On June 18, 2025, the United States Supreme Court voted to uphold Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapies, effectively shielding similar bans in over 20 other states. While not surprising, this is a significant blow to healthcare access for thousands of trans kids throughout the country, and paves the way for further states to establish bans — or significant resistrictions — on gender-affirming care for minors. 

It’s hard to know what to do or how to fight back when the powers that be are making so many paths to leading full lives inaccessible. But we do know this: we want everyone to survive this moment, even when it feels hopeless. We have to take care of each other. Above all, we have to pool our resources and make sure we all have access to the tools we need.

That’s why we’re making DRM-free (easily shareable) copies of Hello, Cruel World (Second Edition) available to download for free from our website through June 25th. Download a copy for yourself or send it to a friend, a family member, a local teen, or anyone else who might be struggling, or anyone else who might need a guide of this kind.

As Kate says in the first chapter, 

I can tell you this with certainty: You are worthy and capable of finding a way to live your life just the way you really are. And there are plenty of good people in the world who believe that a life like yours needs to be lived. If you work at being as fully you as you can possibly be, you will feel better.

And keep in mind that the you that makes life worth living today probably won’t be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year. Identities aren’t meant to be permanent. They’re like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment.

I believe in the truth of you and so do a lot of other people, people you may not even know yet. Whatever you’re being right now, wherever you’ve been traveling, and whatever you might become tomorrow, I believe in you.

This book is a lot about learning how to give yourself permission to go on living even when it really hurts. Right now you might be glad I’ve given you permission. Eventually, you’ll no longer need anyone’s but your own. Permission to do what? Permission to take yet another stab at putting together the kind of identity that makes you feel that you’re being true to yourself and that life is worth living. Go ahead, give yourself permission to become the kind of person you’ve always dreamed you could be.

“You’ll want to keep extra copies of this one on the shelf to give away to friends in need.” —Bitch Magazine 

The twentieth anniversary edition of trans trailblazer Kate Bornstein’s one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive — for teens, freaks, and other outlaws — featuring an introduction by Sara Quin and a new afterword by Paul B. Preciado

Now with 20 additional alternatives and Kate Bornstein’s urgent new essay, “Hello, Cruel Gender,” this edition of Hello, Cruel World offers a much-needed and unorthodox catalog of alternatives to suicide for all of us — ranging from the playful, easy, and irreverent to the controversial, challenging, and earnest. With love, humor, and grit, Bornstein dares readers to re-envision the gender system, encouraging us to unleash our hearts’ desires and journey toward an emphatic embrace of life.

“This book is written for the teen locked inside each of us,” writes Paul Preciado in a new afterword to the book. “The one who has lost their dream, forgotten their infinite desire for transformation, the one who has gotten used to accepting the desires of others rather than pursuing their own.” Here is a trove of insights, at once intimate and edgy, to keep every freak out there alive. 

Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction, 2007 Finalist

Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award, 2009 Honor Book

Celebrate the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara with 30% off all of his books!

ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957.  Following the rebels’ victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba. He was killed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967.

June marks Stonewall Rememberance Month, aka Pride Month, a celebration of LGBTQIA+ liberation and all that has been won and all that is still left to fight for. While we're delighted to celebrate throughout June, we want to encourage everyone to read, and champion, literature by queer writers throughout the year — not just during Pride Month. That said, now's a great time to stock up.

Celebrate queer, trans, and otherwise LGBTQIA+ writers all year long with some of our favorite works of radical queer literature. Pick up a new book for yourself, or for someone else, and don't forget to tell your friends how much you love them.

 

Available to download for free, Full Spectrum Resistance the radical’s guide to activist work—the manual we need at this crucial moment to organize against the fascist creep and fight against the increasingly militarized industry of repression. 

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

Thoroughly exploring the achievements and failures of radical movements throughout history—from 19th-century anti-colonial rebellions in China and the environmental actions of First Nations and Native American tribes throughout the 20th century, to Black Lives Matter and the fight for Gay Liberation—the two volumes of Full Spectrum Resistance candidly advocate for direct action, not just risk-averse models of protest marches and call-ins. With in-depth histories and case studies of social justice and environmental movements, noted writer, activist, and farmer Aric McBay explains why passive resistance alone cannot work, and how we must be prepared to do whatever it takes to create substantial social change.

