SOURCE: "The End of a Guerrillero," in The New York Times Book Review, August 25, 1968, pp. 1-2, 26, 28, 30.

[Lockwood is a photojournalist, editor, and author of a book about Fidel Castro and Cuba. In the following review, in which he offers a highly favorable assessment of Guevara's Bolivia diary, Lockwood praises Guevara's writing style and comments on several events in the Bolivian campaign.]

Dear Folks—Once again I feel the ribs of Rocinante between my heels; once again I take the road with my shield upon my arm…. Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am—only, one of a different sort, one who risks his neck to prove his platitudes…. Now a will which I have polished with delight will sustain some shaky legs and weary lungs. I will do it. Give a thought once in a while to this little twentieth century soldier-of-fortune….

 —Che Guevara: farewell letter to his parents.

Last October, when the Bolivian Government gloatingly announced that it had not only captured and killed the great revolutionary guerrillero, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, but that among the contents of his rucksack had been found a complete war diary in Che's handwriting, minutely detailing his daily adventures and observations, publishers' agents from around the world flocked to La Paz to bid for the right to its publication.

Bolivian President René Barrientos, hoping to recoup some of the $3-million of Bolivia's meager funds which had been spent in bringing Guevara's tiny band to rout, hinted openly that he would like to get a million dollars for the package. At first, the publishers vied briskly with one another and intrigued secretly with members of the Government for the inside track. As months went by, however, most of the competitors dropped out, some because they feared a lawsuit from the Guevara heirs in Cuba (who presumably have some legal right to the diary), others out of dismay at the international scandal that had been stirred up by the crassness of the Bolivians, and still others out of unwillingness to accept the editorial conditions demanded by the Bolivian Government, i.e., that the full story "from the Bolivian side" must be included in any publication.

Then, in July, Fidel Castro shocked La Paz by announcing that he had acquired a copy of Guevara's war diary "free of charge" from a mysterious source and would publish it immediately in Havana and other capitals. Within a week, an English translation of this Cuban edition, together with an introduction written by Castro, appeared in this country in Ramparts Magazine, and now reappears in a Bantam paperback [as The Diary of Che Guevara; Bolivia: November 7, 1966—October 7, 1967].

Almost simultaneously, Stein & Day publishers have come forth with what they call The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Ché Guevara, published under official license of the Bolivian Government. It is called "complete" because it contains Che's entries for 13 days that are missing from the Castro version (out of nearly 400 days). More interesting, it also includes the diaries of three other Cuban guerrilleros ("Pombo," "Rolando" and "Braulio," all officers of Cuba's Army), which shed further light on Che's fascinating narrative, and a 60-page introduction by Daniel James which, among other things, amply fulfills the obligation to present the Bolivian side of the story by devoting three effusive pages to a political biography of President Barrientos and an equal number to Gen. Alfredo Ovando, the army's Commander in Chief.

These two English versions of Che's diary have been compared, and they unquestionably derive from the same original. Both, however, suffer needlessly from inept and inaccurate translations. The Cuban translation, prepared in Havana (in obvious haste), is an especially messy job; the Stein & Day version is somewhat better, but far from perfect.

Che Guevara quietly dropped out of sight in April, 1965. "Other nations of the world call for my modest efforts," he had written at that time to his friend, chief and mentor, Fidel Castro, pledging "to carry to new battlefields the faith which you have taught me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of fulfilling the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism." He was not seen again publicly until two and a half years later, when his grimy and stiffened cadaver, strangely saint-like in death, was brought to the Bolivian town of Vallegrande in the foothills of the Andes Mountains strapped to the runner of an army helicopter. Captured alive, he had been executed the next day on orders from La Paz.

Where had Guevara been all that time? The diaries provide a clue. He had gone first to the Congo. There, together with several other veterans of the Cuban Revolution, he had tried unsuccessfully to reorganize the remnants of Patrice Lumumba's forces. When they would not fight, Che returned secretly to Cuba in 1966. With Castro, he laid the plans for a guerrilla action in Bolivia that would serve as the base and training ground for a continental South American revolutionary movement, thus fulfilling Guevara's dream (expressed as early as 1959) of "transforming the Andes Mountains into the Sierra Maestra of Latin America."

As Fidel Castro has related, it was Che Guevara's custom during the guerrilla days in the Sierra Maestra to jot down his notes and observations each day in a notebook, "in the small and nearly illegible handwriting of a doctor." From this raw material Che later produced a series of accounts entitled Passages From the Revolutionary War, a book which ranks among the best war writing of modern times.

