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The Awakening of Latin America
This classic anthology on Latin America shows the Argentine-born revolutionary's cultural depth, rigorous intellect, and intense emotional engagement with a continent and its people. In a letter to his mother in 1954, a young Ernesto Guevara wrote, “The Americas will be the theater of my adventures in a way that is much more significant than I would have believed.”In The Awakening of Latin America we have the story of those adventures, charting Che’s evolution from an impressionable young medical student to the “heroic guerrilla,” assassinated in cold blood in Bolivia. Spanning seventeen years, this anthology draws on from his family’s personal archives and offers the best of Che’s examples of his journalism, essays, speeches, letters, and even poems. As Che documents his early travels through Latin America, his involvement in the Guatemalan and Cuban revolutions, and his rise to international prominence under Fidel Castro, we see how his fervent commitment to social justice shaped and was shaped by the continent he called home.
530 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
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188 people want to read
About the author
Ernesto Che Guevara
406 books2,071 followersErnesto "Che" Guevara, commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was a Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, since his death Guevara's stylized visage has become an ubiquitous countercultural symbol and global icon within popular culture.
His belief in the necessity of world revolution to advance the interests of the poor prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara's radical ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their movement, and travelled to Cuba with the intention of overthrowing the U.S.-backed Batista regime. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the successful two year guerrilla campaign that topled the Cuban government.
After serving in a number of key roles in the new government, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.
Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled "Guerrillero Heroico," was declared "the most famous photograph in the world" by the Maryland Institute of Art.
His belief in the necessity of world revolution to advance the interests of the poor prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara's radical ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their movement, and travelled to Cuba with the intention of overthrowing the U.S.-backed Batista regime. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the successful two year guerrilla campaign that topled the Cuban government.
After serving in a number of key roles in the new government, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.
Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled "Guerrillero Heroico," was declared "the most famous photograph in the world" by the Maryland Institute of Art.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 9, 2020
Great compilation of Che Guevara's diary entries, speeches, letters, and articles. Gives insight into the evolution of his revolutionary thought process. Also gives insight into guerrilla life and strategy.
December 21, 2024
A wonderful survey of Che's works, offering a broad overview of his transition from aspiring doctor to integral participant in the Cuban Revolution. This collection also highlights very well Che's concept of Latin America as a block of states with common issues and a common cause (as well as a common enemy in the form of the U.S.).
In the tradition of Bolivar, he considered himself a citizen of Latin America but was willing to go wherever he was needed to speak or fight on behalf of people looking to improve social conditions in their homeland.
To have lived through the U.S. backed invasion of Guatemala on behalf of United Fruit, and also to have led the troops that fended off Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion is no small feat. Very interesting to hear the accounts of these events from the man himself.
In the tradition of Bolivar, he considered himself a citizen of Latin America but was willing to go wherever he was needed to speak or fight on behalf of people looking to improve social conditions in their homeland.
To have lived through the U.S. backed invasion of Guatemala on behalf of United Fruit, and also to have led the troops that fended off Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion is no small feat. Very interesting to hear the accounts of these events from the man himself.
September 14, 2025
The obsession continues! As soon as I finished The Motorcycle Diaries I wanted to read more of Che Guevara's writings, because I'd found some of it, especially near the end, incredibly compelling. Anyway, I think this was a really great choice. It's a nicely comprehensive anthology of Che Guevara's own writings, organised chronologically. I think it gives you a pretty complete picture of Guevara's thoughts, development as a thinker, and the overall trajectory of his life.
There were a few sections that weren't my favourite - while I appreciate how it gave me an interesting insight into his thoughts and life, the book is a little overburdened by pages full of Guevara's reading lists at different points in his life. An earlier section in the book includes the short reviews he wrote, and I enjoyed that more, it was quite interesting to get a look in to what his goodreads might have looked like. But reading lists were not as interesting, when compared to the content of the rest of his book (although I suppose I was impressed by quite how much greek philosophy and 16th century poetry he read). I highlighted A LOT, from funny quips (he was an INCREDIBLY funny guy) to insightful and cutting thoughts.
The beginning of the book has some diaries from his earliest travels around Argentina. It's a great place to start - as in The Motorcycle Diaries I really did enjoy his "travel writing", and you can see the seeds of the ideas that he continues to espouse through his life, especially his ideas of being a brother of all of Latin America, and the centering of the United States as the colonial control across the continent. Even from these first travels in 1950 (when he was about 22, my age!) he seemed to be an interesting character, and there was even an article written in an Argentinian newspaper about his trip. I'm always very impressed by the influence he was able to have over people, and the way he leveraged his connections! It's a very important and useful skill.
