Guevara, Che (1928–1967)

KNOWN BY MANY simply as Che, Ernesto Guevara was the quintessential romantic revolutionary who died [Page 204]fighting for the liberation of Latin America. He was born to a middle-class Argentine family and became a medical doctor in 1953. Revealing a rebellious and adventurous spirit, Guevara then abandoned his medical career and began a motorcycle journey through Latin America, at a time when many roads barely accommodated cars, let alone motorcycles.

His travels exposed him to the stark poverty in which many Latin Americans lived and deepened his rejection of capitalist exploitation and U.S. intervention in the region. He arrived in Guatemala during the progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz and witnessed its 1954 overthrow in a U.S.-sponsored military coup d'etat. This experience intensified his political opposition to U.S. imperialism and strengthened his commitment to armed struggle and socialism as the method and goal of political struggle.

From Guatemala, he traveled to Mexico where he joined Fidel Castro and the July 26th Movement and embraced their plans to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. In 1956, Guevara and 19 other men, out of an initial force of 86, survived the guerrilla movement's return to Cuba and initial skirmishes with Cuban government troops. The remaining members of the July 26th Movement retreated to the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they built a base among the area's impoverished peasants, some of whom joined the guerrilla movement while others offered it logistical support, food, and shelter. In January 1959, the guerrilla force marched triumphantly into Havana, Cuba, to the euphoric welcome of many Cubans, and Batista fled the country, taking much of the national treasury with him.

Guevara and Castro headed up the new Cuban government. Castro held senior posts in the Communist Party and the new government and Guevara concentrated on the economy. Determined to end Cuban economic dependency on sugar exports to the United States, Guevara devised a Four-Year Plan that called for “agricultural diversification (de-emphasis on sugar) and industrialization (the manufacture of light consumer goods,” historians Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith explain.

The plan failed, due to a shortage in consumer goods, a decline in foreign reserves, the lack of capital and skilled technicians needed to industrialize, and a drop in sugar production. U.S. opposition to the Cuban revolution and the embargo it imposed on Cuba effectively encouraged the Caribbean nation to look to the Soviet Union for support and supplies. Responding to both the plan's failure and Soviet opposition to his plan, Guevara resigned his position in 1963.

Guevara represented an idealistic interpretation of Marxism and the qualities needed to build a socialist society. He thought that in order to build a new society and successfully break with the capitalist past, it was essential to create el hombre nuevo (the new man). Guevara stressed the need for revolutionaries to sacrifice their material well-being, even their lives, in order to bring about the profound transformations that the construction of socialism demanded. He argued that moral incentives should replace material ones, thus people should work for the good of society, not for their individual advancement.

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