Che Guevara revolutionary diary published

HAVANA, June 15 (UPI) -- The diary Ernesto "Che" Guevara kept during the two years before Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba is being published under the title "Diary of a Combatant."

The book was edited by the Che Guevara Studies Center in Havana, which is headed by his widow, Aleida March, CNN reported Wednesday. The publisher is Ocean Press/Ocean Sur in Australia.

March said she hopes "to show his work, his thoughts, his life, so that the Cuban people and the entire world get to know him and don't distort things anymore."

Guevara, a doctor born in Argentina, accompanied Castro back to Cuba in December 1956 and fought with him in the Sierra Maestra Mountains until their victory on Jan. 1, 1959.

After a stint as head of the Central Bank, Guevara left Cuba to continue the revolutionary struggle in Africa and Bolivia. He captured by Bolivian soldiers and executed in 1967 at the age of 39.

Maria del Carmen Ariet, a researcher at the center, said some of Guevara's handwritten notebooks from that era are missing. She also said Guevara wrote an account of his time in the Sierra Maestra, "Episodes in the Cuban Revolutionary War," which was published in 1963.