Saldaña joined with Ernesto Che Guevara, one of the central leaders of the Cuban revolution, in the 1966-67 revolutionary front that Guevara led in Bolivia. The interview was conducted in Havana in April 1997 by Waters, editor of New International and president of Pathfinder Press, and Pathfinder editor Michael Taber. The book is scheduled to be released by Pathfinder in February.

Subheadings and footnotes are in the original. Copyright © 2001 Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

"This great mass of humanity has said, 'Enough!' and has begun to march."
February 4, 1962
Second Declaration of Havana

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
The triumph of the Cuban Revolution was not an isolated event. It was part of a rising wave of anti-imperialist struggles throughout the Americas, struggles that in turn drew new strength from the example set by the workers and farmers of Cuba. The upheavals that marked the class struggle in Bolivia from the 1950s to the 1970s provide striking confirmation of this reality.

On January 1, 1959, U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba in face of an advancing Rebel Army and of a spreading popular insurrection. The two-year-long revolutionary war waged by the Rebel Army under the command of Fidel Castro from its base in the Sierra Maestra mountains was over. The working people of Cuba in their millions took their future in hand. The first Free Territory of the Americas was born.

The popular victory over the dictatorship and the accelerating revolutionary transformation of Cuban society sounded a clarion call that echoed from Tierra del Fuego to the Río Bravo and beyond. Ordinary men and women of Cuba tenaciously and successfully resisted the fury of U.S. imperialism's reaction, demonstrating in practice, as the Second Declaration of Havana proclaimed, "that revolution is possible." Their actions won new generations of youth, determined to emulate what the Cuban people had done, and gave impetus to already deepening battles across the length and breadth of South America for land, national sovereignty, and against the brutalization of labor.

As Fidel Castro told a July 26, 1960, rally--held in the cradle of the revolution in the mountains of eastern Cuba--the revolution was making that country an "example that will convert the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of the American continent."  
 

Profound economic and social changes on the land and in the size and structure of the working class internationally were brought about by the global crisis of the Great Depression. International finance capital emerged from that crisis only with the help of the expansion of war-fueled production for the imperialist slaughter and the postwar reconstruction bonanza. These depression- and war-wrought changes in countryside and city the world over gave powerful impetus to anti-imperialist movements throughout colonial and semicolonial countries, from Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Ireland, to the Mideast and virtually the entire continent of Africa, to the Americas.

This worldwide advance of national liberation battles found expression within the United States as well. A mass proletarian upsurge of Black Americans brought down the institutional racism of "Jim Crow" segregation, which had dominated the South since the defeat of the post–Civil War Radical Reconstruction and had reinforced discrimination and segregation throughout the country.

In Latin America, as Rodolfo Saldaña here describes, a 1952 revolutionary explosion in Bolivia was the high point of popular struggle in the years between the end of World War II and the victory in Cuba. With Bolivia's powerful tin miners in the front ranks, working people won sweeping concessions from imperialist interests and the country's ruling capitalist families. The upheaval resulted in nationalization of the largest mines, legalization of the trade unions, initiation of land reform, and elimination of the literacy requirement that had effectively disenfranchised the majority of Bolivia's people, the Aymara- and Quechua-speaking indigenous population. But Bolivia remained one of the poorest countries in the Americas; only Paraguay and Haiti had lower per capita incomes.

On July 26, 1953, little more than a year after the popular upsurge in Bolivia, the opening deed in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the Batista dictatorship in Cuba was carried out. Some 160 youth under the leadership of Fidel Castro assaulted the Moncada garrison in Santiago de Cuba and another in nearby Bayamo.

Simultaneously, the young Argentine doctor Ernesto Guevara--later to become Che, one of the central leaders of the Cuban revolution and commander of the 1966–67 revolutionary front in Bolivia discussed in this interview--was setting off on a political journey through the countries of Latin America. Drawn to Guatemala in 1954 as imperialism was organizing to overthrow the Jacobo Arbenz regime there, Guevara escaped to Mexico where he soon met the leaders of Cuba's newly formed July 26 Movement, recently released from Batista's prisons following a nationwide amnesty campaign. Guevara signed on as the troops' doctor and joined the Granma expedition that landed on the shores of eastern Cuba in December 1956 to launch the revolutionary war that culminated two years later in the overthrow of the U.S.-backed tyranny.

