Guevara, Che (1928–1967)

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born on June 14, 1928, to a middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina. The Bolivian military executed him on October 9, 1967, at the small town of La Higuera after a failed guerrilla attempt to overthrow that country's government. Guevara was a socialist revolutionary and a strong internationalist who during the course of his short life traveled throughout much of the world. He is best known for being the number three commander in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces that in 1959 overthrew the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. From the Cuban guerrillas he gained the moniker “Che,” a Guaraní expression commonly used in Argentina that can be roughly translated as “hey you,” and he subsequently became best known by this name. Although his efforts to launch a continent-wide revolution to overthrow capitalism and to usher in a socialist utopia ultimately failed, Guevara became admired for his selfless dedication to a struggle against oppression and for social justice.

The eldest of five children, Guevara came from a liberal-left family that embraced anti-clerical ideas and supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. His mother, Celia de la Serna, had a particularly important influence on the formation of his social conscience. Throughout his life, Guevara suffered from severe asthma attacks, but nevertheless he pushed himself hard and excelled as an athlete. In 1948, he entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. Although Guevara finished medical school in 1953, he was never seriously committed to the profession.

In his early 20s, Guevara made three motorcycle trips that introduced him to the impoverished and oppressive conditions under which the majority of the Latin American people lived and worked. The first was a 4,000-mile moped trip in 1950 through northern Argentina. Alberto Granado, a friend and biochemist, joined Guevara on the second trip in 1951 and 1952 on a 500cc Norton motorcycle nicknamed “La Poderosa” (The Powerful One) that took them out of Argentina. The motorcycle did not make it further than Chile, but the two vagabonds continued on foot, hitchhiking, and on boat to Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Guevara continued on alone to Miami where he spent a miserable month flat broke before returning to his native Argentina.

Guevara kept a diary during his second trip that was published posthumously as The Motorcycle Diaries. Walter Salles made the diary into an award-winning film in 2004 that subsequently revived Guevara as a media star. Although politically relatively insignificant in light of later events in Guevara's life, it was a consciousness-raising experience that ultimately changed the direction his life would take. The trip converted Guevara into a Pan-Latin-Americanist who, much like Simón Bolívar and José Martí, believed that the destiny of Latin America was unified and that national borders served to divide people in their struggles for a more just social order.

After finishing his medical studies in 1953, Guevara began a third trip through Latin America, which proved to be much more important in maturing his revolutionary political ideology. In Bolivia, he observed the mobilization of workers and the implementation of agrarian reform following a popular 1952 revolution. In Guatemala, he lived through a 1954 U.S.-backed military coup that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz's revolutionary government that had given land to peasants. Perhaps more than any other experience, this turned Guevara into a dedicated fighter against U.S. imperialism. It also convinced him that it was necessary to destroy completely the political and military forces of the old system, and to arm the masses to protect a revolution from counter-revolutionary forces. His recollections from this trip are recorded in his book, Back on the Road.

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