Mexican publisher rediscovers Che Guevaras romantic side

A Mexican publisher has printed what it claims are the contents of a dog-eared notebook that were found on Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevaras body shortly after he was executed in October 1967.

London, Sept.13 : A Mexican publisher has printed what it claims are the contents of a dog-eared notebook that were found on Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara's body shortly after he was executed in October 1967.

Planeta, the publisher, claims that notebook was kept locked away for years in a Bolivian army vault.

The new book titled "The Green Notebook Of Che" contains pages filled with Guevara's handwriting, a collection of his favourite poetry. Many of the entries are love poems, and not codes or battle plans.

As the 40th death anniversary of Guevara approaches, romanticising his memory has become a worldwide industry, reports The Independent.

It quotes the new book as saying that Guevara remained in touch with his own romantic side to the end, even as he battled to foment a second revolution in the jungles of Bolivia.

Guevara was executed by Bolivian troops near the town of La Higuera on October 9,1967, after an ambush backed by the CIA and US Special Forces.

Planeta first showed the manuscript to Paco Ignacio, a popular Mexican novelist and biographer of Guevara, who has written the preface to the compendium.

Yesterday, Ignacio recalled the moment when his editor first handed him pages photocopied from Guevara's old spiral notebook.

"He asked, 'What is it?' and I said, 'Well, let me see'," Ignacio told the BBC World Service. "And I said, 'This is Guevara's handwriting. This is the green notebook'."

The existence of the book was already widely known but no biographer had seen it before. After Guevara was shot, according to Ignacio, CIA agents "looked at it and tried to find some code but they said: "They are just poems'."

More precisely, there were verses from 69 poems by four writers - Pablo Neruda from Chile, Nicol�s Guillé* of Cuba, César Vallejo of Peru and the Spaniard, Le�* Felipe.

Much of the notebook's history is murky. Some say Guevara purchased it as he tried to seed his vision of revolutionary socialism throughout Africa after his abrupt departure from Cuba, and from Castro's side, in 1963.

Others say he bought the cheap notebook on a trip to Tanzania that year and would retire, often up a tree, to write in it. In any event, the book stayed with him to the very end.

Planeta refused to reveal how it obtained the notebook, but said it spent two years verifying its authenticity before publication.

There is speculation that Bolivia's populist President, Evo Morales, a close ally of Castro, authorised the notebook's release from military archives after taking office in January last year.

It was never a secret that Guevara was an avid reader of books and Spanish-language poetry. He also tried writing verse himself, but always protested his poems were deeply unaccomplished.

ANI