In Bolivia, Rodolfo Saldaña had dropped out of school and was starting work at Bolivia's largest tin mine, Siglo XX (Twentieth Century) to build the Communist Party of Bolivia among the miners.

These interconnected threads are indispensable for understanding the events at the center of this book. By the mid-1960s, as Saldaña emphasizes, the class struggle in Bolivia, which had accelerated coming out of World War II, was once again reaching explosive dimensions. Political polarization was sharpening throughout the Southern Cone of Latin America. World politics was more and more dominated by U.S. imperialism's rapidly escalating war to crush the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people and the growing mass resistance to Washington's war within the United States and worldwide.

When Che Guevara, backed by Cuba's leadership, concluded that conditions were favorable to launch a revolutionary front in Bolivia, there was nothing casual or uninformed about the decision. Guevara's course was to establish a guerrilla front of internationalist volunteers that could regroup revolutionary forces throughout the region. Their goal was to forge a fighting anti-imperialist movement of workers, peasants, and youth that would overturn the military dictatorship in Bolivia that defended the landed, mining, and other capitalist interests in that country. In the process, they aimed to open the road to socialist revolution on the South American continent.

By October 1967, through the combined efforts of special U.S.-trained Bolivian army units and intelligence operations directed from Washington, Che's diminished troops had been cornered. The defeat of the revolutionary front was sealed by the annihilation of all but a handful of its remaining forces on October 8, including the wounding, capture, and execution of Guevara himself.

In the months and years that followed, a political debate raged among revolutionary-minded forces not only in Bolivia and Latin America, but around the world, assessing the reasons for the defeat. Many political forces who had opposed the revolutionary course of Cuba's leadership from the days of Moncada onward argued that the defeat of Che's guerrilla stemmed from a political misestimation by Guevara and the Cuban leadership. According to these voices, the workers and peasants of Bolivia were indifferent at best to the guerrilla initiative; conditions for a revolutionary course of struggle were lacking in Bolivia. Others claimed even more provocatively that Cuba's revolutionary leadership had abandoned Che and his forces, and failed to take measures that could have reestablished contact with the guerrilla unit, rescuing the combatants from encirclement.

Rodolfo Saldaña's account, published here for the first time, makes a unique contribution. It comes from a Bolivian revolutionary who joined with Che Guevara in the 1966–68 campaign, and throughout a lifetime of political work remained true to the same course. Only My Campaign with Che, by the central Bolivian leader Inti Peredo, offers a similar firsthand account of the struggle from the perspectives of the Bolivian revolutionaries involved. Peredo's book, written shortly before he was killed in 1969 by the military dictatorship in La Paz, circulated in several countries of Latin America in the 1970s. It was translated and published for the first time in English in 1994 by Pathfinder Press together with a new translation of Guevara's Bolivian Diary.

Rodolfo Saldaña was a founding member of the ELN (the National Liberation Army) of Bolivia, the name taken by the forces under Che Guevara's command following their first military engagement with the armed forces of the Bolivian dictatorship in March 1967. A Central Committee member of the Communist Party of Bolivia, he broke with the party in 1966 over the refusal of the leadership under general secretary Mario Monje to collaborate with Che's effort.

Saldaña was slated to join Che's guerrilla as a combatant, but his responsibilities, and the course of the guerrilla struggle itself, kept him at the head of the ELN's clandestine network in the cities and tin mining regions. He carried out the difficult and dangerous assignments of recruiting fighters among working people and youth, especially from the miners, and of providing logistical support for the guerrilla front. In his Bolivian Diary, Guevara noted that Saldaña "made a very good impression on me" when he visited the guerrilla camp at the beginning of the campaign.

Following the death of Guevara and most of the combatants, Saldaña helped organize the rescue and escape of the five survivors, three of them Cuban and two Bolivian. In the heat of the political battles that ensued, he worked to consolidate new forces in Bolivia and to relaunch the revolutionary struggle.

