To celebrate the release of The Bolivian Diary by Ernesto Che Guevara, the latest addition to our new Che Guevara Library, we are proud to share an introduction written by Fidel Castro for the original publication of this book, back in 1968. The introduction is long, but it is incredibly special. Castro's interpretation of events, written so warmly and with such deference to his late friend and comrade, offers the reader an added context for the diary entries in the pages that follow, and provides a window into the impact that Che had on those he encountered. We hope you'll enjoy it.
A Necessary Introduction
by Fidel Castro
It was Che’s custom during his days as a guerrilla [during the 1956–58 Cuban revolutionary war] to carefully record his daily observations in a personal diary. During long marches over rugged and difficult terrain, in the midst of damp woods, when the lines of men, always hunched over from the weight of their packs, ammunition, and weapons, would stop for a moment to rest, or when the column would receive orders to halt and set up camp at the end of an exhausting day’s march, you would see Che—as he was affectionately nicknamed by the Cubans from the beginning—take out a small notebook and, with the tiny and nearly illegible handwriting of a doctor, write his notes.
What he was able to save from these notes he later used in writing his magnificent historical narratives of the revolutionary war in Cuba—accounts full of revolutionary, educational, and human content. [1]
This time, thanks to his invariable habit of noting the main events of each day, we have at our disposal rigorously exact, priceless, and detailed information on the heroic final months of his life in Bolivia.
These notes, not really written for publication, served as a tool in the constant evaluation of events, situations, and people, and at the same time served as an outlet for the expression of his keenly observant and analytical spirit, often laced with a fine sense of humor. They are soberly written and form a coherent whole from beginning to end.
It should be kept in mind that they were written during those rare moments of rest in the midst of a heroic and superhuman physical effort, where he bore exhausting obligations as leader of a guerrilla detachment in the difficult first stages of a struggle of this nature, which unfolded under incredibly harsh material conditions. This reveals once more his method of work, his will of steel.
The diary, in the course of analyzing in detail the incidents of each day, takes note of the shortcomings, critical assessments, and recriminations that are part of and inevitable in the development of a revolutionary guerrilla struggle.
Inside a guerrilla detachment such assessments must take place constantly. This is especially true in the stage in which it consists of a small nucleus facing extremely adverse material conditions and an enemy infinitely superior in number, when the slightest negligence or the most insignificant mistake can be fatal. The leader must be extremely demanding, using each event or episode, no matter how insignificant it may seem, to educate the combatants and future cadres of new guerrilla detachments.
The process of training a guerrilla force is a constant appeal to each person’s consciousness and honor. Che knew how to touch the most sensitive fibers in revolutionaries. When Marcos, after being repeatedly admonished by Che, was warned that he could be dishonorably discharged from the guerrilla unit, he replied, “I would rather be shot!” Later he gave his life heroically. Similar behavior could be noted among all those in whom Che placed confidence and those he had to admonish for one reason or another in the course of the struggle. He was a fraternal and humane leader, but he also knew how to be demanding and, at times, severe. But above all, and even more than with others, Che was severe with himself. He based discipline on the guerrilla’s moral consciousness and on the tremendous force of his own example.
The diary also contains numerous references to [Régis] Debray; it reflects the enormous concern Che felt over the arrest and imprisonment of the revolutionary writer who had been given a mission to carry out in Europe—although at heart Che would have preferred him to have stayed with the guerrilla unit, which is why Che shows a certain uneasiness and, on occasion, some doubts about his behavior.
Che had no way of knowing the odyssey Debray experienced in the hands of the repressive forces, or the firm and courageous attitude he maintained in face of his captors and torturers. He noted, however, the enormous political significance of the trial and on October 3, six days before his death, in the midst of bitter and tense events, he wrote, “We heard an interview with Debray, very courageous when faced by a student acting as an agent provocateur.” This was his last reference to the writer.
The Cuban revolution and its relation to the guerrilla movement are repeatedly referred to in the diary. Some may interpret our decision to publish it as an act of provocation that will give the enemies of the revolution—the Yankee imperialists and their allies, the Latin American oligarchs—arguments for redoubling their efforts to blockade, isolate, and attack Cuba.
Those who judge the facts this way should remember that Yankee imperialism has never needed a pretext to carry out its crimes anywhere in the world, and that its efforts to crush the Cuban revolution began as soon as our country passed its first revolutionary law. This stems from the obvious and well-known fact that imperialism is the policeman of world reaction, the systematic supporter of counterrevolution, and the protector of the most backward and inhuman social structures that still exist in the world.
Solidarity with a revolutionary movement may be taken as a pretext for Yankee aggression, but it will never be the real cause. To deny solidarity in order to avoid giving a pretext is a ridiculous, ostrich-like policy that has nothing to do with the internationalist character of today’s social revolutions. To abandon solidarity with a revolutionary movement not only does not avoid providing a pretext, but in effect serves to support Yankee imperialism and its policy of dominating and enslaving the world.
Cuba is a small country, economically underdeveloped as are all countries dominated and exploited for centuries by colonialism and imperialism. It is located only 90 miles from the coast of the United States, has a Yankee naval base on its territory [Guantánamo], and faces numerous obstacles in attaining socioeconomic development. Grave dangers have threatened our country since the triumph of the revolution; but imperialism will never make us yield for these reasons, because the difficulties that flow from a consistently revolutionary line of action are of no importance to us.
From the revolutionary point of view, there is no alternative but to publish Che’s Bolivian diary. It fell into the hands of [President René] Barrientos, who immediately sent copies to the CIA, the Pentagon, and the US government. Journalists with links to the CIA had access to the document inside Bolivia; having made photocopies of it, they promised to refrain, for the moment, from publishing it.
The Barrientos government and the top-ranking military officers have more than enough reasons not to publish the diary. It reveals the immense incapacity of their army and the countless defeats they were dealt by a handful of determined guerrillas who, in a matter of weeks, took nearly 200 weapons from them in combat. Furthermore, Che describes Barrientos and his regime in terms they deserve, with words that cannot be erased from history.
Imperialism also had its own reasons: Che and the extraordinary example he set are gaining increasing force in the world. His ideas, image, and name are banners of struggle against the injustices suffered by the oppressed and exploited; they evoke impassioned interest among students and intellectuals throughout the world.
In the United States itself, the Black [rights] movement and progressive students, both of which are continuing to grow in numbers, have made Che’s figure their own. In the most combative demonstrations for civil rights and against the aggression in Vietnam, his image is brandished as a symbol of struggle. Few times in history, perhaps never before, has a figure, a name, an example become a universal symbol so quickly and with such impassioned force. This is because Che embodies, in its purest and most selfless form, the internationalist spirit that marks the world of today and that will characterize even more the world of tomorrow.
Arising from a continent yesterday oppressed by colonial powers, today exploited and held in backwardness and the most iniquitous underdevelopment by Yankee imperialism, there has emerged this singular figure who has become the universal symbol of revolutionary struggle, even in the metropolitan centers of the imperialists and colonialists.
The Yankee imperialists fear the power of this example and everything that may help to spread it. The diary is the living expression of an extraordinary personality; a lesson in guerrilla warfare written in the heat and tension of daily events, as flammable as gunpowder; a demonstration in life that the people of Latin America are not powerless in face of the enslavers of entire peoples and of their mercenary armies. That is its intrinsic value, and that is what has kept them from publishing it up to now.
Also among those who may be interested in keeping the diary unpublished are the pseudo-revolutionaries, opportunists, and charlatans of every stripe. These people call themselves Marxists, communists, and other such titles. They have not, however, hesitated to call Che a mistaken adventurer or, when they speak more benignly, an idealist whose death marked the swan song of revolutionary armed struggle in Latin America. “If Che himself,” they say, “the greatest exponent of these ideas and an experienced guerrilla fighter, died in the guerrilla struggle and his movement failed to free Bolivia, it only shows how mistaken he was!” How many of these miserable creatures were happy with the death of Che and have not even blushed at the thought that their stance and arguments completely coincide with those of imperialism and the most reactionary oligarchs!
That is how they justify themselves. That is how they justify their treacherous leaders who, at a given moment, did not hesitate to play at armed struggle with the underlying intention—as would be seen later—of destroying the guerrilla detachments, putting the brakes on revolutionary action, and imposing their own shameful and ridiculous political schemes, because they were absolutely incapable of carrying out any other line. That is how they justify those who do not want to fight, who will never fight for the people and their liberation. That is how they justify those who have made a caricature of revolutionary ideas, turning them into an opium like dogma with neither content nor message for the masses; those who have converted the organizations of popular struggle into instruments of conciliation with domestic and foreign exploiters; and those who advocate policies that have nothing to do with the genuine interests of the exploited peoples of this continent.
