This book is the result of the slow but eventual workings of the US Freedom of Information Act. In 1997, the authors made a request for documents on the US government’s monitoring of Che Guevara, and the material they received became their 1997 book, Che Guevara and the FBI: The US Political Police Dossier on the Latin American Revolutionary. Then in 2007, ten years after the initial request, another package of documents arrived. They are published here with an introduction which summarises Che’s life but which concentrates on the main question on which they shed new light; his death.
Che Guevara was Fidel Castro’s second-in-command in the successful Cuban revolution. He left Cuba in 1965 first for the Congo and then Bolivia, where he organised a guerrilla movement against the government army of US-trained officers, which had overthrown the previous government in a coup in 1964. The expedition to Bolivia was in many ways a test of the idea that Cuba could export its revolution to other countries in Latin America, and its importance was clearly appreciated not just by the Cubans but also by the US.
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