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. Citing successful movements such as the Deacons of Defense of the American Civil Rights Movement, the anti-colonial revolutions in Guinea and Cape Verde, and activist groups like Act-UP, McBay deftly illustrates how to organize activist groups and encourage enlistment, while also noting the necessary precautions one must take to secure these radical circles from infiltration and collapse.

In Volume 2: Actions and Strategies for Change, McBay uses the successful strategies of various actions, such as the Greek Resisters of the 2008 Greek Television Takeover, to articulate the best practices for inter-activist coordination and communication with mass media to effectively spread message. Covering reconnaissance methods and other forms of intelligence-gathering, Volume 2 guides the reader in smart decision-making and damage control, such as how to recover from both covert and overt adversarial attacks, such as COINTELPRO (1971). Moreover, this manual clearly articulates the best strategies and practices for the financial, logistical, and tactical organization necessary to all successful radical movements in the long term. 

Further Reading About Protest and Direct Action, Now 30% Off

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

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THE PROBLEM OF ILLEGALITY
An Excerpt from What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression: A Guide for Activists by Victor Serge

DON'T BE FOOLED

Without a clear perspective on this problem, knowledge of police methods and procedures would be of no practical utility.

Fetishism of legality was and still is one of the characteristic features of the class collaboration tendency of socialism. It involves a belief in the possibility of transforming the capitalist order without entering into conflict with its privileged elements. But rather than indicating a naiveté quite incompatible with the mentality of politicians, it is a sign of the corruption of the leaders. Entrenched in a society they pretend to be fighting, they recommend respecting the rules of the game. The working class can only respect bourgeois legality if it ignores the real role of the state and the deceptive nature of democracy; in short, the first principles of the class struggle.

If the worker knows that the state is a mesh of institutions designed to defend the interests of the property owners against the non-owners, that is, to maintain the exploitation of labor; that the law, always decreed by the rich against the poor, is enforced by magistrates invariably belonging to the ruling class; that the law is invariably enforced along rigorous class lines; that coercion, which begins with a quiet order from a policeman, passes via the lockup and the penitentiary, and ends with the fall of the guillotine—is the systematic exercise of legalized violence against the exploited, then the only way the worker can view legality is as a fact, whose different facets he should know about, with its different applications, traps and pitfalls (and also advantages, which should be made use of at certain points) but which should be nothing but a purely material obstacle to his class.

Is it necessary to demonstrate the anti-proletarian nature of all bourgeois legality? Perhaps. In our unequal struggle against the old world, the simplest things must be explained again and again each day. We need only mention a number of fairly well-known facts.

In every country, the workers’ movement has had to win, in over half a century of struggle, the right to associate and the right to strike. Even in France this right is still not conceded to state employed workers nor those in industries considered to be of public utility (as if all industries aren’t), such as the railways.

In the conflicts between capital and labor, the army has often intervened against labor—never against capital.

In court the defense of the poor is nothing short of impossible, because of the cost of any judicial action; in effect, a worker can neither bring a case nor defend one.

The overwhelming majority of crimes are directly caused by poverty and come into the category of attacks on property. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates are from the poor.

Up until the war, there was discriminatory suffrage in Belgium; a capitalist, a curate, an officer or a lawyer each had as many votes as two, or three workers. At the time of writing an attempt is being made to reestablish discriminatory suffrage in Italy.

To respect legality such as this is to be fooled by it. Nonetheless, it would be equally disastrous to ignore it. The advantages for the workers’ movement are the greater the less one is fooled. The right to exist and to act legally is, for the organizations of the proletariat, something which must constantly be re-won and extended. We stress this because sometimes among good revolutionaries there emerges the diametrical opposite of fetishizing legality—due to a kind of tendency to make the least political effort (it is easier to conspire than to lead mass action) they have a certain disdain for legal action.

We believe that in countries where the reaction has not yet triumphed, destroying the previous democratic constitution, the workers will have to fight to defend every inch of their legal position, and in other countries fight to regain it. In France itself, the legal status the workers’ movement enjoys must be extended, and this can only be done through struggle. The right of association and the right to strike are still denied to state employees and certain other categories of workers; the right to demonstrate is much more restricted than in the Anglo-Saxon countries; the advanced guard of workers’ defense have still not conquered the streets and gained legality as in Germany and Austria.

