When Che Guevara was executed by CIA-backed Bolivian forces in October 1967 he died as revolutionaries are supposed to die: actively engaged in the liberation struggle. He died young enough to never grow old and largely untainted by corruption and compromise. Jean Paul Sartre proclaimed him the most complete human being of the age and immortality was ensured by that one photograph which translated a man into an icon. He died at a moment when the youth of the West were ready to embrace an icon: as anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements spread through the campuses of the US and students took to the streets in Paris, as Soviet tanks drove into the heart of Prague. He supported and spoke directly to anti-imperialist struggles in the still recently independent nations of South America, Africa and Asia. He wrote that "the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love" and when his washed corpse was displayed, local nuns declared that he looked like Christ.

From such raw materials a myth can be built and the complexity of an actual life erased. Prefiguring his death by nine years, he wrote to his mother: "I am not Christ or a philanthropist… I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place."

Che was often to stress that in a revolutionary situation the choice is to kill or be killed: a principle he applied not only to the immediate conditions of his own survival but also to the wider and long-term survival of the revolution. The revolutionary leader "must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching". As a leader of guerrilla forces he took enemy lives and both ordered and enacted the summary execution of traitors. As part of the revolutionary government he oversaw as 'supreme prosecutor' the purging of the army of Batista's supporters and the execution of 'war criminals'.

The industrial and economic policies he pursued were both Utopian and ineffective. His travels abroad failed to secure the export of the revolution and at the time of his death after nine months in Bolivia he had failed to recruit a single peasant to his revolutionary cause.

Che's commitment to the revolution was absolute. By the time he joined Castro's nascent liberation force he had travelled widely in South and Central America seeing at first hand the poverty, exploitation and oppression of that continent. He had read widely in politics and philosophy including Marx, Lenin and Mao. He had witnessed the defeat of revolution in Guatemala. As an Argentinean with a vision of an anti-Imperialist struggle throughout Latin America, his attachment to this Cuban revolution was necessarily different from that of Fidel and the other Cuban nationals.

Whilst Fidel had expressed strong anti-imperialist sentiments, his struggle like that of many other groups was to overthrow the corrupt Batista government and the exploitation of Cuba by US interests. It was only in 1961, just prior to the US backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, that Fidel was to 'reveal the socialist nature of the revolution' to the people of Cuba, and then for political reasons as much as ideological.

It was in the early stages of the armed struggle in Cuba as a part of a group of only twelve revolutionaries that Che formed his theories of guerrilla warfare and the centrality of the rural peasantry to revolutionary change. He held that the conditions for revolution can be created by a guerrilla force acting as a revolutionary vanguard, that it is possible to radicalise the peasantry through "violent struggle against imperialist powers and their internal allies" and organise into a popular force capable of defeating the armies of the state.

This argument in many ways runs counter to elements in both classic Marxism and Marxist-Leninism which see history as driven by the motor of class conflict. At the end of this conflict comes the final revolution when the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production can no longer be contained, when the conditions of the industrial proletariat enable them to realise their class consciousness and act as the revolutionary class. In emphasising the role of the peasantry, Che shares elements with Maoist thought. Even so, official Cuban accounts prefer to emphasise Che's originality in proposing a theory derived from the dialectical process of doing a specific revolution: that theories of revolution are formed from and then inform and transform the practice of revolution which in turn feed back to reform the theories in an endless process of transformation.

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