Defending Che.

Richard Alleva brings a considerable amount of his own "political baggage" to his review of The Motorcycle Diaries, ("Easy Riders," November 5, 2004). Of course, with Ernesto "Che" Guevara, it's difficult, if not impossible, not to get political. But in Alleva's review, I believe that politics clouds his perspective. This might be summed up by his statement, "But it's hard to ride a motorcycle while wearing a straitjacket, and the one [scriptwriter Jose] Rivera and [director Walter] Salles share is left-wing piety."

I see Guevara through the eyes of someone who spent two-and-a-half years in the mid-1960s working with trade unions in Ecuador. I came back radicalized--not to the point where I picked up a gun, but I can almost see why Che did it. As an aspiring pacifist, I can't condone what Guevara did, but I do recognize and support his idealism, which I believe never left him.

Before writing this letter, I reread Guevara's diary of the last eleven months of his life. It consists of daily notes and anecdotes written while tramping through the tropical forests of central Bolivia. In it, Che recounts the day his gang ambushed a group of Bolivian troops. The soldiers who weren't killed in the fighting were "set free after giving them a talking to," a far cry from Che's brutal death. Yes, Guevara picked up the gun, but he was a decent man who suffered and died for his idealism.

JAMES T. DETTE

Weehawken, N.J.

THE REVIEWER REPLIES:

My review of Walter Salles's film contained a lot more praise than blame, a fact no reader can deduce from James Dette's letter, which suggests that my politics (old-guard liberal? conservative? fascistic?) underlie my criticisms. But what were my criticisms? "The beginning of Ernesto's revolutionary commitment ... is never crystallized by a specific dramatic action. Ernesto [Guevara] is just as idealistic at the end of the movie as at the beginning, but he is no closer to becoming Che, and the engendering of Che is surely the raison d'etre of this film." This is an artistic question, not a political one. Whether I admire Guevara or detest him is completely beside the point. However, having pinpointed what I took to be a dramatic flaw, I also tried to guess what produced that flaw. And what except middle-class, left-wing piety could have inspired those worshipful close-ups of workers' faces and the ludicrously solemn photomontage of the wretched of the earth? I wonder if the Ecuadorian workers Dette helped back in the '60s would have bridled at being portrayed as plaster saints if a movie had ever been made about them.

RICHARD ALLEVA