Che thought of his death as something natural and probable in the process; he made an effort to stress, especially in his last writings, that this eventuality would not hold back the inevitable march of the Latin American revolution. In his “Message to the Tricontinental,” he reiterated this thought, “Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism … Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear, if another hand reaches out to take up our arms …” [2]
Che considered himself a soldier in the revolution, with absolutely no concern as to whether he would survive it. Those who see the outcome of his struggle in Bolivia as marking the failure of his ideas can, with the same oversimplification, deny the validity of the ideas and struggles of all the great revolutionary precursors and thinkers; this includes the founders of Marxism, who were themselves unable to complete the task and to see in life the fruits of their noble efforts.
In Cuba, [José] Martí and [Antonio] Maceo were killed in combat; Yankee intervention followed, ending the War of Independence and frustrating the immediate objectives of their struggle. Brilliant advocates of socialist revolution, like Julio Antonio Mella, have been killed, murdered by agents in the service of imperialism. But these deaths could not, in the long run, block the triumph of a process that began 100 years ago. And absolutely nothing can call into question the profound justice of the cause and line of struggle of those eminent fighters, or the timeliness of their basic ideas, which have always inspired Cuban revolutionaries.
In Che’s diary, from the notes he wrote, you can see how real the possibilities of success were, how extraordinary the catalyzing power of the guerrilla struggle. On one occasion, in the face of evident signs of the Bolivian regime’s weakness and rapid deterioration, he wrote, “The government is disintegrating rapidly. What a pity we don’t have 100 more men right now.”
Che knew from his experience in Cuba how often our small guerrilla detachment had been on the verge of being wiped out. Whether such things happen depends almost entirely on chance and the imponderables of war. But would such an eventuality have given anyone the right to consider our line erroneous, and, in addition, to take it as an example to discourage revolution and inculcate a sense of powerlessness among the peoples? Many times in history revolutionary processes have been preceded by adverse episodes. We ourselves in Cuba, didn’t we have the experience of Moncada just six years before the definitive triumph of the people’s armed struggle?
From July 26, 1953—the attack on the Moncada garrison in Santiago de Cuba—to December 2, 1956—the landing of the Granma—revolutionary struggle in Cuba in the face of a modern, well-equipped army seemed to many people to lack any prospect for success; the action of a handful of fighters was seen as a chimera of idealists and dreamers who were “deeply mistaken.” The crushing defeat and total dispersal of the inexperienced guerrilla detachment by Batista’s troops on December 5, 1956, seemed to confirm entirely those pessimistic forebodings. But only 25 months later the remnants of that guerrilla unit had developed the strength and experience necessary to annihilate that same army.
In all epochs and under all circumstances, there will always be an abundance of pretexts for not fighting; but not fighting is the only way to never attain freedom. Che did not live as long as his ideas; he fertilized them with his blood. It is certain, on the other hand, that his pseudo-revolutionary critics, with all their political cowardice and eternal lack of action, will outlive by far the evidence of their own stupidity.
Worth noting in the diary are the actions of one of those revolutionary specimens that are becoming typical in Latin America these days: Mario Monje, brandishing the title of secretary of the Communist Party of Bolivia, sought to dispute with Che the political and military leadership of the movement. Monje claimed, moreover, that he had intended to resign his party post to take on this responsibility; in his opinion, obviously, it was enough to have once held that title to claim such a prerogative.
Mario Monje, naturally, had no experience in guerrilla warfare and had never been in combat. In addition, the fact that he considered himself a communist should at least have obliged him to dispense with the gross and mundane chauvinism that had already been overcome by those who fought for Bolivia’s first independence.
With such a conception of what an anti-imperialist struggle on this continent should be, “communist leaders” of this type do not even surpass the level of internationalism of the aboriginal tribes subjugated by the European colonizers in the epoch of the conquest.
Bolivia and its historical capital, Sucre, were named after the country’s first liberators [Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre], both of whom were Venezuelan. And in this country, in a struggle for the definitive liberation of his people, the leader of the Communist Party of Bolivia had the possibility of enlisting the cooperation of the political, organizational, and military talent of a genuine revolutionary titan, a person whose cause was not limited by the narrow and artificial—not to mention unjust—borders of Bolivia. Yet he did nothing but engage in disgraceful, ridiculous, and unjustified claims to leadership.
Bolivia has no outlet to the sea, and therefore, for its own liberation and to avoid exposure to a cruel blockade, it more than any other country needs revolutionary victories by its neighbors. Che, because of his enormous authority, ability, and experience, was the person who could have accelerated this process.
In the period before a split occurred in the Bolivian Communist Party, Che had established relations with leaders and members, soliciting their help for the revolutionary movement in South America. Under authorization from the party, some members worked with Che for years on various assignments. When the split occurred, it created a special situation, given that a number of the people who had been working with him ended up in one or another group. But Che did not see the struggle in Bolivia as an isolated occurrence, rather as part of a revolutionary liberation movement that would soon extend to other countries in South America. He sought to organize a movement free of sectarianism, one that could be joined by anyone who wanted to fight for the liberation of Bolivia and of all the other peoples of Latin America subjugated by imperialism.
In the initial phase of preparing a base for the guerrilla unit, however, Che depended for the most part on the help of a group of courageous and discreet collaborators who, at the time of the split, remained in the party headed by Monje. Although he certainly felt no sympathy toward Monje, in deference to them he invited Monje to visit his camp first. He then invited Moisés Guevara, a leader of the mine workers and a political leader. Moisés Guevara had left the party to join in the formation of another organization, the one led by Oscar Zamora. He later left that group because of differences with Zamora, who proved to be another Monje. Zamora had once promised Che he would help in organizing the armed guerrilla struggle in Bolivia, but later backed away from that commitment and cowardly folded his arms when the hour of action arrived. After Che’s death, Zamora became one of his most venomous “Marxist-Leninist” critics. Moisés Guevara joined Che without hesitation, as he had sought to do long before Che arrived in Bolivia; he offered his support and gave his life heroically for the revolutionary cause.
The group of Bolivian guerrillas who until then had stayed with Monje’s organization also joined Che. Led by Inti and Coco Peredo, who proved to be courageous, outstanding fighters, they left Monje and decisively backed Che. But Monje, seeking revenge, began to sabotage the movement. In La Paz he intercepted well-trained communist militants who were on their way to join the guerrillas. These facts demonstrate that within the ranks of revolutionaries, men who meet all the conditions necessary for struggle can be criminally frustrated in their development by incapable, maneuvering, and charlatan-like leaders.
Che was a man never personally interested in posts, leadership, or honors; but he believed revolutionary guerrilla warfare was the fundamental form of action for the liberation of the peoples of Latin America, given the economic, political, and social situation in nearly all Latin American countries. Moreover, he was firmly convinced that the military and political leadership of the guerrilla struggle had to be unified. He also believed the struggle could be led only by the guerrilla unit itself, and not from the comfortable offices of bureaucrats in the cities. So he was not prepared to give up leadership of a guerrilla nucleus that, at a later stage of its development, was intended to develop into a struggle of broad dimensions in Latin America. And he certainly was not prepared to turn over such leadership to an inexperienced emptyhead with narrow chauvinist views. Such chauvinism often infects even revolutionary elements of various countries in Latin America. Che believed that it must be combatted because it represents reactionary, ridiculous, and sterile thinking.
“And let us develop genuine proletarian internationalism,” he said in his “Message to the Tricontinental.” “Let the flag under which we fight be the sacred cause of the liberation of humanity, so that to die under the colors of Vietnam, Venezuela, Guatemala, Laos, Guinea, Colombia, Bolivia … to mention only the current scenes of armed struggle … will be equally glorious and desirable for a Latin American, an Asian, an African, and even a European.
“Every drop of blood spilled in a land under whose flag one was not born is experience gathered by the survivor to be applied later in the struggle for liberation of one’s own country. And every people that liberates itself is a step in the battle for the liberation of one’s own people.”
