"A Necessary Introduction" by Fidel Castro, excerpted from "The Bolivian Diary" by Ernesto Che Guevara

December 21

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.

1. Ernesto Che Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2022).

2. Ernesto Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2022).

3. These pages are now incorporated in this edition.

Triangle Square Book Clubs: Radical books for radical kids

Triangle Square Book Clubs are monthly kids’ book subscriptions focused on highlighting social justice kids' books and kids' books from around the world.

Whether picture books or chapter books, or people’s history books for tweens, all of the books included in these subscription options promote a radical kindness towards others, and emphasize the importance of standing up for what’s right.

Triangle Square Book Club subscribers receive one (1) book per month over the course of the subscription period, which is typically six or seven months, depending which of the book clubs are selected by the subscriber. The payment method is only charged one time, and the subscription never auto-renews.

To give a Triangle Square Book Club subscription as a gift, simply input the recipient's mailing address on the shipping page during checkout. If you have any questions, send us an email and we'd be happy to help.

THE KID ACTIVIST BOOK CLUB

Books for future changemakers

For readers ages 4-8

Six picture books that emphasize the power of community and promote a radical kindness towards others: Abolition is Love, 10,000 Dresses, T ogether, Grandpa Stops a War, The Wedding Portrait, and Oh! The Things We’re For.

SUBSCRIBE TO KID ACTIVIST BOOK CLUB

THE GLOBAL KID LIT BOOK CLUB

Picture books from around the world

For readers ages 4-8

Six picture books from all over the globe, from countries such as Indonesia, Portugal, Iran, Brazil, and Palestine: The Lizard, The Duel, The Donkey’s Gone!, T he Story of Hurry, My Night in the Planetarium, and The Best Tailor in Pinbaue.

SUBSCRIBE TO GLOBAL KID LIT BOOK CLUB

THE YOUNG COMRADE BOOK CLUB

Books for a better tomorrow

For readers ages 8-12

Six picture books and chapter books that encourage kids to be true to themselves and stand up for what’s right: Sing It!, Stories for Kids Who Want to Save the World, M is for Movement, Trevor, Human Rights, and Atty at Law.

SUBSCRIBE TO YOUNG COMRADE BOOK CLUB

THE WORLD TRAVELER BOOK CLUB

Kids’ books from around the world

For readers ages 8-12

Seven picture books and chapter books from all over the globe, including Portugal, Iceland, Chile, Denmark, and more: An Unexpected Light, Adam and Thomas, The Silence of Water, The Story of the Blue Planet, A Rabbits Rebellion, Zenobia, and Julia and the Triple C.

SUBSCRIBE TO WORLD TRAVELER BOOK CLUB

THE RADICAL HISTORY BOOK CLUB

Thought-provoking books for tweens and teens

For readers ages 10+

The stuff you won’t learn in school — stories of activists, workers, and other changemakers fighting for a better world: A Young People’s History of the United States, A Different Mirror for Young People, Freedom Summer for Young People, 1493 for Young People, Jane Jacobs, Escape ‘56, and Breaking the Chains.

SUBSCRIBE TO RADICAL HISTORY BOOK CLUB

November 13

Excerpt: Camp Jeff by Tova Reich

Out now, Tova Reich’s new novel is a raucous and biting tale of a Catskills reeducation camp for wealthy sex pests, helmed by a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Epstein (not that one), who just wants to clear his name.

When Manhattan's preeminent writer manqué, Gershon Gordon, receives a thick envelope containing his acceptance to someplace called Camp Jeffrey Epstein, he’s incredulous. True, his already stagnant career has recently ground to a full stop due to accusations of sexual impropriety, but the disgraced financier is dead, and besides, Gordon hasn’t even applied. Despite his reservations, during a freakish winter heatwave Gordon soon finds himself at a former Borscht Belt hotel in the Catskills, seated among the chosen ten — nine men and one woman — selected as members of the inaugural class of Camp Jeff. He hopes he might at least get a book out of the bizarre program, a luxe experimental therapeutic regimen designed to rehabilitate its campers, all of whom have been laid low by the #MeToo movement.

Written in Reich’s signature satirical mode, Camp Jeff revels in its brazen indictment of contemporary masculinity, elite arrogance, and therapy culture. Her whip-smart dialogue and unsparing pen reveal rather than merely mock: here is a deeply considered work of psychological portraiture and a profound examination of contemporary American culture.

CAMP JEFF BY TOVA REICH

CHAPTER ONE

They called it Camp Jeff, short for Jeffrey Epstein, named in honor of the benefactor who had endowed the famous center in the Catskills for the reeducation of #MeToo offenders caught in the hashtag. At first there was serious resistance to the project, not so much to the idea, which, in general, was deemed salutary, redemptive, but rather to calling it by the donor’s name, thrumming as it did with so much negative resonance. That, however, was the only condition on which this visionary Jeffrey Epstein— the good Jeffrey Epstein—would not budge. He had made his fortune in potions and creams drawn from original recipes passed down through the matrilineal line, into which he had poured every drop of his male energy. With such a background, when it came to women, strong and powerful was his personal preference—he wanted only to be knocked out with awe. Maybe a day would come when the name would become permanently soiled and unusable—like the name Adolf Hitler, for example— but in the meantime, statistically speaking, it was likely that there was more than one man still at large called Jeffrey Epstein. Why should he let himself be robbed of his good name, why should he collude in its defilement due to one rotten carrier? No, he would put the name—his name!—right out there to grab the attention span of the public. It would flash like a beacon cautioning all comers that they, too, could end up like the bad Jeffrey Epstein, swinging from a noose in a jail cell, a suicide or murder victim, take your pick, but at the same time, it would also send the message that not every Jeffrey Epstein has to be a pervert and a deviant. The good Jeffrey Epstein would cleanse the name, he would purify it as with one of his Hungarian bubby’s magic Magyar lotions that kept you forever unblemished. The renewal of the name would be reflected in the renewal, the rehabilitation, of the sinners. He envisioned a network of camps stretching well beyond New York State, beyond the borders of the USA, internationally: Jeffrey Epstein Worldwide—yes, JEW, unfortunately. Because, though nobody dared to utter this out loud as part of the conversation, a disproportionate number of the hashtagged were, as it happened, Jews, like the recipients of the Nobel Prize.