THE POSTWAR EXPERIENCE

During the war the governments of all the belligerent countries replaced democratic institutions by military dictatorship (martial law, the virtual suppression of the right to strike, prorogation or recess of parliaments, handing over all power to the generals and the court-martial regimes). The exceptional requirements of national defense gave them a plausible justification. Since the end of the war, when the Red tide surging out from Russia flowed out over the whole of Europe, almost all the capitalist states—this time fighting the class war, and under threat from the workers’ movement— treated their previously sacred legislation as worth less than the paper it was written on.

The Baltic states (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) and Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia brought out against the working class brutal laws untainted with democratic hypocrisy. Bulgaria refined the effects of its brutal legislation with extra-legal violence. Hungary, Italy and Spain were content with abolishing, so far as the workers and peasants were concerned, any legality whatsoever. More cultivated, and better organized, Germany, without resorting to special powers, established what can be called a regime of legal police terror.1 The United States brutally applies its laws on “criminal unionism,” sabotage and . . . espionage! Thousands of workers were arrested under an Espionage Act passed during the war against German subjects living in the United States.

The only countries left in Europe where the labor movement still enjoys the benefits of democratic legality are Scandinavia, England, France and a few small countries. It can be said without fear of being disproved by events that with the first really dangerous social crisis this advantage will be promptly and abruptly withdrawn. Very definite signs have appeared which demand our attention. In November 1924, the British elections took place on the basis of an anticommunist campaign, the basic evidence for which was a forged letter from Zinoviev, supposedly addressed to the British Labour Party and intercepted by the state. In France there have on several occasions been attempts to dissolve the CGT. If I am not mistaken, this dissolution even received formal approval. Briand in his time even—illegally—went so far as to militarize railway workers, in order to break their strike. Clemenceau’s tactics are not something belonging to the distant past—and Poincaré has shown, since the occupation of the Ruhr, an evident desire to imitate him.

Now, for a revolutionary party, being taken unawares by being outlawed means that you disappear. On the other hand, being prepared for illegality makes you certain of surviving any measures of repression. Three striking examples from recent history illustrate the truth of this.

1. A great communist party which allowed itself to be taken unawares when made illegal:

The Yugoslav Communist Party, a mass party, which in 1920 had more than 120,000 members and sixty deputies in the Skupchina, was dissolved in 1921, in compliance with the State Defense Law. Its defeat was instant and total. It disappeared from the political scene.[2]

2. A communist party which was taken only half unawares:

The Italian Communist Party [PCI] was obliged, even before Mussolini’s rise to power, to pursue what was at best a semi-legal existence, because of fascist persecution. The furious repression—with 4,000 workers arrested in the first week of 1923— was at no point able to smash the PCI, which on the contrary was strengthened and fortified, its membership rising from 10,000 in 1923 to almost 30,000 at the beginning of 1925.

3. A great communist party which was not in the least taken unawares:

At the end of 1923, after the revolutionary events of October and the Hamburg insurrection, the German Communist Party was dissolved by General von Seeckt. Prepared over a long period, and with flexible, illegal organizations, it was none-theless able to continue its normal existence. The government soon had to reconsider a measure of such evident inanity. The German Communist Party came out of illegality with its forces hardly impaired, to get over three and a half million votes in the 1924 elections.

THE LIMITS OF LEGAL REVOLUTIONARY ACTION

What is more, legality, in the most “advanced” capitalist democracies, has limits which the proletariat cannot respect without condemning itself to defeat. Propaganda in the army, a vital necessity, is not legally tolerated. Without the defection of at least a part of the army, there is no victorious revolution. This is a law of history. In every bourgeois army, the party of the proletariat must arouse and cultivate revolutionary traditions, possess extensive organizations, tenacious in their work, and more vigilant than the enemy. The most democratic of legal systems would not in the least tolerate action committees at the very points where they are most necessary: in the great railway junctions, the docks, the arsenals and the airports. The most democratic of legal systems does not tolerate communist propaganda in the colonies: as proof, take the persecution of the Egyptian and Indian revolutionaries by the British authorities; and also the regime of police provocation established by the French authorities in Tunisia. Finally, it need scarcely be said that international communications services must at all times be subject to investigation by the political police.