The next section had excerpts from The Motorcycle Diaries, so that saved me some time as I'd literally just read those a week beforehand. I was quite glad that immediately afterwards were extracts from Otra Vez, the diaries of his second trip around Latin America. He really was a prolific and dedicated diarist, it definitely inspired me to try and commit a bit harder to mine as of late. This is a very interesting piece of writing, as it jumps quite wildly in tone. I suppose that's unsurprising, for a piece of contemporary private writing, especially given the rollercoaster he went through. I definitely learned a lot about the idea of having a "set path" to follow, by seeing the way that he had to navigate all sorts of road blocks (both literally and figuratively), and how his aims and plans morphed through the two or three years of travelling. As he travels through Central America, he starts to deal with more direct threats towards him (for example having books confiscated for being communist), and difficulties with visas. While in Costa Rica, I was again really impressed by how quickly he got to know all sorts of people. I'd be quite interested to read other sources from people of this time, to work out how he was perceived at this point, before becoming the Cuban Revolutionary; he certainly seemed to be influential already. This section also has some of my favourite quotes I collected, including, "Asthma is fucking with me." It's so charmingly human. The most fascinating part of this diary is near the end, as he hears news of and eventually becomes involved with the US invasion of Guatemala, overthrowing their leader and imposing a new one. It was insane to read it "as it happened", from someone who even in the moment knew he was really witnessing history. He showed a lot of bravery in immediately wishing to be involved on the front lines as a medic, despite the imminent threat to his own self, added on to the fact he was a known communist - the party was outlawed extremely shortly into the new leaders reign. He was eventually able to escape to Mexico, where we are greeted by a rather hilarious change of tone as he discusses exploring caves. We do eventually see the seeds of his involvement with the Cuban Revolution, meeting Castro's brother, getting jailed for being a communist (they found a course in his room for learning Russian, which was apparently enough... I mean they were right but that evidence is crazy...), and then their final setting sail on the Granma towards Cuba. Overall, this was one of my favourite parts of the book, it was a really interesting document of this time in Latin America.
While in Mexico, he wrote a number of quite interesting articles, that he sent back to his family, and are published in this book. They're good medium-short pieces of analysis. I found some really interesting because I broadly agreed ("Machu-Picchu: An Enigma in Stone of the Americas"), and one interesting because in many ways I didn't agree ("The Workers of the United States: Friends or Enemies?"). I think it's always nice to run across parts I don't agree with (and to formulate arguments in my head for WHY that is), because it helps me to find the bounds and limits of my agreement, and to feel a bit more sure that I'm really considering my own thoughts and opinions etc., and not just absorbing them all from someone else. The point of this exercise is to learn a lot more about Latin America and this period in history from the perspective of someone deeply involved, not to just download a lot of new opinions to have!
I found it quite interesting that some of Guevara's poetry was included - I'm not quite sure what to think of them, which I think is mostly the fault of this being translated from Spanish. It was a section that I especially wished I'd been able to find not-in-translation somewhere on the internet, but I found it oddly not that easy. I think poetry is really one of the most tricky things in the world to translate - see Emily Wilson's 80 pages of translation notes or whatever on the Iliad.
In Part Two, we then move on to writing from during the Revolutionary War in Cuba. The interview Guevara did with an Argentine journalist while a guerrilla fighter in the jungle was really fascinating, and it was cool to see him through somebody else's eyes, if only for a little bit. I quite enjoyed a number of his articles written for propaganda magazines; they're interesting studies in how to simplify a problem and present it in an easy to digest and motivatory manner, as well as often being really funny. My favourite was "Don't Be Stupid, Buddy!" which was great fun and quite clever too. I also really really enjoyed the speeches to the Youth Congress and International Volunteer Work Brigades. I suppose I'm a little biased, but it was nice to see him explicitly acknowledge and thank the USAmerican faction for being there, and talk about how they deserve a lot of respect for fighting against what their country is doing. They were also good speeches to see him sharing his vision of the new Cuba they're building.
