h1 Che Guevara’s last diary entry October 10th, 2007
Yesterday, October 9, marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Ernesto Che Guevara.
Guevara, an Argentine medic who joined Fidel Castro in fighting the US-backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba and later becoming a leader of the Cuban revolutionary government, was captured and executed while waging guerrilla war in Bolivia in 1967.
In a tribute, Fidel Castro once recalled that it was Che Guevara’s habit to record his observations as a guerilla in a personal diary:
During the long marches over abrupt and difficult terrain, in the middle of the damp woods, when the lines of men, always hunched over from the weight of their mochilas, munitions and arms would stop for a moment to rest, or when the column would receive orders to halt and pitch camp at the end of a long day’s journey, one could see Che…take out his notebook and, with the small and almost illegible letters of a doctor, write his notes. What he was able to conserve from these notes he later used in writing his magnificent historical narrations of the revolutionary war in Cuba…
Castro continues:
…thanks to his invariable habit of jotting down the principal occurrences of each day, we have at our disposal rigorously exact, priceless and detailed information concerning the heroic final months of his life in Bolivia.
These notations…served him as a working guide in the constant evaluation of occurrences, the situation and the men…
Here are extracts from Guevara’s monthly analysis for September 1967 from his diary:
Monthly Analysis: It should have been a month of recuperation and it was on the point of being so when the ambush into which Miguel, Coco and Julio fell spoiled everything, and put us in a dangerous position, besides losing Leon…
On the other hand the news about the other group seems to be true, and it should be considered the end, although it is possible that a little group is roaming, avoiding contact with the army, because the news of the joint death of the seven may be false, or at least exaggerated.
The characteristics are the same as those of last month, except that now the army is showing more effectiveness in action, and the mass of peasants does not help us at all and have become informers.
The most important tasks are to escape and look for more propitious zones and to reestablish contacts, despite the fact that the whole apparatus is badly disjointed in La Paz where they have also given us hard blows…
Meanwhile, the following is from Guevara’s last diary entry:
Octubre 1967
Eleven months since our inauguration as guerrillas; the day was being spent without complications, even bucolically, until 12:30 when an old woman shepherding her goats came into the canyon where we had camped and it was necessary to apprehend her. The woman gave no truthful news about the soldiers, saying that she didn’t know anything, as it was a long time since she had gone there. She only gave information about the roads; and according to her report, it shows that we are approximately one league from Higueras and another from Jaguey and about two from Pucara. At 17:30, Inti, Anicetoo and Pblito went to the old woman’s house where she has two daughters, one crippled and the other dwarfed. 50 pesos were given to her with the request that she not say a word, but with little hope that she would keep her promises.
The 17 of us left under a waning moon, the march was very tiresome and we left many traces in the canyon where we were. There are no houses nearby, but there some potato fields irrigated from the same creek. At 2 we stopped to rest, since it was useless to continue advancing. Chino becomes a real load when it is necessary to walk at night.
The army gave strange information about the presence of 250 men in Serrano to prevent the passage of those encircled, saying there were 37, and giving our refuge as being between the river Acero and the Oro. The news seems to be diversionary. H=2000
Reading through both accounts, I cannot help but think that in a way, both and several other notes from his diary seem to portend the fate that awaited his band of guerillas: A mere 13 hours after writing these last lines, on October 8, 1967, and 11 months after arriving in Bolivia, large number of enemy troops surrounded and attacked them.
“Among those who fought in positions close to Che, there were no survivors…” But he himself “continued fighting despite being wounded until the barrel of his M-2 rifle was destroyed by a shot, rendering it completely useless,” thus paving the way for his capture. Only a day later, he was brutally executed by his captors.
The legacy of Che Guevara is contentious. And sadly, while most people recognize Guevara’s face in the famous T-shirt design popular these days, not many really know who he is these days. Others (recalling some of my schoolmates in high school) even mistake him for Bob Marley.
Since his death in the hands of the CIA-trained Bolivian military, there are those who have put down Guevara, saying his failure in Bolivia only showed the lack of validity of his ideas. This conception, I believe is gravely wrong. For decades, Guevara’s ideas, image, and name has been a strong force around the world. His extraordinary example has been bannered by various social mass movements, student radicals and intellectuals in the struggle against injustice. And while the era of guerilla warfare and peasant wars may have become passé today, the validity of his example has not became dated. In his selfless way, Che demonstrated that the common people are not always powerless against oppression. Che lives! ■
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