Word: castros
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great mysteries surrounding Che Guevara's diary of his ill-fated guerrilla campaign in Bolivia is how it reached the hands of Fidel Castro. Almost immediately after Che had been captured and executed by Bolivia's army last fall, Western journalists swarmed to La Paz to bid for the publishing rights. "If I had the money," said Bolivian Minister of Government Antonio Arguedas at the time, "I would buy the diary myself and resell it at a profit." It seems, however, that money did not stand in Arguedas' way after all. Last week, less than a month...
...Scramble. The occasion was almost a national holiday for Cuba, where thousands queued up around bookstores waiting for their free copy of the book and Radio Havana poured out endless plugs for it. Castro practically had his choice of publishers for editions outside Cuba, has already authorized five other publications in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. In the U.S., he gave the nod to the leftist Ramparts magazine, and publication of the diary in Ramparts last week set off a mad scramble among other magazine and paperback houses for republication rights; at week's end, they were still locked...
...Castro, who wrote a 7,000-word introduction to the diary, was a bit vague when it came to explaining his propaganda coup. "The way that the diary came into our hands cannot be divulged at the moment," he wrote. "It is enough to say that it required no monetary remuneration." Actually, several copies of the diary have been around for the stealing or buying. At least one copy each had been photographed for Bolivian President Rene Barrientos, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and several Bolivian military brass. In addition, two U.S. journalists were allowed to transcribe many...
Bowdlerized Text. Though the Cuban version of the diary appeared to be genuine enough?and Castro invited newsmen to inspect photostats of its source?some doubts remained about its completeness. U.S. Freelance Writer Andrew St. George, who had seen the original, called the Cuban text "hasty, doctored and bowdlerized." Some errors in transcription were almost inevitable: Che's handwriting was a tiny, jerky scrawl and, in the course of his tortuous marches through Bolivia's rough terrain, parts of the text had been blotted out by sweat and rain...
Violated Discipline. The most serious problem, as both Che and Castro make clear, was the hostility of Bolivia's Communist Party and its secretary-general, Mario Monje, to the idea of guerrilla warfare. From the day he arrived in disguise on the deserted cattle ranch that served as the guerrilla base camp, Che was faced with the task of trying to impose his strict martial control on a group that had violated its own party discipline by joining his forces. Castro, in his introduction, bitterly accuses Monje of sabotaging the whole campaign with his "chauvinism and sterile reactionary sentiment...