Another speech that I would nominate for maybe the best in this book (admittedly, it's also probably by far the longest), was "Economics Cannot be Separated from Politics", a speech he gave as an intervention at the CIES Conference, Punta del Este. He's speaking to the other delegations from around the Americas, and puts forwards some really really good points breaking down other arguments that have been made in the conference, of course mostly from the USA. The title tells you a lot of the general gist, but the way he explains his points is really good, and you can really feel the power of him as a speaker through the book. After I finished this speech, I looked him up on YouTube to see him on video actually giving a speech. I'd definitely recommend it, I think it's really cool to see it brought to life, and to hear the power and conviction in his voice. He really is, in my opinion, a very charismatic person, and I think that's quite an interesting aspect of this all to consider. Because of course, some of his strengths are his strategy, and some are his experience in medicine, and yet others were how well read he was across the board. But you can't really teach good looks and charisma, and that definitely helped him a lot. It's an important part of a movement, whether people like it or not.
Tacked on at the end after all the writings of Punta del Este, is a letter he wrote. There's a few of these dotted through the book - the early ones are to his family, and are INCREDIBLY charming. The way he writes to his mother is just so so sweet. But the later ones are often to various political allies in various places, and I did find it quite funny just how directly and casually he writes.
Finally, in Part Three, we come to a section on his works and writings after leaving Cuba to try to spread socialism through other parts of the world, and to support "homegrown" revolutions in other countries. There's an excerpt from the Congo Diary, which as he wrote himself, is, "the story of a failure." To be honest, I found this whole section to be quite depressing, especially in a later piece of writing when he mentions being 39, and considering how much longer he can reasonably live the life of a revolutionary. It's like I said to Anna when we were watching Little Women - the story never changes. His Bolivian Diary is even more depressing, as you read through months and months of things slowly falling apart, action lists that remain the same with little progress, people slowly being killed or deserting. Unfortunately, because he died suddenly, there's very little closure. I'd really like to learn more about his opinions on why these efforts in other countries didn't work, but while that's not possible I'll settle for other people's opinions if I can find them. There's a fair number of writings through this book on the "special conditions" that existed in Cuba, so I suppose I can try and apply some of that to the situations to work out how they were different. That's one of the other things about this book that's depressing - he does quite a lot of analysis of the political situations of other countries, and it's depressing to see where they lead. For example, he talks excitedly about the prospects in Brasil, the new left-wing leaders being elected and their good relations with Cuba. But of course, what he doesn't know at the time of writing is that shortly afterwards Brasil will be taken over by a military dictatorship that will last through to 1985, and that a left-wing president will not be elected again until Lula. But then again, through his speeches especially at the UN and Punta del Este, I was able to understand a lot more WHY the Cuban Revolution was unqiue and not really followed in the area by other successful revolutions, despite the brewing tensions across many other Latin American countries pushing for similar change, because the way Cuba was completely cut off (partially through the US threatening other countries in order to make it stick), as well as the collapse of their trade abilities after the US cut off the sugar quota make it clear how very hard it is to stick to your guns and pull through with that much pressure.
Anyway, in the end the book ends with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang, as there's a collection of Communiques that Guevara had written while in Bolivia but were never published, and then more bloody long reading lists. By this point, I was very confused how another 15% of my book was going to happen given that Guevara was dead, but it turned out the entire rest of the book was index! So I really steamrolled the last section ;)
Alright, I'm very aware that this is a comically long-winded review, but this is a rather long book with so many different parts to it, that I found it hard to just sit down and review it as a whole. I had lots of different thoughts about each of the parts, and I wanted to record them, if only for my own posterity. Overall, I think this was a really worthwhile read. I felt like I got a good whistle-stop tour of Che Guevara, and I don't feel so much like I need to trawl through loads more of his writing, although if I can find somewhere a collection with more speeches I might spring for it. Some of the bits drag it down a bit, but I still found it all so good, fun to read, and fascinating, that I've not reduced the score at all. I've already talked to everybody I know about lots of different thoughts from this book, so I'm going to take a guess that on the think about it for a long time scale, it's going to do alright. We'll see! On to my Fidel Castro biography next ;)
There were a few sections that weren't my favourite - while I appreciate how it gave me an interesting insight into his thoughts and life, the book is a little overburdened by pages full of Guevara's reading lists at different points in his life. An earlier section in the book includes the short reviews he wrote, and I enjoyed that more, it was quite interesting to get a look in to what his goodreads might have looked like. But reading lists were not as interesting, when compared to the content of the rest of his book (although I suppose I was impressed by quite how much greek philosophy and 16th century poetry he read). I highlighted A LOT, from funny quips (he was an INCREDIBLY funny guy) to insightful and cutting thoughts.
