Most of us may not be given to making sacrifices for whatever ideals we may profess. But we hold in esteem those who do, even if we do not agree with their ideals. I imagine that what attracts one here is the element of commitment. But paradoxically, immortality comes with the surrender of the joys of what one lives for.

Dr Nagi concludes his passionate book on Guevara thus 'Important conditions certainly play an important role. But the maturity of such conditions cannot, by itself, ensure the success of a revolution. Neither can the absence of these objective conditions be made an excuse to deny the need for struggle.'

He appears to endorse voluntarism. And indeed, Guevara, like Rosa Luxemburg, had a perceptible voluntarist inclination in the classical Nietzchean sense. Nagi quotes Guevara as stating 'The job of a revolutionary is to make revolution — he himself makes the conditions favourable for it.' This may be an exaggerated statement but there are two propositions contained in it. Firstly, Latin America had a revolutionary situation and the communist parties there, held back by Moscow from revolutionary action, had grown lazy. Secondly, a spark was needed to set the continent on fire.

Actually, the Cubans were able to bring about a revolution relatively easily because the US had not understood the nature of the movement. As a result, they underestimated the US's determination to prevent the rise of another Cuba in Latin America. The Soviet bureaucracy was possibly as opposed to revolution as was the US, since it came in the way of Moscow's search for a détente with Washington. Therefore it regarded revolutionary action as adventurism.

Guevara, who gradually developed contempt for the Soviets, accepted the label but added that he was 'an adventurer who risked his skin to prove his truths.' His break with the Soviets came in 1965, when, in a speech delivered at the Afro-Asian Conference in Algiers, he accused them and other socialist countries of exploiting the third world by conducting unequal trade with it like the western countries. He also told some other leaders that capitalism would be restored in the Soviet Union. Then, of course, there was no place for him in Cuba which was dependent so crucially upon Moscow.

However his Bolivian project and its catastrophic end raised more serious questions. Dr Nagi's discussion of the subject is absorbing. He mentions the criticism levelled at Guevara but he ultimately blames the Bolivian communist leader, Monje, and the Soviet Union for the debacle. But, as Trotsky had said earlier, 'for them, the questions ended where, for others, they began.'

To look at the question from a practical political angle, internationalism means going to the aid of other countries' revolutionaries both materially and morally, as Che did for the Cubans. It does not mean carrying a whole ensemble to another country and organising a rebellion there in disregard of the local party.

The concept of a foco was Latin America's answer to its combination of a high degree of urbanisation and a relatively empty countryside. It was turned by Regis Debre later into a new theory of revolution. But it has proved to be only an extreme form of armed propaganda.

And what explains the global popularity of Che Guevara? The revolution was more than just about seizing the means of production by destroying the old army. The crucial aspect in the process is the creation of the new man as the result of that very action. Guevara, in challenging the US's hegemony in Latin America and, by the same action, defying the Soviet Union's embargo on revolutions, rose above the Latin American universe. He grasped the flag of pure revolution and, like Prometheus, engaged all of humanity. It was idealism raised to a palpable force. He became the icon of rebellion against injustice everywhere.

Dr Nagi's book is what the existentialists call un acte d'engagement or an act of commitment. It is well-researched and the narrative is passionate without being flamboyant. This is probably the first work of its kind in Urdu and thus a valuable contribution to the struggle for social change in Pakistan. The author has also used to the full our local tradition of summoning poetry to the aid of prose, where a single couplet illumines many pages. Faiz's lines here are not an embellishment. They enrich the story.

The author ends with an indictment of the Soviet Union's double-dealing. There is no doubt that the bureaucratic bourgeoisie had seized power there in the 1930s, but a spark remained somewhere. The last consignment of Soviet arms arrived in Kabul on the day that the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

Che Guevara

By Dr Saulat Nagi

Fiction House, Lahore

270pp. Rs240