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  • Published: 5 January 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241548745
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $37.00

I Embrace You With All My Revolutionary Fervor

Letters 1947-1967




A new selection of the letters of Che Guevera, from birth to death, many released for the very first time

Che Guevara was an inveterate letter writer and diarist throughout his short but extraordinary life. His letters and diaries are those of a master narrator, characterized by a brutal honesty, a remarkable lack of ego, a razor-sharp wit, an iron will and a great capacity to express his love and affection for his closest friends and family.

This selection of Che Guevara's correspondence, beginning with letters penned in his early travels around Latin America as a medical student, shows how he polished his unique style over the years. This selection maps the emergence of a dedicated revolutionary and original political thinker from the wide-eyed young Argentine who set out to discover Latin America. Covering the entirety of Che's life, from his famous motorcycle journey around South America to the Cuban Revolutionary War, from the setting-up of the pioneering communist state of Cuba to his revolutionary travels to the Congo and Bolivia. But it also reveals a more intimate, personal side to Che, including his letters to his mother, wife and children.

In one of his last letters to his young children, Che advised them to 'always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.'

  • Published: 5 January 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241548745
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $37.00

About the authors

Ernesto Che Guervara

Ernesto Che Guevara was born into a middle-class family in Argentina in 1928 and trained as a doctor, but became radicalized by the poverty and hunger he witnessed in South America. He played a key role in the Cuban revolution and served in Fidel Castro's government. He then travelled to Congo to support the rebellion there, and finally to Bolivia, where with a small, committed group he initiated a revolutionary movement and was captured and executed by Bolivian and US military forces in 1967.

Ernesto Che Guevara

ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957.  Following the rebels’ victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba.

Maria del Carmen Ariet Garcia

MARÍA DEL CARMEN ARI GARCIA is a researcher and Associate Senior Professor at the University of La Habana, where she has worked as a teacher and lecturer in postgraduate courses, workshops, and seminars. She was awarded the National Prize for Cultural Research for Lifetime Achievement in 2019. She is Scientific Coordinator of the "Ernesto Che Guevara" Center for Studies, advisor to the Che Guevara Chair, FLACSO Program of the University of La Habana. Member of the Scientific Degrees Commission for Sociology of the Ministry of Higher Education (MES), member of LASA and of the Editorial Board of the journal Contexto Latinoamericano.