With Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara enjoying a renaissance on the silver screen, Bolivian officials have unveiled his original journals dating from 1966-67.

On Monday, Bolivia released two frayed notebooks, a logbook and several photographs that had been sealed inside a vault since 1986.

"Several transcripts of the diary have been published … but this is the first time the public will be able to look at the handwritten journals," the country's vice-minister of culture, Pablo Groux, told Reuters.

Bolivia has a plan to publish the diaries, which chronicle Guevara's attempt to spread revolution in Bolivia.

Argentinian-born Guevara kept diaries throughout his travels in South and Central America. His treatise on guerrilla warfare is also considered a seminal work.

Trained as a doctor, he witnessed the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala and in 1959 played a role in bringing Fidel Castro to power in Cuba. Guevara tried to spread socialism in Congo and Bolivia before being killed by Bolivian soldiers in 1967.

Long idolized by the left, Guevara's story has been brought to the screen twice in the last five years — in the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries and the 2008 movie Guerrilla, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

His Bolivian diaries, covering the period from November 1966 to his capture in October 1967, have previously been translated into English.

The original journals were stolen from an army vault in 1980 and eventually surfaced at a London auction. Bolivia reclaimed them and sealed them in a vault at the central bank.