The camps would be situated in the rural outskirts of the great coastal cities bookending the American heartland, and it was anticipated that they would be populated largely by representatives of the fallen leading lights endemic to the particular shining metropolis in the latitude. In the flagship New York Camp Jeff, for example, you already had your respectable concentration of literary and media types, your intellectuals, your finance guys; in the prospective Boston offshoot, you could count on servicing your academics and scientists; in San Francisco, your tech boys; in Los Angeles, titans in The Industry, and so on. But as it turned out, thanks to the mordant humor of the gods, Camp Jeffrey Epstein, the branch in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, remained alone of its kind, one and unique, and consequently, with nothing to rival it, the most prestigious and sought after. The elite of the fallen, in particular its proud intelligentsia—that is, those who were not out-and-out rapists and pimps and traffickers, and who had not actually landed in jail and indeed had not even been fined but instead simply had been publicly shamed while muttering abjectly sorry-sorry-sorry, then instantly removed from whatever lofty position they had occupied, and from polite society in general, as if pincered like a louse between the tips of long steel tweezers, extracted and shunned—every one of these outcasts singled out for reprogramming wanted desperately to get into Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York. Even if it meant enduring the insult of reeducation, especially the demeaning group sessions and other moronic communal requirements, nothing but lowbrow brainwashing, bottom line, refereed by pathetically inferior nobodies no less, it remained their top choice. Competition for acceptance to Camp Jeff, the New York branch, was brutal.

It was located in the swath of the Catskills that in its heyday had been known as the Borscht Belt, in the once-gilded old Lokshin Hotel and Country Club that the good Jeffrey Epstein, patron and philanthropist, a man who prided himself on being endowed with normal domesticated sexual appetites unlike his namesake, had rescued from collapse and abandonment, and set about renovating and refurbishing to meet the highest standards suitable to a rehabilitation center. The fabled attraction of the old hotel, now on the way to a full remodeling, top of the line, was what had been called in the old days the Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge, honoring the establishment’s visionary founder, where once, in those golden years, the best talent, singers, dancers, and especially comedians, brilliant rising jokers, had been showcased. The former Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge, now known as the Jeffrey Epstein Social Hall, had been totally reconfigured, thanks to the generosity of the good Jeffrey Epstein, provided with all of the prescribed larger and smaller public and private spaces for the performance of serious therapeutic group dynamics as well as individual self-examination, reflection, healing. Yet in a gracious, truly a nostalgic, nod to the golden days of Jewish immigrant striving and hopefulness, the honorable Jeffrey Epstein had also arranged for a section of the Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge to be carved out for a cutting-edge theater space called the Zuzi Epstein Playhouse, a tribute to his lost daughter, named for her formidable great-grandmother—the girl who had exited too soon, exercising her right to choose. Upon its stage, inmates, or “campers” as they were called, from the world of entertainment could get up, and as one of them, that wise guy Gershon Gordon, the world-famous literary powerhouse and public intellectual, put it, expose themselves.

Indeed, a good number of the campers were true celebrities whose sojourn at Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York was one of the primary features that made it such a desirable destination for those hashtag degenerates self-channeled to the reeducation track. The acclaimed comedian Arnie Glick, for example, a camper there, was known to venture up onto the Zuzi Epstein Playhouse stage as often as would be tolerated to unload himself of some Glick-shtick to keep in shape for his desperately fantasized comeback. The finale, which every insider breathlessly anticipated, occurred when his co-inmate Gordon would roll up in his wheelchair to the foot of the stage, dressed in his trademark blacks—black sports jacket, black turtleneck, black jeans, the entire ensemble topped by a black velvet yarmulke setting off his signature white bouffant, his hair having gone prematurely, or, better, precociously, white—as the master (who would have found Gordon’s particular head covering most disagreeable) once nailed an ambitious, albeit fictional, Bostonian, also a self-styled writer and intellectual. Thus decked out, Gershon Gordon would boom out, “Shut up already, Arnie Prick,” the entire audience of inmates chanting along in jubilant chorus.

“Oh, Arnie Sick, Arnie Very, Very Sick,” Glick would wail so desolately, so penitently, a living testament to the success of the indoctrination by the mental-health storm troopers to which he had been subjected as an element of the Camp Jeff deprogramming, and he’d go limp and deflate into a puddle right there on the floor of the stage, as if resigning himself to be wiped up and flushed into the sewers, dragged off ignominiously from the wings by a cane hooked into his collar as in the legendary Lokshin days. It was a smashing routine, classic, Gordon and Glick, Vladimir and Estragon. What were they waiting for? With full faith they awaited the day when the nightmare that had ensnared them in the hashtag would come to its inevitable end like every other fad, like every other perverse fanatical craze that had gripped society over the millennia, and real life would resume. On that day they would make their reentry into the newly enlightened world as if emerging from a leper colony, climbing out of a pit crawling with scorpions and snakes, they would go forth together, born again, welcomed and hailed as honored survivors.

At Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York, Gershon Gordon, so gifted, so charming and erudite, trapped by the legend of his own precocity and ambition into a career as eternal prodigy and potential, was acknowledged intellectual royalty; gratefully, Arnie Glick accepted the supporting role of Gordon’s personal fool. The duo were joined by the news anchor Bob Bloom and the talk show host, Bob Blatt, the Two Bobs, fallen media giants dragged out of the tube, their names and faces instantly recognizable in every household across the fruited plains, far surpassing in primetime fame whatever nod had ever been allotted to Gordon or Glick. Together, the four of them made up what Arnie Glick, scarred forever by his high school years, from which he still extracted most of his material, called the Popular Group, the coolest clique on the premises having the most fun right in your face, everyone longed to crash their party. They were the Gang of Four, as the more evolved Gordon dubbed them, the Four Amigos, the leading nutcases in the cuckoo’s nest. Brandishing the power of their quartet, they took sad satisfaction during this dark intermission in their once radiant trajectory on earth in sabotaging the staff of inferiors—the mental-health mafia, therapists of every school, all of them women by birth or choice, including the administrators and the nurses of course, sculpted and toned for those emergencies when fitness and force would be required. All four of them, Gordon and Glick, Bloom and Blatt, were enviably good talkers, that was their trade, it was how they had once earned their living, seduced their benefactors, supported their habits, but here at Camp Jeff, they all deferred to Gershon Gordon, by unspoken consensus Gershon Gordon was their voice. This was because, as Arnie Glick explained, Gershon Gordon got into Camp Jeffrey Epstein due primarily, though not exclusively, to sins he had committed with the so-called harassments that came out of his unzipped Jewish mouth, whereas they, the Two Bobs and Arnie himself, had sinned without foreplay, with the clipped Jewish weapon that suddenly, startlingly, they yanked out of their pants.

