The Unexpurgated Che

Cuban Revolutionary Che Guevara's diary of his abortive eleven-month campaign in Bolivia was first published by Fidel Castro last month and picked up in the U.S. by Ramparts magazine and Bantam Books. It was widely criticized as bowdlerized, with key dates and names edited out. Last week New York publishers Stein & Day weighed in with an unexpurgated edition entitled The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents.

The Stein & Day book improves pointedly on the translation. Where Castro's version spoke only of "discipline" or "pressure" on the Bolivian peasants, for example, Editor Daniel James, a former managing editor of the New Leader and biographer of Che, interprets the diary's euphemistic disciplina more accurately as "terrorism." The Complete Diaries also offers a supplement to Che's account by including the diaries of three of his lieutenants, all of whom recounted the bitterness of their last days as revolutionaries. And James reveals that 13 of the guerrillas slain with Che were actually high-ranking Cuban army officers, four of them members of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party--facts which Castro's editors carefully censored.

Probably the most valuable part of the book is the introduction by James, who puts the diary's daily notations in thoughtful perspective. Che failed in Bolivia, James concludes, by ignoring his own precepts. He picked Bolivia as a centrally located focus for Latin American revolution, disregarding the fact that Bolivian peasants had already benefited from one revolution in 1952, and had no quarrel with the government or army. He highhandedly overruled local Communists and relied on imported Cuban revolutionaries. He wandered about the country with no coherent strategy, and in the end, he let his guerrillas be hemmed in by the more mobile government troops.

Yet, as much as anyone, it was Castro himself who ensured Che's defeat by leaving him to wander in Bolivia with neither the proper material nor moral support. James ascribes that betrayal to their longstanding rivalry. Had Che succeeded in leading a continental revolution, he would have emerged the greater leader, and might well have jeopardized Castro's future position. For his part, Che, as the apostle of Communist revolution in Latin America, had little choice but to go to Bolivia. Concludes James: "He needed a revolution far more than the revolution needed him."

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