Nobody maintained the need for illegal revolutionary organization more firmly than Lenin—in the period of the founding of the Russian Bolshevik Party and later, during the founding of the European communist parties. Nobody fought harder against the fetishism of legality. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democracy (in Brussels and London, 1903), the division between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks took shape precisely over the question of illegal organization. The motive was the discussion of the first paragraph of the statutes. L. Martov, who for 20 years was to be the leader of Menshevism, wanted to concede membership of the party to anyone which lent it his services (under the control of the party)—that is, in reality, to the many sympathizers, especially in intellectual circles, who would try not to compromise themselves to the point of collaborating in illegal actions. Intractably, Lenin maintained that to belong to the party it was necessary “to participate in the work of one of its (illegal) organizations.” The discussion appeared to be splitting hairs. But Lenin was a thousand times right. You cannot be half, or a third a revolutionary. The party of the revolution must, of course, make use of every contribution; but it cannot be content with receiving just vague, discreet, verbal, inactive sympathy from its members. Those who do not agree to risk a privileged material situation for the sake of the working class, should not be in a position to exercise real influence within it. The attitude towards illegality was for Lenin the touchstone for differentiating between real revolutionaries and others.[3]

PRIVATE POLICE FORCES

Another factor must be taken into account: the existence of private police forces outside the law that provide the bourgeoisie with excellent hired guns.

During the world war, the information service of Action Française was notably successful in supplying Clemenceau’s courts-martial. It is well known that Marius Plateau was at the head of AF’s private police. Meanwhile, a certain Jean Maxe,[4] the zealous compiler and distributor of the Cahiers de l’antifrance, devoted himself to spying on the vanguard movements. It is very likely that all the reactionary formations inspired by the example of the Italian fascists have espionage and police services.

In Germany, since the official disarming of the country, the essential forces of reaction have been concentrated in extremely secretive organizations. The reaction has understood that, even in parties supported by the state, clandestinity is a precious asset. Naturally all these organizations take on the functions of virtual undercover police forces against the proletariat.

In Italy, the fascist party is not content with having the official police at its disposal. It has its own espionage and counterespionage services. Everywhere it spreads informers, secret agents, provocateurs and police spies. And it is this mafia, police and terrorists all in one, which “suppressed” Matteotti—as it had many others.

In the United States, the participation of the private police in the conflicts between labor and capital has grown fearfully. The offices of famous private detectives provide the capitalists with discreet informers, expert provocateurs, riflemen, guards, foremen and also totally corrupt “trade union militants.” The Pinkertons, Burns and Thiels detective agencies have 100 head offices and about 10,000 branches: they supposedly employ 135,000 people. Their annual budget comes to $65 million. They have set up industrial espionage, factory-floor espionage, espionage in the workshop, the shipyards, offices, and wherever there are workers employed. They have created the prototype of the worker-informer. [5]

An analogous system, exposed by Upton Sinclair, operates in the universities and schools of the great democracy whose praises are sung by Walt Whitman.

CONCLUSIONS

To sum up: the study of the workings of the Okhrana shows us that the immediate aim of the police is more to know than to repress. To know in order to repress at the appointed hour, to the extent desired—if not altogether. Faced by this wily adversary, powerful and cunning, a workers’ party lacking clandestine organization, a party which keeps nothing hidden, is like an unarmed man, with no cover, in the sights of a well positioned rifleman. Revolutionary work is too serious to be kept in a glasshouse. The party of the revolution must organize so as to avoid enemy vigilance as far as possible; so as to hide its most important resources absolutely; so as not—in the countries which are still democratic—to be at the mercy of a lurch to the right by the bourgeoisie, or of a declaration of war so as to train our comrades in the behavior which is demanded by these imperatives. [6]

On the early morning of June 4, 2025, I woke up with an email from my friend Steven Barclay announcing the sad news of the sudden death of our dear Edmund White. I had not seen Edmund in a long while, but I immediately felt the pain one suffers at the loss of a close friend.  

For almost two decades Edmund actively participated in the life of our Village Voice Bookshop in Paris (1982-2012), largely contributing to its success. He arrived in the city in 1983, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the US. The first book he presented at the bookshop was his novel A Boy’s Own Story praised by Susan Sontag as the work of ‘one of the outstanding writers of prose in America today.’ He stayed in Paris until the late 90’s, launching over those years no fewer than fourteen of his books— including his singular biography of Jean Genet. His works on Proust and Rimbaud came out after he had left Paris for New York.  