November 06

Required Reading: Seven Days of Free eBooks from Seven Stories Press

Over the next seven days, we’re offering free digital copies of some of our more relevant — perhaps even inspiring — works of radical literature. Download a copy, share it with your friends, then read it together.

"Political power," says Howard Zinn, "is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare in the sense that guerillas look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect."

In Artists in Times of War, Zinn looks at the possibilities to create such apertures through art, film, activism, publishing, and through our everyday lives. In this collection of four essays—three of which are previously unpublished—the author of A People's History of the United States writes about why "to criticize the government is the highest act of patriotism."

This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.

“Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Serge

In early 2004, photographs came to light revealing extensive prisoner abuses, instances of torture, and other war crimes at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib detention center, committed by U.S. military and other government personnel. At the time, the Human Rights Watch confirmed that “the only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed." It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison.

In Abolition Democracy, Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted list." She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.

Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing Bush-era disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Born in San Salvador in 1935, Roque Dalton dedicated his life to armed struggle while writing fierce, tender poems about his country and its people. In Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, Dalton offers a road map for a liberated El Salvador, writing through the lens of five poetic personas, each with their own imagined history and distinct voice. This collection shows a country caught in the crosshairs of American imperialism, where the few rule the many and the many fight to survive—and yet there is love and humor and self-mockery to be found here on every page, in every verse, as well as an abiding faith in humanity. “I believe the world is beautiful,” Dalton writes, “and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”

A guide to direct action for those disillusioned with the posturing of liberal “activism.”

The left is losing, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here is the radical’s guide to activist work—the manual we need at this crucial moment to organize for universal human rights, a habitable earth, and a more egalitarian society.

In Volume 1: Building Movements and Fighting to Win, McBay describes the need for resistance movements, and paints a portrait of what a thriving resistance movement might look like today.

Powerful ideas of protest and freedom of expression from the world-renowned Egyptian political prisoner and activist.

Featuring a foreword by Naomi Klein.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade. Collected here for the first time in English are a selection of his essays, social media posts and interviews from 2011 until the present. He has spent the majority of those years in prison, where many of these pieces were written. Together, they present not only a unique account from the frontline of a decade of global upheaval, but a catalogue of ideas about other futures those upheavals could yet reveal. From theories on technology and history to profound reflections on the meaning of prison, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a book about the importance of ideas, whatever their cost.

"If we are to be treated like animals with no agency, so be it. But we shall bypass cattle and livestock, ignore pets and domesticates. We shall look to the lizards, starfish and earthworms— those beings that can regenerate after any injury, no matter how grave. We shall accept that regenerated organs may not be identical to what was lost. They could appear to be mutilated, but look closer and you will see the beauty in monstrosity, for only the monstrous can hold both the history of dreams and hopes, and the reality of defeat and pain together. The monstrous need not forget their old injuries in order to lose their fear of acquiring new ones."

The complete writings of radical leftist and political revolutionary, Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Red Army Faction (RAF), aka. The Baader-Mienhof Gang.

No other figure embodies revolutionary politics and radical chic quite like Ulrike Meinhof, who formed, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the RAF, notorious for its bombings and kidnappings of the wealthy in the 1970s. But in the years leading up to her leap into the fray, Meinhof was known throughout Europe as a respected journalist, who informed and entertained her loyal readers with monthly magazine columns.

November 04

Election 2024 Survival Guide: A Reading List

November 01

Monica Cure on translating “Too Great a Sky” by Liliana Corobca

Too Great A Sky, a new novel from Liliana Corobca and her award-winning translator Monica Cure, tells the story of the deportation of Romanians from Bucovina. The protagonist, Ana, is eleven years old when the Soviet soldiers send her from Bucovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan. She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three week long journey via train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the boxcar in the form of story-telling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great grand-daughter, who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candor, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map.

In her introductory letter, which you can read below, Monica Cure shares some insight into the process of translating the text, particularly the challenges in rendering into English a narrative interspersed with moments of prayer, folksong, and other lyrical, sometimes ecstatic, often allegorical, frequently idiomatic, sequences of verse.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

Translating Too Great a Sky, the third novel by Liliana Corobca that I’ve translated, was especially challenging. If while working on The Censor’s Notebook I was exceedingly aware of the possibility that a translator could also be a censor, while translating Too Great a Sky I felt the additional burden of accuracy in bearing witness, especially given the ongoing war in Ukraine. Though it is a fictional story, many of the events and details closely follow the facts of the Soviet deportation of Romanians from what was then part of Romanian Bucovina, now Ukrainian Bukovyna, during World War II. In her academic work, with Dumitru Covalciuc, Corobca edited a volume of over eighty oral histories of survivors entitled The Romanian Golgotha: Testimonies of Bucovinians Deported to Siberia (Golgota românească. Mărturiile bucovinenilor deportați în Siberia, Vestala, 2015). These oral histories and others inform many of the incidents narrated by Ana Blajinschi in the novel.

