Translator’s Note

Bolivian soldiers who on 8 October 1967 searched Che Guevara’s rucksack found in it two book-format diaries, written on page after page. None of the soldiers could read. After the search they returned the diaries to their unit commander — Lieutenant Gary Prado, who a few hours earlier had taken the wounded Guevara prisoner. The lieutenant passed the diaries to the divisional staff. They contained the text of the Diary that Guevara had kept throughout every day of his last epic. The Diary was a valuable prize, and many world-famous publishers began bidding for first publication rights. But in the meantime, Bolivia’s then Minister of the Interior Arguedas, in sensational circumstances, transmitted a photocopy of the Diary to the Cuban government. Nine months after Che’s death, the first book edition of Guevara’s Bolivian notes was published in Havana. The Cuban publisher gave it the title: The Bolivian Diary.

“Today a new stage begins.” This first sentence of the Diary is at the same time a commentary on Guevara’s political philosophy. Che treated the Bolivian campaign as only one stage of the great revolutionary process being lived through by Latin America and, more broadly, by the countries of the Third World. He did not count on easy victory in this campaign. In conversation with Mario Monje — only partially reported in the Diary — Guevara said that victory for the Bolivian partisans might come in fifteen to twenty years. He himself did not expect to live to see that moment. (Guevara died at the age of 39.) Guevara’s friend Ricardo Rojo, in his book Mi amigo, Che, recalls that as early as 1961 Guevara told him he had come to terms with the thought of imminent death. His letters written before his departure for Bolivia testify to the same. He believed that revolution needed personal example more than slogans and manifestos, and that readiness for death should characterise every fighter.

One of the people who knew him from the Bolivian period once said to me: “Che knew he would die there, but when speaking of the struggle that had to be undertaken, he thought someone had to start.”

It is worth bearing this in mind when reading the Diary, because this is the notebook of a commander of a surrounded unit — the notebook of a man who for at least the last six months of his life is already fighting a hopeless fight, who knows he could save himself by laying down his arms but who does not for a moment consider that alternative. On the contrary — he goes on, falls, picks himself up, and goes on. The last pages of the Diary are illuminated by no hope; the noose tightens ever more; he sees his people dying, he sees them running away, he is ever more alone — throttled by asthma, crushed by the weight of an enormous rucksack full of books, starved, with boils on his legs, in alien treacherous terrain where there is no knowing which way to go, in a place more cut off from the world than if he were on the moon, with no chance of any help, alone facing the consciousness of the end — a consciousness he must have had, for what remained was not much: a few more kilometres of marching, a pistol without ammunition, one last moment of joy that “the day passed idyllically,” one last night, one last ravine, one last shot.

source: kapuscinski.info