November 4–9, 1964 Che Guevara visits the Soviet Union.
December 11, 1964 Che Guevara addresses the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, condemning the US war in Vietnam and supporting independence movements from Puerto Rico to the Congo.
December 17, 1964 Che Guevara leaves New York for Africa, where he visits Algeria, Mali, Congo (Brazzaville), Guinea, Ghana, Tanzania and Egypt.
February 24, 1965 Che Guevara addresses the Second Economic Seminar of the Organization of Afro-Asian Solidarity in Algiers, controversially urging the socialist countries to do more to support Third World struggles for independence.
March 14, 1965 Che Guevara returns to Cuba and shortly afterwards drops from public view.
April 1, 1965 Che Guevara delivers a farewell letter to Fidel Castro. He subsequently leaves Cuba on a Cuban-sponsored internationalist mission in the Congo, Africa, entering through Tanzania.
April 18, 1965 In answer to questions about Che Guevara’s whereabouts, Fidel Castro tells foreign reporters that Che “will always be where he is most useful to the revolution.”
June 16, 1965 Fidel Castro announces Che Guevara’s location will be revealed “when Commander Guevara wants it known.”
October 3, 1965 Fidel Castro publicly reads Che Guevara’s letter of farewell at a meeting to announce the central committee of the newly formed Communist Party of Cuba.
November 21, 1965 Che Guevara leaves the Congo, and begins writing up his account of the African mission, which he describes as a “failure.”
December 1965 Fidel Castro arranges for Che Guevara to return to Cuba in secret. Che Guevara prepares for a Cuban-sponsored guerrilla expedition to Bolivia.
January 3-14, 1966 The Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America is held in Havana.
March 1966 The first Cuban combatants arrive in Bolivia to begin advance preparations for a guerrilla movement. Tania has already been working there since 1964.
July 1966 Che Guevara meets with Cuban volunteers selected for the mission to Bolivia at a training camp in Cuba’s Pinar del Río province.
November 4, 1966 Che Guevara arrives in La Paz, Bolivia, in disguise, using the assumed name of Ramón Benítez.
November 7, 1966 Che Guevara and several others arrive at the farm on the Ñacahuazú River where the guerrilla detachment will be based. Che makes his first entry in his diary of the Bolivia campaign.
December 31, 1966 Che Guevara meets with the secretary of the Bolivian Communist Party, Mario Monje. There is disagreement over perspectives for the planned guerrilla movement.
March 23, 1967 The first guerrilla military action takes place in a successful ambush of Bolivian Army troops.
March 25, 1967 The formation of the Bolivian National Liberation Army (ELN) is publicly announced.
April 16, 1967 Publication of Che Guevara’s “Message to the Tricontinental,” which calls for the creation of “two, three, many Vietnams.”
May 1967 US Special Forces arrive in Bolivia to train counterinsurgency troops of the Bolivian Army.
June 23-24, 1967 The Bolivian Army massacres miners and their families at the Siglo XX mines. This becomes known as the San Juan massacre.
July 1, 1967 President Barrientos publicly announces Che Guevara’s presence in Bolivia.
July 31–August 10, 1967 The Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) conference is held in Havana. The conference supports guerrilla movements throughout Latin America. Che Guevara is elected honorary chair.
September 26, 1967 The guerrilla unit falls into a Bolivian Army ambush at Quebrada de Batán, near La Higuera.
October 8, 1967 The remaining 17 guerrillas are trapped by army troops and conduct a desperate battle in the Quebrada del Yuro (El Yuro ravine). Che Guevara is seriously wounded and captured.
October 9, 1967 Che Guevara and two other captured guerrillas (Willy and Chino) are executed by Bolivian soldiers following instructions from the Bolivian government and Washington. The remains of Che Guevara and the other guerrillas are secretly buried in Bolivia.
October 15, 1967 In a television appearance Fidel Castro confirms news of Che Guevara’s death and declares three days of official mourning in Cuba. October 8 is designated the Day of the Heroic Guerrilla.
October 18, 1967 Fidel Castro delivers a memorial speech for Che Guevara in Havana’s Revolution Plaza before an audience of almost one million people.
July 1968 Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diary is published in Cuba and distributed free of charge to the Cuban people. It is simultaneously published in many countries to counter the CIA campaign to discredit the revolutionary movement in Latin America. With an introduction by Fidel Castro, it becomes an instant international bestseller.
July 1997 Che Guevara’s remains are finally located and returned to Cuba to be buried along with the bodies of other guerrilla fighters found in Bolivia in a new memorial built in Santa Clara.
Editor’s Preface
After spending a night with his friends, the Granados, in Córdoba at the beginning of the 1950s, young Ernesto Guevara de la Serna became determined to learn everything he could about Latin America and dreamed of exploring the entire region.
The idea grew to incorporate new plans and different companions until, at the end of 1951, he and Alberto Granado set out together. Emulating Don Quixote and his trusty Rocinante, the two travelers made the trip on a motorbike. They weren’t as lucky as their legendary predecessor, however, for their steed broke down soon after they had embarked on their adventure.
