It was one of Che's habits during his guerrilla life to jot down meticulously the day's events in a personal diary. On long marches across rough and difficult terrain or through damp forests, when the lines of men, always weighed down with rucksacks and weapons and ammunition, stopped to rest for a moment, or when the column received orders to halt and pitch camp at the end of an exhausting day, Che (as he was affectionately called by the Cubans from the start) would be seen taking out his notebook and setting down impressions in his tiny, almost illegible doctor's handwriting. He later made use of the notes he managed to preserve, to write his magnificent historical reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, so full of value from a revolutionary, educational and human point of view.
Once again, thanks to Che's enduring habit of noting the principal events of each day, we have access to priceless information, detailed and rigorously exact, about those last heroic months of his life in Bolivia.
He constantly used these notes, which were not really intended for publication, as a tool with which to evaluate events, men and the general situation. They also provided an outlet for his acutely observant and analytical spirit, which was often tinged with a keen sense of humour. He kept up the habit so conscientiously that the notes remain coherent from beginning to end.
It must be remembered that this diary was written during extremely rare moments of rest from superhuman and back-breaking physical effort, without mentioning Che's exhausting responsibilities as a guerrilla leader during the difficult early days of this form of struggle which unfolded in particularly hard material circumstances; this goes to show once again the kind of man Che was, and his strength of will.
There are detailed analyses of each day's incidents in this diary, exposing the errors, criticisms and recriminations, which are an inevitable part of any revolutionary guerrilla.
Criticisms of this sort have to be made incessantly in a guerrilla detachment, especially during the first stage, when there is only a small nucleus of men who are permanently exposed to extremely adverse material conditions and an enemy which is far superior in number; at such times, the least oversight, the most insignificant error of judgement, can be fatal, and the chief has to be very exacting. He must turn each event or minor incident, however trivial, into a lesson for fighters and future leaders of new guerrilla detachments.
The training of a guerrilla force makes constant demands on the honour and conscience of each man. Che knew how to touch the most sensitive cords in a revolutionary's heart. When he told Marcos, after repeated warnings, that he might have to give him a dishonourable discharge, Marcos replied, ' I'd rather you shot me! ' Later on, Marcos bravely gave up his life. All the men in whom Che placed his trust and yet had to admonish for one reason or another in the course of the struggle, felt the same way as Marcos. Che was a humane and comradely leader who also knew when to be demanding, even severe at times. But he was always far harder on himself than on others and he based his discipline on the moral conscience of the guerrillas and on the tremendous force of his personal example.
There are numerous references to Regis Debray in the diary which show Che's great concern over the arrest and imprisonment of the revolutionary writer to whom he had entrusted a mission in Europe, although he would in fact have preferred Debray to stay with the guerrillas. This explains why there is a certain inconsistency about his attitude and why he even voices some doubts concerning Debray's behaviour.
Che never knew what Debray had to endure while in the clutches of the forces of repression, and the firm, courageous stance with which he confronted his captors and tormentors.
However, Che did realize the immense political significance of Debray's trial and. on October 3rd, just a few days before his death, during tense and bitter moments Che noted: ' We heard an interview with Debray, very bravely confronting a student who provoked him.' This was his last reference to the writer.
Just because Che often refers to the Cuban Revolution and its connection with the guerrilla movement, there are some who might interpret the publication of his diary as an act of provocation on our part, something that will give the enemies of the Revolution, the Yankee imperialists and their allies, the oligarchies of Latin America, a pretext for redoubling their attempts to isolate, blockade and attack Cuba.
Those who think this must not forget that Yankee imperialism has never felt the need for any excuse to carry out its misdeeds anywhere in the world, and that its efforts to destroy the Cuban Revolution date from the first revolutionary law promulgated in our country; for everyone knows that imperialism acts as a policeman for all that is reactionary and is the systematic promoter of counter-revolution, protecting the most backward and inhuman social structures in the world.
