Guevara's diary gives a day-by-day account of the 1966-67 effort to launch a continent-wide revolutionary front centered in Latin America's Southern Cone. It also contains valuable lessons in revolutionary leadership that can be studied and learned from.

The new edition by Pimlico, a division of Random House in the United Kingdom, however, does nothing to aid that process. Hoping to tap into the renewed interest in the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban revolution, Pimlico reissued the 1968 edition published there by Lorrimer Publishing. Other than a short introduction and a three-page postscript, nothing new has been added. Virtually no annotation has been prepared that would make Guevara's text comprehensible to readers who are not already very familiar with the subject.

A new introduction by Jon Lee Anderson argues that Guevara's revolutionary perspective was wrong. "Che's diary is...the rendition of a colossal personal failure," Anderson opines. The book's main value is "eloquently detailing the eternal conflict between man's search for ideals and the vicissitudes of reality in a physical world." Anderson is the author of a biography of Guevara that expounds that view for 832 pages.  
 
Pathfinder edition
In contrast, Pathfinder Press published a new edition of the Bolivian Diary in 1994, making Guevara's account available in English for the first time in decades. Edited by Mary-Alice Waters, Pathfinder's edition features a new translation and includes extensive footnotes, chronology, glossary, index, maps, and additional documents of the struggle that make the book accessible to new generations of working people and youth.

In a June 30 review of the Pimlico edition, the Times Literary Supplement noted the superiority of the Pathfinder edition.

"There is nothing particularly to recommend this edition" by Pimlico, reviewer Nicola Miller wrote. "The publishers have clearly taken a decision to keep footnotes to a minimum...and there is no bibliography or index.... I suspect that many readers, especially those under the age of forty, would welcome more help than is given in decoding a framework of reference that is no longer common currency. In that respect, the Pathfinder edition of 1994, edited by Mary-Alice Waters, is better value."  
 
CIA-backed edition reissued too
As if to underscore this fact, a second major publisher recently reissued the Bolivian Diary in an edition not designed to aid readers seeking the truth. Cooper Square Press, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, has published a facsimile of the 1968 edition published by Stein & Day under the title The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents.

As its name suggests, the Stein & Day edition was published with the backing of Washington and the Bolivian military dictatorship, for which these were indeed "captured documents," issued without the authorization of Guevara's widow. The U.S. government and its Bolivian subordinates--who stole the diary from Guevara when he was taken prisoner and then summarily executed in October 1967--aimed initially to publish a distorted version, omitting certain passages and altering others, confident that they could get away with it since they thought they had the sole copy. These efforts were frustrated when Cuba obtained a copy of the diary and arranged to have it published in millions of copies throughout the world.

The Cooper Square Press edition contains a new introduction by Henry Butterfield Ryan, a retired U.S. foreign service officer. It also includes the original introduction by Daniel James, a long series of slanders against Guevara and the Cuban Revolution.

Ryan admits the shady origins of this edition, saying, "Can one doubt that the U.S. government, and probably the CIA, helped Stein and Day obtain the diaries?" But that's irrelevant, he adds. "For today's reader, however, the provenance of the diaries has little importance."

Get your Pathfinder edition now!