Author: Ludwik Stomma. Source: Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 18, 1970. Date of publication: 3 May 1970.

Who is Che, really? For Americans — a terrible travelling salesman of revolution, with a reward of 50,000 pesos placed on his head. For most French people — a photogenic playboy, a demon of adventure, of which so many young people dream. For the inhabitants of the Third World — friend number one, a fascinating symbol, the embodiment of a myth. For the entire world — a romantic Don Quixote. (Albert-Paul Lentin, “Guevara’s Challenge,” Le Nouvel Observateur)

On 8 October, in the Yuro ravine, Ernesto Guevara was surrounded by superior forces, taken prisoner, and subsequently executed. Of the people who took part in his partisan movement, nine are alive today: three deserters who entered the service of CITE (the Special Unit Training Centre for Counter-Insurgency), three who managed to escape to Cuba, and three who are held in Bolivian prisons. Rarely is a defeat so complete.

And yet the defeat was transformed into a different kind of victory. From the moment of his death, Guevara’s image spread with extraordinary speed across the world — across the walls of universities, the covers of underground publications, the manifestos of groups with the most varied political orientations. This is a paradox typical of the age: the man who failed militarily became the universal symbol of a generation in revolt.

The Bolivian Diary is the most honest document of that defeat. Guevara does not mythologise himself. He records setbacks methodically — the distrust of the local peasant population, the illnesses that decimated the unit, the desertions, the growing despair of the final months. He notes on 7 October, the day before his capture: “Today completes the 11th month of our guerrilla inauguration. The day passed in an idyllic fashion.”

This sobriety — this capacity to observe even one’s own defeat with the eye of a historian — is what makes the document exceptional. The defeat was total. The victory consisted in the fact that the defeated man became, in death, more powerful than in life.

source: kapuscinski.info