Yankee aggression may use our solidarity with the revolutionary movement as a pretext to attack us, but this will never be the true cause. To deny solidarity in order to eliminate the pretext would be an absurd, ostrich-like policy totally alien to the international nature of today's social revolutions. To disown our solidarity with the revolutionary movement would not just mean denying the pretext, but would actually be tantamount to supporting Yankee imperialism and its policy of world enslavement and domination.
Cuba is a small and economically underdeveloped country, like all countries which have been dominated and exploited by colonialism and imperialism for centuries. It is only 90 miles away from the coast of the United States, and has a Yankee naval base on its territory. There are many economic and social obstacles to its development. Our country has known periods of great danger since our victorious Revolution, but that will not make us yield or weaken; a consistent line of revolutionary conduct is impervious to hardships.
From a revolutionary point of view, we have no option but to publish the diary Che wrote in Bolivia. The diary fell into Barrientos's hands and he immediately sent off copies to the CIA, the Pentagon and the United States government. Journalists on good terms with the CIA were allowed to see the document in Bolivia and to have photostat copies made of it — but only after promising not to publish it for the time being.
The Barrientos government and its top military chiefs have good reasons for not wanting the diary to be published, since it shows up the incredible inefficiency of the Bolivian army, defeated over and over again by a handful of determined guerrillas who captured nearly 200 arms in battle within a few weeks.
Che also describes Barrientos and his regime in terms which they richly deserve and that cannot be erased from history.
Imperialism also has personal reasons of its own: Che and his extraordinary example are constantly growing in strength throughout the world. His ideas, his portrait and his name are banners in the struggle against injustice by the oppressed and the exploited and they arouse passionate enthusiasm in students and intellectuals everywhere.
Even in the United States, the Negro movement and the ever-increasing number of radical students have adopted Che's image. His photographs are paraded as emblems of the struggle in the most militant civil rights marches and demonstrations against the aggression in Vietnam. Rarely, if ever, in history has one man's image, name and example spread so rapidly and so completely. The reason is that Che stood for the spirit of internationalism in its purest and most disinterested form, and it is this spirit which characterizes the world of today and, even more so, the world of tomorrow.
This amazing figure who symbolizes world-wide revolutionary struggle even in the capitals of the imperialist and colonial world came from a continent which was once oppressed by colonial powers and which is now exploited and kept in the most criminal state of underdevelopment by Yankee imperialism.
The Yankee imperialists are frightened of Che's potent example and of everything that helps to spread his reputation. This is the greatest value of the diary: it is the living expression of an extraordinary personality, a lesson for guerrilla fighters written in the heat and suspense of each day. That is what makes it explosive; it is the proof that men in Latin America are not helpless against those who try to enslave them with mercenary armies; that is what has stopped the imperialists from publishing the diary.
It could well be that many so-called revolutionaries, opportunists and impostors of every sort, who call themselves Marxists, Communists and a variety of other names, would also prefer the diary to remain unknown. They do not hesitate to dismiss Che as a deluded adventurer, or at best an idealist, claiming that his death was the swansong of revolutionary armed struggle in Latin America. ' If Che, the greatest exponent of such ideas and an experienced guerrilla fighter was lulled in a guerrilla war and if his movement did not liberate Bolivia, that proves he was completely wrong! ' That is the way they argue; and how many of those miserable characters rejoiced at the news of Che's death, not even ashamed that their position and their reasoning coincided perfectly with those of the most reactionary oligarchies and with. imperialism!
They reasoned like this to justify themselves or to justify treacherous leaders who did not hesitate occasionally to pretend to endorse armed struggle while in fact — as has been discovered since — their true purpose was to destroy guerrilla movements in the bud, to slow down all revolutionary action, and to put in its place their own absurd and despicable political deals, being utterly incapable of taking any other line of conduct. They also needed to justify those who lacked the will to fight and who will never fight for the liberation of their people, but who have turned revolutionary ideology into a caricature of itself, until it is nothing more than a dogma and an opiate without any genuine meaning or message for the masses. Such men have converted the organizations for the struggle of the masses into instruments of conciliation with both foreign and domestic exploiters and advocates of policies that go against the interests of the exploited Latin-American people.
