Che Guevara's Farewell letter to his daughter Hilda

[Jade]

February 15, 1966.
Dearest Hildita, I am writing you now, although you'll receive this much later. But I want you to know I am thinking about you and hope you're having a very happy birthday. You're almost a woman now, And I cannot write you the way I do the little ones, telling them silly little things or little fibs.
You must know I am still far away and will be gone for some time, doing what I can to fight against our enemies. Not that it is a great thing, but I am doing something, and I think you always be able to be proud of your father, as I am of you.
Remember, there are still many years of struggle ahead, and even when you are a woman, you will have to do your part in the struggle. Meanwhile, you will have to prepare yourself, be very revolutionary....which at your age means to learn a lot, as much as possible, and always be ready to support just causes. Also, obey your mother and don't think you know it all to soon. That will come with time.
You should fight to be among the best in school. The best in every sense, and you already know what that means: study and revolutionary attitude. In other words: good conduct, seriousness, love for the revolution, comradeship, etc. I was not that way at your age, but I lived in a different society, where man was the enemy of man. Now you have the privilege of living in another era and you must be worthy of it.
Don't forget to go by the house to keep an eye on the other kids and advise them to study and behave themselves. Especially Aleidita, who pays a lot of attention to you as her older sister.
All right, old lady. Again I hope you are very happy on your birthday. Give a hug to your mother and your Gina. I give you a great big strong one to last as long as we don't see each other.
Your Papa

Some Biographical Notes:
Guevara, Che (1928-1967)
Argentinian doctor; joined Castro in Mexico in 1954; a leader of the 1956-59 Cuban Revolution. Che served as president of Cuba's national bank and as Cuba's minister of industry in the period immediately following the Cuban Revolution.

Towards the end of his formal affiliation with the Cuban government, Che came to implicitly criticize Soviet bureacracy. His positions put him at odds with the party line of the Cuban CP. In 1965, Che realized that the defence of the Cuban revolution and the creation of revolutions abroad were naturally not always in sync, and this ultimately led to his resignation and his return to revolutionary work abroad.

During Che's subsequent revolutionary campaigns, he wrote his Message to the Tricontinental (1967) in which he openly criticized the Soviet Union; claiming that the Northern hemisphere of the world, both the Soviet Union and the US, exploited the Southern hemisphere of the world. He strongly supported the Vietnamese Revolution, and urged his comrades in South America to create "many vietnams".

In 1965 Che left Cuba to set up guerrilla forces first in the Congo and then later in Bolivia, where he was ultimately captured and killed in October 1967. Accounts of his execution have varied over the years, but many contemprary accounts indicate some degree of collaboration between Bolivia's government troops and the United States CIA.

Guevara developed a theory of primacy of military struggle, in particular concept of guerilla foquismo. Many of Che's theories regarding guerilla tactics are articulated in his 1961 work "Guerilla Warfare."


Communiqué No. 1 to the Bolivian People
Revolutionary Truth against Reactionary Lies

The military brutes who have usurped power, after killing workers and laying the groundwork for the total handover of our resources to US imperialism, are now mocking the people with a comic farce. Even as the hour of truth arrived and the masses took up arms, responding to the armed usurpers with armed struggle, they tried to continue with their lies.
On the morning of March 23, troops from the Fourth Division, quartered in Camiri, about 35-strong and led by Major Hernán Plata Ríos, penetrated guerrilla territory along the Ñacahuazú River. The entire group fell into an ambush set up by our forces. As a result of the action, we confiscated 25 weapons of all kinds, including three 60-mm mortars with a supply of shells and other ammunition and equipment. Enemy casualties consisted of seven dead, including a lieutenant, 14 prisoners, five of them wounded in the clash and cared for by our medics to the best of our capabilities. All the prisoners were freed after explaining the aims of our movement.
The list of enemy casualties is as follows:
Dead: Pedro Romero, Rubén Amezaga, Juan Alvarado, Cecilio Márquez, Amador Almasán, Santiago Gallardo, and an army informer and guide whose last name was Vargas.
Prisoners: Major Hernán Plata Ríos, Captain Eugenio Silva, soldiers Edgar Torrico Panoso, Lido Machicado Toledo, Gabriel Durán Escobar, Armando Martínez Sánchez, Felipe Bravo Siles, Juan Ramón Martínez, Leoncio Espinosa Posada, Miguel Rivero, Eleuterio Sánchez, Adalberto Martínez, Eduardo Rivera, and Guido Terceros. The last five were wounded.
In publicly announcing the first battle of the war, we are establishing what will be our norm: revolutionary truth. Our actions have demonstrated the integrity of our words. We regret the shedding of innocent blood by those who died; but peace cannot be built with mortars and machine guns, as those clowns in braided uniforms would have us believe. They try to portray us as common murderers. But there never has been, and there will not be, a single peasant who has any cause to complain of our treatment or our manner of obtaining supplies, except those who, as traitors to their class, served as guides or informers.
Hostilities have begun. In future communiqués we will set forth our revolutionary positions clearly. Today we make an appeal to workers, peasants, intellectuals, to everyone who feels the time has come to confront violence with violence and rescue a country being sold off in great slabs to Yankee monopolies, and raise the standard of living of our people, who grow hungrier every day.
National Liberation Army of Bolivia

Che Guevara Archive

Che's Speech 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on December 11, 1964

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