The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara. BY ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA. New York: Pathfinder, 1994, 467 pp.5
The republication of Che Guevara's Bolivian Diary together with accounts by other veterans of his failed insurgency in the high Andes is intended, its editor Mary- Alice Waters writes, "to bring to life for a new generation of revolutionary-minded fighters worldwide this work by one of the great communist leaders of our time." The diary was found in Guevara's knapsack by the Bolivian military after his capture and murder in 1967. It was first published in the United States in 1968 in a special edition of Ramparts magazine, instantly becoming a required component of the radical student's catechism. Che's diary remains a fascinating read, dispirited and hopeful at the same time, and abruptly terminated. Guevara believed he was "opening the final stage of the liberation of the Americas." In this he was resoundingly mistaken, but his death and the recent unearthing of his remains in Bolivia have created a mythology that will likely long survive the end of the Cuban revolution he has also helped to romanticize.