The Bolivian Diary: Authorized Edition

Do not exist better way to know someone that read it own history. May have people who do not like Che Guevara; however he was one of the most important people of the 19th century. To me he was a hero; his history is full of great ideas and actions. Patria o Muerte, Venceremos........

Creo que es una excelente fuente de información. Lo único malo, es que uno se queda con mas ansias de seguir leyendo. No se que pasa, pero la juventud de este tiempo solo está en escuchar todas estas porquerías que los ricos nos están vendiendo, en lugar de leer y estar actualizado con informaciones valiosas como éstas. Porque estos ricos tildan al Che y las personas que piensan como él de comunistas, no sabiendo que ellos tenían verdaderos pensamientos cristianos. Porque ningunos de estos oligarcas están viviendo el Evangelio.

Che customarily writes an entry every day in his diaries, even when nothing happened all day. He uses them later to write a memoir without all the boring day-to-day stuff. Of course he could not do that with his final diary. At first this appears to be a diary about nothing but a lot of marching, marching, marching. You can get more out of it by reading it as a companion to a biography, like Jon Lee Anderson's very detailed biography of Che. Then you'll know why their 10 day excursion took 48 days, and what happened to Joaquin's troops, or why Fidel couldn't send them reinforcements, and other questions that are not answered in the diary, because the diary is only a little slice of the bigger picture. Worth reading if you are interested in the revolution in a historical sense (whether or not you agree with Che politically).

The diary starts on November 7, 1966, and ends on October 7, 1967, the day before Che Guevara was captured in a CIA/U.S. Army Special Forces - Bolivian Army Special Forces operation. He was executed on October 9 by the Bolivian Army. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the intention of fomenting revolutions in Congo-Kinshasa and then in Bolivia. The Bolivian campaign failed in many areas and the closing entries from Guevara begin to show the strain from frustration, wounds from battle and illness. Guevara "appeared" in Bolivia after months of speculation to his whereabouts. But seemingly from the outset, there were numerous problems. Though there was early success in the rough terrain against the Bolivian Army, Guevara's army of Cubans had difficulty recruiting the local populace and received little assistance from the Bolivian Communist Party. It led to a fatal mistake in military strategy that is based on desperation; Guevara divided his troops into two units. The units were never able to reestablish contact. Communication with Havana also proved impossible due to faulty and lost equipment. Though his Bolivian operation was a dramatic failure, the diary is a living text that douments the last year in the life of Guevara, who achieved through his fervor an iconic status as a beacon of the internationalist guerilla movement.