An African Dream

The complete text of the campaign diaries kept by Guevara in the Congo in 1965-1966. In January 1965 Ernesto Guevara, one of the heroes of the Cuban Revolutionary War and a minister in Fidel Castro's government, vanished. His sudden disappearance was a subject for conjecture all over the world. He eventually surfaced in the heart of Africa where, with 100 Cuban guerilla fighters to assist him, he put into action his theories of how to help the oppressed peoples of Africa throw off the yoke of colonial imperialism. His first task was to help the young Laurent Kabila in his struggle against the dictator Mobutu, who had seized power in the newly independent Congo following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The diaries that Guevara kept during his months in Africa record a political, strategic and ideological failure: the first steps, in fact, in the catastrophic, if heroic, adventure that ultimately led to Guevara's death in the jungles of Bolivia and to the creation of one of the most romantic and potent legends of our time.