We are likely to see a lot of him in the weeks ahead. Cuba is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew the corrupt, Right-wing dictatorship which had turned the Caribbean island into little more than an offshore brothel, casino, drug-den and get-richquick haven for American gangsters.

In the early hours of the morning of January 3, 1959, at the climax of a fierce, two-year guerilla war fought in the Sierra Ma...

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