The beginning of the book has some diaries from his earliest travels around Argentina. It's a great place to start - as in The Motorcycle Diaries I really did enjoy his "travel writing", and you can see the seeds of the ideas that he continues to espouse through his life, especially his ideas of being a brother of all of Latin America, and the centering of the United States as the colonial control across the continent. Even from these first travels in 1950 (when he was about 22, my age!) he seemed to be an interesting character, and there was even an article written in an Argentinian newspaper about his trip. I'm always very impressed by the influence he was able to have over people, and the way he leveraged his connections! It's a very important and useful skill.
The next section had excerpts from The Motorcycle Diaries, so that saved me some time as I'd literally just read those a week beforehand. I was quite glad that immediately afterwards were extracts from Otra Vez, the diaries of his second trip around Latin America. He really was a prolific and dedicated diarist, it definitely inspired me to try and commit a bit harder to mine as of late. This is a very interesting piece of writing, as it jumps quite wildly in tone. I suppose that's unsurprising, for a piece of contemporary private writing, especially given the rollercoaster he went through. I definitely learned a lot about the idea of having a "set path" to follow, by seeing the way that he had to navigate all sorts of road blocks (both literally and figuratively), and how his aims and plans morphed through the two or three years of travelling. As he travels through Central America, he starts to deal with more direct threats towards him (for example having books confiscated for being communist), and difficulties with visas. While in Costa Rica, I was again really impressed by how quickly he got to know all sorts of people. I'd be quite interested to read other sources from people of this time, to work out how he was perceived at this point, before becoming the Cuban Revolutionary; he certainly seemed to be influential already. This section also has some of my favourite quotes I collected, including, "Asthma is fucking with me." It's so charmingly human. The most fascinating part of this diary is near the end, as he hears news of and eventually becomes involved with the US invasion of Guatemala, overthrowing their leader and imposing a new one. It was insane to read it "as it happened", from someone who even in the moment knew he was really witnessing history. He showed a lot of bravery in immediately wishing to be involved on the front lines as a medic, despite the imminent threat to his own self, added on to the fact he was a known communist - the party was outlawed extremely shortly into the new leaders reign. He was eventually able to escape to Mexico, where we are greeted by a rather hilarious change of tone as he discusses exploring caves. We do eventually see the seeds of his involvement with the Cuban Revolution, meeting Castro's brother, getting jailed for being a communist (they found a course in his room for learning Russian, which was apparently enough... I mean they were right but that evidence is crazy...), and then their final setting sail on the Granma towards Cuba. Overall, this was one of my favourite parts of the book, it was a really interesting document of this time in Latin America.
While in Mexico, he wrote a number of quite interesting articles, that he sent back to his family, and are published in this book. They're good medium-short pieces of analysis. I found some really interesting because I broadly agreed ("Machu-Picchu: An Enigma in Stone of the Americas"), and one interesting because in many ways I didn't agree ("The Workers of the United States: Friends or Enemies?"). I think it's always nice to run across parts I don't agree with (and to formulate arguments in my head for WHY that is), because it helps me to find the bounds and limits of my agreement, and to feel a bit more sure that I'm really considering my own thoughts and opinions etc., and not just absorbing them all from someone else. The point of this exercise is to learn a lot more about Latin America and this period in history from the perspective of someone deeply involved, not to just download a lot of new opinions to have!
I found it quite interesting that some of Guevara's poetry was included - I'm not quite sure what to think of them, which I think is mostly the fault of this being translated from Spanish. It was a section that I especially wished I'd been able to find not-in-translation somewhere on the internet, but I found it oddly not that easy. I think poetry is really one of the most tricky things in the world to translate - see Emily Wilson's 80 pages of translation notes or whatever on the Iliad.
In Part Two, we then move on to writing from during the Revolutionary War in Cuba. The interview Guevara did with an Argentine journalist while a guerrilla fighter in the jungle was really fascinating, and it was cool to see him through somebody else's eyes, if only for a little bit. I quite enjoyed a number of his articles written for propaganda magazines; they're interesting studies in how to simplify a problem and present it in an easy to digest and motivatory manner, as well as often being really funny. My favourite was "Don't Be Stupid, Buddy!" which was great fun and quite clever too. I also really really enjoyed the speeches to the Youth Congress and International Volunteer Work Brigades. I suppose I'm a little biased, but it was nice to see him explicitly acknowledge and thank the USAmerican faction for being there, and talk about how they deserve a lot of respect for fighting against what their country is doing. They were also good speeches to see him sharing his vision of the new Cuba they're building.