Bearing witness is difficult and often complicated, a reality that is heightened in this novel. At first, I had no intention of getting overly involved in the “facts” of the story. My engagement started simply enough — I wanted to render the Romanian spellings of foreign words into their most common spellings in English. Almost all place names in the novel are real. I felt that leaving the Russian and Kazakh ones in the Romanian spelling would seem inconsistent with the character Ana having learned Russian and Kazakh as she does in the novel. Finding the Russian and Kazakh names is easy enough for rivers such as the Irtysh and Ob. But then I couldn’t find which steppe the “Anarhai” steppe could be. Liliana sent me the spelling in Cyrillic and luckily a blog post on the writing of Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov came up allowing me to match it to the Anarkhay steppe, which would have been obvious had I been more familiar with that part of the world. Then came Central Asian foods and customs. Without having intended to, I found myself looking up every unfamiliar word, place, and name. In the process of doing so, I noticed several discrepancies that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Fortunately, Liliana and I have a collaborative working relationship as well as a friendship. We cross-checked Central Asian details with information that could be found online. We found the names of dishes that more closely resembled their descriptions in the novel. We changed the name of the Kyrgyz teacher, again thanks to Chingiz Aitmatov. We made it clearer that people from that part of the steppe happened not to have a ready supply of apples rather than never having heard of them, a detail that had come from the testimony of a deportee to Siberia rather than Kazakhstan.

I could have chalked up any errors to Ana Blajinschi not understanding certain words at the time of her deportation when she was eleven, or to her forgetting or confusing things in her old age while explaining them to her great-granddaughter in the novel’s present tense. But I realized I wanted Ana’s account to be as accurate as possible so long as Liliana felt the same way that I did and agreed with the changes. Ana as a character is somewhat otherworldly at the same time as she is very human — I wanted errors to be anyone’s but hers, even as I recognized no memory or testimony is perfect.

I also knew that Ana’s story, while based on real events, is fiction and that this is a source of power in the book. The emotions come from the way the story is told, how it draws the reader close. Though I was tempted to consult a Kazakh language specialist, I limited myself to imposing only once on the writer Maria Rybakova, who was living in Kazakhstan at the time, to help me find an appropriate word in Kazakh that could sound like an insult in English, since the word had to be changed from the Romanian version regardless. I’m grateful for her assistance in polling thirty people for options. Moreover, though I researched every unfamiliar word, I thought including notes would detract from the story (a decision supported by the editors at Seven Stories). Often, I added a couple words of description to Romanian words I left untranslated, such as cojoc and sarmale, to help readers without distracting them from the story. These changes were easier to make because Ana often explains things to her great-grand-daughter rather than simply narrating them.

The songs included in the novel were based on songs actually composed by deportees and sung by survivors. Corobca found them in the journal The Land of the Beeches (Ţara Fagilor) dedicated to the history and culture of Romanians in that area. She altered them slightly when writing them into the narrative and I was somewhat more liberal in my translation. For most of the songs I prioritized a folksy tone and rhyme, or at least half-rhymes. The only song fragments for which I adamantly created a regular meter were the songs the deportees danced to when they got off the train.

Liliana also read a range of religious books in preparation for writing the novel since several of the main characters, especially Ana Blajinschi, are marked by their Christian faith. In some ways this aspect was less of a challenge for me since my grandfather had been a Romanian Baptist pastor who had been imprisoned for his faith in the early years of the communist regime and so the language of Christian faith was already very familiar to me. In several of the prayers I preserved what may seem to be awkward syntax since it accurately depicts the rhythm of extemporaneous spoken prayer, with the common interjection of the word “Lord.” Specifically Orthodox aspects, which show up in the novel in layered ways, were less familiar to me. A troiță is a large wooden or stone cross set up at crossroads or to mark an event, but Troiță de Sus is also the (fictional) name of the village in Moldova where Ana settles, and de sus can be translated either simply as “upper” in geographic usage or as “from above” in a metaphorical sense. Part Three was entitled “Troiță de Sus” in Romanian and we decided that the most important meaning to keep was “roadside crosses,” especially since Ana had just shared the memory of the invisible crosses she saw along the train tracks.

Throughout the novel, Orthodox and folk practices and beliefs are often intertwined, as they continue to be in reality, especially in rural areas. Liliana collected many of the folk beliefs present in the novel during fieldwork in her own village in Moldova, especially those mentioned in the book during the burial ritual performed with words on the train. Ana’s last names also hold both religious and spiritual connotations. Her maiden name is Zeiţă, which means “goddess,” while her married name, Blajinschi, and its affectionate diminutives (Blajinica, Blajina, and Blajâna), has at its root the word blajin. The word means a combination of gentle, peaceful, kind, and forgiving, which calls to mind Christian virtues. The gentle mother in the train and Anton, Ana’s husband, are described using this word as well. But blajin can also refer to fairy-like creatures from Romanian folklore, also called Rohmani, as Ana notes. The syncretism of Orthodox and pre-Christian beliefs is especially present in the day in which the dead are honored, which I translate here as the “Feast of the Peaceful,” but a literal alternate translation could be the “Easter of the Blajins.”

Too Great a Sky is comprised of countless liminal spaces: between heaven and earth, both literally and metaphorically; different peoples; different languages, including words in Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, Polish, and Karakalpak; and different eras. Passages about various sewing machines and fabrics, and the process of manually preparing hemp, make sense in the context of Ana’s desire to bridge the gap between past and present. In telling her story to her great-granddaughter, Ana is both witness and translator. The further apart the spaces are, the more challenging the translation is, but also the more rewarding.

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

MONICA CURE is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her first published full-length translation, her 2022 translation of The Censor's Notebook, was awarded with the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.

October 25

Gary Indiana (1950 - 2024)

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)

It is with great sorrow that we share the news that novelist, essayist, critic and literary icon Gary Indiana has died at age 74. Below, you will find a video from our last event with him, the launch of our recent reissue of I Can Give You Anything But Love, in which Gary reads from the book and shares some stories about his so-called anti-memoir. Watching it now, after his passing, we’re struck by the grace with which Gary oscillates between his biting wit and sardonic sense of humor, and a real tenderness that emerges when you least expect it. He was, as always, determined to not let anyone get too comfortable in their assumptions about him, about literature, about writing as a whole. We will miss him dearly.