In the same way, Che believed fighters from various Latin American countries would participate in the guerrilla detachment, that the guerrilla struggle in Bolivia would be a school in which revolutionaries would serve their apprenticeship in combat. To help him with this task he wanted to have, together with the Bolivians, a small nucleus of experienced guerrilla fighters, nearly all of whom had been his comrades in the Sierra Maestra during the revolutionary struggle in Cuba. These were men whose abilities, courage, and spirit of self-sacrifice Che knew. None of them hesitated to respond to his call, none of them abandoned him, none of them surrendered.
In the Bolivian campaign Che acted with his proverbial tenacity, skill, stoicism, and exemplary attitude. It might be said that he was consumed by the importance of the mission he had assigned himself, and at all times he proceeded with a spirit of irreproachable responsibility. When the guerrilla unit committed a careless mistake, he quickly called attention to it, corrected it, and noted it in his diary.
Unbelievably adverse factors built up against him, such as the separation—supposed to last for just a few days—of part of the guerrilla detachment, a unit that included a courageous group of fighters, some of them sick or convalescent.
Once contact between the two groups was lost in very rough terrain, separation continued, and for endless months Che was preoccupied with the effort to find them. In this period his asthma—an ailment easily treated with simple medication, but one that, lacking the medication, became a terrible enemy— attacked him relentlessly. It became a serious problem, as the medical supplies that had been accumulated by the guerrillas beforehand had been discovered and captured by the enemy. This fact, along with the annihilation at the end of August of the part of the guerrilla detachment he had lost contact with, were factors that weighed considerably in the development of events. But Che, with his iron will, overcame his physical difficulties and never for an instant cut back his activity or let his spirits flag.
Che had many contacts with the Bolivian peasants. Their character—highly suspicious and cautious—would have come as no surprise to Che, who knew their mentality perfectly well because he had dealt with them on other occasions. He knew that winning them over to the cause required long, arduous, and patient work, but he had no doubt that in the long run they would obtain the support of the peasants.
If we follow the thread of events carefully, it becomes clear that even when the number of men on whom Che could count was quite small—in the month of September, a few weeks before his death—the guerrilla unit still retained its capacity to develop. It also still had a few Bolivian cadres, such as the brothers Inti and Coco Peredo, who were already beginning to show magnificent leadership potential.
It was the ambush in La Higuera [on September 26, 1967]— the sole successful action by the army against the detachment led by Che—that created a situation they could not overcome. In that ambush, in broad daylight, the vanguard group was killed and several more men were wounded as they headed for a peasant area with a higher level of political development—an objective that does not appear to have been noted in the diary but which is known through the survivors. It was without doubt dangerous to advance by daylight along the same route they had been following for days, with inevitably close contact with the residents of an area they were entering for the first time. It was certainly obvious that the army would intercept them at some point; but Che, fully conscious of this, decided to run the risk in order to help the doctor [Octavio de la Concepción de la Pedreja (El Médico)], who was in very poor physical condition.
The day before the ambush, he wrote, “We reached Pujio but there were people who had seen us down below the day before, which means we are being announced ahead of time by Radio Bemba [word of mouth] … Traveling with mules is becoming dangerous, we are trying to make it as easy as possible for El Médico because he is becoming very weak.”
The following day he wrote, “At 13:00, the vanguard set out to try to reach Jagüey and to make a decision there about the mules and El Médico.” That is, he was seeking a solution for the sick, so as to get off the road and take the necessary precautions. But that same afternoon, before the vanguard reached Jagüey, the fatal ambush occurred, leaving the detachment in an untenable situation.
A few days later, encircled in the El Yuro ravine, Che fought his final battle.
Recalling the feat carried out by this handful of revolutionaries is deeply moving. The struggle against the hostile natural environment in which their action took place constitutes by itself an insuperable page of heroism. Never in history has so small a number of men embarked on such a gigantic task. Their faith and absolute conviction that the immense revolutionary capacity of the peoples of Latin America could be awakened, their confidence in themselves, and the determination with which they took on this objective—these things give us a just measure of these men.
One day Che said to the guerrilla fighters in Bolivia, “This type of struggle gives us the opportunity to become revolutionaries, the highest form of the human species, and it also allows us to emerge fully as men; those who are unable to achieve either of those two states should say so now and abandon the struggle.”
Those who fought with him until the end have become worthy of such honored terms; they symbolize the type of revolutionary and the type of person history is now calling on for a truly challenging and difficult task—the revolutionary transformation of Latin America.
The enemy our forebears faced in the first struggle for independence was a decadent colonial power. Revolutionaries have as their enemy today the most powerful bulwark of the imperialist camp, equipped with the most modern technology and industry. This enemy not only organized and equipped a new army for Bolivia—where the people had destroyed the previous repressive military apparatus—and immediately sent weapons and advisers to help in the struggle against the guerrillas. It has also provided military and technical support on the same scale to every repressive force on the continent. And when these methods are not enough, it has intervened directly with its troops, as in the Dominican Republic.
Fighting this enemy requires the type of revolutionaries and individuals Che spoke of. Without this type of revolutionary and human being, ready to do what they did; without the spirit to confront the enormous obstacles they faced; without the readiness to die that accompanied them at every moment; without their deeply held conviction in the justice of their cause and their unyielding faith in the invincible force of the peoples, against a power like Yankee imperialism, whose military, technical, and economic resources are felt throughout the entire world—without these, the liberation of the peoples of this continent will not be attained.
The people of the United States themselves are beginning to become aware that the monstrous political superstructure that reigns in their country has for some time no longer been the idyllic bourgeois republic the country’s founders established nearly 200 years ago. They are increasingly subjected to the moral barbarism of an irrational, alienating, dehumanized, and brutal system that takes from the people of the United States a growing number of victims in its wars of aggression, its political crimes, its racial aberrations, the miserable hierarchy it has created among human beings, its repugnant waste of economic, scientific, and human resources on its enormous, reactionary, and repressive military apparatus—in the midst of a world where three-quarters of humanity live in underdevelopment and hunger.
Only the revolutionary transformation of Latin America will enable the people of the United States to settle their own accounts with imperialism. At the same time, and in the same way, the growing struggle of the people of the United States against imperialist policy can become a decisive ally of the revolutionary movement in Latin America.
An enormous differentiation and imbalance occurred in the Americas at the beginning of this century. On one side a powerful and rapidly industrializing nation, in accordance with the very law of its social and economic dynamics, was marching toward imperial heights. On the other side, the weak and stagnant countries in the Balkanized remainder of the Americas were kept under the boot of feudal oligarchies and their reactionary armies. If this part of the hemisphere does not undergo a profound revolutionary transformation, that earlier gap will seem but a pale reflection of not just the enormous present unevenness in finance, science, and technology, but rather of the horrible imbalance that, at an increasingly accelerated rate, the imperialist superstructure will impose on the peoples of Latin America in the next 20 years.
If we stay on this road, we will be increasingly poor, weak, dependent, and enslaved to imperialism. This gloomy perspective also confronts, to an equal degree, all the underdeveloped nations of Africa and Asia. If the industrializedand educated nations of Europe, with their Common Market and supranational scientific institutions, are worried about the possibility of being left behind, and contemplate with fear the perspective of being converted into economic colonies of Yankee imperialism, what does the future have in store for the peoples of Latin America?
This is unquestionably the real situation that decisively affects the destiny of our peoples. What is urgently needed is a deep-going revolutionary transformation that can gather together all the moral, material, and human forces in this part of the world and launch them forward so as to overcome the economic, scientific, and technological backwardness of centuries; a backwardness that is greater still when compared with the industrialized world to which we are tributaries and will continue to be to an even greater degree, especially to the United States. If some liberal or bourgeois reformist, or some pseudorevolutionary charlatan, incapable of action, has a different answer; and if, in addition, that person can provide the formula, the magic road to carrying it out, that is different from Che’s conception—one that can sweep away the oligarchs, despots, and petty politicians, that is to say, the servants, and the Yankee monopolists, in other words, the masters, and can do it with all the urgency the circumstances require—then let them stand up to challenge Che.
But no one really has an honest answer or a consistent policy that will bring genuine hope to the nearly 300 million human beings who make up the population of Latin America. Devastatingly poor in their overwhelming majority and increasing in number to 600 million within 25 years, they have the right to the material things of life, to culture, and to civilization. So the most dignified attitude would be to remain silent in face of the action of Che and those who fell with him, courageously defending their ideas. The feat carried out by this handful of guerrila fighters, guided by the noble idea of redeeming a continent, will remain the greatest proof of what determination, heroism, and human greatness can accomplish. It is an example that will illuminate the consciousness and preside over the struggle of the peoples of Latin America. Che’s heroic cry will reach the receptive ear of the poor and exploited for whom he gave his life; many hands will come forward to take up arms to win their definitive liberation.