Che envisaged death as a natural and probable part of the process, and he tried, especially in his last documents, to underline the fact that this eventuality could not slow down the inevitable march of Revolution in Latin America. He emphasized this in his message to the Tricontinental Congress: ' Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism... wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome so long as our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may reach out to pick up our weapons.'
Che looked upon himself as a soldier of the revolution and never worried about surviving it. Those who imagine that Che's ideas failed because of the outcome of the struggle in Bolivia might as well use this simplistic argument to say that many of the great revolutionary precursors and revolutionary thinkers, including the founders of Marxism, were also failures because they were unable to see the culmination of their life's work and died before their noble efforts were crowned with success.
In Cuba, the ultimate triumph of a process which was set into motion 100 years ago was not halted by the deaths of Marti and Maceo in combat, followed by the Yankee intervention at the end of the War of Independence which frustrated the immediate objective of their struggle, nor was it halted by the assassination of a brilliant theoretician of socialist revolution like Julio Antonio Mella, murdered by agents in the service of imperialism. And absolutely no one can doubt the rightness of these great men's cause and line of conduct, or the validity of their basic ideas which have always served as an inspiration to Cuban revolutionaries.
We can see from Che's diary how genuine was the possibility of success and what an extraordinary catalyst the guerrilla proved to be. On one occasion, observing obvious symptoms of weakness and rapid decline in the Bolivian regime, he noted: ' The government is disintegrating rapidly; what a pity we do not have 100 more men right now.'
Che knew from his Cuban experience how many times our small guerrilla detachment was on the point of being exterminated. It could have happened because, in war, one depends so much on chance and circumstances. And if it had happened, would it have given anybody the right to say that our line of conduct had been wrong, using our example to discourage revolution and inculcate people with a sense of helplessness? The revolutionary process has known setbacks many times in history. Did we not, in Cuba, experience Moncada only six years before the final triumph of our people's armed struggle?
Between the attack of July 26th, 1953, on the Moncada Fortress and the Granma landing on December 2nd, 1956, there were many who believed that the revolutionary struggle in Cuba was hopeless, that a handful of fighters would not stand a chance against a modern and well-equipped army, and that those fighters could only be looked upon as idealists and dreamers ' who were utterly wrong.' The terrible defeat and the total dispersal of the inexperienced guerrilla detachment on December 5th, 1956, seemed to prove the pessimists' point of view completely. But, only twenty-five months later, the remnants of that guerrilla force had acquired enough strength and experience to rout the army totally.
There will be good excuses not to fight at all times and in every circumstance, and that will be the surest way never to win freedom. Che did not outlive his ideas, but he gave them added strength by shedding his blood for them. His pseudo-revolutionary critics, with their political cowardice and their permanent lack of action, will quite certainly live to see the day when their stupidity will be exposed.
It will be noticed in this diary that one of these revolutionary specimens becoming more and more common in Latin America, Mario Monje, brandishing his title of Secretary of the Communist Party of Bolivia, disputed with Che the political and military leadership of the movement. He went on to say that, for this, he would resign his party position, and seemed to think that it was quite enough to have once held such a title to claim the prerogative.
Needless to say. Mario Monje had no guerrilla experience and had never fought a combat in his life; without mentioning the fact that his personal notion of Communism should have rid him of such narrow and vulgar chauvinism long before then, just as our ancestors got rid of it to fight the first round for Independence.
If this is their concept of what the anti-imperialist struggle on this continent should be, then these so-called ' Communist leaders ' have not progressed further in the notion of internationalism than the Indian tribes which were conquered by the colonisers.
And so, this Communist Party boss proceeded to make ridiculous, shameful and undeserved claims for leadership in a country called Bolivia, with a historic capital called Sucre, both named in honour of the first liberators who came from Venezuela; and Bolivia owed its final liberation to the political, military and organizational talent of an authentic revolutionary genius who did not limit his beliefs to the narrow, artificial and even unjust frontiers of that country.
