Che Guevara’s last diary entry
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…