Below that video, we've also included some links to some beautiful tributes from our friends at Frieze, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and more.

GARY INDIANA was a novelist and critic who chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From Horse Crazy (1989, reissued in 2018 by Seven Stories Press), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), "a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians" (n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. With 1997's Resentment: A Comedy, Indiana began his true crime trilogy, following up with Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002). Together, the three novels show the most vicious crimes in our nation's history to be only American pathologies personified. In 2015, he published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love (reissued in paperback by Seven Stories Press in 2024) and later the novel Gone Tomorrow (reissued in 2018 by Seven Stories Press). A renowned writer with a historic tenure as the art critic at the Village Voice, Gary Indiana is also the author of the essay collections Vile Days (2018) and Fire Season (Seven Stories Press, 2022), among others. Called one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today" by the London Review of Books, "the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society" by Jamaica Kincaid, and "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana was a writer who was both inimitable and impossible to pin down. Gary Indiana passed away on October 24, 2024 after a long battle with cancer.

October 22

Media Literacy 101 - Take 30% off our Media Literacy Reading List

September 06

Announcing “Sad Tiger” by Neige Sinno (tr. Natasha Lehrer)

Cover Design by Stewart Cauley

Sad Tiger (Triste tigre), the acclaimed multi-award-winning literary sensation by Neige Sinno, has been acquired by Seven Stories Press for publication in English in March 2025.

Winner of the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens in 2023 and the European Strega Prize in 2024, Neige Sinno has created a powerful new literary form.

Annie Ernaux says, “Reading Triste tigre is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers. . . it is the most powerful, profound book I’ve ever read about the devastation of one person’s childhood by an adult.” (Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2022, in the New York Times, 11/26/2023)

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, will be published in the United States and United Kingdom by Seven Stories Press in March 2025. The book was released by P.O.L. in France in 2023 and was the literary phenomenon of French publishing that year, selling over 300,000 copies and with foreign language rights sold in over twenty countries.

In the book — the title inspired by William Blake’s poem "The Tyger" — Sinno tells how she was repeatedly exposed to sexual violence as a child and describes the consequences this experience has imposed on her adult life, on the way she perceives the world, reality, others, and art. Sad Tiger is a work of literature created by weaving years of trauma with an investigation of the limits of both language and imagination, critically examining texts by Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, and Virginie Despentes among others. In trying to write the unthinkable, Sinno offers the reader the opportunity to explore a realm where our thoughts seldom go. And even if the realm itself is dark, the fact that we can bravely navigate through it with our intelligence intact, creates a remarkable reading experience.

Since its publication in French, Sad Tiger (Triste tigre) has won over a dozen literary prizes including the Prix Femina, the European Strega Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, and the US and UK Goncourt Prizes. It was also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt.

Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon calls Triste Tigre “a shocking, and necessary masterpiece.”

Complete list of prizes to date for the original French edition, Triste Tigre:

Winner of the European Strega Prize, 2024
Winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, 2023
Winner of the Prix Femina, 2023
Winner of the US and UK Goncourt Prize Selection, 2024
Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023
Winner of the Inrockuptibles Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Medicis , 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Decembre Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Wepler, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Flore, 2023
Winner of the Goncourt Prizes in Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea, 2023

“[A] forensic exploration of how to speak about the unspeakable and how to define the domain of the unspeakable” —Natasha Lehrer, The Times Literary Supplement

"The most extraordinary book of the literary season . . . Exceptionally intelligent and truthful, Triste tigre is a must-read." —Elle

NEIGE SINNO is a French writer who has studied American literature in the United States and Mexico and has worked as a translator and professor of literature. She is the author of two previous books of fiction, Le Camion and La Vie des rats and a literary essay on reading: Lectores entre líneas: Roberto Bolaño, Ricardo Piglia y Sergio Pitol (winner of the Lya Kostakowsky Hispano-American literary essay prize). Born in France, she has lived in Mexico for the past 20 years. Her 2023 book, Triste tigre, won several of France’s top literary prizes and became the publishing sensation of the year. It will be published by Seven Stories Press, in a translation by Natasha Lehrer, in April 2025.

NATASHA LEHRER is a prizewinning writer and translator. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, and The Guardian, among many others, and translated works by Chantal Thomas, Vanessa Springora, Amin Maalouf, Victor Segalen, Robert Desnos, and Georges Bataille. In 2016 she was awarded the Scott Moncrieff prize for Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger. She lives in France.

SAD TIGER
By Neige Sinno
Translated by Natasha Lehrer
$22.95 | Trade paperback original | 288 pp | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4”
March 25, 2025 US
March 27, 2025 SSP-UK
9781644214671

Winner of multiple prizes, Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and is an international phenomenon.

“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory — her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.

Sad Tiger — the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” — is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

August 27

Excerpt: Entering History — Paco Ignacio Taibo II on Pancho Villa

Pancho Villa and staff riding near the US border. Ca. 1912.

ZERO: ENTERING HISTORY

I

This is the story of a man who almost always got out of bed in a different place from where he had gone to sleep. He developed this strange habit because — for more than half his adult life, seventeen out of the thirty years before he joined the Revolution — he had been an outlaw, a fugitive from justice, a gunslinger, a thief, a bandit, a cattle rustler. And he feared the night’s vulnerable hours would be his perdition.

A man who felt uncomfortable bareheaded, who had in his youth earned the nickname el Gorra Chueca (Crooked Hat) because he rarely removed his hat, not even to make or return a greeting. After years of research, Villa and his hats became fused in the mind’s eye of this biography’s author, an impression confirmed by Martín Luis Guzmán in The Eagle and the Serpent, “Villa wore his hat [. . .] frequently even when he was in his office or at home.” To provide scientific backing for the matter, this narrator reviewed 217 photographs. In these, Villa appears without a hat in only twenty. Many of these are in situations in which going hatless was almost obligatory: in one, he is swimming, in another four, he is at a funeral or a wake, and in a few others, he is already deceased — his hat having fallen to the ground during the fatal firefight. In the remaining 197 photos, he wears all kinds of hats. There are simple Texan Stetsons, cowboy hats, Federale army hats with visors, enormous huaripas norteños with wide brims and tall crowns, huicholes, broad-brim woven hats, three-cornered texanos, pith helmets, and military visor caps known in those days as “Russians.” His love for hats went so far that, once when he had to conceal his identity, he secured a bowler hat that made him look like a “village priest.”