Edmund was an author who embraced many different subjects, including some touchy ones. Always trusting the judgment of his audience and their sense of humor, with obvious delight he would choose to read some of the most sulfurous pages from his gay novels. These performances always ended with great applause, large smiles and good laughter.  He was much loved by his readers who crowded into the bookshop to listen to him. 
After the closing of the Village Bookshop in 2012, I saw Edmund once more. It was at a talk he gave at La Maison de la Poésie across from the Pompidou Center in the Marais.  He was accompanied by Michael Carroll, his husband, also a writer. 

Over the years I continued to pay attention to his new publications, but the one I most cherish and regularly return to is The Unpunished Vice, A Life of Reading (2018) in which he invites readers to discover his immense and eclectic library that reveals the extraordinary range of his literary tastes. In it he also shares with us his special relation with every single book of the hundreds of authors mentioned in the book, showing how each one of them is important to him. A trove of literary treasures. 

 “My lodestar was always Paris,” and “Colette my first great passion.” Whether in The Unpunished Vice or his earlier The Flâneur, A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2004), Edmund tells us again and again of his love for Paris, one very different from tours, and one that includes “his” beloved French writers. 

(See in my memoir Village Voices for Edmund’s mentions of Michel Foucault (p. 60); Jean Genet (p. 61) and his great interview by René de Ceccatty (p. 62-64) ) 

My last contact with Edmund was an email received on January 6, 2025: 

“Dear Odile, best wishes for the new year! Sorry I haven’t participated in the memoir about the bookstore. It certainly was one of the many joys of living in Paris and it became my literary home for years… I’m fine busy writing though my new books are no longer published in France… “

Reading these last words I felt a pang of sadness. It is my hope that Edmund’s past and latest works will find their way back to France and in French, a language Edmund spoke fluently and honored by writing unforgettable biographies about such iconic writers as Proust and Baudelaire. 

Odile Hellier
June 7, 2025
Paris

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ODILE HELLIER was born in the South of France during World War II and raised in the two different regions of Lorraine, near the German border still haunted by past wars, and Brittany fronting the Atlantic Ocean. After advanced studies in Russian language and literature she taught in high school for two years, she decided to broaden her scope and work in world organizations. During the fall of 1968, Hellier enrolled in a professional school in Paris that trained translators and interpreters in international relations. Hellier is the founder and owner of the Village Voice Bookshop—a hub of Anglophone literary life and culture that operated in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris for over thirty years. Village Voices is Hellier’s archival project and personal memoir.

The sequel to The Motorcycle Diaries, this book is Ernesto Che Guevera's journal documenting the young Argentine's second trip through Latin America, revealing the emergence of a committed revolutionary.

These letters, poetry, and journalism document young Ernesto Guevara's second Latin American journey following his graduation from medical school in 1953. Together, these writings reveal how the young Argentine is transformed into a militant revolutionary.

After traveling through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Central America, Ernesto witnesses the 1954 US-inspired coup in Guatemala, which has a profound effect on his political awareness. He flees to Mexico where he encounters Fidel Castro, marking the beginning of a political partnership that profoundly changes the world and Che himself. Includes a foreword by Alberto Granado, Che's companion on his first adventures in Latin America on a vintage Norton motorcycle, and features poems written by young Ernesto inspired by his experiences along with facsimiles of pages from his diary.

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FOREWORD
ALBERTO GRANADO

It is a difficult task to write the foreword to a book whose author’s work and life made him a paradigm of a human being. One faces the temptation to transform that person into some kind of myth that is unrelated to the reality of his life. This challenge is even greater when one had the great fortune of participating in those “extravagant dream trips” into concrete reality.[1]

Those of us who enjoyed his friendship and were close enough to perceive the moral and intellectual qualities that set him above the ordinary run of humankind should, however, always remember that he was a man and only a man, not a mythical being.

Bearing this in mind, I accept the responsibility as an old friend—from as long ago as October 1942—of presenting this diary of his second Latin America journey, which with some premonition he gave the title “Otra Vez” [Once Again].

In this vivid account, the reader constantly encounters the flesh-and-blood Ernesto Guevara with all the temerity of his 25 years. Various aspects of the emerging personality are revealed, as he sets out to confront all the challenges of the journey along with his friend Carlos Ferrer (Calica)[2]: “two distinct wills extending out into the Americas, not knowing exactly what it is they seek, nor in which direction it lies.”