On October 7, Che wrote his last lines. The following day at 1 p.m., in a narrow ravine where he proposed waiting until nightfall in order to break out of the encirclement, a large enemy force made contact with them. The small group of men who now made up the detachment fought heroically until dusk. From individual positions located on the bottom of the ravine, and on the cliffs above, they faced a mass of soldiers who surrounded and attacked them. There were no survivors among those who fought in the positions closest to Che. Since beside him were the doctor in the grave state of health mentioned before, and a Peruvian guerrilla who was also in very poor physical condition, everything seems to indicate that until he fell wounded, Che did his utmost to safeguard the withdrawal of these comrades to a safer place. The doctor was not killed in the same battle, but rather several days later at a place not far from the Quebrada del Yuro [El Yuro ravine]. The ruggedness of the rocky, irregular terrain made it difficult—at times impossible—for the guerrillas to maintain visual contact. Those defending positions at the other entrance to the ravine, some hundreds of meters from Che, among them Inti Peredo, resisted the attack until dark, when they managed to lose the enemy and head toward the previously agreed point of regroupment.
It has been possible to establish that Che continued fighting despite being wounded, until a shot destroyed the barrel of his M-2 rifle, making it totally useless. The pistol he carried had no magazine. These incredible circumstances explain how he could have been captured alive. The wounds in his legs kept him from walking without help, but they were not fatal.
Moved to the town of La Higuera, he remained alive for about 24 hours. He refused to exchange a single word with his captors, and a drunken officer who tried to annoy him received a slap across the face.
At a meeting in La Paz, Barrientos, Ovando, and other top military leaders coldly made the decision to murder Che. Details are known of the way in which the treacherous agreement was carried out in the school at La Higuera. Major Miguel Ayoroa and Colonel Andrés Selich, rangers trained by the Yankees, ordered warrant officer Mario Terán to proceed with the murder. Terán, completely drunk, entered the school yard. When Che, who heard the shots hat had just killed a Bolivian [Willy] and a Peruvian guerrilla fighter [Chino], saw the executioner hesitate, he said firmly, “Shoot! Don’t be afraid!” Terán left, and again it was necessary for his superiors, Ayoroa and Selich, to repeat the order. He then proceeded to carry it out, firing a machine gun burst at the belt down. A statement had already been released that Che died a few hours after combat; therefore, the executioners had orders not to shoot him in the chest or head, so as not to induce fatal wounds immediately. This cruelly prolonged Che’s agony until a sergeant, also drunk, killed him with a pistol shot to the left side of his body. Such a procedure contrasts brutally with the respect shown by Che, without a single exception, toward the lives of the many officers and soldiers of the Bolivian Army he took prisoner.
The final hours of his existence in the hands of his contemptible enemies must have been very bitter for him, but no one was better prepared than Che to be put to such a test.
The way in which the diary came into our hands cannot be told at this time; suffice it to say it required no monetary payment. It contains all the notes he wrote from November 7, 1966, the day Che arrived in Ñacahuazú, until October 7, 1967, the evening before the battle in the El Yuro ravine. There are a few pages missing, pages that have not yet reached our hands; but they correspond to dates on which nothing of any importance happened, and therefore do not alter the content of the diary in any way. [3]
Although the document itself offers not the slightest doubt as to its authenticity, all photocopies have been subjected to a rigorous examination to establish not only their authenticity but also to check on any possible alteration, no matter how slight. The dates were compared with the diary of one of the surviving guerrilla fighters; both documents coincided in every aspect. Detailed testimony of the other surviving guerrilla fighters, who were witnesses to each of the events, also contributed to establishing the document’s authenticity. In short, it has been established with absolute certainty that all the photocopies were faithful copies of Che’s diary.
It was a laborious job to decipher the small and difficult handwriting, a task that was carried out with the tireless assistance of his compañera, Aleida March.
Hasta la victoria siempre! [Ever onward to victory]
Written for the first authorized edition of Che’s The Bolivian Diary, published in July 1968.
Hailing from Croatia and Poland, our two latest literary fiction releases, in their own ways, explore isolation and captivity, memory and legacy. The first of the two, Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić, deftly translated into English by Ellen Elias-Bursać, is a novel about being locked in: socially, domestically, and intimately, told through three different perspectives, all affected by the patriarchy in their own way. In the second, Antona Lloyd-Jones' stunning translation of Dr. Josef’s Little Beauty by Zyta Rudzka, twin sisters, Leokadia and Helena, living together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw, reflect on their childhoods spent in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.
Ivana Bodrožić’s latest award-winning novel tells a story of being locked in: socially, domestically and intimately, told through three different perspectives, all deeply marked and wounded by the patriarchy in their own way.
Here the Croatian poet and writer depicts a wrenching love between a trans man and a cis woman, as well as a demanding love between a mother and a daughter, in a narrative about breaking through and liberation of the mind, family, and society.
This is a story of hidden gay and trans relationships, the effects of a near-fatal accident, and an oppressed childhood, where Ivana Bodrožić tackles the issues addressed in her previous works—issues of otherness, identity and gender, pain and guilt, injustice and violence.
A daughter is paralyzed after a car crash, left without the ability to speak, trapped in a hospital bed, unable to move anything but her eyes. Although she is immobilized, her mind reels, moving through time, her memories a salve and a burden. A son is stuck in a body that he doesn’t feel is his own. He endures misperceptions and abuse on the way to becoming who he truly is. A mother who grew up being told she was never good enough, in a world with no place for the desires and choices of women. She carries with her the burden of generations.
These three stories run parallel and intertwine. Three voices deepen and give perspective to one another’s truth, pain, and struggle to survive.
A Holocaust story as fascinating and compelling as it is terrifying and puzzling — a book about aging and war crimes, pain, and pride.
In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two twin sisters, Leokadia and Helena, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them spent time as children in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. At the center is Helena, who at the age of 12 was saved from extermination by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer and physician who was known as the “angel of death” for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings.
This is a story both provocative and disturbing about the fear that lingers in victims. Was the sisters’ relationship with the executioner a desperate attempt to save their lives, or perhaps they harbor a hideous pride and sense of superiority over other prisoners? Rudzka’s extraordinary writing turns unsettling questions about memory and survival into art.
Paul Auster roamed the plains of American letters, producing works ranging from experimental to commercial fiction, every book something completely new, never repeating himself, producing a half-century of significant contributions, one after another. It would be impossible to conceive of contemporary American literature without him. Truly one of the greats of his generation—a poet and translator turned memoirist and novelist—always hungry to expand the boundaries of what a book can be. Not least, he bridged the cultures of Big and Independent publishing. His last book, Baumgartner, from the independent publisher Grove, is a strong novel, not at all a book you’d think could have been written by a sick man, although Paul was already very sick with cancer when he wrote it. The Invention of Solitude, his first book, is certainly one of the towering works of the second half of the 20th century—there’s never been a debut like it.
We published Paul’s A Life in Words, a book-length series of conversations with a Danish academic, I.B. Siegumfeldt, who specializes in Paul Auster studies. It has him telling the story of each of his books from The Invention of Solitude (1982) to Sunset Park (2010).
Paul was someone who talked to you on the phone, not via email. He would call, and you could call him. For most of the years I knew him, he didn’t have an assistant. He embodied all that makes American writing so particular, the savage grace that grows from us still being a young frontier country after all. We will always miss him now.
To mark the publication of We Live Here, a graphic biography of Detroit Eviction Defense written by Jeffrey Wilson and illustrated by Bambi Kramer, we are proud to share Wilson’s introductory note, in which he offers a history of housing in Detroit and the specific methods that banks, corporations, and collections agencies work to evict or otherwise displace longterm residents.
SOLIDARITY AND HOME DEFENSE THE CASE OF DETROIT
By Jeffrey Wilson
This comic centers on the fourth anniversary celebration of Detroit Eviction Defense (DED). During the festivities, members recounted their stories fighting housing dispossession. In doing so, they offer a model of place-based struggle that has won some eighty homes back from the brink of eviction. Emerging out of the Occupy Movement of 2011, DED is a grassroots coalition of homeowners, anarchists, faith-based activists, union members, and community advocates. To understand DED’s strategies, it is helpful to have a clear picture of the city’s housing history and modes of eviction.