Bolivia does not have an outlet to the sea; if it were liberated, it would need the revolutionary victory of its neighbours more than any other country so as not to be subjected to the most intolerable blockade. And Che was the man who could have accelerated the process with his tremendous prestige, abilities and experience.
Che had established relations with Bolivian Communist leaders and militants before the split that occurred within the Party, calling on them to help the revolutionary movement in South America. Some of those militants, with the party's permission, collaborated with him on various tasks for years. The party split created a new situation in which the militants who had worked with Che found themselves in different camps. But Che did not look upon the struggle in Bolivia as an isolated cause; he saw it as part of a revolutionary movement for liberation which would soon extend to other countries of South America. His aim was to organize a movement that would be free of sectarianism and that could be joined by all those who wanted to fight for the liberation of Bolivia and other Latin American countries subjected to imperialism. During the initial phase of preparation for a guerrilla base, however, Che had relied chiefly on the aid of a courageous and discreet group which remained in Monje's party after the split. It was out of deference to them that he first invited Monje to visit the camp, although he felt no sympathy for him whatsoever. Later, Che also invited Moisés Guevara, the political leader of the miners who had left Monje's party to help create another organization. from which he finally had to withdraw as well because he disagreed with Oscar Zamora. Zamora, another Monje, had agreed to work with Che in organizing armed guerrilla warfare in Bolivia, but he later withdrew his support and sat back like a coward when the hour for action had struck. In the name of ' Marxist-Leninism,' Zamora became one of Che's most vicious critics after his death, while Moisés Guevara unhesitatingly joined Che, as he had agreed to do long before Che came to Bolivia, offering his support and heroically giving up his life to the revolutionary cause.
The group of Bolivian guerrilla fighters, who had remained loyal to Monje's organization until then, did the same. Directed by Inti and Coco Peredo, who later proved their courage and their worth as combatants, they broke away from Monje and became staunch supporters of Che. But Monje was not pleased with the outcome and began to sabotage the movement, dissuading militant and well-trained Communists from going to join the guerrilla. Actions of this nature show how incompetent leaders who are impostors and manipulators can criminally check the development within the revolutionary framework of men who are completely ready and able to fight.
Che was a man who never took any personal interest in rank, position or honours, but he was absolutely convinced of one thing: that in revolutionary guerrilla warfare, which is the basic form of action needed to liberate the peoples of Latin America given the economic, political and social condition of almost all those countries, the military and political leadership of the guerrilla has to be unified and the struggle can only be led from within the guerrilla and not from comfortable bureaucratic offices in the cities. He was determined not to give in on this point or to hand over to an inexperienced blockhead with narrow, chauvinistic views, the leadership of a guerrilla nucleus, which was ultimately destined to spread the struggle across all of South America. Che felt that chauvinism, which so often contaminates even the revolutionary elements in various Latin American countries, was something to be fought against, an absurdly reactionary and sterile attitude. As he said in his message to the Tricontinental: ' And let us develop a true proletarian internationalism... the flag under which we fight would be the sacred cause of redeeming humanity. To die under the flag of Vietnam, of Venezuela, of Guatemala, of Laos, of Guinea, of Colombia, of Bolivia, of Brazil — to name only a few scenes of today's armed struggle — would be equally glorious and desirable for an American. an Asian, an African, even a European. Each drop of blood spilt by a man in any country under whose flag he was not born is an experience passed on to those who survive, to be added later to the Liberation struggle of his country. And each nation liberated is a phase won in the battle for the liberation of one's own country.'
Che also believed that fighters from different Latin American countries should participate in the development of the guerrilla and that Bolivia's guerrilla force ought to act as a school for revolutionaries who would learn in combat. To help him in this task he needed, along with the Bolivians, a small nucleus of experienced guerrillas, nearly all of them his comrades in the Sierra Maestra at the time of Cuba's revolutionary war; he knew the aptitudes, courage and spirit of sacrifice of these men, and not one of them failed him in his demands, abandoned him or surrendered.