Of particular value in the account Saldaña gives here is the concrete, historical perspective he offers on the character of the class struggle in Bolivia and the long-gestating social, political, and economic realities that created the "fertile ground" for revolutionary struggle in the 1960s and '70s. In the process, he gives the lie to those who have argued that Che's guerrilla failed because it was a political adventure, ignorant of and alien to the conditions of Bolivia, and drew only an indifferent or hostile response from the country's workers, peasants, and youth.

Of value also is the picture he provides of the political and class trajectory of cadres of the Bolivian Communist Party such as himself and Rosendo García Maismán, the leader of the mine workers federation at Siglo XX. It comes as no surprise that they were among the small handful who broke with the party to chart a course, together with Che, towards the revolutionary struggle for power.

In passing, Saldaña also answers those who tried to use the defeat of the Bolivian front to slander the Cuban leadership for supposedly failing to provide necessary logistical support for Che and his comrades. He dismisses as simply uninformed--or nefarious--those who have sought to drive a wedge between Che and the revolution in Cuba he helped to lead, the revolution that made him the person he became.

In subsequent years Saldaña spoke little about his political experiences as part of the Bolivian vanguard that fought alongside Che. Of modest demeanor, he gave virtually no interviews. On the thirtieth anniversary of Che's death, while living and working in Havana he provided invaluable help in the preparation, first in Spanish and then in English, of Pombo: A Man of Che's 'guerrilla.' That firsthand account by Harry Villegas (Pombo), a member of Che's general staff in Bolivia, was published by Editora Política in 1996 and by Pathfinder Press in 1997. In the course of this work, Saldaña agreed to talk with Pathfinder editors Mary-Alice Waters and Michael Taber about Bolivia and the revolutionary campaign led by Guevara. The interview took place in Havana on April 26, 1997.

It was originally slated for publication in the fall of 1997 as part of the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara's death in combat. But Saldaña's health prevented him from reviewing the interview at the time. He completed his editorial work shortly before his death in June 2000.  
 

The extensive interview was transcribed by Mirta Vidal and translated by Michael Taber.

A number of photos of events in Bolivia and of Saldaña himself are published courtesy of Gladys Brizuela, Saldaña's companion of many years. Pedro Glasinovic, editor-in-chief of the daily Presencia in Bolivia, and Delfín Xiqués of Granma in Cuba also provided invaluable aid in searching for and providing photos of the class struggle in Bolivia.

Mary-Alice Waters
December 2000
 
 
  Saldaña: Conditions were ripe for revolutionary struggle

Question: Many who disagree with the revolutionary perspectives Che Guevara fought for argue that he and his fellow combatants were mistaken in going to Bolivia in 1966. Can you give us some background on the class struggle in Bolivia that shaped this decision?

Saldaña: The Bolivian people have a long history of struggle. There have been moments of really violent confrontations between the people and the repressive forces, though the two sides were not equal. More than once in the history of the country there have been true popular insurrections that toppled governments. There have also been massacres of miners, peasants, factory workers, and other working people in the cities, mainly La Paz.

Perhaps the defining moment of popular struggle was 1952. At that time a military junta ruled the country. As head of the police force, the minister of the interior conspired and launched a coup, but popular participation began changing the character of events, giving rise to a popular insurrection. For several days there were armed confrontations in the streets of La Paz, Oruro, and other cities, and the popular forces came out on top.

That's how the revolutionary process of April 1952 began, with the fall of the military junta that was governing the country and the rise of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR). Wherever there was a confrontation, the popular masses defeated the military forces. For all intents and purposes, in those cities where there were confrontations the army came apart.

Question: Why did workers, peasants, and others take to the streets in 1952? What led up to it?

Saldaña: Three issues were central: nationalization of the mines, land reform, and universal suffrage.

Nationalization of the tin mines was a demand the people had embraced for many years, and as a consequence of the revolutionary upheaval, the great mining companies were nationalized. There were three tin mining consortiums: Hochschild, Patiño, and Aramayo.¹ These were taken over to form the state mining sector.

Mining was the foundation of the economy because Bolivia was one of the largest producers of tin in the world. At certain times it has been the main producer, and at other times, it was second, but it has always been among the leading producers....