Nevertheless, once the decision has been made to leave the beaten track offered by Venezuela in order to discover and participate in the revolution then underway in Guatemala, the change occurring in him becomes more palpable; now a certain confidence emerges that he has found the path he had been seeking.

While his first trip through South America served to deepen his ideas about social distinctions and sharpened his consciousness of the need to struggle against them, this second journey consolidates his political understanding and fires a growing need for further study in order to grasp more clearly why and how such a struggle should be waged so that it culminates in a genuine revolution.

In my mind’s eye, I remember the good-bye from his family and friends who did not understand the reasons for his departure, yet they went through the motions appropriate to members of their class of farewelling someone leaving in search of new horizons— although in this case he was breaking all the group norms and contradicting all established schemas.

I see him dressed in Argentine army fatigues: tight pants, rough shirt and boots with the laces certainly untied, not as a sign of carelessness but in accordance with his scale of values in which external show is not the most important.

Hanging out of the second-class compartment with a broad smile, holding high his almost shaven head (always the “pelao Guevara”[3]), he departs Buenos Aires station and enters history.

From this moment, he notes down everything he considers important, the pages of his diary becoming something of a fascinating kaleidoscope of a constant symbiosis of the literary stylist and the insightful observer.

He gives a graphic description of the countryside around the Bolsa Negra mine [in Bolivia] and then comments: “But the mine’s heart was not beating. It lacked the energy of the arms of those who every day tear from the earth their load of ore, arms that on this day, August 2, the Day of the Indian and of Agrarian Reform, were in La Paz defending the revolution.”

In this passage, we can see succinctly what was already becoming axiomatic for Ernesto: the importance of the human being in all aspects of life. But at the same time, such comments reflect the great beauty of a talented writer.

Another striking aspect of this early diary is the great variety of activities Ernesto undertook on this short trip. He goes from lecturing about teacher training at the University of Buenos Aires to speaking about research with the eminent Spanish physiologist P. Suñer, a victim of persecution by the Franco regime.

He had a series of discussions (often disagreements) with prominent individuals. He drew up a critical balance sheet after each discussion that shows a remarkable insight, even half a century later.

Arriving in Costa Rica, he met several exiles, including two who would later play a significant political role as presidents of their respective countries. Certainly, his discussions with Juan Bosch from the Dominican Republic and Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela instantly raise the question of how this unknown young man with an unassuming manner, yet incisive and critical in dialogue, could break through the circle of officials surrounding these figures.

The answer to this question is not easy; but the fact is that these discussions did take place and Ernesto’s conclusions from them could not have been more accurate.

In a few words, he describes Bosch as he was during his time in government. And he anticipates with pitiless realism how Betancourt would later conduct himself, both as president of Venezuela and leader of the Acción Democrática electoral machine, in handing over his country’s great wealth to the US transnationals.

The diary is not lacking in joy or vitality, and along with the man of ideas, we find the lively young man full of energy, sensitive to the presence of women, capable of giving the “negrita Socorro” some affection and comfort without betraying himself, while at the same time being able to judge their encounter in its true colors.

The account of his time in Mexico is extraordinarily important because of the wide range of his interests it reveals. He visits museums, admires the murals of Orozco, Rivera, Tamayo and Siqueiros, tours the fascinating Aztec pyramids, without forgetting his real objectives. Along with his fascination with Mexican culture arises his decisive and irreversible commitment, as he puts it, “to lead the life of a proletarian.”

Thus, he does not allow himself to be tempted by offers of help from Ulises Petit de Murat, Hilda [his wife], Petrone or his own aunt Beatriz, who would set him on a bourgeois path. He maintains his proletarian status with “the ordinary chain of hopes and disappointments” that characterizes the life of that class during the struggle for real power.

This new attitude to the political problems around him is clearly shown in a discussion with a group of Argentine exiles in Mexico. They want to send a message of support to the new government in Argentina that has emerged after the overthrow of Perón. In this meeting, Ernesto argues that before giving their support to the government, they should wait until it has delivered “something definite with regard to trade union democracy and the running of the economy.”

