Lessons of the Cuban Revolution

Book by Pathfinder Press offers well-curated study of Western Hemisphere's first socialist revolution and the transformation of its realizers

Book Review | 3000 Words | 15 Minute Read

Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War,
1956–58
By Ernesto Che Guevara
Pathfinder Press (1996) | 536 pp

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Members of Column no. 8 following liberation of Fomento, December 18, 1958, as they closed in on Santa Clara, during popular insurrection against U.S.-backed military tyranny in Cuba.

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The Cuban Revolution of January 1959, and the revolutionary transformation of society that followed, remains one of human history’s great revolutions. In commemoration of the 66th anniversary of its New Year’s Day triumph, I reread Pathfinder Press’s collection of Che Guevara’s writings about the events in the Sierra Maestra. Having only read bits and pieces here and there, this was the first time I read it from beginning to end. The collection—which includes maps, hundreds of footnotes, a prologue and other contributions by Fidel Castro, as well as a detailed chronology of important dates, battles, letters and revolutionary profiles—is as riveting and hilarious, as it is educational and revelatory, in point of relaying in a cinemaesque style the everyday life and long-term evolution in becoming and remaining a revolutionary.