At last, Che on Che! Discover the personal side of the legendary Che Guevara in a way never before revealed to the world. This book includes many unpublished short stories and poems written to his wife and children, as well as photos from the Guevara family album, showing a surprisingly sensitive and artistic side to a man often seen as a hard-line revolutionary.

An enthusiastic amateur photographer, Che's self-portraits are a stunning feature of this selection along with some beautiful short stories, poems, and personal letters, which have just been released from his family's personal archives. Among the innumerable biographies and photo books on Che, this large format, attractively designed book is unique.

Edited by prominent Latin American poet and intellectual Victor Casaus, with the assistance of Che's widow and children.

Publication is planned to coincide with two new Che films (Robert Redford's film on The Motorcycle Diaries and a Steven Soderbergh biopic).

"Che was the most complete human being of our age."—Jean Paul Sartre

The usual revolutionary psychosis on display. Committed to "saving the world" once he got power he was at a loss to do anything but make vacuous speeches and, of course, kill, until he was up to his elbows in blood.
As he discovered that the real world was a bit more complex than his teenage formulations, he tried time and time again, Congo, Russia, China and finally Bolivia to escape into the role playing and costumes of "man of the people" but never duplicating the thrills of the Sierra Maestra until betrayed by Fidel he died alone in a mud hut, with the solace that millions of like wise vacuuous teenagers would someday wear his picture on a t-shirts while getting stoned.

I purchased Self Portrait because it sounded like a good biography/autobiography of Che Guevara. What the book actually is is a coffee table book, with small excerpts from Che's diaries and letters and commentary by the editor, Victor Casaus. It seems in some parts of the book that Casaus is more the author and that his words fill the pages more than Guevara's. This book has great photos of Guevara and it decorates my coffee table quite nicely, but if you are looking for a good history of Guevara, look elsewhere.

A very interesting way of portraying the Cuban hero through pictures. My one criticism is that the pictures at the end of the book are not captioned to tell us what they are or when they were taken.

If you are tired of the same books on Che Guevara, this is the different book. Formed by texts and images based upon Che's own life it follows mainly the same path of its biographers but in such a beautiful way it made his own daughter Aleyda (who rarely saw him) exclaim: "the photos in this book are so magnificent you feel a desire for kissing him, embracing him and keep talking to him" (she means with his own personal texts based in his own testimony).

The selection, prepared on the first hand with the remembrance of a lost love (by his widow) and on the other, by the professional eye of Victor Casaus (a Cuban cinematographer who had been many times a judge on international film competitions) you can follow Dr. Guevara from his childhood, young age, his travels, the Sierra Maestra up to his last days in Bolivia.

Sorry, no Christ figure photo (in the words of its own editor). Keep in mind this is a pro-Cuban Government book so you instead will find Fidel, but judge by yourself. My only last opinion is that if this people can produce such a book in a system so full of censorship, I do wonder what they can achieve in liberty!