Che, the New Man and the New Woman

Extract

The ‘Catholic Left’ in Britain, during its short life, showed little interest either in spirituality or in political activity outside journalism. There are quite good reasons for these omissions, but it is interesting to find that they are not repeated in the practice of leftwing Catholics in Latin America. Action and spirituality, and the tension between them, are important themes of Sheila Cassidy’s account of her experiences in Chile, and her story is all the more interesting because she is so patently not a Catholic left groupie.

The personality which comes through this book is very much that described by Michael Hollings in his introduction: ‘enthusiastic . . . efficient, impetuous, starry-eyed, down-to-earth, practical, emotionally uninhibited, politically a child’. The rambling and occasionally gushing narrative almost makes one forget at times that its author was obscenely tortured with electric shocks by the Chilean secret police.

These qualities also give the story an appealing freshness. It is almost a classical adventure story, in which the author became involved largely by accident. No political or religious motives took Dr Cassidy to Chile. She had got to know a Chilean medical student during her own studies, and one of Chile’s attractions was the chance to gain surgical experience with less night work than in Britain. Dr Cassidy spent two years in Chile before returning to England to see her dying father, and a further two from the beginning of 1974. The military coup against the Allende government took place towards the end of the first period and Dr Cassidy’s imprisonment occupied the last two months of the second.