Book Description

A unique account of the last doomed eleven months of the most courageous and dedicated revolutionary of the 20th century. First published in Cuba in 1968 in a free edition of 250,000 copies, it has since become a classic. In November 1966 Che Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, arrives in Bolivia to lead a guerrilla detachment fighting that country's military dictatorship. At the beginning of the diary the war games of the guerrillas seem no more real than those of Boy Scouts at play. But then real deaths begin, in flooded rivers or in ambush. The guerrilla fighters win their first battles and outwit the vastly superior army forces sent against them; but, in the end, Che Guevara and his dwindling group are surrounded and crushed. In its terse and simple prose, the Bolivian Diary gives a unique account of the guerrilla's lonely fight against armies, mountains, jungles, hunger, disease and death. And the reader's knowledge of Guevara's fate makes the book even more moving a record of the guerrillas' day-to-day suffering and bravery.