Nevertheless, no difficulties, doubts or broken-down motorbikes, abandoned at the start of their journey, could sway them from their purpose, and for Ernesto the trip became the first experience in a life-long passion.
This anthology covers three periods Che’s life, years which reveal most of his ideas and thinking about Latin America:
1950–55: Discovering Latin America
1956–64: Latin America from Within
1965–67: The Americas United: Revolutionary Internationalism
In each of these periods, Che faced extraordinary challenges, but he persevered, his iron will ensuring he continued in his endeavor to create the great homeland of Latin America of which Simón Bolívar and José Martí had dreamed.
This book forms part of the project of the Che Guevara Studies Center (Havana) and Ocean Press to present Che’s thinking and legacy, in his own words, from his youth to his final days in Bolivia: his perspective on and his vision for Latin America and its peoples—for whom he gave his life and in whom his memory lives on.
Introduction
My mouth narrates what my eyes have seen…1
Recalling a verse by the Argentine writer Sabato, with the pleasure he always got from his constant companion, poetry, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna began his first journey as a determined adventurer in January 1950. He set out to discover the northern part of his native Argentina, the reality of which he had only so far caught a brief glimpse.
From the moment he decided to explore Latin America, Che regarded this as an extremely important obligation. Sadly, only a few of the pages of the diary he kept of this trip around Argentina have been preserved, but what we have shows a young man’s inner world full of dreams and philosophical ponderings, in a never-ending search for truth. This search would lead him, throughout his life, to try to feel the pulse of the people of Latin America.
The thousands of miles he traversed through arid lands, both beautiful and not so beautiful, opened his eyes to a reality he encountered everywhere: the backwardness in which the vast majority of the peoples of Latin America were mired, condemned to poverty and helplessness.
Barely a year after his initial exploratory trip, Che embarked on an experience that made a lasting impression on him. In that brief period of time, his social awareness had sharpened as he questioned everything he encountered. He signed on as a nurse on ships that took him to Caribbean countries and as a health officer in the
port area of Buenos Aires—events he never documented but which fed his inquiring mind and led him to undertake further adventures.
His next travels were far more extensive and adventurous, covering a large part of Latin America. On that journey, he was not alone but accompanied by his friend Alberto Granado, who shared his goals and dreams. They set out on an unreliable old motorcycle that had to be abandoned in Chile.
Ernesto’s life-long habit of writing down everything he experienced shows the lasting effect that trip had on him as a young man. Unconsciously, he developed a distinctive style in the accounts of his travels as he was driven to explore unknown lands, experiences that changed him more than he could have imagined.
His travels through Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela led him to delve into truths that he had sensed but never corroborated. He acknowledges his limitations as a writer, but his diaries clearly convey his search and show how objective and remarkably perceptive he was.
From Chile on, his constant theme was injustice: first, in the issue of health care, about which he already knew something, and then in regard to the miners, especially a family of communist miners he met, with whom he felt “more brotherhood than ever before.” Faced with so much injustice, he noted the need for fundamental change. Given governments’ failure to act and the merciless exploitation to which the poor were subjected, in his first political commentary he expressed the need to shake off the “uncomfortable Yankee friend” in order to achieve sovereign and independent nationhood.
His comments about Peru were even more significant, because there he encountered a problem of which he had previously been unaware: that of the continent’s indigenous peoples. At Machu-Picchu, he was struck by the conquistadors’ barbarism in contrast to the incredible richness of the destroyed indigenous culture. There at Machu-Picchu he first appreciated the immensity and vastness of indigenous culture and architecture, which stimulated a desire to learn more about the conquest that had cruelly subjugated the peoples of a continent in the interests of feudal Spain.
On his birthday in June 1952, six months after he set out on his trip with Alberto Granado on the motorbike, in his account entitled “Saint Guevara’s Day” (an ironic invocation of Peronism) he examined the many ways in which he was beginning to get a sense of the united Latin America that Bolívar had sought.
Caracas, the “city of the eternal spring,” marked the end of his long journey, and there he was exposed to another issue about which he had been very ignorant—the position of blacks in a white society, another aspect of the racist and deforming impact of colonialism.
Che concludes The Motorcycle Diaries with what he calls “A note in the margin.” Here he attempts to synthesize his experiences, saying he is not trying to prove any particular thesis, but simply describing what he felt was exerting an ever greater spiritual force on the self-confessed and ironic “eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma,” as he refers to himself, a man who had taken a path that would lead him to fight to transform the world.
He had yet to identify all the elements of his vision of revolution—the role of the popular masses, the question of the seizure of power, his humanism and, above all, his Latin Americanism. But he had already developed certain convictions that meant he was ready to throw himself into the struggle alongside the masses of people, even if it meant sacrificing his life.
Some time would pass and many events would take place in Ernesto’s life before he would write similar phrases with the same sentiment. He had to take a second look at Latin America. In Otra vez [Once Again]2—the title he gave his diary of that second journey—he develops the same themes.
In July 1953, after completing his medical studies, Ernesto set out with Calica Ferrer, another old friend, heading first to Bolivia to learn about the revolutionary process that the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) had initiated in 1952. He was interested in the Bolivian experience because, apart from the Peronist movement in his own country—about which he was somewhat skeptical—he had not witnessed any actual revolution and was curious to see how the masses participated in the process.