In this respect, the Bolivian diary of Che Guevara is no disappointment. In few writers does the style so transparently reflect the personality of the man. The writing is economical and matter-of-fact in tone, free of all hyberbole yet vivid, and leavened with a fine, dry sense of humor, the butt of which is often the author himself. The narrative begins slowly and gradually gains momentum. As it tersely unfolds one experiences a rising tension, a growing sense of tragic fate inexorably working itself out. As in all good adventure stories, though you know how it ends, you cannot put the book down.

The daily accounts begin with Che's arrival in Nancahuazú in November, 1966, and end the day before his capture the following October. The journal begins on a note of optimism and humor. Having traveled from Cuba via Prague, Frankfurt and São Paulo, bald and beardless and on a false passport, Che enters Bolivia and arrives at the farm which is intended to be his base of operations. The diary begins (reviewer's translation):

(November 7, 1966) A new stage begins today. We arrived at the farm by night. The trip was quite good. After entering by way of Cochabamba, adequately disguised, Pachungo and I made the necessary contacts and traveled in two jeeps for two days…. On approaching the farm during the second trip, Bigotes, who had just learned my identity, nearly ran off a cliff, leaving the jeep stranded on the edge of a precipice. We walked about 20 km., arriving after midnight at the farm, where there are three Party workers.

Other Cuban guerrilla veterans arrive in the weeks that follow, in pairs, by various routes. In the end, Guevara's guerrilla foco will contain 20 Cubans (including at least 4 members of Cuba's Central Committee), 29 Bolivians and 3 Peruvians. Of the Bolivians, 4 will desert and several others will prove unfit for combat.

Things seem to go wrong almost from the beginning. Three days after Che's arrival, two Cubans carelessly let themselves be seen by a local peasant. For security purposes, the group is forced to leave the more comfortable farm and set up a new base camp in the jungle. At the end of December, Mario Monje, head of the pro-Moscow Bolivian Communist party, visits this camp and meets with Che. In return for support, he demands to be given military and political leadership of the revolution. Che refuses, and Monje departs in anger, withdrawing the party aid upon which Che had been counting as a source of men and supplies from the cities.

In the meantime, personality clashes have already broken out between some of the Cuban veterans, and there is friction between the Cubans and the Bolivians. Che is forced to discipline two Cuban comandantes and delivers a lecture to the entire group on the need to form "an exemplary nucleus made of steel."

It is clear from almost the initial entries in Che's journal that the Bolivian operation is intended to be only the first stage in a continental revolution. The strategy was to gain a foothold in Bolivia first, then to branch out north and south, thus creating "two, three, many Vietnams" (in Che's words). Peru and Argentina apparently were to be the next theaters of operations.

Guevara correctly saw that his real enemy was the United States; his theory was that the more brush fires that could be created, the more extended the United States would become in trying to put them out, and thus the greater the chances of any single revolutionary movement succeeding. That the United States understood and feared this strategy is evidenced by the alacrity with which it moved to send materiel and "advisers" to Bolivia once it was convinced that Che Guevara was there.

By the end of January the initial guerrilla group is complete. Che prepares to take his troop on a 25-day march through the jungle for training and toughening. In his monthly analysis for January he writes: "Now begins the real guerrilla phase, and we will test the troops. Time will tell what will happen and what the prospects are for the Bolivian revolution." To which he adds a comment that is an ominous portent of things to come: "… the incorporation of Bolivian fighters has taken the longest to accomplish."

Things continue to go poorly. The guerrilla force, lacking knowledge of the terrain, continually loses its way. Two men are accidentally drowned. Others contract malaria, and Che himself begins to suffer from recurrent bouts of asthma. All are hungry. The local peasantry, from whom Che hopes to enlist new recruits, exhibit stolid indifference to revolutionary ideals. Many villages speak an Indian dialect unknown even to the Bolivians in Che's force, making communication practically impossible. The march lasts 48 days instead of the planned 25.

As hardships and privations in crease, so does the friction between some of the veteran Cuban officers. One of the comandantes "Marcos," whom Che had intended to place in charge of the vanguard, is demoted for temperament and derelection of duty and ordered either to join the rear ranks as a common soldier or go back to Cuba. (He joins the rearguard and, much later, dies bravely in battle.)

The worst blow is reserved for Che's troop when it finally returns "home" to Nancahuazú; two of the Bolivian guerrilleros have deserted and have led army soldiers to the base camp, resulting in the capture of photographs, diaries and other documentary proof of Che Guevara's presence in Bolivia. Che records these events and their circumstances in his usual matter-of-fact way and then adds, gloomily, "An atmosphere of defeat prevailed."