Along with this proletarian consciousness arises an ever-greater sense of human solidarity. Just as during his first trip when he shared his overcoat with a couple of workers on a freezing night on the Chilean Altiplano, now in Mexico, despite his own hardships, he seeks and obtains money (150 pesos) to help his friend “El Patojo” [“Shorty”] [4] return to Guatemala where his mother needs his financial and emotional support.

The final pages of the diary make perfectly clear the three main lines of conduct that have marked the first decades of his life: his interest and ability in science; his wanderings among curious travelers and his study of nature and civilizations in the company of friends; and his need to participate in a genuine revolution.

With regard to science, he comments on the presentation in Guanajato of his work on allergies and considers the option to do research work and human medicine. At this time, when he is writing about his future, he also refers to the idea of meeting the Granados in Caracas, and although he considers this a possibility, it is more of a passing thought than a concession to the pleas of his friends. What is especially clear to me is that his behavior and attitude is already very different from that of “Fuser” with whom he shared some unrepeatable moments in 1952. His desire for travel and research is still there, but you can sense his iron conviction not to become a semi-scientist, semi-bohemian, semi-revolutionary. Now he is ready to make a great decisive leap.

Through one of those accidents of life, it was during that difficult month of July [1955] that he first met Fidel Castro, finding in him the strength and support he needed.

And if it is said that this diary gives little space to a meeting that would be so important for the future, would I be wrong in thinking that in writing those lines, he said to himself, paraphrasing the words of “the Master” [José Martí]: “There are some things that must remain in silence.”

Alberto Granado
Havana, Cuba
August 1998

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1.  Alberto Granado was Ernesto’s traveling companion in his first trip around Latin America in 1951-52.

2. Carlos Ferrer (Calica) was a childhood friend from Alta Gracia, Córdoba.

3. Pelao: close-cropped, one of Ernesto’s nicknames.

4.  Julio Roberto Cáceres Valle.

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Born in Argentina in 1922, ALBERTO GRANADO was Che's companion on his first motorcycle adventure in Latin America, chronicled in the New York Times Bestseller The Motorcycle Diaries. A doctor and biochemist, Granado lived and worked in Venezuela for several years before moving to Cuba in 1961, where he co-founded the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Santiago. He authored the memoir Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary, and retired in 1994.

May 1st marks International Workers’ Day, a worldwide celebration of worker-power dating back to May 1, 1886, when roughly half a million workers across the United States walked off their jobs in their fight for an eight-hour workday.

To celebrate these radical roots, we're happy to share 30% off our May Day Reading List, a selection of writings we recommend from some of our favorite authors, activists, and agitators.

To celebrate the release of Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh, translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum, we're proud to share an excerpt from this "tender, sharply-imagined coming-of-age novel, full of clarity and bleak humor" (Elaine Castillo). 

Rock, Paper, Grenade is a gritty and bald bildungsroman, a lilting picaresque of a life lived in the shadow of someone else’s war.

A realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this novel offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches out and opens the curtains, letting in a little light.

When Tymofiy is five years old, his small family in Cherkasy, Ukraine grows by one. Not with the birth of a baby sister or brother, but with the appearance of Felix—mentor and tormentor, enemy and friend—Tymofiy’s grandmother’s sometime-boyfriend. “Who are you?” Felix screams in the depths of a confused and drunken rage at all who cross his path, his memories of the Soviet-Afghan war clouding his eyes and senses. “Who are you?” Tymofiy asks himself as he drifts through the streets of his hometown, searching for love and protection, for a better, happier way of life.

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A POLONAISE FOR FELIX

Lida had never been afraid of anything. Maybe because she did not watch TV or read the newspapers. Lida would listen to the radio and knit. She would sit in her small, cramped room on the bed under a monochrome tapestry (a naked woman on a riverbank), knit, and, of course, listen to the radio.

Lida swam in the Dnipro all year. Almost every day, fearless and hardened by nature, she went to the river, resolutely crossed the long sandy beach covered with islands of ice and mounds of snow, walked out on the frozen surface, looked for an ice hole left by fishermen, took off her clothes, but for a faded-pink and at one time red swimsuit, firmly rested her hands on the edges of the hole, and dove in. And all this happened year after year, until one February day she didn’t resurface from beneath the ice. For almost a minute, an unexpected force carried her away from the ice hole through the dark waters of the Dnipro, farther from the light and closer to death.