This is the story of a man whose fighting methods were said to have been studied by Rommel (false), Mao Zedong (false), and Subcomandante Marcos (true); who recruited Tom Mix to the Mexican Revolution (highly improbable, but not impossible), who was photographed next to George Patton (though there’s not much to this as George was then a lowly lieutenant), who hooked up with María Conesa, the most important diva in Mexican history (false, he tried, but failed), and who killed Ambrose Bierce (absolutely false). A man who composed “La Adelita” (false), even if the lyrics to the “Corrido de la Muerte de Pancho Villa” claim that he did, while attributing “La Cucaracha” to him as well . . . but he did no such thing. A man who was a contemporary of Lenin, Freud, Kafka, Houdini, Modigliani, and Gandhi but who had never heard of them. And if he had— because sometimes he read the papers—he probably didn’t assign them the least importance because they were alien to the territory that defined Villa’s whole world: a small strip of the planet stretching from the cities along the border with Texas all the way to Mexico City (which he didn’t like at all). A man who was married (or entered into close, almost marital relationships) twenty-seven times—and who had at least twenty-six children (according to my incomplete inquiries)—but who didn’t seem to be excessively fond of weddings or priests, preferring parties, dancing, and, above all else, his friends and comrades.

A character famous for his drinking, even though he hardly ever touched alcohol, sentenced drunken officers to death, and destroyed barrels of alcoholic beverages in the various cities he controlled. Ciudad Juárez reeked of liquor when he ordered all drink in the bars be poured out into the streets. A man who loved strawberry milkshakes, peanut brittle, queso asadero, canned asparagus, and meat cooked over the fire until it was as tough as shoe leather.

A man with at least three “autobiographies,” none of which he wrote.

A person who barely knew how to read and write but who established more than fifty schools when he was the governor of Chihuahua.

A man who, during the era of the machine gun and trench warfare, deployed the cavalry in combination with nighttime attacks, airplanes, and trains. Etched in Mexico’s memory are the plumes of smoke rising from hundreds of trains conveying the Division of the North towards Zacatecas.

An individual who, despite describing himself as a simple man, loved sewing machines, motorcycles, and tractors.

A revolutionary with the mind of a bank robber who, while a general leading a division of 30,000 men, took time to hide treasure in dollars, silver, and gold in caves and basements, buried in clandestine locations, treasures with which he would later buy ammunitions for his army in a country that did not manufacture bullets.

A person who began by rustling cattle but then created the most spectacular contraband network at the service of a revolution.

A citizen who, in 1916, proposed the death penalty for anyone who committed electoral fraud, a rare phenomenon in Mexican history.

The only Mexican who almost bought a submarine, who rode a magic stallion named Siete Leguas (in reality, his horse was a mare), and who fulfilled the dreams of the narrator’s future generation by escaping from the Tlatelolco military prison.

A man who was hated so intensely that his enemies pumped 150 bullets into the car in which he was killed and whose head they stole from his body three years after his assassination. A man who managed to deceive his persecutors even after death because, although he officially lay at rest in the Monument of the Revolution in Mexico City — a sullen pile of rock lacking in any grace that appears to celebrate the death of a revolution crushed under the weight of fifty years of betrayal — he was actually buried in Parral. This is the story, then, of a man who told stories and about whom stories were told, including the stories he told about himself, in so many and such a wide variety of versions that it sometimes seems impossible to disentangle them.

The historian can do nothing less than study this character with fascination.

II

In the memories of those who survived, the cattle were bigger, the mountains were taller, the plains were wider, the hunger was worse, and the water scarcer, while the fear was merely fleeting. It’s not that those telling the stories are exaggerating; it’s that those who are listening have very little to go on. The narrator has attempted to listen while enveloped in the endless and grandiose rumors arising from Villismo, and from the figure of Pancho himself. Sometimes the narrator feels he has achieved this goal, but not always.

José María Jaurrieta, who accompanied Villa for three years during his guerrilla phase, explained, “If the reader has spent any time in the countryside, especially at night, when loneliness is at its most desperate, they will know the supreme power of the campfire in bringing men together and making them talk.”

Villa told his stories hundreds of times around the campfire, in the dead hours of the night, during long train rides, over endless marches. And those who heard Villa’s stories told others what he had told them. And they told others too. And we are still telling those stories today.

Pancho Villa spoke as if he knew that he would be the subject of passionate public adoration and festering bourgeois hatred, while providing unparalleled material for novels that would never be written. Yet this is not the case; he did not possess a predetermined historical consciousness, rather, his was the simple passion of a master storyteller who knew that credibility lies in the details and that every story either gets better or worse with the retelling, but that there is no obligation whatsoever for each version to sound the same. History does not exist, only stories.

Every storyteller knows that at the end of the day authenticity, the apparent plausibility of his ephemeral and personal truth, lies in the details. Not in what he says — in phrases that might become the property of what is called history — but in how he describes the ring with a fake red stone wagging on someone’s finger, how he talks about the color of their boots. The storyteller knows that exact numbers are essential: 321 men, 11 stallions, and a mare, February 28; that this supposedly precise exactitude, even if untrue, ties the story together, solidifies it, fixes it in the gallery of the real truth.

It is well known that the most frequently repeated stories are not necessarily the most verifiable ones, they are merely that, the most repeated ones. And it is just as obvious that over the course of a long life, a person will be many people, with echoes of each crossing paths with what they are, or what they seem to be.

The author of this book knows and respects these forms of recovering the past. However, beyond this, it is difficult to create history out of these materials. Thus, just as often as he has opted to try to establish “what really happened,” he has just as many times left it up to the reader to decide for themselves, or to enjoy—along with the author — moving between narratives that are oftentimes contradictory. This is why throughout history there are so many versions that do not harmonize in their details.