Throughout the Bolivian campaign, Che displayed those exemplary qualities of endurance, ability and stoicism, for which he was so rightly famous. It can truly be said that, knowing the importance of the task he had set out to accomplish, he proceeded to go about it with the most faultless sense of responsibility at all times. On every occasion that the guerrilla acted carelessly, he quickly took the fact into account, corrected it, and set it down in his diary.
The most incredible succession of adverse factors combined against Che, such as the loss of contact with a group of his fighters containing several valuable men, some of them ill, others convalescing. The separation, which was only intended to last for a few days, was drawn out interminably for months, during which Che made every effort to find them over extremely difficult terrain. During this period, his asthma became a serious problem; normally, a simple medicine would have kept it under control easily, but without that medicine, it became a terrible enemy which attacked him mercilessly. This occurred because the stores of medicine wisely stocked by the guerrilla were discovered and seized by the enemy. The evolution of the struggle was gravely affected by this event as well as by the liquidation, at the end of August, of the group with which Che had lost contact. Yet Che managed to overcome his physical deterioration with a will of steel, and he never allowed it to affect his morale or to stand in the way of action.
Che repeatedly came into contact with the Bolivian peasants and he could not have been surprised by their extremely wary and distrustful nature, as he had had dealings with them on other occasions and knew their mentality well. He realized that it would be a long, difficult and patient job to win them over to his cause, but he never doubted for a moment that he would succeed in the end.
If we examine the sequence of events carefully, we will see that even in September, a few weeks before Che's death, when the number of men on whom he could rely had dwindled drastically, the guerrilla still maintained its capacity for development and some of the Bolivian cadres, such as the brothers Inti and Coco Peredo, were beginning to show terrific potential as leaders. But the Higueras ambush, the only successful army action against Che's detachment, proved to be an irreversible setback for the guerrilla. This action killed off the advance party and wounded several men as they were moving in broad daylight to another zone where the peasants were more developed politically. This objective is not mentioned in the diary, but survivors have testified that it was their goal. Of course, it was dangerous to advance by day along a road they had been following for several days, inevitably coming into contact with local people, in an area which was new to them. And it must have seemed obvious that the army would try to stop them somewhere along the way. But Che, fully conscious of the risk he was running, decided to try his luck so as to help the doctor who was in very bad physical shape.
The day before the ambush, Che wrote: ' We reached Pujio but there were people there who had seen us the day before, which means that news of us has spread by word of mouth.' ' It is becoming dangerous to march with the mules, but I want the Doctor to travel as comfortably as possible as he is very weak.'
The following day, he wrote: ' At 13:00, the advance party left to try and reach Jagüey and to make a decision there about the mules and the Doctor.' In other words, Che was trying to find a solution concerning the sick man in order to abandon their route and take necessary precautions. But that same afternoon, before reaching Jagüey, the advance party fell into the fatal ambush from which the detachment never recovered.
A few days later, encircled in the Yuro ravine, Che fought his last combat.
What this handful of revolutionaries accomplished remains extremely impressive. Even their struggle against the hostile environment they had selected is an unforgettable saga of heroism. Never before in history had such a small number of men set out on such a gigantic undertaking. Their faith, their absolute conviction that the great revolutionary process could be triggered off in Latin America, their confidence and determination as they went to accomplish this objective, give us some idea of their stature.
Once Che said to the guerrilla fighters of Bolivia: ' This form of struggle gives us the opportunity to turn ourselves into revolutionaries, the highest state a man can reach; but it also allows us to graduate as men; those who cannot reach either of these two states must say so and give up the struggle.'
The men who fought with him until the end proved they deserved both of these titles. They symbolize the kind of revolutionaries and men which history needs right now for a really difficult and arduous mission: the revolutionary transformation of Latin America.
During the first fight for independence, the enemy our ancestors fought was a decadent colonial power. The enemy which today's revolutionaries have to reckon with is the most powerful bastion of the imperialist camp, the most highly advanced, technically and industrially. It was this enemy which re-organized and re-equipped the army of Bolivia after the people had crushed the previous repressive military forces. It was this enemy which immediately sent weapons and military advisers to fight against the guerrilla, just as it always has given military and technical aid to every force of repression on this continent. And if that does not suffice, this enemy intervenes directly and sends in troops, as happened in Santo Domingo.
