Ernesto Che Guevara was born into a middle-class family in Argentina in 1928 and trained as a doctor, but became radicalized by the poverty and hunger he witnessed in South America. He played a key role in the Cuban revolution and served in Fidel Castro's government. He then travelled to Congo to support the rebellion there, and finally to Bolivia, where with a small, committed group he initiated a revolutionary movement and was captured and executed by Bolivian and US military forces in 1967.
An extraordinary new selection of the letters of Che Guevara, from throughout his life, many released for the very first time
Che Guevara was an inveterate letter writer and diarist throughout his short but extraordinary life. His letters and diaries are those of a master narrator, characterized by a brutal honesty, a remarkable lack of ego, a razor-sharp wit, an iron will and a great capacity to express his love and affection for his closest friends and family.
This selection of Che Guevara's correspondence, beginning with letters penned in his early travels around Latin America as a medical student, shows how he polished his unique style over the years. This selection maps the emergence of a dedicated revolutionary and original political thinker from the wide-eyed young Argentine who set out to discover Latin America. Covering the entirety of Che's life, from his famous motorcycle journey around South America to the Cuban Revolutionary War, from the setting-up of the pioneering communist state of Cuba to his revolutionary travels to the Congo and Bolivia. But it also reveals a more intimate, personal side to Che, including his letters to his mother, wife and children.
In one of his last letters to his young children, Che advised them to 'always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.'