Felix rescued Lida. He often accompanied her when she was swimming. He walked into the distance, smoked, walked carefully along the icy quiet surface of the reservoir, looking toward the fairway, as if expecting desert caravans of dushman armed with Stingers to swim out of the frosty haze. But, of course, there were no caravans. And, of course, no dushman either. And when he looked back, there was no Lida. Felix rushed to the ice hole and beneath the murky ice he saw her gray flailing body. He threw off his jacket, plunged to the waist, slid his fingers along her body, looked for something to grab onto, finally grabbed her hair, pulled. Lida hit her head on the bottom of the ice, scratched her face and hands, had almost stopped breathing, and, as was made clear later, had said goodbye to life. In the murky crystal of the cold water, she managed to catch a glimpse of the light edge of the sky, remembered the summer and the sound of reeds in the backwaters between the villages of Chervona Sloboda and Lesky, the tall pines of the Sofiyivka Park, and the spring morning draft that swayed the whitewashed lace curtains hanging in the cottage’s summer kitchen. And most of all, she thought about how it was a pity that there was so little and that there could have been a little more: summer, reeds, sunshine, forest skirted with dried mushrooms, limitless lawns of heather, and silver poplars in the wind, pouring over the transparent afternoon splendor. And this was the most frightening of her fleeting thoughts.

After this, Lida didn’t swim in winter anymore.

Perhaps the river’s ice was the only thing that frightened her.

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Felix was discharged in ’89. After he was wounded, shell-shocked, and held in captivity, the Moscow leadership started to seriously doubt his usefulness. According to the law, while waiting for retirement, he had to work somewhere, so he was taken on as a truck driver for a pasta factory. His influential friends from the Soviet party got him the job. At first, before he got used to it, Felix wandered around the factory open-mouthed. He hardly understood anything and did not trust anyone. The consequences of the shell shock did not let up for a long time. He was allowed not to work, so he wandered between the shops, sat for hours beneath the leaky shed roof, and smoked, watching the measured flow of factory life. Curiously, he repaired the fence around the flowerbed, poisoned a hornet’s nest near the public toilet, and drew a realistic penis for the funny bear on the May Day poster.

And finally, he found his way. He joined a group of veterans of the Afghan war (some criminals among them), who drove around the grounds in a truck with black plates, while workers, those who couldn’t get away with not working, filled the truck with groceries: Soviet cognac, condensed milk, butter, sacks of flour and pasta, boxes of candies and cakes. After the truck passed the checkpoint without obstacle, it rolled in the direction of the Eastern Borderlands and finally unloaded on the right bank of the Western Bug River. The patrons of the party got part of the money, something was thrown to the director of the factory, and everything else was divided and spent on booze. At the same time, Felix collected payments at the central market. They resold purchases there, provisions bought from the villagers. The payments were small, but the market was big. Sometimes he took goods instead of the money. A silver-haired Azerbaijani with a missing ear got him sweet peppers and tomatoes. Fat-bottomed Ada specialized in meat. One agreeable old man brought eggs and farmer’s cheese directly to Felix’s apartment.

The building he lived in was right across from the market. It was a new, brick building from ’86 with large bright rooms and glassed-in balconies. The neighbors were mostly officers of the 40th Army of the Soviet Ground Forces and their families. Felix got a three-room apartment on the fourth floor. His wife, Tanya, and daughter moved in while Felix was still stationed in Afghanistan. Just like a thousand of his army friends, he outfitted the apartment with Japanese appliances hauled on donkeys and camels by caravanners from Pakistan and covered the living room with a fluffy, patterned rug requisitioned from the Bagram market. The furniture, however, was from Romania, but beech wood, a bespoke order from the factory in Baia Mare. His wife took care of decorating the apartment. In the beginning, Felix did not care about the apartment, the appliances, not even the rug, though he had taken a long time selecting it and was anxious about it, asking the seller detailed questions and bargaining for each afghani, and having reached an acceptable price, he came away with it for free. And when he returned, he still did not care. He was used to an austere life; he couldn’t care less about the cozy apartment. Then he came to his senses, looked around, but it was too late to change anything.

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ARTEM CHEKH is a Ukrainian author and soldier. He is the author of some sixteen books, including Absolute Zero, and his work has been translated into English, Polish, Czech, and Russian. Chekh is currently serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.