The first-ever edition of Che Guevara's letters, the vast majority
never before published in English in any form.
Ernesto Che Guevara was a voyager - and thus a letter writer - for his
entire adult life. The letters collected in I Embrace You with All My
Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947-1967 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 which the book's
title comes), 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 guerrilla
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 20 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."