While writing this book, the narrator suffered and quarreled with the marvelous universe of Villista storytellers and “liars” who were kicked out of the official history, only to find their way back into social and popular history by the glorious paths of tall tales, anecdotes, oral tradition, and legend.

Villa’s opponents were no more truthful, but they relied on, and they continue to rely on, fraudulent documentation, exaggerated military reports (that remain hidden in the archives), clouds of smoke that obscure, official silences, compulsory versions, and professional historians. That is, they lie from positions of power.

III

Villismo — and Villa, in particular — generate dual appreciations that are, even among his admirers, in the best case, condescending. A combination of admiration, repulsion, fascination, fear, love, and hate. For the twenty-first century civilized (rare enough) observer, Villa’s thirst for social revenge, his furor, his contempt for his own life and those of others, and his terrible affinity for violence can be disconcerting and frightening. Going in search of Villa as Robin Hood but finding Long John Silver is usually dangerous. It’s much better to simply tell his story.

For those who would like the past to work like the Bible, or provide a road map, a clear moral, a manual to correct present wrongs, this is the wrong book. The past is a chaotic story that is read contentiously from today’s point of view. This fact obliges an even moderately intelligent historian to describe the past, not to judge it, to chew it over, to put it in such an order as to manipulate information to make it conform to a hypothesis. Most important of all, it must not be censored, so that the reader may form their own interpretation, judge history for themselves, and decide upon affinity, love, or reprobation. This is the reader’s responsibility. We start from the assumption that Pancho Villa himself does not deserve a prettified version, neither does this author who dedicated four years to this work, and finally, neither does the reader.

IV

In this work photographs have been treated like informational material and not like illustrations and, therefore, are irregularly distributed throughout, concentrated at certain moments in the life of its principal character and practically absent at others.

Literature covering the Revolution has been used in the same manner, trying to separate fact from fiction (Campobello, Rafael F. Muñoz, Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán). However, it is rarely possible to do so with certainty because of the abundance of source material and the impact of subjective considerations and impressions which are hidden in both the facts and the fiction, as will be the case in the following pages.

Lamentably, Villa’s voice, which appears frequently in the text in between quotation marks, is not completely his own; rather, many times it is the voice given to him by his secretaries, his biographers, and his scribes.

Canonized as one of the greatest military commanders of all time, Pancho Villa used calvary charges to rout superior armies in battle after battle, turning the tide in campaigns that kept the dream of the Mexican revolution alive even after its founding principles had been betrayed. Here in this magisterial biography of Villa, novelist, biographer, historian, and crime fiction writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II presents a new vision of Villa not only as a master of war but also as the living incarnation of the revolutionary hopes of a great nation. Taibo’s irreverent and conversational style, together with his deep research, make Pancho Villa a major advance in our understanding of the Mexican revolution and its most explosive leader. Until now, Villa has been defined and interpreted mostly by his enemies. Here, for the first time, he finds himself among friends.

July 10

Excerpt: I Can Give You Anything But Love

To celebrate the paperback release of Gary Indiana's memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, we are proud to share an excerpt from the book, a sexy, literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work. In this excerpt, Gary takes us to his commune-hopping period in late-60s San Francisco, introducing us to an incredible cast of characters — his lovers, their lovers, his friends, their friends, their roommates, his roommates, etc — who set out, together, to create a porn movie called The Straight Banana.

Things to remember better: Ferd Eggan entered my life in San Francisco in 1969. I had dropped out of Berkeley. I had what today are called sexual identity issues that made it impossible to focus in any degree-winning manner on philosophy and English literature, my purported areas of study. I had drifted away from classes and moved out of student housing, crashing at various communes around the Berkeley campus. One was a Trotskyite commune. Another housed a study group of Frankfurt School scholars with guest lectures by Herbert Marcuse and also raised money for the Tupamaros. Another went in for encounter sessions and scream therapy. My ﬁnal Berkeley commune was devoted to growing peyote cacti and magic mushrooms. I met Ferd on a ﬁlm set. He was helming a new wrinkle in the developing canon of narrative porn cinema from his own co-authored script, The Straight Banana (“exhibitionist ﬂashes nymphomaniac, fucking ensues!”—a meet-cute picture). I was “sexually involved” by that time—not on camera—with one of the stars of The Straight Banana, a tall, bisexual Nebraskan refugee often billed as Mr. Johnny Raw, or plain Johnny Raw, whose penis was a minor celebrity in the Bay Area.

Johnny Raw, aka Leonard Jones of Omaha, lived in the Marina district. I never socialized with him. I hardly knew him. I didn’t care about him. His self-involvement was hermetic and vaguely reptilian. Johnny Raw referred to the creeps who bought tickets to jerk off watching his films as “the fans,” and believed he was an actual movie star. He was boastful, stupid, pathetically narcissistic, and sad, but such a deluded asshole it was impossible to feel sorry for him. I liked how he looked, he liked how I looked looking at him, that was literally all we shared. Whenever we stumbled over each other that summer, both in half-drunk stupors, in the same bar, at the same midnight hour, we rushed robotically to the Marina in a cab, and got it on—without passing Go, without collecting two hundred dollars, without spending a minute longer in each other’s company afterward than I needed to put my clothes on.

I never took my clothes off, actually. Johnny Raw usually pulled his dick and balls out of his fly or lowered his pants to his ankles. Gay youth today may find it incomprehensible, but “having sex” with Johnny Raw ten or fifteen times that summer didn’t involve Johnny Raw fucking me, or me fucking Johnny Raw. I was unusually innocent for my age — and, it’s the truth, unusually pretty and sought after at nineteen. I admit that by my present lights, I’d have to agree with former President Clinton that he “did not have sex with that woman.” By today’s standards, I had been around too long to hook up with men and then do nothing besides service them with a blowjob. But that’s as far as I’d ever gone. Regardless of a precocious history of fellatio with other boys since the seventh grade, I had no concept of anal sex. I wasn’t aware of it as something many people did. A true son of 1950s backwoods New Hampshire, I thought sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality. Believed, in fact, that a rectum capable of accommodating even an average penis was such an aberration of nature that only rare, anally deformed individuals even attempted it. “Fucking,” in my mind, meant male-on-female vaginal penetration.