Although a temporary period of military success will follow, this is actually the turning-point in Che Guevara's fortunes, for he is now compelled to abandon his training camp and go on the military offensive before he is ready and long before he had planned.

Beginning in Nancahuazú and moving southward, he fights a series of skirmishes with the poorly trained Bolivian Army troops and sustains a string of victories, most of them from carefully planned ambushes laid according to the classic model described by Guevara in his handbook, On Guerrilla Warfare. However, April proves one of the cruelest months for Che. On the 17th, he is accidentally separated from his rear guard, reducing his forces by more than 20 per cent, including five Cubans. (Though he will spend months searching for them, he will never see them again.) On the 20th, the revolutionary ideologue Régis Debray, who had departed against Che's wishes after spending a month with him, is captured near Camiri and immediately becomes an international cause célèbre.

Guevara is now obliged to move northward again, taking to the inhospitable mountains and fighting as he goes. Victories continue, but now they are paid for with mortalities and casualties in his already meager forces which he is unable to replenish with even one Bolivian peasant recruit. He is cut off from support from the cities, and he has lost radio contact with Havana. Ascending into the mountains, Che is again visited with a series of horrendous asthma attacks. His medicine exhausted, he can no longer march and must alternately ride a mule (Rocinante?) or, when he loses consciousness, be carried on a litter. His sickness has begun to demoralize his men.

The diary entries of this time, faithfully recording each detail of mounting adversity in an unbroken tone of incandescent courage and optimism, invoke a growing melancholy in the reader. Upon hearing on the radio that 16 American anti-guerrilla experts have arrived in La Paz to train the Bolivian rangers, Che notes with satisfaction: "We may be taking part in the first episode of a new Vietnam."

By August, Che records that his band is now down to 22 men, three of whom are disabled, and subsisting on horsemeat. Guevara's asthma is now so advanced that he has begun to lose control of his temper, berating his men and abusing his horse. For the man who had once written, "Now a will which I have polished with delight will sustain some weary lungs and shaky legs," this breach of self-discipline is a severe blow. He calls a meeting of his men:

We are in a difficult situation … there are moments when I lose control of myself. This will change, but we must all share equally the burden of the situation, and whoever feels he cannot stand it should say so. This is one of those moments in which great decisions must be made, because a struggle of this type gives us the opportunity to become revolutionaries, the highest rung on the human ladder, and also allows us to graduate as men. Those who cannot reach either of these stages should say so and leave the struggle.

By September, Che is bottled up in the mountains, desperately searching for an escape route from the tightening encirclement of the Rangers. Practically every new entry begins with the notation, "A black day." Though now aware that he is probably reaching his end, he still possesses enough spirit for a moment of humor: "I almost forgot to emphasize the fact that today, after something like six months, I bathed. This constitutes a record which several others are already approaching."

Why did Che Guevara fail? Unquestionably, the most significant cause of his defeat was his inability to attract the support of the Bolivian peasants. During 11 months of operations over an extensive rural area, not a single native joined the guerrilla band. Instead, as Che himself admits, the peasants responded to his urgings with indifference and duplicity, and many served as paid informers to Barrientos's troops.

One reason for this was lack of sufficient preparation. It seems incredible that neither Che nor any of the Cubans had taken the trouble to learn Quechua, the most common dialect spoken by the Bolivian Indians, before arriving in Bolivia; it is equally incredible that there was not at least one Bolivian in the group who spoke Guarani, the other prominent Indian tongue of the region.

More significant may have been a miscalculation by Castro and Guevara in attempting to duplicate the success of the Cuban revolution by transposing its tactics wholesale to a Bolivian setting. The two situations are not identical.

When Fidel Castro landed in the Sierra Maestra in 1956, he was a well-known Cuban patriot who was returning to his own country at the head of a revolutionary force who were 99 per cent Cubans. Castro had no avowed political program or ideology except that of ridding Cuba of a dictatorship and restoring a democratic government. He operated in a territory (Oriente Province) which he knew personally; he had, in fact, grown up among its peasants and spoke their dialect. Hence, Castro was able to obtain the overwhelming support of the peasantry, a factor which proved decisive to the success of his revolution.

