I Embrace You With All My Revolutionary Fervor

Ernesto Che Guevara was a voyager--and thus a letter writer--for his entire
adult life. The letters collected here 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 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 guerilla 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 twenty 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."