This classic anthology on Latin America shows the Argentine-born revolutionary's cultural depth, rigorous intellect, and intense emotional engagement with a continent and its people.

In a letter to his mother in 1954, a young Ernesto Guevara wrote, “The Americas will be the theater of my adventures in a way that is much more significant than I would have believed.”

In The Awakening of Latin America we have the story of those adventures, charting Che’s evolution from an impressionable young medical student to the “heroic guerrilla,” assassinated in cold blood in Bolivia. Spanning seventeen years, this anthology draws on from his family’s personal archives and offers the best of Che’s writing: examples of his journalism, essays, speeches, letters, and even poems. As Che documents his early travels through Latin America, his involvement in the Guatemalan and Cuban revolutions, and his rise to international prominence under Fidel Castro, we see how his fervent commitment to social justice shaped and was shaped by the continent he called home.

Nearly half of this book is published for the first time and pre-dates Che’s arrival in Cuba with Fidel Castro’s guerrilla expedition in 1956. Also included are his notes for his unfinished book, The Social Role of Doctors in Latin America.