DISPOSSESSION BY THE NUMBERS
Housing displacement in Detroit typically takes two forms: mortgage and/or tax foreclosure. A mortgage foreclosure happens when a financial institution takes possession of a property for nonpayment and is the central focus of this book. Tax foreclosure, detailed in the appendix, is when the local municipality takes possession of a property for three consecutive years of nonpayment and subsequently auctions the house, more often than not to real estate speculators.
Between 2005–2013 Detroit recorded nearly 70,000 mortgage foreclosures impacting approximately 30 percent of residential properties (Akers & Seymour, 2019). One activist describes these mortgage foreclosures and the subsequent fallout as a “hurricane without water” (Interview, 2016). The sentiment seems correct and the problem grows significantly when taking mortgage and tax foreclosures together. Between 2005 and 2015, 1 in 3 properties in the city faced either a mortgage or tax foreclosure (Kurth, 2015). Approximately 160,000 foreclosures were executed, impacting 120,000 homes or 48 percent of all residential properties. Of these homes, 27,000 experienced a kind of double dispossession of a mortgage foreclosure and then a tax foreclosure (Akers & Seymour, 2019).
While mortgage foreclosures have devastated individual families, some of these properties also cost the city millions. As the Detroit News reported, nearly 56 percent of these mortgage-foreclosed homes were in some state of disrepair as of 2015, with nearly 13,000 slated for demolition, costing Detroit $200 million (Kurth, 2015).
Mortgage foreclosures in Detroit are not isolated, but are built upon a frenzy of subprime lending. In the four years leading up to the housing market crash of 2008, nearly $4 billion in predatory loans was injected into the city’s housing market. Such lending practices are a contemporary iteration of what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has termed “predatory inclusion.” The fair housing era facilitated more robust access to the housing market for many African Americans. Yet this was not the end of discrimination or segregation. Black people continued to pay exorbitant rates and face unequal terms for housing that was often of substandard quality, as Taylor comments. This inclusion was another way that “Black bodies become vessels through which racial capital extracts value” (Denvir, 2020). Detroit before the 2008 market crash is a reminder of the impacts of predatory inclusion. While subprime lending averaged 24 percent of the national market, a kind of predatory inclusion drove rates in Detroit to an average 68 percent in 2005. In some targeted neighborhoods this number rose to 80 percent of all mortgages (Kurth & MacDonald, 2015).
While the pre-2008 mortgage regime produced inclusionary practices, the post housing market crash strengthened exclusionary practices. A Bridge Michigan analysis of mortgages found that in 2007 African Americans received 75 percent of mortgage loans in Detroit but by 2017 this decreased to 48 percent, despite the fact that Black people make up nearly 80 percent of the city's population. White people comprised only 10 percent of Detroit’s population but received 17 percent of loans in 2007 and 58 percent in 2017. Several Detroit neighborhoods, which had once generated 600 mortgages in 2007, produced zero in 2017 (Wilkinson, 2019). Homes are still being purchased in Detroit, but for many residents nontraditional and much riskier arrangements such as land contracts or rent-to-own are the only avenues for homeownership. Housing advocates estimate that 1 in 10 evictions result from land contracts, yet these numbers might be much higher as such agreements are not required to be registered by the city (Einhorn & Mondry, 2021).
The waning of mortgage foreclosures by the mid-2010s was followed by a series of catastrophic tax foreclosures. Approximately 100,000 tax foreclosures were triggered in the city between 2011 and 2015 (Atuahene, 2020). The peak was 24,793 foreclosures occurring in 2015 (Aguilar, 2020). In tax foreclosure, homes that are behind three years are then sent to tax auction. These auctions have moved online since 2015, facilitating speculators from around the world in buying properties in Detroit, as the appendix of this book outlines.
Tax foreclosure as dispossession is only part of the story. Wayne County now leverages Detroit’s tax debt to make a profit. The City of Detroit is paid annually for an individual’s delinquent taxes by Wayne County. Essentially this makes it so that Detroit does not have unpaid taxes on the ledger. In order to lend Detroit this money, the county borrows annually from individual investors or banks. To pay off these loans Wayne County then collects unpaid property taxes from delinquent Detroit homeowners, charging them an additional 4 percent interest rate or higher. As Bridge Magazine notes, “profit [for the county] comes from borrowing at 5 percent or less and getting up to 22-percent return on delinquent taxes, creating the surplus controlled by the county treasurer.” Key to this is that the largely white suburbs get to control the surplus generated from Black residents of Detroit. The article continues by noting, “in 2004, Wayne County began to collect Detroit’s delinquent taxes, doubling the county’s surplus of fees and interest from delinquent taxes to an average of $33 million from $15 million per year” (Kurth et al., 2017).
As a consequence, Detroit, once a city known as a center of Black homeownership, has shifted from a city in which homeowners were the majority to a city in which renters are the majority. The housing stock now has 124,000 owned units and 140,000 rentals (Ruggiero et al., 2020). Coupled with the pandemic, this shift has placed struggles against housing dispossession on different footing. At the forefront now are tenant rights.
WE LIVE HERE: DETROIT EVICTION DEFENSE
This book is a celebration of place-based struggle against the forces of dispossession outlined above. Recounted are stories by Detroiters, primarily Black women, who fought and organized to save their homes from a mortgage foreclosure. Together with local activist group DED, these women answer the question “what will Detroit look like in the future?” by asserting that “there is no Detroit without us!” Told in eight chapters, families who have lived in the city for generations detail their deeply personal stories of falling behind on mortgage payments, going through the eviction process, and fighting to keep their homes. In doing so, these stories work against the unexamined assumption that foreclosures are caused by individual irresponsibility. As each family discusses their particular situation, this idea is upended and we can discern that it is not individual fault but rather the contours of racial capitalism that usurp Black and Latinx wealth. While each story has its own particular points of emphasis, the heart of this book is about transformation, resistance, and solidarity in the face of housing loss.
These stories contradict a popular image of the city as a kind of blank canvas. A canvas to be painted as a collection of cheap properties that entice real estate speculators from around the world, as a creative playground for artists or a landscape for billionaires to resculpt downtown, and as a spot for suburban tourists. Tying these activities together is a view of the city as a functionally empty frontier in need of resettlement. Yet beyond these conventional players in urban growth and development are groups like DED that expand our ability to imagine possible resistances to the future of housing implicit in these exploitative visions.
Central to DED’s work are direct action tactics to keep Detroiters in their homes. This ranges from physically stopping bailiffs from entering and evicting families to strategies such as packing the courtroom with DED members during eviction hearings. These tactics emerge from DED’s broader organizing, in which homeowners build support in their neighborhoods to mount a defense against eviction. Those facing an impending eviction are urged by DED to go to family, friends, and neighbors to let them know their situation in order to build support for a home defense.
These acts are not insignificant. People facing eviction often feel ashamed and these moments of community building around dinner tables or in church halls creates the solidarity that is necessary to save a home.
In solidarity with the pro-Palestine student actions at Columbia University, NYU, University of California Berkeley, University of Minnesota, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and many other universities throughout the country, we are proud to offer free downloads of Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos by Mark Edelman Boren.
A sweeping, two-volume recent history of student protest, Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos not only highlights successful resistance students movements of the past 20+ years, but also examines the ways that new technologies further enable direct actions and other tactics for resistance to administrative and police repression.
As Mark Boren writes, "Student resistance throws into relief the relationships within our societies between the rulers and the people. It defines cultural moments and indicates the directions in which nations are heading. And if student activism has a rich and storied past, it is just as true that student movements are shaping the world more than they ever have before. ... The explosion of protests in the world has shown us that there are millions of people — many of them young and altruistic — who are willing to stand up to forces of oppression, to risk their bodies, their freedom, and their lives to make the future better than the past, and that is humbling, inspiring, and hopeful for the future."
Student resistance in the first decade of the 21st century was the single most powerful liberating force around the globe during those years. Challenging governments—in a few cases, overturning governments—at a time when representational democracies appeared weak and authoritarian regimes were on the rise. In Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos, Book 1, Mark Boren goes continent by continent, country by country, to show us the contours of the new frontlines of resistance, the sacrifices that were made, the seismic changes caused by the Internet, and the new powers of surveillance and military technology that governments across the globe used to monitor and suppress student groups, raising the stakes and the human cost of resistance in many countries.
