When Salvador Allende took power in Chile a decade ago, he was the world's first freely-elected Marxist president. Major newspapers sized it up as the most important event in Latin America since Fidel Castro, nearly a dozen years earlier, had swept down from the Sierra Maestra to seize power in Havana. Three years later Allende died in the rocket-blasted rubble of his presidential palace. He would rise from the dead to be transformed into what English writer David Holden would describe as the world's most potent cult figure since Che Guevara. - Jacket flap.