[In the following essay, the critic examines Guevara's writing habits as well as the focus and publication history of his diaries.]

Since his death in a squalid hamlet in the jungled mountains of Bolivia eight months ago, Ernesto (Che) Guevara has assumed a revered place in the romantic imagination of thousands of revolutionaries around the world. To many young people in particular, his bold attempt to carry the torch of Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution to the very heart of the South American continent was an act of high adventure and noble purpose. Last week, however, with the publication of his secret personal diary, Che himself revealed for the first time all the mundane details of his Bolivian sojourn—the constant battle he waged against jungle sickness, the bone-wearying effort to elude pursuing Bolivian troops, the internecine conflicts among his own Communist comrades. And for all the unquestioned drama contained in its 345 pages, the diary turned out to be the story of a blundering failure.

The diary, long thought to be tucked away in a heavily guarded safe in the Bolivian capital of La Paz, was released last week by the Cuban Government to a half dozen sympathetic foreign publishers, including Ramparts magazine in the U.S. Although Castro insisted that a Cuban "sympathizer" had provided Havana with the copy, there were a number of conflicting versions of just how the diary was spirited out of Bolivia.

For the occasion, Castro wrote a glowing introductory tribute to his old comrade-in-arms. "It was Che's habit during his days as a guerrilla," Fidel reminisced,

to write down his daily observations in a personal diary. During the long marches over abrupt and difficult terrain, in the middle of the damp woods, when the lines of men, always hunched over from the weight of their mochilas [knapsacks], munitions and arms, would stop for a moment to rest, or when the column would receive orders to halt and pitch camp at the end of a long day's journey, one could see Che … take out his notebook and, with the small and almost illegible letters of a doctor, write his notes.

That, of course, was almost a decade ago, in Cuba's Sierra Maestra. But Che remained a faithful diarist in the Bolivian Andes, Castro explains, despite the fact that the struggle there "unfolded under incredibly hard material conditions." While the Cuban Premier carefully refrains from taking credit for sending Che to Bolivia to launch the insurrection, he leaves little doubt that he hoped, by presenting the diary to the world, to strengthen the cause of his militant philosophy of world revolution.

Indeed, a large portion of Castros' introduction is devoted to a bitter commentary on Che's conflicts with the conservative wing of the Bolivian Communist Party. Castro levels a searing blast at Communists, like those in Bolivia, who follow Moscow's line of peaceful coexistence rather than Fidels' own doctrine on the necessity for waging guerrilla wars. According to the Cuban Premier, Bolivian Communist Party Boss Mario Monje Molino did "nothing more than enter into shameful, ridiculous and unmerited claims for power" with Che and later actually "began to sabotage the movement, intercepting well-trained Communist militants in La Paz who were going to join the guerrillas."

In fact, as Che's diary makes clear, Monje and other Bolivian Communist leaders failed to share his vision of a "liberation" movement extending from a secure base in the Bolivian mountains to Argentina, Peru and other South American countries. Determined nonetheless to launch a "second Vietnam" in Latin America, Che left Cuba more than two years ago and flew to Europe (where he purchased his German diary in Frankfurt). Disguised as a balding Uruguayan businessman, he arrived in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz sometime in the fall of 1966. From there, he journeyed to La Paz to confer with local Communists and then proceeded to a farm which had been purchased for him by his Bolivian sympathizers in the isolated area of Îanchuhuasú, where he first began writing his diary.

Sometimes dramatic, sometimes tedious, the diary makes heavy reading due to its constant use of noms de guerre. The tangled geography of the region remains as confused to the reader as it was to the guerrilla chief himself. But what emerges is still a fascinating document of the painstaking mechanics of trying to start a revolution in an inhospitable land with groups of men (never more than 53) who frequently suffered not only from hunger, thirst and disease, but also from petty conflicts of personality and nationality. Che reveals himself as touchingly human by faithfully recording the birthdays of his comrades and his family. And as for Jules Régis Debray, the French Communist writer who, upon being captured and subsequently tortured by Bolivian Army troops, revealed the whereabouts of the Cuban's guerrilla hide-out, Che seems surprisingly uncritical. (Some experts, however, suspect that Che was not entirely happy with Debray's performance in the jungle—and let Castro know about this by radio.)

Castro gives his version of what happened to Che after he wrote the last entry in his diary on Oct, 7. The next day, he was caught by Bolivian soldiers and taken to the town of Higueras. There, on Oct. 9 in a small school house, writes Castro, "Maj. Miguel Ayoroa and Col. Andrés Selnich, rangers trained by the Yankees, instructed Officer Mario Terán to proceed with the killing. When the latter, completely drunk, went into the place, Che … saw that the assassin vacillated [and] said firmly, 'Shoot, don't be afraid!'"