Student resistance in the second decade of the 21st century has increased in both quantity and quality, supercharged by social media, to the point where it has become the single most powerful force for change in the world today, embodying the hopes of hundreds of millions of citizens to finally address climate change, the condition of women and other major issues. Student resistance movements are the vanguard that can jumpstart wider social movements that put governments on notice at a time when corruption and stagnation plague democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. In Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos, Book 2, Mark Boren details the increasing technological sophistication of student movements, as the stakes continue to rise and the movements grow ever larger. With 1.5 billion students in the world, student activists today use technology to turn local movements into national and international ones. Armed with sophisticated communications and cell phone cameras to record police violence, linked to websites for broadcasting and encrypted apps for privacy, today's student activists have already done much to stop genocide and ensure government reform or regime change in scores of countries.
Greg Ruggiero, one of America’s top editors of leftist nonfiction, returned in November 2023 to Seven Stories Press, where he began his career in book publishing.
Ruggiero started out as a pamphleteer, hawking works by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky from street corners with his cohort Stuart Sahulka. Together, they founded Open Magazine and, in 1991, the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, publishing, among many others, Edward Said, Loretta Ross, Manning Marable, Mike Davis, Thomas Frank, The United Nations, and the Dalai Lama.
In 1998, he partnered with Seven Stories Press to create the Open Media series, which pioneered a new kind of political pamphlet in book form, most notably Noam Chomsky’s 9-11 andAngela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, but also works from less well-known authors, such as Tanya Reinhardt's Israel/Palestine.
In 2005, he left Seven Stories, moving to City Lights in early 2006. At City Lights his notable publications include The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane, and a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with lecture notes by Angela Davis. After 17 years, Ruggiero left City Lights in 2023.
His first acquisition for Seven Stories was MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within, which hit regional and national bestseller lists in its first week of sales in February 2024. Subsequent acquisitions include Talking About Abolition by Sonali Kolhatkar (January 2025), Reversing the Pipeline: Black Boarding Schools and Mass Incarceration by Tamar Sarai, Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth by Stan Cox, Todd Miller’s Dammed: Climate Change, Borders, and the Emerging Water Wars, and From Gaza to Paradise by Ramzy Baroud.
* * *
For further information:
Ruth Weiner
Seven Stories Press
914-309-8570
ruth@sevenstories.com
The three texts this book, classic writings by four famous revolutionaries —The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, Reform or Revolution (1899) by Rosa Luxemburg and Socialism andMan in Cuba (1965) by Ernesto Che Guevara — illuminate a shared socialist ideology that spans two centuries. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.
PREFACE TO MANIFESTO
“KARL MARX, ROSA LUXEMBURG, AND CHE GUEVARA”
BY ADRIENNE RICH
If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to “do something,” you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.
The essays in Manifesto were written by three relatively young people — Karl Marx when he was 30, Rosa Luxemburg at 27, Che Guevara at the age of 37. Born into different historical moments and different generations, they shared an energy of hope, an engagement with history, a belief that critical thinking must inform action, and a passion for the world and its human possibilities. That society as it was materially constructed would have to undergo radical change in order for such possibilities, stifled or denied under existing conditions, to be realized, all three affirmed in their lives and work. They were educated, reflective people who sharpened their thinking powers on that endeavor.
Marx lived most of his prodigiously creative life in poverty and exile. Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara were targeted and assassinated for their intellectual and active leadership in socialist movements. Any one of them might have led the life of a relatively comfortable professional. Each made a different choice. Yet reading what they wrote, including the essays in this book, one feels not the grimness of a tooth-gritting, dogma-driven politics, but the verve and exuberance of mind that accompanies creative indignation. For all three, feeling intensely alive translated into the vision of an integrated society, in which each person could become both individuated and socially responsible: “an association,” as a famous phrase from The Communist Manifesto expresses it, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” [1] Or, as Che told a group of Cuban medical students and health workers in 1960:
The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.
What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. [2]
None of them was thinking in isolation or in a historical vacuum. They had the past and its earlier thinkers to learn from and critique; they observed and participated in social movements; they worked out and argued ideas and strategies, sometimes fiercely, with comrades (Marx especially with Friedrich Engels, Luxemburg with Leo Jogiches, Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky and others of the German Social Democratic Party, Che Guevara with Fidel Castro, other Latin Americans and with leaders of the “nonaligned” nations). They saw themselves not as “public intellectuals” but as witnesses of and contributors to the growing consciousness of a class which produced wealth and leisure without sharing in it, a class fully capable of reason and enlightened action, though often lacking the formal education that could lead to political power.
That the working people who produced the wealth of the world could move toward political and economic emancipation, they did not simply believe but saw as a necessary evolution in human history. Revolutions were all around them, mass movements, strikes, international organizing. But it was not just the temper of their times that drew them into activity. (Many professionals and writers, especially when young, have been attracted by a moment’s flaring promise of social change, only to pull back as the windchill of opposition begins to freeze the air.) Rather, they observed around them the accelerating relationship between private wealth and massive suffering, capital’s devouring appetite for expansion of its markets at whatever human cost (including its wars); and in that awareness they also saw the meaning of their lives.
As a young medical student traveling through Latin America, Che Guevara noted this concretely:
I went to see an old woman with asthma… The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition. It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. [3]
It was Marx first of all who described how capital not only dispossesses and forces the vast majority of people “to sell themselves piecemeal,” but contains, ultimately, its own undoing:
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. [4]
But he first lays forth an exposition of the history of capitalism, the emergence of bourgeois or owning-class power and the effects of that power, a panorama so prescient of 21st century social conditions that it transcends its own moment of writing. As Che was to observe in 1964:
The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, foresees the future. But in addition to foreseeing it (by which he would meet his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: it is not enough to interpret the world, it must be transformed. [5]
And in fact, over more than 150 years The Communist Manifesto has become the most influential, most translated, reprinted (and demonized) single document of modern history. It’s a work of extraordinary literary power fused with historical analysis; a document of its time yet resonant, as we see here, for later generations. A document which can be, has been, critiqued and argued with — even by its author — but which will be carried into any future that is bearable to contemplate.
Marx, Luxemburg and Guevara were revolutionaries but they were not romantics. Their often poetic eloquence is grounded in their study and critical analysis of human society and political economy from the earliest communistic arrangements of prehistory to the emergence of modern capitalism and imperialist wars. They did not idealize past societies or attempt to create marginal communities of lifestyle purists, but — beginning with Marx — they scrutinized the illusions of past and contemporary reformers and rebels in the light of history, aware how easy it can be for parties and leaders to lose momentum, drift off and settle down with existing relationships of power. (It is this kind of compromise that Luxemburg addresses in Reform or Revolution.)
So what have we here?
The Communist Manifesto was so named because at a certain moment the emerging German League of Communists asked Marx and Engels to draft a platform. Thus, Marx is both setting forth a new theory of history and making a program manifest: asking, what in economic history has produced the need for Communism as a movement andwhat does Communism in 1848 actually stand for? He describes, with admiration as well as condemnation, the contradictory achievements of industrial capitalism. He notes, sometimes with scorching wit, the “spectral” interpretations of Communism floating abroad, and defines its real goalas common ownership of the means of production.
Fifty years later, in 1899, Luxemburg vigorously analyzes the reformist “opportunism” that would keep the old systemic relations of ownership and production in place under the guise of socialist reform. She dissects this opportunism in the ideas of Eduard Bernstein, an elder leader of the German Marxist Social Democratic Party with the additional cachet of being Engels’ literary executor. Her confrontation is coming from a young person, a foreigner, and a woman in a party rife with “virulent male chauvinism.” [6] Coming from anyone, it would have constituted a brilliant intellectual autopsy.
