Guevara, Ernesto (Che) (1928–1967)

Che Guevara was a Latin American Marxist guerrilla who helped lead the Cuban revolution and attempted to instigate communist revolutions in several other countries. His political theories and adventurous life have inspired many followers.

Guevara was born to middle-class parents in Rosario, Argentina, on May 14, 1928. (His birth certificate, forged to avoid scandal, states June 14, 1928.) At the age of two, Guevara developed the asthma that would haunt him throughout his life. Guevara's liberal, intellectual parents fostered his pursuit of knowledge. Guevara excelled at school, displaying an early interest in both politics and athletics—he was a passionate rugby player, a remarkable achievement given his asthma.

Graduating from secondary school with honors, in 1947 Guevara went on to medical school. In 1952, before completing his studies, he set off with a friend for several months, traveling through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela on a motorcycle. Traveling without much money, his journeys took him among the slums and rural villages of Latin America, where he witnessed the poverty and oppression of the people by the ruling elites and North American plantation owners.

After passing his final examinations in 1953, Guevara spent time in Bolivia and Guatemala, where in May 1954 he witnessed the CIA-sponsored coup that toppled Guatemala's leftist government. (While in Guatemala he acquired the nickname Che, which is Argentine slang for “Hey, you.”) These experiences transformed him into an ardent Marxist. Expelled from Guatemala in the aftermath of the coup, he soon traveled to Mexico City, by now determined to become a revolutionary.

There, in 1955, Guevara met Fidel Castro, who had already made one abortive attempt to overthrow the Batista regime in Cuba. The two men became close friends, and when Castro and his ragtag band of rebels returned to Cuba in December 1956, Guevara went with them. He became Castro's second-in-command, and his ideological fervor and tactical theories (made famous in his 1960 book, La Guerra de Guerrillas, or Guerrilla Warfare) shaped the Cuban Revolution. In January 1959, Castro and his followers overturned the Batista regime. Guevara spent five years in Cuba, where he took charge of economic development. Guevara's unbending radicalism and hard-line anti-American views soon irritated Cuba's Soviet supporters, and a rift grew between Guevara and Castro. In 1965, a frustrated Guevara left Cuba, hoping to inspire Cuban-style revolutions in other third world countries.

The main tenets of Guevara's revolutionary theory held that a foquista or foco (focal point) of hardened guerrillas operating in the countryside should be used to crystallize opposition to a ruling regime among the peasantry; by this method, a very small number of actual fighters could mobilize opposition without needing to confront the state military head on. Looking for a suitable country to try to repeat his success, he and a small band of supporters traveled first to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was then in the midst of a civil war. Guevara found the Congolese guerrillas undisciplined and ineffectual, and after six months he left the country. After a brief stop in Cuba, in March 1966 he traveled incognito to Bolivia to attempt another revolution.

Bolivia, too, would prove unripe for revolution. Both the local peasantry and the Bolivian Communist Party were suspicious and resentful of Guevara and his Cuban guerrillas; Guevara's asthma began to trouble him, and he spent long periods incapacitated and unable to organize his troops. Desperate, Guevara made a number of tactical errors that put the Bolivian Army on his scent; as the Bolivian mission began to seem more and more futile, even Castro dropped his support. In October 1967, Guevara was captured and killed. Fearful that news of his death would spark massive unrest, the Bolivian authorities buried him in an unmarked grave; his remains were finally recovered and transported to Cuba in 1997.

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