You need the kind of revolutionaries and men that Che described to fight against such an enemy. Without such revolutionaries and men, ready to do what they did, without their spiritual strength to tackle the vast obstacles in their way, without their permanent readiness to die at any moment, without their profound belief in the justness of their cause, without their utter faith in the invincible strength of the people, faced with the might of Yankee imperialism as it throws its military, technical and economic weight around in every corner of the world, the liberation of the peoples of this continent will never be accomplished.
The people themselves in North America are beginning to realize that the monstrous political superstructure which governs their country has for quite a time been totally different from the idyllic bourgeois republic which its founders established nearly two hundred years ago. Their distress grows as they watch the moral barbarism of an irrational, alienating, dehumanized and brutal system which is making an ever-increasing number of victims among the citizens of the U. S., through aggressive wars, political crimes and racial folly; they see human beings turned into mere cogs of a machine; they see the disgusting way in which economic, scientific and human resources are squandered on a vast, reactionary and repressive military apparatus when three-quarters of the world is underdeveloped and hungry.
But only the revolutionary transformation of Latin America would enable the people of the United States to settle their private score with imperialism, while at the same time the growing revolt within the U. S. itself against imperialist policy could become a decisive factor in the revolutionary struggle of Latin America.
And if this half of the American continent does not undergo a profound revolutionary transformation, the fantastic inequality which presently exists between the two halves of the continent will continue to increase. This imbalance began at the turn of the century, when the U. S. rapidly industrialized, and at the same rate, acquired imperial aspirations as it followed the dynamic course of its own social and economic evolution. Meanwhile, the other Balkanized nations of the American continent remained weak and stagnant, submissively yielding to the yoke of feudal oligarchies and their reactionary armies. In another twenty years, this terrible inequality will have increased a hundredfold, not just economically, scientifically and technically, but above all politically.
If this goes on, we will become progressively poorer, weaker, more dependent on, and enslaved by imperialism. This sombre prospect looms over all the underdeveloped nations of Africa and Asia as well.
If the industrialized and educated nations of Europe, with their Common Market and their pooled scientific institutes, are worrying about getting left behind and are afraid of becoming the economic colonies of Yankee imperialism, what does the future have in store for the people of Latin America?
Perhaps some liberal or bourgeois reformist or pseudo-revolutionary impostor, incapable of action, has found a solution to this genuine and incontestable situation which decisively affects the destiny of our people; if so, let him speak up. Let him tell us what he proposes in place of a profound and urgent revolutionary transformation, one which would polarize all the moral, material and human resources needed in this part of the world to make up for the economic, scientific and technical backwardness of centuries, even greater when we compare it to the industrialized world which makes us and will go on making us its serfs, especially the United States. If he can produce the magic formula which will accomplish this in a different way. which will wipe out the oligarchies, the despots, the petty politicians, all the lackeys of the Yankee monopolies, their masters, and if his solution can be applied as rapidly as circumstances require, then let him raise his hand and challenge Che.
But no one has proposed an honest alternative or a consequent line of conduct which would give genuine hope to the 300 million human beings, most of them desperately poor, who make up the population of Latin America; not forgetting that those 300 million will have become 600 million within the next 25 years, all of whom have a right to a decent living, a culture and civilization. It would therefore be more decorous to fall silent before the gesture made by Che and by those who fell at his side, courageously defending his ideas. Because of what that handful of men did, their noble ideal, which was to redeem a continent, will remain the highest proof of what will-power, heroism and human greatness can do. It is their example, which will awaken the conscience of the Latin American people in the struggle to come; Che's heroic call will reach the receptive ears of the poor and the exploited for whom he gave his life. And many hands will stretch out to pick up weapons and to conquer freedom once and for all.
