This book by two leading US civil rights lawyers provides both documentary evidence and a clear accessible narrative to clarify a number of disputed aspects about the life and death of Argentinian revolutionary, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and the early years of the Cuban Revolution. The principal facts established are: 1) that Che did not leave Cuba in 1965 because of a split with Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution of 1959; 2) ‘that the US government, particularly its Central Intelligence Agency, had Che murdered, having secured the participation of its Bolivian client state’; and 3) that the Cuban’s foreign policy was independent of, and even antipathetic to the interests of the USSR.

These facts may not be controversial to supporters of the Cuban Revolution and those knowledgeable about US imperialism’s modus operandi in Latin America. However, as the authors point out, the idea that ‘the United States, and particularly the CIA, was not implicated in Che’s murder, has been accepted by almost every writer on the subject’. This includes the authors of the major biographies of Che published around the 30th anniversary of his execution in Bolivia in 1997; ‘none of these writers consider the CIA’s own admission that it had tried to assassinate Che, as well as Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, on various occasions when they were in Cuba’. Likewise, the notion of a split between Che and Fidel, and the crude caricature of Cuban internationalism as an instrument of USSR’s foreign policy, continue to be repeated by bourgeois and left commentators.

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