Can his reputation survive the publication of his own words?

In December 1953, he wrote to his aunt from San José, Costa Rica, “I have sworn before a picture of our old, much lamented comrade Stalin that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.” [1, p. 62]Another letter to the same aunt was signed with the words "Stalin II." [2, p. 167] More important was the fact that when Guevara visited the USSR in his capacity as one of the most important leaders of the victorious Cuban revolution in November of 1960, he insisted on depositing a floral tribute at Stalin's tomb[1, p. 181]. It is important to remember that this was more than four years after Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes.

This from Che Guevara's Guevara journal of his travels through Latin America: “I now feel my dilated nostrils, savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood, of enemy death; I now tense my body, ready for the struggle, and I prepare my being as a sacred place so that in it resounds with new vibrations and new hopes the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat.” The Motorcycle Diaries omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries form the film.

A phrase in a letter to his wife on January 28, 1957, not long after disembarking in Cuba, which was published in her book Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra: “Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty.” It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people.

[1] Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York: Vintage, 1998).

[2] Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997.