Che wrote his last lines on October 7 th. On the following day, at 13:00 hours, in a narrow ravine where they had decided to wait until nightfall to break out of the encirclement, a large enemy troop made contact with them. Although reduced in number, the group of men who now made up the detachment fought heroically until dusk, from individual positions on the floor of the ravine and on ledges higher up, against the mass of soldiers who had surrounded and attacked them. There were no survivors among those who were fighting close to Che. Near him were the doctor, whose very bad state of health he had noted earlier, and a Peruvian fighter also in extremely poor physical condition; it therefore seems most likely that Che was doing everything in his power to protect the retreat of these two comrades to a safer place, until he himself was wounded. The doctor was not killed during this fight, but several days later, quite near the Yuro ravine. The guerrillas had great difficulty locating each other visually, because the terrain was so irregular and rocky. At times, they could not see one another at all. Some of the men, including Inti Peredo, who were defending the other entrance of the ravine several hundred metres from Che, held off the attack until dark and were then able to slip away from the enemy, heading for the spot where they had prearranged to meet.
It has been established that Che, although wounded, continued to fight until the barrel of his M-2 was destroyed by a bullet, making it totally useless. The pistol he was carrying did not have a magazine. It was only due to these incredible circumstances that they were able to catch him alive. The wounds in his legs, although not fatal, made it impossible for him to walk unaided.
He was taken to the village of Higueras and remained alive for another 24 hours, more or less. He refused to say a single word to his captors and slapped a drunken officer who tried to taunt him.
Barrientos, Ovanda and other top military chiefs met in La Paz and decided, in cold blood, to assassinate Che. The way they proceeded to carry out this underhand agreement in the school of Higueras is now known. Major Miguel Ayoroa and Colonel Andrés Selnich, two Rangers trained by the Yankees, ordered a non-commissioned officer, Mario Terán, to murder Che. Terán went in. completely drunk, and Che. who had heard the shots which had just killed a Bolivian and a Peruvian fighter, seeing the brute hesitate said to him firmly, ' Shoot. Don't be afraid.' Terán left the room and his superiors, Ayoroa and Selnich, had to repeat the order which he finally carried out, firing his machine-gun at Che from the waist down. The official tale that Che had died a few hours after the combat was already in circulation; this was why his executioners gave orders not to shoot him in the chest or the head, so as not to produce instantly fatal wounds. Che's agony was thus cruelly prolonged until a sergeant, who was also drunk, finally killed him with a pistol shot in the left side. The whole procedure was in brutal contrast with the respect Che never once failed to show for the life of the many Bolivian officers and soldiers he had taken prisoner.
Those last hours of his life, spent in the hands of his despicable enemies, must have been bitter for him; but no man was better prepared than Che to face an ordeal of this kind.
We cannot, for the time being, reveal how this diary fell into our hands; it is enough to say that we did not have to pay anyone anything for it. It contains all the entries written down by Che from November 7th. 1966, the day on which he arrived at the Ñacahuasu, until October 7th, 1967, the night before the combat in the Yuro ravine. Only a few pages are missing which are not yet in our possession, but they are entries for dates when nothing important happened, and they in no way alter the diary's overall contents.
Although there is not the slightest doubt about the document's authentically, all photostat copies of it were rigorously examined, not just to establish that they were genuine, but also to see if there were any discrepancies, however minor. The dates were also checked against those in the diary of one surviving guerrilla fighter. The detailed testimony of all the remaining survivors, who were present at these events, provided us with further proof of the diary's accuracy. We are utterly convinced that all the photostats were authentic copies of pages from Che's diary - Che's wife and comrade, Aleida March, greatly helped in the laborious and exhausting task of deciphering his minute and difficult handwriting.
The diary will be published almost simultaneously by the publisher Francois Maspero in France, Feltrinelli in Italy, Trikont Verlag in the German Federal Republic and Ramparts magazine in the U.S.A. There will be Spanish editions by Ruedo Ibérico in France and Revista Punto Final in Chile, as well as in other countries.
¡Hasta la Victoria Siempre!
Fidel Castro
READ 'BOLIVIAN DIARY' OF ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA : http://chehasta.narod.ru/bd_con.htm
