Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War

Within a year after the triumphal entry into Havana at the beginning of 1959, Che Guevara began to set down the history of the guerrilla war. Fearful that the events would “dissolve into the past” and that an important part of the history of America would be lost, he urged other leaders of the Revolution to do the same, asking only “that the narrator be strictly truthful.”

His history of the war appeared episodically during the next few years in various Cuban periodicals such as Verde Olivo and Bohemia. In 1963, the Havana publishing house Ediciones Unión collected nineteen episodes under the title Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria. This volume, originally published in 1968, contains diagrams of several battles, photographs, and maps of the guerrilla itinerary in the Sierra Maestra.

The introduction by Fidel Castro consists of the text of his speech in memory of Guevara at the Plaza de la Revolución in 1967. “He wrote with the virtuosity of a master of our language,” said Castro. “His narratives of the war are incomparable. The depth of his thinking is impressive. He never wrote about anything with less than extraordinary seriousness, with less than extraordinary profundity—and we have no doubt that some of his writings will pass on to posterity as classic documents of revolutionary thought.”

Ernesto Che Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928. Shortly after receiving his medical degree, he enlisted in the cause of the oppressed of Latin America. He fought in Guatemala, conquered in Cuba, and died in Bolivia at the age of thirty-nine.