[In the following mixed review of Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, the critic praises the volume's candor and humor but questions its value as an historical document.]

When the history of the Cuban Revolution comes to be written—and perhaps the time is not yet ripe—Ernesto "Che" Guevara's Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War will probably be regarded as the outstanding contemporary account of the revolutionary war in the Sierra Maestra. There exist a number of excellent first-hand reports by journalists (mostly foreign), but of the revolution's leaders only Guevara systematically recorded, from memory and "a few hasty notes", the most significant episodes of the war—experiences from which he derived the theories expounded in his now classic and, it seems, internationally (if sometimes inappropriately) influential Guerilla Warfare.

First published in installments in various Cuban periodicals during the early 1960s, Guevara's "fragmentary history" of the war ("a series of personal reminiscences") opens with a strikingly unheroic account of the voyage from Mexico to Cuba that Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl, the author (none of whom was over thirty years old) and some eighty other would-be revolutionaries made in the yacht Granma:

With our lights extinguished we left the port of Tuxpan amid an infernal mess of men and all sorts of material. The weather was very bad…. We began a frenzied search for the anti-seasickness pills, which we did not find. We sang the Cuban national anthem and the "Hymn of the 26th of July" for perhaps five minutes and then the entire boat took on an aspect both ridiculous and tragic: men with anguished faces holding their stomachs, some with their heads in buckets, others lying in the strangest positions, immobile, their clothing soiled with vomit.

Apart from two or three sailors and four or five other people the rest of the eighty-three crew members were seasick.

Three days after landing in Oriente province on December 2, 1956, and totally unprepared for immediate battle, they experienced at Algeria de Pìo a bloody baptism of fire at the hands of Batista's troops. Guevara himself, who was already suffering from an acute attack of asthma, was severely wounded:

I immediately began to wonder what would be the best way to die, now that all seemed lost. I remembered an old story of Jack London's in which the hero, knowing that he is condemned to freeze to death in the icy reaches of Alaska, leans against a tree and decides to end his life with dignity.

Only twelve rebels survived the massacre to form the nucleus of the Rebel Army which two years later marched into Havana.

Guevara's narrative (complete with diagrams) of the rebels' skirmishes with government troops, the establishment of contacts with the local peasant population, the creation of a "liberated zone", and the way in which the guerrilleros (200 of them by June, 1957) coped with their everyday problems—the provision of food, water and clothing, the supply of arms and ammunition, the maintenance of discipline and morale (particularly during the early difficult months)—is one of unusual interest. Moreover, it is related with considerable frankness, modesty and, surprisingly, with a good deal of humour. Doctor, dentist (albeit a reluctant one), military commander of the Rebel Army's fourth column and responsible for the "political orientation" of new recruits. Guevara emerges from this book as a most attractive adventurer. "A virtuoso in the art of revolutionary war" (to use Castro's description of him), he became addicted to life in the sierra and came to believe in revolution as a kind of personal therapy: "revolution", he wrote, "purifies men, improves and develops them". The letters he wrote in the period after 1959, a number of which are printed as an appendix to the book, give some idea of the frustration he felt with his post-revolutionary life as a bureaucrat. It can have surprised no one who knew him when in 1965, having played his part in consolidating the Cuban Revolution "in its territory", he left in search of "new battlefronts" in the struggle against American imperialism—to meet his death two years later in a Bolivian jungle.

From the historian's point of view, Guevara's Reminiscences are of strictly limited value. Many of the questions crucial to any understanding of the origins, nature and development of the Cuban Revolution remain unanswered. There is little to be learned, for example, about the way in which the political aspirations of the rebels evolved beyond the desire to overthrow the Batista dictatorship. Guevara simply states that as they came into closer contact with the peasants of the Sierra Maestra (who were, of course, far from typical of the Cuban population as a whole)—"prematurely aged and toothless women, children with distended bellies, parasitism, rickets, general avitaminosis"—they began to see the need for "a definite change in the life of the people. The idea of agrarian reform became clear …". His own ideological influence on the revolution—always said to be paramount—is still not clear. The relationship between the 26th of July Movement and the Partido Socialista Popular (the Communists) is scarcely discussed: "The P.S.P. joined with us in certain concrete activities", Guevara writes, "but mutual distrust hampered joint action and, fundamentally, the party of the workers did not understand with sufficient clarity the role of the guerrilla force, nor Fidel's personal role in our revolutionary struggle". The reasons for the ultimate rebel victory over Batista remain obscure. Guevara merely refers in vague terms to the oppressive nature of the existing regime, the privileged position of the latifundistas businessmen and foreign monopolists, and the demoralization and technical ineptitude of the military. In the last analysis, he says, in a statement which explains very little, "the war was won by the people, through the action of its armed fighting vanguard, the Rebel Army, whose basic weapons were their morale and their discipline". The narrative effectively ends with the second battle of Pino del Agua (February, 1958) and only a few pages are devoted to the events leading up to the seizure of power in January, 1959.

No one could reasonably accuse Guevara of exaggerating his own role in the Cuban revolutionary war: however brilliant, he was throughout Fidel Castro's second-in-command. At the same time one of the most curious features of his narrative is the infrequency with which Fidel himself figures in it. The explanation, of course, lies in the fact that the fourth column operated independently for much of the time and Guevara is describing his war. Yet no account of the war as a whole would be complete without an understanding of Castro's complex personality and his military and political skills.