I Embrace You With All My Revolutionary Fervor

“Of its contents, 80 percent has never beenavailable before. Deftly edited by Havana scholars María del Carmen Ariet García and Disamis Arcia Muñoz, the letters in I Embrace You are a newly available revelation. To read them is to discover his humor, his courage, his frankness, his odd blend of arrogance and generosity, his wanderlust and his idealism, his willingness to subsume himself in the cause of freedom for the poor in Cuba, in Congo, and in Bolivia… . In his sharp, clear, witty prose, you discover his irony, his love of poetry, his smooth shifts among registers— a writerly ease stemming from years ofreading world literature.”
— Joy Castro in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928, and killed on October 9, 1967, the short life of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna is that of one of the greatest and most enduring revolutionary figures of all time, named one of Time magazine’s “icons of the 20th century.” He was politicized first-hand during his travels as a young man around Latin America, and especially by witnessing the CIA-backed overthrow of the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 in Guatemala. He sought out a group of Cuban revolutionaries exiled in Mexico City. And, in July 1955, immediately after meeting their leader Fidel Castro, enlisted in their expedition to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The Cubans nicknamed him “Che,” a popular form of address in Argentina.

Four years later, after a fierce revolutionary struggle, General Batista fled on January 1, 1959, and Che became a key leader in the new revolutionary government. Che was also the main representative of the Cuban revolutionary government around the world, heading numerous delegations to Asia, Africa, Latin America and the United States. Beginning in 1965, Che lead two Cuban missions to support revolutionary struggles elsewhere in the world, first in Congo and then in Bolivia. Both of these interventions failed, and Che’s accounts of these struggles in Congo Diary and The Bolivian Diary show the lessons learned and the humility and fierce intelligence with which Che approached every revolutionary struggle.

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