“I remember it as if it were yesterday," the man sitting across the table says softly. "Willy went up first; he was leading the centre group. We were almost at the top of the ravine when we heard them."
His voice falls away, his eyes flash, and I suddenly get a glimpse of the passion that made him an international icon. "They started firing. I often wonder what would have happened if they had really got me, but it was just a graze." He indicates his leg. "I still have the scar, you know?" Then he grins. "Luck was with me. Minutes later, we were out of the ravine, and we never looked back."
Trim and tanned despite his 82 years, in an expensive business suit, the chairman of the Guevara Foundation looks nothing like the Marxist rebel whose portrait once plastered the walls of student bedrooms across the world. Naturally, the Bolivian campaign in 1967 was not Che's only brush with death. Three years later, after he had vanished without trace, an American bomb nearly got him in North Vietnam. In 1975, he was hit in the arm during a shoot-out with a British patrol in south Armagh; two years later he took a bullet in the shoulder during the Angolan incursion into southern Zaire. "Che cannot die!" he says now, with a laugh. But perhaps he is only half joking.
By the early 1980s, Che was tired of life on the run. Already in his fifties, he had long since decided that there might be another way to change the world. "I learned that you cannot defeat capitalism at the point of a gun," he smiles. "But you can bring it down from within."
Perhaps that explains the lawsuit to regain control of his image rights. Now, the profits from all those T-shirts and posters go to the Guevara Foundation in Havana. "We have branches here in Cuba, in Ho Chi Minh City, in Shanghai, in Caracas and in Paris," he says proudly. "One day, London! Why not?"
Life is not all smart suits and private jets for the guerrilla-turned-philanthropist. Still the target of death threats from Cuban exiles, he spends millions every year on bodyguards, and a case brought by the relatives of his victims during the Cuban Revolution is still rumbling through the US courts. Visa problems mean he can never enter the United States, although he once shook hands with Bill Clinton at a Belfast reception. And interestingly, he has not returned to Bolivia since that close shave in 1967.
But as the Guevara business empire continues to expand - especially in Latin America, China and sub-Saharan Africa - he shows no hint of regret. As I turn to leave his plush Havana office, taking in the photos of him with Bono, Bob Geldof and Princess Di, he calls me back.
“Here," he says, tossing something over: "Our latest product." It's a plastic bracelet, the slogan in tiny letters: Hasta la vitória siempre.
