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  The Bolivian Diary: The Authorised Edition

  2009 marks the 42nd anniversary of the U.S. backed assassination of international revolutionary; Ernesto Guevara De La Serna, affectionately known to billions as ‘Che’. Born into an academic, middle class family on June 14th 1928 in Rosario, Argentina. Che; an asthmatic, well read intellectual and talented sportsman, embarked upon his now legendary motorcycle trip around Latin America at the age of 23; observing first hand, the unbearable conditions forced upon the continent’s impoverished working class. Conditions systematically exacerbated by an unholy alliance between Rothschild imperialism, and a handful of home-grown lackeys.

  Che witnesses the CIA’s coup d’etait in Guatemala; overthrowing the country’s popular, democratically elected president; Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, and reversing his egalitarian polices through the violent imposition of dictatorial stooges loyal to the Ivy League bourgeoisie. This first hand encounter with North American aggression further serves to radicalise the young doctor, leading him to accurately define imperialism as "A carnivorous animal that feeds upon the unarmed peoples of the world". It was on his second, arguably more enlightening, road trip in 1953, that Che, aged 25, met Fidel Castro, with whom he would join forces to liberate Cuba; by deposing U.S. puppet Fulgencio Batisita in 1959. After an energetic, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to mobilise anti-colonial resistance in The Congo, Che delivered one of the greatest speeches of all time at the U.N. General Assembly on December 11th 1964, resigned his post as Cuban finance minister and embarked upon his fateful journey to foment Castro-esque revolution in Bolivia, circa 1967.

  'The Bolivian Diary' is an excellent account of grassroots guerrilla warfare, the tumultuous origins of the Bolivian struggle itself and how an absence of political consciousness amongst the people would go onto undermine and implode the entire operation. Che’s entries provide an informative insight into the mind of a great man; be it the functional, often mundane, routines of setting up outposts & defences:

  "December 18th

  It Rained all day, but we still worked on the cave…"

  To his views & wry observations on comrades, and the left-right paradigm:

  "January 26

  Loyola made a very good impression on me; she is very young and softly spoken, but one can tell she is very determined. She is about to be expelled from the Communist Party youth group, but they are trying to get her to resign first".

  Joseph Campbell once defined a hero as "...someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself" and Che in his many, and often inappropriate, latterday pictorial manifestations; should not be consigned to the archives of collective memory. But held up as an invincible portrait of resistance and a timeless, heroic figure who extolled the virtues of a universal truth. Banquo’s ghost to the Macbeths of imperialism. And if future leaders only strive to make one of Che’s statements come true, then let them make it this: "The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination and to the independent development of their nations."

  Review by Kashif Ahmed on 15:32, 08 Jul 2009

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