For a while post-Berkeley, I lived in the attic of a hippie commune with no special theme going on, in a leased house on Seventeenth Street. By coincidence, a tenant below was Johnny Raw’s costar in The Straight Banana. Grinda Pupic, a licensed practical nurse whose legal name was Bonnie Solomon, secured the attic for me when I moved across the bay, as a favor to a Berkeley friend of a friend.

A relentlessly sultry, ebulliently secular Jew, Bonnie’s sang-froid enabled her to resume her side of an argument about local zoning laws between takes, while the bone-hard penis of a costar remained planted in her lady parts. Among friends and coworkers she exuded a generally misleading maternal solicitude. At the Nocturnal Dream Shows in North Beach, Bonnie sang with the Nickelettes, a hallucinatory, feminist auxiliary of the Cockettes. We occasionally had sex. I wasn’t a frontal virgin. Bonnie was awfully nice and surprisingly tough.

I tagged along on a location shoot in the Sausalito hills, riding shotgun in a pickup driven by a hippie sound engineer, a roguishly bearded ex-Mouseketeer with a doomed aura named Brando Batty. (According to the state of California, that really was his real name. He once showed me his driver’s license.) By nightfall I had a temp job, as emergency gaffer and continuity girl on The Straight Banana shoot. My thing with the eponymous Straight Banana (we just referred to him as Banana, really) quickly lapsed, in the easy manner of the day, into a different thing with Ferd, who already had a male squeeze and a more involved relationship with an older woman named Carol.

She wasn’t much older, chronologically, but her weariness suggested she’d survived the Titanic and much else of cosmic historical significance. Older than a thousand years, still bitter over some deal gone terribly south in ancient Babylon, Carol sat stiffly in Brando Batty’s truck all afternoon, penciling irritable remarks on the script she’d co-written, or flipping through Variety. I sensed a crazy attraction to Ferd, but became completely spellbound by Carol. She had the vibe of somebody who’d lived the nightmare in a big, expensive way. Short, wiry limbed, her glossy auburn hair poodled in a perky cut, she seemed implacable enough to launch a military coup in South America.

Sporadically emerging from her four-wheel bunker during lulls in the filming, she’d march directly up to Ferd to give him notes before talking to anyone else. She blinked theatrically at the sun; slid her sunglasses down from their nest in her hair; aimed a studied yawn in our general direction; lit a Marlboro with a silver lighter; smoothed her throat with the fingers she’d covered the yawn with. Each movement set off baffling signals, her private-looking little actions both seductive and off-putting, a selfishly generous display: as she studied her effect on people, Carol also telegraphed her utter indifference to whatever effect that was. I instinctively sensed she would shove me or anybody else out of a lifeboat if she thought they added too much weight. But I often dismissed as paranoid intuitions that were as obvious as giant letters on a billboard. Ferd was as easy-going as Carol was brittle. He japed, mugged, giggled, flirted, bantered with everyone while setting up shots, giving actors notes, squinting into the Arriflex viewfinder. His infectious looseness visibly stiffened when Carol asserted her presence. Their gravity together engraved a “serious” grown-up circle around them. The pornographic circus it excluded looked embarrassingly silly and juvenile, suddenly.

. . .

To say I fell in love with Ferd the day I met him wouldn’t be completely wrong, but sounds schmaltzy if I consider how little feeling I had for Johnny Raw from the jump, aside from a fascination with the body part that made him famous. In less than an hour around Ferd, Johnny evaporated from my consciousness.

Ferd was the first male I ever felt attracted to who was smarter than me, intellect never having been conspicuous in the few men I had “dated” before. Decades later, after his looks went, his charisma continued to make him beautiful, in a wasted, Egon Schiele way. I’ve thought about Ferd over much of my life, and find him full of contradictions, but this is what seems constant: his intellectual finesse; his formidable conviction that his sense of reality trumped all others’; a decency of heart often wildly at odds with situations I found him in, as well as with the first two qualities I mentioned.

None of this was entirely apparent when I met him, when he lived with Carol. I quickly got tangled up with both of them, cast in confusing roles as an understudy to Ferd’s boyfriend, Chip (who I never knew beyond hello good-bye), and as a way-ward urchin Ferd and Carol adopted. They collected people like pollen sticking to their clothes: runaways, burnouts, lost souls of all sorts. Carol acted as a vulpine den mother to a shifting cast of acolytes and hangers-on.

She reigned over the upper floors of a five-story Victorian on Broderick Street that exuded lifeless desuetude. Charles, the owner, retired from some clandestine profession, occupied in perpetuity a wing chair facing the fireplace in a musty floor-through salon on the ground floor. He passed his days draining tall cans of Rainier Ale while staring at a TV that was seldom actually on, stacking ale cans in green pyramids that almost brushed the high ceiling. Exactly where in that somnolent house Charles kept the box of earth where he slept, I never knew. His alleged college roommate, Steve, a more tangible, slightly corpulent man of sixty-two, was given to “sporty” plaid shirts, fishing pants with many pockets, and muted red loafers. Steve inhabited a room in the basement. Charles was a man of no words. Steve had a certain voluble joie de vivre. In a pinch, one might call him jolly. He wasn’t really.

In the fullness of time I became a tenant. I was given a claustrophobic child-size room on the third floor containing a canopied bed, a framed charcoal drawing of Leopold Stokowski, and a ceiling bulb. But not yet.

From I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana, published in paperback (2024) by Seven Stories Press.

GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), "a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians" (n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. With 1997's Resentment: A Comedy, Indiana began his true crime trilogy, following up with Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002). Together, the three novels show the most vicious crimes in our nation's history to be only American pathologies personified. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love and later the novel Gone Tomorrow. Called one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today" by the London Review of Books, "the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society" by Jamaica Kincaid, and "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.

"A Necessary Introduction" by Fidel Castro, excerpted from "The Bolivian Diary" by Ernesto Che Guevara

December 21

by Fidel Castro