Luxemburg makes it clear that to be antireformist is not to be antireform:
For Social Democracy there exists an indissoluble tie between social reform and revolution. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal. [7]
With her critique of Bernstein’s article as a springboard, she goes on to enunciate ideas that acquire renewed pungency and suggestiveness today:
The fate of the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy; but the fate of democracy, on the contrary, is bound to the socialist movement. Democracy does not acquire greater chances of life in the measure that the working class renounces the struggle for its emancipation; on the contrary, democracy acquires greater chances of survival as the socialist movement becomes sufficiently strong to struggle against the reactionary consequences of world politics and the bourgeois desertion of democracy. He who would strengthen democracy must also want to strengthen and not weaken the socialist movement; and with the renunciation of the struggle for socialism goes that of both the labor movement and democracy. [8]
Legal reform and revolution are not different methods of historical progress that can be picked out at pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. They are different momentsin the development of class society which condition and complement each other, and at the same time exclude each other reciprocally…
In effect, every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for legal reforms does not itself contain its own driving force independent from revolution. [9]
In 1965, Che Guevara, as participant-theorist of an actual ongoing revolution, writes to an Uruguayan editor friend a letter obviously intended to make manifest the experience of the emerging Cuban society. By then, Che, an Argentine, had traveled on his continent, studied Marxism in Guatemala, fought along with Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, [10] served in the new Cuban revolutionary government, and was beginning to work for the extension of socialism in Latin America and among the “nonaligned” nations of Africa and Asia. He is writing of the labor pains of a transitional revolutionary society. How is it to be born? There is the idea, socialism, and there is also “the human being” — incomplete, coming alive in new conditions where labor becomes shared social responsibility, but also initially dwelling as it were between two vastly different worlds: “The new society in formation has to compete fiercely with the past.” [11] Commodity relationships are still imprinted on the mind. This phase of revolutionary process is new and unstable and anxiety may seek relief in autocratic rigidity. The leadership in such a transition has need for a vigilant, well-calibrated self-criticism. Rosa Luxemburg had written: “Revolutions are not ‘made’ and great movements of the people are not produced according to technical recipes that repose in the pockets of the party leaders.” [12] Che envisioned that “[s]ociety as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school” [13]; those who hope to educate must be in constant and responsive touch with those who are learning: teachers must also be learners.
In this connection it’s necessary to think about art and culture. Marx writes of how
the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... [U]ninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…[14]
And, in a system of commodity relationships, “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science” become “paid wage laborers” who must “sell themselves piecemeal” and “are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of exploitation, all the fluctuations of the market.” For the artist, this can also mean censorship by the market.
Che elaborates this theme:
The superstructure [of capitalism] imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents [I read this phrase as in ironic quotes] may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed… Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated. [15]
But he also points to the blinders of earlier socialist revolutions-in-process, where “an exaggerated dogmatism” has tried to address the question of culture, demanding “the formally exact representation of nature” in art, followed by “a mechanical representation of the social reality they wanted to show: the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contradictions, that they sought to create.” [16]
Che struggles here with the dialectic of art as simultaneously embodiment and shaper of consciousness, rooted in past forms and materials even as it gestures toward a still unachieved reality. What is to be the freedom of the artist in the new Cuba? It can be difficult, living under present conditions, to conceive of how a freedom expanded to all, to each and every person, might expand, not limit, the freedom of the imaginative artist, and the very possibilities of art. Difficult for those who are already artists — even as, outraged, we are forced to market ourselves piecemeal and struggle for what Marx called “disposable time” [17] — to see the “invisible cage” within which we work. Difficult, too, perhaps, for the navigators of a new society to apprehend the peculiar, but not exceptional, labor of the artist.
In the words of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci:
…to be precise, one should speak of a struggle for a “new culture” and not for a “new art” (in the immediate sense)… [P]erhaps it cannot even be said that the struggle is for a new artistic content apart from form because content cannot be considered abstractly, in separation from form. To fight for a new art would mean to fight to create new individual artists, which is absurd since artists cannot be created artificially. One must speak of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately engrained in “possible artists” and “possible works of art.” [18]
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a self-indulgent or self-deceiving life. Patience, realism and critical imagination are required of both kinds of creativity. Yet all the writers in this book speak emotionally of the human condition and of human realization, not as “losing oneself” within a mass collectivity but as release from the frozen senses, the dumbed-down alienation of mass society: Marx of “the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses [from the mere sense of having]… The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human,social object” [19]; Rosa Luxemburg of “social happiness,” of the mass strike as “creativity,” of “freedom” as no “special privilege” and of the “love of every beautiful day.” And Che of the revolutionary as “moved by great feelings of love” though this may “seem ridiculous” in bourgeois politics; of the need for a “new human being” created through responsible participation in a society belonging to all.
As Aijaz Ahmad has written, “The first resource of hope is memory itself.” [20] Marxism is founded on the historical memory of how existing, apparently immutable, human relationships came to be as they are. In the essays that follow we hear voices from three different generations of people who believed, as recent enormous antiwar and anti-imperialist gatherings on every continent have been asserting, that “another world is possible.” If for some today this still only means trying to regulate and refurbish the runaway engine of capitalism, for an ever-growing number of others it means changing the direction of the journey, toward an utterly different, still-forming reality. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.
—Adrienne Rich, March 2004
1. see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p53.
2. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Speech to Medical Students and Health Workers,” Che Guevara Reader, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p115.
3. Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p70.
4. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p35.
5. “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” Che Guevara Reader, p123.
6. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 2nd ed., (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p27.
7. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p71.
8. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p126.
9. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p128.
10. The revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro that overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba (1959). Its name commemorated Fidel’s July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada army barracks.
11. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p154.
12. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), p328.
13. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p155.
14. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p33.
15. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p161.
16. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p162.
17. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. Martin Nicolaus, (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p708.
18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds., tr. William Boelhower, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p98.
19. “Private Property and Communism,” The Portable Karl Marx, Eugene Kamenka, ed., (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p151.
20. “Resources of Hope: A Reflection on Our Times,” in Frontline (India) Vol. 18 #10, May 15–25, 2001.
Dan Wakefield’s NYT obituary gives a great sense of the beauty and range of the man. I just want to add that he and Kurt Vonnegut shared a publisher in Seymour Lawrence, who introduced the two, asking the older Vonnegut to show the younger Wakefield around. Vonnegut took Wakefield under his wing. And after Vonnegut’s death Wakefield repaid his friend by editing Vonnegut’s letters for Random House, setting a new standard for Vonnegut studies at the time. And then, together with Jerry Kinkowitz, also editing, for Seven Stories, Vonnegut’s Complete Stories, a phenom of a story collection, weighing in at over a thousand pages in an oversized volume for which our art director Stewart Cauley created a font based on Vonnegut’s lettering. Dan Wakefield’s passion, for people, for books, and for his fellow writers was unparalleled.
He was prolific and acclaimed, producing novels, journalism, essays, criticism, screenplays and, in a memoir, an account of his path from faith to atheism and back again.
David Stout, a former editor and reporter with The Times, died in 2020. Alex Traub contributed reporting.
Dan Wakefield, a protean and prolific journalist, novelist, screenwriter, critic and essayist who explored subjects as diverse as life in New York City in the 1950s, the American civil rights movement, the wounds that war inflicts on individuals and society, and, not least, his personal journey from religious faith to atheism and back again, died on Wednesday in Miami. He was 91.
His death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Will Higgins, who from 2016 to 2017 hosted a public radio show with Mr. Wakefield, “Uncle Dan’s Story Hour,” on which Mr. Wakefield told stories about his life and career from the Red Key Tavern, an old bar in Indianapolis, his hometown. His health began to decline late last year after he had a stroke, prompting his move to Miami, Mr. Higgins said.
Mr. Wakefield achieved early and stunning success as a writer and was still writing well into his last years. He had more than 20 books to his credit; most of them were nonfiction, but he also wrote novels. Critics and other authors praised his work as showing a reporter’s instincts combined with graceful prose.
He began to build his reputation shortly after graduating from Columbia University in 1955 with honors in English, writing articles, essays and stories for Esquire, The Nation, Playboy, Commentary and other magazines. Not long after his graduation, The Nation sent him to Mississippi to cover the Emmet Till murder trial, one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement.
After the trial was over, with an all-white jury’s acquittal of the white men involved in one of the most heinous racial murders in American history, Mr. Wakefield wrote, “The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it.”
He went on to find acclaim before he was 27, with the publication in 1959 of his first book, “Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem,” an account of the six months he spent living in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of Manhattan.
“To read Mr. Wakefield’s book is to walk into 100th Street in Spanish Harlem and suddenly share its life, its problems and its tragedies,” Harrison E. Salisbury of The New York Times, who had himself written about New York’s Puerto Ricans, declared in a review. Mr. Wakefield’s reporting on the neighborhood’s crime and other social problems, he added, “should bring civic conscience to a boil — if such a conscience does, in fact, exist.”
Mr. Wakefield’s next book, “Revolt in the South” (1962), explored resistance to the civil rights movement in the old Confederacy. While praising his “humility and compassion,” Claude Sitton, who covered the civil rights movement for The Times in the 1950s and ’60s, faulted the book in a Times review for “errors of fact and judgment” and for overlooking differences among the Southern states.
