Rediscovering Che Guevara, the romantic revolutionary

Romanticising the memory of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro's brother-in-arms during the Cuban uprising,has long been a worldwide industry. But the Argentinian revolutionary remained in touch with his own romantic side to the end, even as he battled to foment a second revolution in the jungles of Bolivia, a new book reveals.

Guevara was executed by Bolivian troops near the town of La Higuera on 9 October 1967, after an ambush backed by the CIA and US special forces. Now, as the 40th anniversary of his death approaches, a Mexican publisher has printed what it claims are the contents of a dog-eared notebook which was found on his body and kept locked away for years in a Bolivian army vault. But the secrets offered up in the new book, The Green Notebook Of Che, are neither codes nor battle plans. Instead, the pages – densely filled with Guevara's handwriting – contain a collection of his favourite poetry. Many of the entries are love poems.

Planeta, the publisher, first showed the manuscript to Paco Ignacio, a popular Mexican novelist and biographer of Guevara, who has written the preface to the compendium. Yesterday, Ignacio recalled the moment when his editor first handed him pages photocopied from Guevara's old spiral notebook. "He asked, 'What is it?' and I said, 'Well, let me see'," Ignacio told the BBC World Service. "And I said, 'This is Guevara's handwriting. This is the green notebook'."

The existence of the book was already widely known but no biographer had seen it before. After Guevara was shot, according to Ignacio, CIA agents "looked at it and tried to find some code but they said, 'They are just poems'." More precisely, there were verses from 69 poems by four writers – Pablo Neruda from Chile, Nicolás Guillé* of Cuba, César Vallejo of Peru and the Spaniard, Leó* Felipe.

Much of the notebook's history is murky. Some say Guevara purchased it as he tried to seed his vision of revolutionary socialism throughout Africa after his abrupt departure from Cuba, and from Castro's side, in 1963. Others say he bought the cheap notebook on a trip to Tanzania that year and would retire, often up a tree, to write in it. In any event, the book stayed with him to the very end.

Making an anthology of his favourite poems was probably a matter of sheer practicality. Carting books into the jungles of Bolivia on Guevara's last and, ultimately, ill-fated venture, was presumably not an option. "So as not to carry too many books, he wrote down the poems he liked," Ignacio suggested.

Planeta refused to reveal how it obtained the notebook but said it spent two years verifying its authenticity before publication. There is speculation that Bolivia's populist President, Evo Morales, a close ally of Castro, authorised the notebook's release from military archives after taking office in January last year. It was never a secret that Guevara was an avid reader of books and Spanish-language poetry. He also tried writing verse himself but always protested his poems were deeply unaccomplished. "He said they were very bad and I agreed," Ignacio said. He added that he was surprised by the predominance of love poetry in the book, rather than political works espousing Guevara's Marxist ideology. "You have to remember they were copied during the most difficult times of the Bolivian experience and are not the kind of poems you expected to find," Ignacio said.

"It is a new way of seeing Guevara. It is a new angle of [his] character. When I read the poems, you have a kind of shock that this was what he was copying one by one in those days."