The Bolivian revolution did not particularly inspire him, as he clearly recognized the political and ideological weakness of the leaders of the movement and foresaw a process of attrition when the goals they had set themselves initially were not achieved; but he did observe the potential strength of the people, especially the super-exploited Bolivian miners.
Naturally, the US government’s attempts to crush the Bolivian revolution, immersed as it was in the Cold War, did not escape the notice of the young Ernesto Guevara. This US pressure would eventually lead Bolivians to a dead end where they were forced to abandon their nationalist project.
Ernesto decided to move on. In Ecuador, he discussed his experiences in Bolivia with a group of friends, who invited him to go to Central America with them to learn about the Guatemalan revolutionary process. Under President Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala was generating great hope among the most advanced Latin American intellectuals and political leaders.
It was in those circumstances that he wrote a letter to his family including a revealing comment: “In Guatemala, I shall improve myself and achieve what I lack to be a true revolutionary.” He knew enough about Central America before arriving in Guatemala to understand what US penetration in the region meant and to conclude that the only possible solution was a revolution that challenged the feudal bourgeoisie and foreign capital in order to achieve real justice for the people. Understanding this reality, he saw that the much-touted Pan-Americanism was a false substitute for real Latin American unity, and the only thing it had achieved was an overwhelming disparity between rich and poor, and the economic and political subjugation of the weak countries of the South. History had already tragically underlined this truth with US interference in the Panama Canal, the assassination of Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua, and the United Fruit Company’s pitiless exploitation of workers in Central America—all of which were carried out in the name of Pan-American “unity.”
Ernesto saw that Pan-Americanism and imperialism went hand in hand, and that Pan-Americanism—wittingly or unwittingly—acted as the tool of imperialism, which meant the accumulation and export of capital, monopoly concentration and the exploitation of countries producing raw materials. When its interests so required, imperialism made demands that either indirectly or directly forced Latin American nations to adopt US-style democracy.
For this reason Guatemala proved to be a turning point in Ernesto Guevara’s intellectual and ideological evolution as an “aspiring revolutionary.” Recognizing the conceptual and programmatic limitations of the Guatemalan process, he nevertheless considered it an authentic revolution, one worth risking his life for.
This was an enriching period of his life, in which his experiences stimulated the need to study more, especially philosophy, which he had earlier tackled enthusiastically.
Guatemala was a revolutionary school for him, but also a source of frustration when the revolution was defeated in June 1954. “The crushing of another Latin American dream” was how he referred to the shameful plot between the US State Department, the CIA and the puppet governments of Central America against the Guatemalan government, which was simply attempting to transform its feudal economy through a moderate agrarian reform law, but whose real “crime” was to seize land that the United Fruit Company considered to be its property.
Such policies of a legitimate, popularly elected government were enough for the CIA to launch an international campaign portraying Guatemala as a nation ruled by “international communism” and which, therefore, provided a clear threat to peace and security in the hemisphere. Less than a year after the agrarian reform was implemented, the CIA prepared to isolate Guatemala diplomatically, promoted internal subversion, created artificial conflicts with Guatemala’s neighbors and trained a shock force of mercenaries ready to invade the country from Honduras.
Events in Guatemala served to strength
en Ernesto’s anti-imperialism, evident in remarks in his letters and travel diary about the role the United States had played in overthrowing the Árbenz administration. He also consciously affirmed that revolution was the only way to achieve “the rule of justice in Latin America” and that the unity of the region was absolutely necessary. He also reiterated that he saw himself as belonging to Latin America, and not just to the country of his birth, Argentina.
In Guatemala, he made contact with a group of exiled Cuban revolutionaries, including some of those who had participated in the July 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks to challenge the Batista dictatorship. For the first time, Ernesto learned about the goals of the July 26 Movement and its leader, Fidel Castro, who was then in prison in Cuba for having led the attack in Santiago de Cuba.
Later, in Mexico, Ernesto encountered the Cubans again and met Fidel, who had been amnestied and released from prison, arriving in Mexico in June 1955. Ernesto’s diary includes the entry: “One political event is meeting Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary, an intelligent young fellow who is very sure of himself and extraordinarily audacious; I think we hit it off well.”3
From that moment Ernesto Guevara—now known as “Che,” a nickname the Cubans bestowed upon him—became irrevocably linked with the Cuban revolution in what was to be one of the most enriching periods of his life. This meeting enabled him to achieve what he had dreamed of from a young age.
While in Mexico, he analyzed the factors leading to the overthrow of the Guatemalan revolution. He also examined how his experiences had served to broaden and sharpen his political awareness, helping him map out his future, which he now saw as entwined with that of humanity. This was a definitive moment in the development of his humanist thinking.
He outlined in greater depth the reasons why he saw that Latin Americanism and imperialism were in eternal conflict. His analysis was now reinforced by his more profound study of Marxism—especially Karl Marx’s political economy. He considered these studies absolutely necessary for understanding Latin America’s ills and how the continent would solve these problems through socialism, even though he was not yet entirely clear about what that meant.