Agrarian reform was also a measure demanded by the majority. Prior to 1952, peasants struggling for a parcel of land were murdered or imprisoned by the large landowners for defending their rights against landlord oppression and exploitation.²

Because of this whole situation, the 1952 events culminated in these two fundamental measures: agrarian reform and nationalization of the large mining companies.

The third important measure was universal suffrage. The right to vote, was previously restricted to persons who knew how to read and write. The majority of the Bolivian people were illiterate, and continue to be today. Clearly at that time there was greater illiteracy than now. But even today it is true. It is not enough to go to school for a year or two, the little rural or urban schoolhouse. It's true they may have learned to read and write a little, but owing to lack of use they again sink into illiteracy. The poorest sectors do not have access to the daily press. They are unable to buy a newspaper, a book, a magazine.

Steps to meet the popular demands around these three issues really filled the population with enthusiasm. They opened up perspectives for the development of the country, for the economic and social development of Bolivia.

Within Latin America as a whole the revolutionary process of 1952 awakened great hope. People thought that a new type of society would be built in Bolivia, a more just society, with a better distribution of wealth, with possibilities for human development. But things didn't work out that way.  
 
Revolutionary process stalled and reversed
Very early on, pressures to limit and reverse these revolutionary measures in Bolivia began to be felt. These came from the United States government primarily, from the large corporations, from international bodies. These forces brought great pressures to bear on the government and on the governing party.³

Measures necessary for deepening the revolutionary process were not taken by those in power. So, shortly after 1952, the people began fighting to advance these measures, and later still, to defend them....

In its first few years, the MNR government headed by Víctor Paz Estenssoro had the support of the mass of peasants and workers--miners, factory workers, railroad workers, and so on. But in the final years of the 1950s, and at the beginning of the 1960s, these sectors of the population began to see that things were not going as they should.

Many conquests won through constant battles by the workers were taken away. The elimination of the inexpensive grocery stores in the mines, which supplied basic products for working families at subsidized prices, meant a significant decrease in workers' purchasing power. Wages suffered a continual decline through inflation. Massive layoffs in the mines and other sectors began. These facts meant that confrontations with the government became more and more violent. After 1952 various governments succeeded each other belonging to the same ruling party, the MNR. Between 1960 and 1964, there were steadily deepening conflicts. The govern-ment's repression of the trade union movement, the workers movement, also became more and more violent. The year 1964 marked the high point of these confrontations.

In October 1964, on the plains of Sora Sora, near the city of Oruro, the largest armed conflict took place between the army and miners of Siglo XX⁴ and Huanuni.  
 
Revolutionary crisis in Southern Cone
Question: Did the miners have their own militias?

Saldaña: Right after 1952 there were workers and peasants militias, which were armed. But over the years, in various ways, they were disarmed. If workers militias still existed, it was more or less in name only. But some workers, both in the cities and in the mining areas, kept their weapons. In the first years, after 1952, the peasants also purchased weapons, but little by little these were taken away.

At the end of October 1964, after the events of Sora Sora, there was a massive wave of arrests in La Paz, of workers and students. I don't remember exactly, but it must have been much more than a thousand persons. This occurred at the end of October. But the struggle continued.

René Barrientos, general of the Bolivian air force and vice president of the republic at that time, organized a coup d'état on November 4, 1964. President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the MNR leader who in 1952 had decreed the nationalization of the mines, the agrarian reform, and universal suffrage, was deposed. In the course of the coup there were armed confrontations with workers and others, in the streets of La Paz, for example. And there were even popular confrontations with the army itself, although the army adopted the stance that it was placing itself on the side of the people in carrying out the coup.

On November 4, 1964, workers seized a series of places, including the Panóptico jail in downtown La Paz. All the political prisoners there were set free, many of whom had been arrested at the end of October. There were also union leaders who had been in jail for months. All these people went out into the streets.

A few days before, the government of Paz Estenssoro had closed the workers' radio stations. There were a number of these--certainly more than twenty--run by unions of miners, factory workers, railroad workers, construction workers, and others. All these radio stations were closed down. The union locals were closed. Their bank accounts, that is, the money the unions had in banks, or in company vaults, were frozen. The unions could not touch their money nor could they use their offices and meeting halls.

