A firsthand account of the military campaigns and political events that culminated in the January 1959 popular insurrection that overthrew the US-backed dictatorship in Cuba. With clarity and humor, Guevara describes his own political education. He explains how the struggle transformed the men and women of the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement led by Fidel Castro, and how these combatants forged a political leadership capable of guiding millions of workers and peasants to open the socialist revolution in the Americas.
Includes speech by Fidel Castro “Men contribute to the making of history, but history also makes men.”
“This edition is the first English-language volume to collect the entire series of articles from Verde Olivo, the weekly publication of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, from 1961 to 1964…the last two years of the Cuban Revolution’s military campaign that overthrew the Batista government.” —Research Book News
Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) was an Argentine-born central leader of the Cuban Revolution. Guevara was a Rebel Army commander during Cuba’s 1956–58 revolutionary war; held central responsibilities in revolutionary government, including minister of industry and president of the National Bank; led volunteer internationalist columns in Congo 1965, Bolivia 1966–67; wounded, captured, and murdered by Bolivian army in CIA-organized operation.
His writings published by Pathfinder Press include:
Che Guevara Talks to Young People (2000)
Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War 1956–58 (1996)
Bolivian Diary (1994)
“On the Concept of Value: A Reply to Albert Mora” and “The Meaning of Socialist Planning: A Reply to Charles Bettelheim,” both in
New International no. 8 (1991)
Che Guevara Speaks (1967)
Other Contributor:
Mary-Alice Waters (1942– ), a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee since 1967, is president of Pathfinder Press and editor of New International magazine. She joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1962 and Socialist Workers Party in 1964. She has helped lead the SWP’s work nationally and internationally, especially in defense of the Cuban Revolution as well as the fight for women’s liberation.
Waters was YSA national secretary, then chairperson (1967–68). She covered the 1968 student-labor uprising in France for the Militant and edited that working-class newsweekly from 1969 through the early 1970s.
She has edited more than thirty-five books on the Cuban Revolution as well as more than a dozen other titles. Waters has spoken in the United States and around the world on the Cuban Revolution and its lessons for working people and youth everywhere.
Her works include:
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party (2019, coeditor)
In Defense of the US Working Class (2019)
Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? (2016)
“It’s the Poor who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System”: The Cuban Five Talk about Their Lives within the US Working Class (2015)
Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women (2024, coauthor)
Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970, editor)
