Furibundo de la Serna

Laurence Whitehead

• The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America by Ernesto Che Guevara, translated by Ann Wright
  Verso, 155 pp, £19.95, June 1995, ISBN 1 85984 942 3
• Che Guevara by Jean Cormier, with Hilda Guevara and Alberto Grando
  Editions du Rocher, 448 pp, frs 139.00, August 1995, ISBN 2 268 01967 5
• Journal de Bolivie edited by Ernesto Che Guevara, translated by Fanchita Gonzalez- Batlle and France Binard
  La Découverte, 256 pp, fr 120.00, August 1995, ISBN 2 7071 2482 6
• L’Année ou nous n’étions nulle part: Extraits du journal de Che Guevara en Afrique edited by Paco Ignacio Taibo, Froilán Escóbar and Félix Guerra, translated by Mara Hernandez and René Solis
  Métaillié, 281 pp, fr 120.00, September 1995, ISBN 2 86424 205 2

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna found what his life was for in July 1955, in Mexico City. It was there, at the age of 27, that he met Raúl Castro, who introduced him to his older brother, Fidel. The Argentine doctor joined a motley band of Cuban expeditionaries in the near-suicidal landing (or sinking) of the Granma in a mangrove swamp at the eastern end of the island. The survivors took to the hills and, with the support of the peasants of the Sierra Maestra (as chronicled in Guevara’s Passages from the Revolutionary War and elaborated in his subsequent foco theory of guerrilla warfare), they toppled the pro-American dictator Batista.