Word: bolivian
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During the Bolivian campaign, Che roughed out the first draft of a short story whose hero, Pablo, shares important characteristics with the author and illustrates Che's own lifelong obsession with overcoming challenges and seeking social approval. Like Che, who grew up in a middle-class Buenos Aires family and was asthmatic, Pablo is citified, deracinated and afflicted with a physical handicap: poor sight. In the story, entitled Prueba Superada (Passing the Test), Pablo becomes almost overwhelmed by fear, anxiety and doubt after joining a guerrilla column in an unnamed Latin American country. On one terrible march, his shoes...
...often said to reflect the theories of Mao, Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap. To the extent that he sought to establish a rural, peasant base for revolution, that is true. His Bolivian papers, however, betray a pervasive Stalinist influence. Che sneered at the late Sociologist C. Wright Mills (The Marxists) for his "stupid anti-Stalinism," describing him as "a clear example of North American leftist intellectuals." He dismissed New Left Ideologue Herbert Marcuse because his concepts "are of little relevance in the national liberation struggle and nation-building as it had to be carried out under Stalin...
...proposed that sympathizers buy supermarkets in the major Bolivian cities to insure the guerrillas a source of food and profit. Wrote Che: "A truck rolling anywhere along the desolate Bolivian roads could unload five or ten metric tons of supplies for a guerrilla column without arousing the slightest suspicion...
...hardships and sense of isolation demoralized Che's men. The Bolivian army, which proved to be much better than Che imagined, relentlessly pursued the guerrillas, forcing them to abandon most of their supplies, including Che's asthma medicine. Wandering aimlessly within an ever-tightening perimeter, the guerrillas fell to quarreling and fighting one another. During this time, Che wrote a poem called "A Memory," which Bolivian authorities allowed St. George to copy from one of his notebooks...
...sent to Bolivia as his advance agent. In La Paz she got a job in the presidential press office and helped arrange the secret arrival of Che and the other Cubans. Then, violating Che's orders, Tania, who was an amateur musicologist and collected tape recordings of Bolivian folk music, went to the hills to live with him. On August 31, 1967, Tania and nine men walked into a Bolivian army ambush. All but one of them were killed. An autopsy showed that...