Product Description

The complete text of the campaign diaries kept by Guevara in the Congo in 1965-1966. In January 1965 Ernesto Guevara, one of the heroes of the Cuban Revolutionary War and a minister in Fidel Castro's government, vanished. His sudden disappearance was a subject for conjecture all over the world. He evntually surfaced in the heart of Africa where, with 100 Cuban guerilla fighters to assist him, he put into action his theories of how to help the oppressed peoples of Africa throw of the yoke of colonial imperialism. His first task was to help the young Laurent Kabila in his struggle against the dictator Mobutu, who had seized power in the newly independent Congo following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The diaries that Guevara kept during his months in Africa record a political, strategic and ideological failure: the first steps, in fact, in the catastrophic, if heroic, adventure that ultimately led to Guevara's death in the jungles of Bolivia and to the creation of one of the most romantic and potent legends of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #963848 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-17
• Original language: Spanish
• Binding: Paperback
• 244 pages

Customer Reviews

A truly trotskyist revolutionary in the facade of communism
Che was a trotskyist no matter what people say, from his critique of the soviet economy to his disgust of the wealth of soviet beuracratic caste. This book is masterpiece of self critiscism and showss us how Che's own formulated theory of guerrilla wagrfare will not work without the key ingredients of dedicated revolutionaries, the right amount of political education of the soldiers and the importance of being able to speak the language and the importance of not taking advantge of the peasantry who so often will supply the rural guerrilla movement until it is self sufficient. This book shows how everyone makes mistakes even people who are put on a pedestal and used as icons, that through self-critiscism we can become better revolutionaries and better people. It is just a shame Che never faced up to the fact that precise planning is needed before the leader of a revolution goes into battle, something he should have learned from Fidel, also from Trotsky himself who led the Russian Civil War although reading Trotsky would have been very hard for him ( getting hold of it).