Collected for the first time, here are Guevara's letters, the vast majority never-before published in English.
"The powerful of the earth should take heed: deep inside that T-shirt where we have tried to trap him, the eyes of Che Guevara are still burning with impatience." —Ariel Dorfman
Ernesto Che Guevara was a voyager—and thus a letter writer—for his entire adult life. The letters collected here range from letters home during his Motorcycle Diaries trip, to the long letter to Fidel after the success of the Cuban revolution in early 1959, from the most personal to the intensely political, revealing someone who not only thought deeply about everything he encountered, but for whom the process of social transformation was a constant companion from his youth until shortly before his death. His letters give us Che the son, the friend, the lover, the guerilla fighter, the political leader, the philosopher, the poet. Che in these letters is often playful, funny, sometimes sarcastic, and deeply affectionate. His life was short, and these twenty years, from when he was 19 until days before his death, show it was also incredibly rich and full.
As his daughter Aleida Guevara, also a doctor like her father, writes, "When you write a speech, you pay attention to the language, the punctuation and so on. But in a letter to a friend or a member of your family, you don't worry about those things. It is you speaking, in your authentic voice. That's what I like about these letters; they show who Che really was and how he thought. This is the true political testimony of my father."
What People Are Saying
"Che is not only an intellectual, he was the most complete human being of our age." Jean Paul Sartre
"In these present times, when for many ethics and other profound moral values are seen to be so easily bought and sold, the example of Che Guevara takes on an even greater dimension." Rigoberta Menchu
“Of its contents, 80 percent has never beenavailable before. Deftly edited by Havana scholars María del Carmen Ariet García and Disamis Arcia Muñoz, the letters in I Embrace You are a newly available revelation. To read them is to discover his humor, his courage, his frankness, his odd blend of arrogance and generosity, his wanderlust and his idealism, his willingness to subsume himself in the cause of freedom for the poor in Cuba, in Congo, and in Bolivia. . . . In his sharp, clear, witty prose, you discover his irony, his love of poetry, his smooth shifts among registers— a writerly ease stemming from years ofreading world literature.” Joy Castro in the Los Angeles Review of Books