Ernesto Che Guevara
El diario del Che en Bolivia

There are books that don't even need to be read.

There are books that convey emotions and sensations to us, just through the cover, the texture of the paper, the scent of aged cellulose it emits, or the tactile perception you get when you hold it in your hands. This “El diario del Che en Bolivia” is one of those.
It is a rare copy of the original Cuban edition of 1968, published right after the events described from December 1966 to October 1967. A copy purchased at a flea market directly in Cuba, when I went for a vacation in the summer of 2007.
I don't know Spanish, but having read the Italian version, it doesn't take much to decipher its meaning in case I wanted to reread it in its mother tongue.
But this book, I repeat, has a charm all its own that goes beyond the content and conveys emotions through other means, beyond the written word.

Meanwhile, it is a book with a stunning cover (photo), worn by use and time, presenting us with the portrait of a dirty and worn-out Che Guevara with a green spatula mark diagonally across as if it were an interpretation of a Warhol painting.
The inner paper is yellowed by time and certainly by the fact that it is not of good quality. Stained, ruined pages held together by glue that is now dried out and poorly applied from the start.

On the 3rd internal page, at the title “Una introducciòn necessaria”, a preface by Fidel Castro, I find two neatly glued commemorative stamps depicting Fidel celebrating victory and the revolutionary poet Jose Martì (photo).
 
Here and there small pencil notes enrich it (photo) and spark my imagination about the various owners who must have preceded me: were they farmers contemporaneous with the events? Other revolutionaries? A meticulous and attentive student? Who knows, but I think in certain cases the actual historical reconstruction isn't important but what imagination wants us to believe. So I delude myself, perhaps, of having a piece of the Revolution in my hands, still smelling of sulfur and guerrilla, of years now gone by that evokes in my imagination moments of euphoria never lived or shared except through history books.
 
A book in my view “precious” that features in the last pages a sort of black and white photo report (the photos are grainy and technically poorly done! photo here) with Che engaged in various battles in the fields or in some moments of rest. A graphically unattractive book, poorly typeset, with very improbable fonts and disjointed spacing, but that emanates a truly difficult-to-describe charm.
 
A book which every time I open it reserves for me small, imperceptible surprises (now, for example, as I'm turning it over in my hands to write this review, I discovered between the folds of the pages a small hidden stamp I had never noticed before - photo here).
 
The back cover closes with an itinerant map of the military actions undertaken by the guerrilla (photo). Actions which, as we all know, will end with his capture and killing by Bolivian government troops.
 
A book of which very few copies circulate but, perhaps, not entirely impossible to trace and obtain. By going to Cuba, perhaps, and wandering through some improbable market like I did...