“Bad day for me: I got over it by willpower because I felt broken.”
This review is not intended to be a judgment on the historical-political figure, nor a trial on what Latin American history was during the Cold War, a field of confrontation between the USA and the USSR, superpowers engaged in multiple peripheral conflicts to avoid direct clashes, with unimaginable consequences. This is not the place and, frankly, we don’t think we are capable of it.
The book is the revival of the diary kept by Che Guevara during the guerrilla war in Bolivia against the illegitimate government led by René Barrientos Ortuño. A political testament and historical testimony of enormous impact that we were lucky to be able to read, because History, with a capital H, is also made up of these stories, however reworked, however biased.
The diary is invaluable when you think about the conditions in which it was written. The difficulties in having paper and pencil, in keeping the writings dry when you had to cross a river chased by the regular army, not to mention the desire to stop and write when the fatigue of a long march took your soul. The will to tell what would otherwise have been forgotten.
It is wonderful the description done by Che Guevara of Bolivian peasants: people exploited to the core, unaware slaves of an amoral productive system and a governmental system without checks and balances, which can only survive through the subjugation of the people.
Out of the historical-political considerations on the figure of Che Guevara, and on his military action in Bolivia, the pages of the diary bring to life a romantic hero, perhaps idealized, and of his “foolish” adventure, to follow a higher ideal.
A man capable of crossing the length and breadth of the Latin American subcontinent to try to bring social justice, or whatever he thought it was. Driven perhaps more by a feeling of pan-Americanism than of communism.
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Che Guevara, The Bolivian Diary, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2001 (prima edizione 1968)
Original Edition: Diario del Che en Bolivia, Instituto del Libro, L’Avana, Cuba, 1968