In 1970, his first novel, “Going All the Way,” achieved a level of recognition that most writers find only in their dreams. Nominated for a National Book Award, it told the story of two young Korean War veterans returning to their homes in Indianapolis in the summer of 1954 and finding that the middle-class values they had grown up with were no longer enough.
The novel was praised by critics and some major writers. Gay Talese called it “wonderful, sad and funny.” One critic said Mr. Wakefield was a bit like Norman Mailer but without the “rhetorical boom and self-idolatry.” Another pronounced it simply “a great book.”
Kurt Vonnegut, who had attended the same Indianapolis high school as Mr. Wakefield about a decade before him, wrote in a foreword that “Going All the Way” was “a richer book than ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’” and with “wider concerns and more intricate characters” than that Philip Roth classic.
Mr. Vonnegut was similarly effusive about “Going All the Way” in Life magazine. In 2015, Mr. Wakefield told The Times that he regarded Mr. Vonnegut as the “godfather” of “Going All the Way,” for the praise he had heaped upon it. The two writers became good friends. In 2017, Mr. Wakefield coedited a volume of Mr. Vonnegut’s complete stories.
Mr. Wakefield’s other novels were “Starting Over” (1973), about a divorced man torn between a new love and his ex-wife; “Home Free” (1977), about a slacker on a cross-country trip in the countercultural America of the 1960s; “Under the Apple Tree” (1982), a coming-of-age tale set in small-town Illinois during World War II; and “Selling Out” (1985), about a college professor and serious short-story writer who goes to Hollywood to write a sophisticated television series — an experience not unlike Mr. Wakefield’s own.
His television credits included “James at 15,” an NBC drama about the life of a teenage boy, which he created. He quit the show early in 1978, just a few months after its premiere, after a dispute with the network over an episode in which the protagonist loses his virginity. (He accused NBC of playing down the script’s references to birth control.) The series was canceled shortly afterward.
He also wrote the screenplay for the 1997 movie adaptation of “Going All the Way,” which starred Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and other young actors. “Starting Over,” too, was the basis for a movie, released in 1979, with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh.
Mr. Wakefield began his writing career as a columnist for his high school newspaper in Indianapolis and a sports stringer for The Indianapolis Star. (At a convention for high school journalists, he roomed with another young sports columnist, Richard G. Lugar, who later was elected mayor of Indianapolis and to the United States Senate. Both youths were Eagle Scouts.)
Mr. Wakefield studied journalism at Harvard in 1963 and 1964 under a Nieman fellowship. His other awards included a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1968. Over the years, he taught and lectured at several colleges and universities and numerous writers’ workshops.
Dan Wakefield — his birth name was Dan, not Daniel — was born in Indianapolis on May 21, 1932, to Ben and Brucie (Ridge) Wakefield. He was raised Presbyterian and became a Baptist. But as he morphed from an awkward, acne-afflicted adolescent into a young adult, a spiritual emptiness replaced his faith. He agonized as his parents divorced, he had troubled relationships with women, and he found little solace in talk therapy. By the time he was 24, he recalled in an essay in The Times, “I had bourboned myself into near oblivion.”
He used alcohol and drugs to fight off a “sense of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being,” he wrote in “Returning: A Spiritual Journey” (1988). The next year, in an essay in The Times, he wrote that his way back to belief was marked by logic — he recalled a physicist asking, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — as well as contemplation.
On Christmas Eve 1980, he attended a service at King’s Chapel, a Unitarian Universalist church in Boston (the minister was a neighbor). He became active in the church, having found himself in the presence of a “larger force or purpose or higher power I identify as God,” he wrote in “Returning.”
Mr. Wakefield lived his final years in Indianapolis. He moved back there in 2011 after living in Miami for 17 years as a writer in residence at Florida International University. He had also lived in New York, Boston, Hollywood and Venice, Calif.
In his later years, he led workshops on spirituality at churches and synagogues across the United States and at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y.
His marriage to Alice Jokela Stewart ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive.
Mr. Wakefield had a paternal relationship with his goddaughter, Karina Corrales, whose mother took a writing class with him in Miami after his move there. He met Ms. Corrales when she was toddler and ultimately paid for her to attend college. He had spent time with her and her husband toward the end of his life.
Asked to define his philosophy of life, Mr. Wakefield quoted Philo, the ancient philosopher of Alexandria, Egypt: “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” As for his life beyond writing, reading and reflecting, he said, “No golf, no horseshoes, no stamp-collecting, no hobbies.” And, he added, “No regrets.”
UPDATE: the New Rochelle Library event for Voices of a People's History of the United States in the 21st Century has been rescheduled to April 18th at 6:30pm.
It has come to our attention that the New Rochelle Public Library has pulled out of hosting an event with authors Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, originally scheduled for Thursday, March 21st, in which Arnove and Pessin were to discuss their book Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance. They were informed the event would be indefinitely postponed due to complaints about the authors’ vocal support for Palestine. It is unacceptable for New Rochelle public institutions to promote censorship and silence pro-Palestinian voices. This is similar to book bannings we’ve seen in libraries across the US and echoes authoritarian efforts to silence and oppress opinions that do not support their agenda. Libraries should serve as spaces to expand our thinking, not constrict it.
The New Rochelle Public Library's decision to indefinitely postpone this event is alarming. Our ask is that NRPL continue with the event as scheduled, and to take a strong stance against censorship of any sort. Please email or call the Board of Trustees using the scripts posted below. We will not be silenced!
EMAIL SCRIPT:
EMAIL: Director of the NRPL, Tom Geoffino, tgeoffino@nrpl.org
SUBJECT LINE: Event Cancelation- Arthur Arnove & Haley Pessin
Dear Mr. Geoffino,
I am emailing today because it has come to my attention that Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin’s book event was indefinitely postponed due to their support for Palestine. Silencing their voices goes against everything our community stands for. The library should serve as a non-political space for ALL voices to be heard. Please see that their event continues as originally scheduled.
- Call the New Rochelle Public Library: (914) 632-7878
- On the menu, wait for dial name to speak. Then, type TOM to speak to the director, Tom Geoffino.
SCRIPT:
"Hi Mr. Geoffino, I am calling to voice my concern over the indefinite postponing of Anthony and Haley's event next week due to their pro-Palestinian views. The library should serve as a non- political space that welcomes voices from all backgrounds. Silencing pro- Palestinian voices goes against everything New Rochelle and public libraries stand for. I would like to see their event continue as originally scheduled."
We are extremely pleased to report that Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn, has been longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize!
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón has established himself as one of the great voices of Latin American literature with his debut novel The Night, and his short story collection Sacrifices. His latest book to be translated into English, Simpatía is a suspenseful novel with unexpected twists and turns about the agony of Venezuela and the collapse of Chavismo.
Simpatía is set in the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken but liberated by Paulina's departure. Two other events end up disrupting his life even further: the return of Nadine, an unrequited love from the past, and the death of his father-in-law, General Martín Ayala. Thanks to Ayala’s will, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission—to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina.
This novel centers on themes of family and orphanhood in order to address the abuse of power by a patrilineage of political figures in Latin America, from Simón Bolívar to Hugo Chávez. The untranslatable title, Simpatía, which means both sympathy and charm, ironically references the qualities these political figures share. In a morally bankrupt society, where all human ties seem to have dissolved, Ulises is like a stray dog picking up scraps of sympathy. Can you really know who you love? What is, in essence, a family? Are abandoned dogs proof of the existence or non-existence of God? Ulises unknowingly embodies these questions, as a pilgrim of affection in a post-love era.
Each year the International Booker Prize introduces readers to the best novels and short story collections from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.
The prize recognises the vital work of translators with the £50,000 prize money divided equally: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators). In addition, there is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).
The 13 books on the longlist have been chosen by the 2024 judging panel: broadcaster and journalist Eleanor Wachtel, as chair; award-winning poet Natalie Diaz; internationally acclaimed novelist Romesh Gunesekera; groundbreaking visual artist William Kentridge; and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.
Their selection was made from 149 books published between 1 May 2023 and 30 April 2024 and submitted by publishers – the highest number since the prize was relaunched in its current format in 2016. 2024’s submissions were made up of books originally written in 32 languages, up from 27 in 2023. Since 2016, books representing 63 languages have been submitted for the prize, ranging from Farsi and Vietnamese to Kikuyu and Welsh.
The shortlist of six books will be announced on 9 April 2024. The winning title will be announced at a ceremony on 21 May 2024, which will be livestreamed.