After November 4, Barrientos opened things up a little. The especially repressive measures against the workers were lifted. The workers' radio stations were permitted to resume. The union locals were reopened. But Barrientos soon faced growing working-class resistance to the dictatorial measures of his regime.

In May 1965 the government decreed a lowering of wages in the mines and ordered a massive wave of arrests of workers leaders. They were immediately deported, sending large numbers into exile in Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. They were taken as far as possible from the Bolivian border--to the south of Argentina, to the south of Chile. Soon, little by little, they began to return to the country secretly.

In October 1965, the same year as the large-scale arrests, there were massive strikes by workers demanding freedom of their union leaders and the restoration of wage levels. The political movement was again heating up. There were armed confrontations in the main cities and mining centers.

In October, once again armed confrontations took place, and the military occupied the Central-Southern Council, which are a series of mines located in the south of the Department of Potosí, an area in which nothing had ever happened, that is, there had been no violent confrontations. The workers occupied other mines, too. So these armed confrontations in the cities themselves presented a new situation to us, to revolutionaries in Bolivia.

This was more or less the situation in the country at that time. We can thus answer the question of whether or not Bolivia was fertile ground for initiating the kind of revolutionary struggle Che envisioned.

Question: What do you think?

Saldaña: I believe it was. The conditions existed.⁵ There was repression; there were aspirations of the population that had not been satisfied and urgently required a solution; and the people could not fulfill their aspirations in the existing situation. There were solid reasons for the people to fight, to struggle, and they were increasingly doing so, but without results.

I also want to recall here the situation in Latin America as a whole. This was taking place in Bolivia in particular. But the same situation was being repeated, to different degrees, with its own characteristics, in the rest of Latin America. Guerrilla groups had arisen in a number of Latin American countries....  
 
Response by miners, students, and others
Question: What was the popular response within Bolivia on learning of Che's guerrilla?

Saldaña: After the first clash between the army and Che's forces occurred on March 23, I drafted a manifesto, and we distributed it in the cities. We did not yet have a name, so we were posed with the decision of what name the organization should use to address the people. We knew the decision rested with Che and the guerrilla group. That was where our command was. But we needed to say something to the people in some way, to explain somehow what was happening.

This was the document we used to begin to work in the mines, with which we began to work in the city, explaining more or less what the guerrilla struggle meant.⁶

Question: Without mentioning Che?

Saldaña: Correct. Under those conditions, we had to do our work without mentioning Che. The enemy already knew there were guerrillas, and it had to have known that groups were working to support the guerrillas. We were telling them nothing they didn't know. There were individuals among the people, among the workers, however, seeking ways to make contact with the guerrillas, seeking that possibility. These were the reasons for what we did, and the conditions under which we did it.

Question: What was happening among the tin miners?

Saldaña: The support received from the miners is one of the things that gives the lie to charges that the Bolivian workers and peasants were indifferent to the struggle Che initiated.

I had been a miner at Siglo XX. I built the Communist Party there in the 1950s. So I knew the party members, many of whom I had recruited.

I went to Siglo XX, it must have been in February 1967. I spoke with Rosendo García Maisman, who in those days was general secretary of the union, of the miners of Siglo XX, and a leader of the party there. He was an intelligent comrade, a very capable and courageous comrade. Without entering into details, I informed him that a decision had to be made soon. Later, after the first battle, he and I met on a number of occasions. By then he was already one of us, and he began to form two groups. One of these groups was to join the guerrilla column, and the other was to carry out support tasks.

As to the miners' commitment to the struggle, we have the testimony of Rosendo García's widow in the film Coraje del Pueblo [Courage of the People]. This film seeks to reconstruct all the events of the Noche de San Juan massacre. There the widow of Rosendo García is interviewed, and she mentions the trip I made to Siglo XX to talk with her husband. The communiqué we spoke about earlier had been sent to Siglo XX for distribution. That task had already been carried out by the compañeros grouped around García.

The miners registered their support to the guerrillas at general assemblies. They decided that each worker would donate one day's pay to help the guerrillas. Their commitment shows us that there was generalized support among the workers. It's possible, of course, that there were some who were not in agreement. But the miners unanimously made this decision at their assembly.

