Marcelo Ferroni presents his debut novel, a fictional reconstitution of Che Guevara's last revolutionary expedition.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011
3:00 PM
4302 Rolfe Hall
UCLA

In May 2004, the US State Department released the transcription of the interrogation of Paulo Neumann, a former history student from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, conducted in a military hospital in Bolivia in 1967 by two renegade Cubans working for the CIA. This is, in a nutshell, the fictional frame for this spy thriller centred around the figure of a bitter, bald, pot-bellied Che Guevara.

Che is in Tanzania after the Congo fiasco, pensive, dreaming of taking his revolutionary warfare to Argentina, where the communists don’t see eye to eye with Fidel. The target finally chosen by the revolutionaries is Barrientos’ Bolivia, in 1966, which the author describes as “a strange hybrid of nationalism and pro-American conservatism imported from Brazil”, and that is where Operación Fantasma heads.

Paraphrasing history in diaries and reports, Ferroni takes readers behind the scenes of the operation, during the forming of urban networks of the international leftist movement, and out to the Ñancahuazú battlefronts, recreating the events of that tragic (and oft-timescomical) guerrilla war in detail.

In A Practical Guide to Guerrilla Warfare, after a painstaking survey of biographies and historical studies, Ferroni puts the methods extolled in Che’s own Guerrilla Warfare to the test, and points out, with a certain dose of fiction, the contradictions in this revolutionary practice.

“A Practical Guide to Guerilla Warfare, Marcelo Ferroni’s debut novel, is a provocation. His fictional reconstitution of Che Guevara’s last steps is a frontal attack on the romantic image of the heroic guerilla enjoyed by ‘Che’.” -Folha de S. Paulo

“A good-humored version of the real errors in planning that, in the year 1967, helped lead to Che Guevara’s death.” -O Estado de S. Paulo

Marcelo Ferroni was born in 1974, in São Paulo. He was an editor at Globo Livros,
where he also published the short story collection Dia dos mortos (Day of the Dead), and is
currently at Alfaguara, the literary imprint of Objetiva. A Practical Guide to Guerrilla Warfare
is his first novel, and is also due to be published in Spain, Portugal and Italy
 

This event forms part of the series "On Brazilian Cosmopolitanism."

Cost : Free and open to the public.

Download file: ferroni-eq-lce.pdf

Sponsor(s): Latin American Institute, Center for Brazilian Studies, Spanish and Portuguese