By contrast, in Bolivia Che Guevara was a famous Cuban leader on foreign soil. He was the chief of a revolutionary band that was also largely made up of foreigners. He was an acknowledged Communist doctrinaire whose revolutionary program involved the communization not only of Bolivia but of all Latin America. In effect, he was the agent of a foreign power operating on Bolivian soil—at least, in the eyes of the Bolivians. He did not speak their language. Given these circumstances, it does not seem surprising that the Indian peasants offered a cool reception to the bearded foreign warriors, or that the Government was able to capitalize on their natural xenophobia and turn them into informers.

One wonders, also, at the inadequate planning that seems to have characterized the preparations for the Bolivian adventure. Were Castro and Guevara simply overconfident or overoptimistic? Why, for example, were not more Bolivians involved in the operation from the beginning, perhaps receiving their preliminary training in Cuba? Why did not the Cuban veterans (whom Che accuses of having grown soft and lazy in desk jobs during the nine years since the revolution) undergo a rigorous reconditioning before they left? (Some had no training.)

Once in Bolivia, why didn't the Cubans, instead of doing most of the fighting, function as "advisers" to the Bolivian guerrilleros (as did the United States experts to the Bolivian Rangers who ultimately defeated Che)? Why didn't Che, who knew beforehand that there would be trouble with the Bolivian Communist party, arrange other lines of support in advance to ensure that his guerrilla would not be cut off from the cities?

With more planning, better luck, and a guerrilla cadre mainly staffed and led by Bolivians, could the revolutionary effort have succeeded? There is no sure answer. "Pombo's" diary tells us that Che expected victory in Bolivia to take at least 10 years. Certainly many of the conditions that spawn revolutions do exist in Bolivia, among them extreme rural poverty, a feudal system of land ownership, exploitation and suppression of the tin miners, corruption at all levels of government, and a revolutionary tradition.

Daniel James, in his introduction to the Bolivian edition of Che's diaries, ascribes Che's defeat in part to his failure to appreciate the tremendous political popularity of President Barrientos, whom James characterizes as "a typical Latin-American revolutionary"—an assertion likely to cause guffaws even among Barrientos's cronies. Barrientos's regime, which began with a coup d'etat, is so shaky that it almost fell during Guevara's short-lived period of victories and is now tottering again because one of his ministers stole a copy of Che's diary and sent it to Fidel Castro, enabling him to publish it first.

Were there sufficient space, it would be interesting to compare the two introductions by Fidel Castro and Daniel James, which represent points of view that could not be more opposite. However, one matter in James's essay must be mentioned. At the beginning, and again at the end of his introduction, he devotes several pages to a discussion of what he calls the "rivalry" between Guevara and Castro.

According to James's somewhat muddled exposition, the two had never gotten along since their days together in the Sierra Maestra (though both had carefully hidden their feelings). When Che returned to Cuba in 1965 from Algeria, Castro, out of pique at Guevara's supposed efforts to assume the ideological leadership of the Cuban revolution, banished him first to the Congo and then to Bolivia (after which Fidel, "copied Che's ideological program"). When Guevara began to encounter adversity, James goes on, Fidel purposely withheld the aid and support that could have saved his life, and abandoned Che "to fight and die alone in the wilds of the Bolivian southeast," thus eliminating his chief rival to the leadership of the Latin-American armed struggle.

Suffice it to say that there exists not one shred of documentary evidence, either in Che's diaries of anywhere else, to support this fantastic story. In Cuba, since his departure in 1965, Guevara's name and image have been promoted incessantly by Castro's propaganda organs. If anything, Fidel's support of his comrade has been overenthusiastic, as witness the O.L.A.S. conference of 1967, where Che was clearly identified as the new Bolivar of South America's Socialist revolution—which no doubt helped stimulate United States action in Bolivia. As for Guevara's feelings for Castro, they are nowhere expressed more movingly than in his farewell letter to Fidel:

If my final hour finds me under other skies, my last thought will be of this people [the Cubans] and especially of you. I am thankful for your teaching, your example, and I will try to be faithful to the final consequences of my acts…. I embrace you with all my revolutionary fervor!

It must be left to the reader to speculate why James (who has published a violently anti-Castro book about Cuba) sees fit to devote so much of his Introduction to this gratuitously vicious slur on Fidel Castro.

Yet no amount of scandal or intrigue will tarnish Che Guevara's Bolivian diary or prevent it from being read as one of the most transcendent documents of our time. More than a simple war journal, it is a rare self-portrait of the compleat revolutionary. Out of this diary of defeat emerges a triumphant legacy of courage, selflessness and devotion to principle of heroic dimensions. The revolutionary movement to which he so willingly sacrificed himself, though temporarily weakened by his death, must ultimately be fortified by the exemplary testament which he has left it.