Journalist, historian and author who served as a foreign correspondent and features editor of the Guardian
After the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara was executed in October 1967, his body was placed on display to the press by the US-supported Bolivian army in the remote town of Vallegrande. The event was watched over by a CIA agent, who in turn was watched by Richard Gott, the Guardian journalist, who has died aged 87.
The head of the CIA’s “country team” was furious at being spotted by Gott, who also confirmed that it was Guevara’s body. Apart possibly from the agent, he was the only person there who had seen Che before.
Guevara’s death, Gott would write in his authoritative Cuba: A New History (2004), ended many people’s romantic association with the Cuban revolution, but he held “an abiding affection for the people and their struggle …” His sympathy for that struggle and against regional imperialism from the conquistadores to the norteamericanos, became a lifetime focus.
Gott’s early career wandered in several directions. Perhaps our generation (I was a close friend of his from college years onwards), living under the threat of mutual assured destruction, placed little value on a “career” anyhow.