Question: This was in May or June?

Saldaña: This was at the end of May or at the beginning of June.

On June 24 there was supposed to be an expanded meeting of the miners federation, that is, union leaders from all the country's mines, were coming to Siglo XX. Representatives of the teachers and university students were also coming. In addition, this meeting at Siglo XX was to serve as a vehicle to discuss some general questions dealing with the workers' demands, and certainly it would have taken up support to the guerrillas.

During the night of June 23 into the dawn hours on June 24, the army entered the mining camp shooting, throwing grenades at the homes of the miners while they slept. This is why many women and children were among those killed. That was the Noche de San Juan massacre. The only place the troops encountered armed resistance was at the union hall, where Rosendo García was, together with the few who were able to respond to the call of the mine's siren. The union's siren would be sounded in the mornings so the workers would get to work; it's like an alarm clock. But the siren was also used to summon people to assemblies and as a warning about some danger. That night the siren was sounded.

Immediately the workers knew--since it wasn't time to go to work it had to be something else, some emergency, or an assembly. Something was happening.

With a few rifles, they confronted the army. A number of people were killed there at the union hall, including Rosendo García Maisman, the central leader of the workers at Siglo XX. Many others died in their homes from machine-gun fire.⁷

The delegates who had arrived for the meeting hid out in the mines, and later in different ways they secretly left the area, which was occupied by the army.

This was the highest expression of support the guerrillas received, but this doesn't mean it was the only one. There were other demonstrations of support, although none reached this level. There was a willingness among members of many political parties to join up. There was the attitude of many intellectuals. Proof of this can be found in poems written at the time the guerrilla struggle began, and after Che's death.⁸ We collected these poems together in a book. And there were surely many others that were never compiled for inclusion, that remained anonymous. There were also songs. In short, there were a whole series of manifestations of support. This is in response to those who say there was no support among the Bolivian people, that Che was isolated. That is not true. The guerrilla events after March 23 stirred the people as a whole, the population as a whole, in all their different social layers.
 
 
1. Each of these three companies was owned by Bolivian capitalist families with strong links to imperialist interests. Each had also located its headquarters outside Bolivia: Patiño in the United States. Aramayo in Switzerland, and Hochschild in Chile. U.S. and British capital had substantial minority shareholdings in Patiño, which accounted for 43 percent of Bolivia's tin production. 2. In the Bolivian countryside before 1952, some 92 percent of all cultivated land was owned by 6 percent of landowners. Most peasants lived in virtual bondage to the landlords.

3. During this period, Washington was also leading an effort to topple the government of Guatemala and crush political and social struggles there accompanying a limited land reform initiated by the regime of Jacobo Arbenz. The Arbenz regime was overthrown in a CIA-backed operation in June 1954. Dictators throughout Latin America were being armed and supported by Washington--from Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay to Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. 4. Siglo XX was the largest tin mine in Bolivia.

5. The preconditions for a revolutionary situation were summarized by Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin in his 1920 pamphlet, 'Left-Wing' Communism--An Infantile Disorder: "The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the 'lower classes' do not want to live in the old way and the 'upper classes' cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters). It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (symptomatic of any genuine revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the size of the working and oppressed masses--hitherto apathetic--who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow it." 6. The authorship of this manifesto was previously either thought to be unknown, or sometimes attributed to Guevara. It should not be confused with Communiqué no. 5, "To the Miners of Bolivia.

7. Dozens were killed in the Noche de San Juan massacre. Guevara's response is contained in the ELN's communiqué no. 5, "To the Miners of Bolivia," published by Pathfinder in Pombo: A Man of Che's 'guerrilla' and in Guevara's Bolivian Diary.

8. On October 14, 1967, at a meeting of students at the University of Cochabamba proclaiming Che a "Bolivian patriot and citizen," Ramiro Barrenechea Zambrana read his poem, "To the Commander of the Americas." These and other poems are collected in a book edited by Barrenechea entitled El Che en la poesía boliviana [Che in Bolivian poetry] (La Paz: Caminos Editores, 1995).