Another speech that I would nominate for maybe the best in this book (admittedly, it's also probably by far the longest), was "Economics Cannot be Separated from Politics", a speech he gave as an intervention at the CIES Conference, Punta del Este. He's speaking to the other delegations from around the Americas, and puts forwards some really really good points breaking down other arguments that have been made in the conference, of course mostly from the USA. The title tells you a lot of the general gist, but the way he explains his points is really good, and you can really feel the power of him as a speaker through the book. After I finished this speech, I looked him up on YouTube to see him on video actually giving a speech. I'd definitely recommend it, I think it's really cool to see it brought to life, and to hear the power and conviction in his voice. He really is, in my opinion, a very charismatic person, and I think that's quite an interesting aspect of this all to consider. Because of course, some of his strengths are his strategy, and some are his experience in medicine, and yet others were how well read he was across the board. But you can't really teach good looks and charisma, and that definitely helped him a lot. It's an important part of a movement, whether people like it or not.
Tacked on at the end after all the writings of Punta del Este, is a letter he wrote. There's a few of these dotted through the book - the early ones are to his family, and are INCREDIBLY charming. The way he writes to his mother is just so so sweet. But the later ones are often to various political allies in various places, and I did find it quite funny just how directly and casually he writes.
Finally, in Part Three, we come to a section on his works and writings after leaving Cuba to try to spread socialism through other parts of the world, and to support "homegrown" revolutions in other countries. There's an excerpt from the Congo Diary, which as he wrote himself, is, "the story of a failure." To be honest, I found this whole section to be quite depressing, especially in a later piece of writing when he mentions being 39, and considering how much longer he can reasonably live the life of a revolutionary. It's like I said to Anna when we were watching Little Women - the story never changes. His Bolivian Diary is even more depressing, as you read through months and months of things slowly falling apart, action lists that remain the same with little progress, people slowly being killed or deserting. Unfortunately, because he died suddenly, there's very little closure. I'd really like to learn more about his opinions on why these efforts in other countries didn't work, but while that's not possible I'll settle for other people's opinions if I can find them. There's a fair number of writings through this book on the "special conditions" that existed in Cuba, so I suppose I can try and apply some of that to the situations to work out how they were different. That's one of the other things about this book that's depressing - he does quite a lot of analysis of the political situations of other countries, and it's depressing to see where they lead. For example, he talks excitedly about the prospects in Brasil, the new left-wing leaders being elected and their good relations with Cuba. But of course, what he doesn't know at the time of writing is that shortly afterwards Brasil will be taken over by a military dictatorship that will last through to 1985, and that a left-wing president will not be elected again until Lula. But then again, through his speeches especially at the UN and Punta del Este, I was able to understand a lot more WHY the Cuban Revolution was unqiue and not really followed in the area by other successful revolutions, despite the brewing tensions across many other Latin American countries pushing for similar change, because the way Cuba was completely cut off (partially through the US threatening other countries in order to make it stick), as well as the collapse of their trade abilities after the US cut off the sugar quota make it clear how very hard it is to stick to your guns and pull through with that much pressure.
Anyway, in the end the book ends with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang, as there's a collection of Communiques that Guevara had written while in Bolivia but were never published, and then more bloody long reading lists. By this point, I was very confused how another 15% of my book was going to happen given that Guevara was dead, but it turned out the entire rest of the book was index! So I really steamrolled the last section ;)
Alright, I'm very aware that this is a comically long-winded review, but this is a rather long book with so many different parts to it, that I found it hard to just sit down and review it as a whole. I had lots of different thoughts about each of the parts, and I wanted to record them, if only for my own posterity. Overall, I think this was a really worthwhile read. I felt like I got a good whistle-stop tour of Che Guevara, and I don't feel so much like I need to trawl through loads more of his writing, although if I can find somewhere a collection with more speeches I might spring for it. Some of the bits drag it down a bit, but I still found it all so good, fun to read, and fascinating, that I've not reduced the score at all. I've already talked to everybody I know about lots of different thoughts from this book, so I'm going to take a guess that on the think about it for a long time scale, it's going to do alright. We'll see! On to my Fidel Castro biography next ;)
February 19, 2023
Loved this! An essential for anyone curious about the Cuban Revolution told from an internal perspective, and of course for anyone curious about Che Guevara and his life. It not only compiles all of Guevara's work neatly and chronologically, it also provides a timeline in the beginning of his life, which I found insanely helpful as this was my first introduction to both him and the Cuban Revolution. The ideas and points outlined in Guevara's works still apply today, and are no less important because of their age. A great book about a great man!
August 15, 2023
A masterful anthology of Che's writing that brings life to the legend -- journalism, diaries, essays, speeches, and letters. It provides invaluable perspective on Che Guevara, the Cuban Revolution, and Latin America.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews