Che's Diary

When the Bolivian army summarily executed Che Guevara last October in a remote mountain town, soldiers found in his possession a diary chronicling the eleven-month guerrilla campaign that Che had expected to set the torch to Latin American revolution. Publishers from as far away as India flocked to La Paz, where the government had locked up the diary in a safe, to negotiate for the rights to print it. Last week Fidel Castro, Che's longtime comrade-in-arms and boss, pulled a publishing coup on all of them. He presented Che's diary to the world from Havana.

Mad Scramble. The occasion was almost a national holiday for Cuba, where thousands queued up around bookstores waiting for their free copy of the book and Radio Havana poured out endless plugs for it. Castro practically had his choice of publishers for editions outside Cuba, has already authorized five other publications in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. In the U.S., he gave the nod to the leftist Ramparts magazine, and publication of the diary in Ramparts last week set off a mad scramble among other magazine and paperback houses for republication rights; at week's end, they were still locked in legal maneuvers.

Castro, who wrote a 7,000-word introduction to the diary, was a bit vague when it came to explaining his propaganda coup. "The way that the diary came into our hands cannot be divulged at the moment," he wrote. "It is enough to say that it required no monetary remuneration." Actually, several copies of the diary have been around for the stealing or buying. At least one copy each had been photographed for Bolivian President Rene Barrientos, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and several Bolivian military brass. In addition, two U.S. journalists were allowed to transcribe many of the doc- uments found on Che, which included, besides the diary, correspondence and military records. Other copies of the diary could certainly have been made by Castro sympathizers.

Bowdlerized Text. Though the Cuban version of the diary appeared to be genuine enough?and Castro invited newsmen to inspect photostats of its source?some doubts remained about its completeness. U.S. Freelance Writer Andrew St. George, who had seen the original, called the Cuban text "hasty, doctored and bowdlerized." Some errors in transcription were almost inevitable: Che's handwriting was a tiny, jerky scrawl and, in the course of his tortuous marches through Bolivia's rough terrain, parts of the text had been blotted out by sweat and rain.

Whatever its propaganda value to the Cubans, Che's 60,000 words are hardly an advertisement for making revolution in Latin America. They are full of jotted references to distances, heights, menus, petty quarrels and his own physical ailments?flatulence, a foot sore and his ever-bothersome asthma?much of which makes little sense in its relatively unedited form. There is also quite a bit of the absurd in the day-by-day notations: at the height of the campaign, Che commanded fewer than 50 men, and his skirmishes with the Bolivian army were so indecisive that he carefully counted horses and dogs among the enemy casualties.

Violated Discipline. The most serious problem, as both Che and Castro make clear, was the hostility of Bolivia's Communist Party and its secretary-general, Mario Monje, to the idea of guerrilla warfare. From the day he arrived in disguise on the deserted cattle ranch that served as the guerrilla base camp, Che was faced with the task of trying to impose his strict martial control on a group that had violated its own party discipline by joining his forces. Castro, in his introduction, bitterly accuses Monje of sabotaging the whole campaign with his "chauvinism and sterile reactionary sentiment."

During his first months in Bolivia, Che set about trying to show green troops how to cut through the thick jungle underbrush and how to live off the land, noting once that his hunters had "managed to get two monkeys, a parrot and a dove." He determined "to write to Sartre and B. Russell to have them organize an international fund to help the Bolivian Liberation Movement." Shortly after his troops staged their first hit-and-run attack on the army, killing seven men, Che gloated: "Perhaps this is the first episode of a new Viet Nam." On his birthday, June 14, 1967, he wrote: "I have reached thirty-nine, and inexorably the age is approaching that forces me to think of my future as a guerrilla fighter; however, for the time being I am sound."

Even the little triumphs were short-lived. Bolivia's stolid Indian peasantry, whom Che expected to join the revolution, did not respond: "The mass of peasants does not help us at all and has become informers." Che watched some of his most loyal followers fall in combat, get separated from others and cut off from supplies by the army's ever-tightening clamp. "This type of struggle gives us the opportunity not only to turn ourselves into revolutionaries, the highest level of the human species, but it also allows us to graduate as men," he wrote on Aug. 8, still confident of victory. Two weeks later, his tone had changed: "The situation is becoming anguished. The rnacheteros [trailblazers] were suffering fainting spells. Miguel and Dario were drinking their own urine and Chino was doing likewise, with the ominous results of diarrhea and cramps."

Che's last entry is dated Oct. 7, the day before he was captured in a ravine in the Quebrada del Yuro, a bullet in his left thigh and his M-l semi-automatic carbine shot out of his hands. "The 17 of us left [a canyon] under a waning moon, the march was very tiresome and we left many traces in the canyon where we were," he wrote. "At two we stopped to rest, since it was useless to continue advancing." The sad crusade was near its end.

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