Che Guevara

Comrade
Che Guevara
Guerrillero Heroico, 1960
Minister of Industries of Cuba
In office
11 February 1961 – 1 April 1965
PresidentOsvaldo Dorticós Torrado
Prime MinisterFidel Castro
Preceded byOffice established
Succeeded byJoel Domenech Benítez
President of the National Bank of Cuba
In office
26 November 1959 – 23 February 1961
Preceded byFelipe Pazos
Succeeded byRaúl Cepero Bonilla
Personal details
Born
Ernesto Guevara

(1928-06-14)14 June 1928[1]
Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina
Died9 October 1967(1967-10-09) (aged 39)
La Higuera, Santa Cruz, Bolivia
Manner of deathExecution by shooting
Resting placeChe Guevara Mausoleum, Santa Clara, Cuba
Citizenship
  • Argentina
  • Cuba
Political partyM-26-7 (1955–1962)
PURSC (1962–1965)
Spouses
​
​
(m. 1955; div. 1959)​
​
(m. 1959)​
Children5, including Aleida
Alma materUniversity of Buenos Aires
Occupation
Known forGuevarism
Signature
Nicknames
Military service
AllegianceRepublic of Cuba[2]
Branch/service
Years of service1955–1967
RankComandante
Unit26th of July Movement
CommandsCommanding officer, FAR
Battles/wars
Che Guevara's voice
Guevara speaking to the youth in Havana
Recorded 1962

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Latin American Spanish: [ˈtʃe ɣeˈβaɾa];[3] 14 June 1928[1] – 9 October 1967) was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.[4]

As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was appalled by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed.[5][6] His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology.[5] Later in Mexico City, Guevara met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with the intention of overthrowing US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.[7] Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.[8]

After the Cuban Revolution, Guevara played key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals,[9] instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both president of the National Bank and instructional director for Cuba's armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion,[10] and bringing Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba, which preceded the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.[11] Additionally, Guevara was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal guerrilla warfare manual, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful continental motorcycle journey. His experiences and studying of Marxism–Leninism led him to posit that the Third World's underdevelopment and dependence was an intrinsic result of imperialism, neocolonialism, and monopoly capitalism, with the only remedies being proletarian internationalism and world revolution.[12][13] Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment continental revolutions across both Africa and South America,[14] first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed.[15]

Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. As a result of his perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a "new man" driven by moral rather than material incentives,[16] Guevara has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist movements. In contrast, his critics on the political right accuse him of promoting authoritarianism and endorsing violence against his political opponents. Despite disagreements on his legacy, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century,[17] while an Alberto Korda photograph of him, titled Guerrillero Heroico, was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as "the most famous photograph in the world".[18]

  1. ^ a b The date of birth recorded on his birth certificate was 14 June 1928, although one tertiary source, (Julia Constenla, quoted by Jon Lee Anderson), asserts that he was actually born on 14 May of that year. Constenla alleges that she was told by Che's mother, Celia de la Serna, that she was already pregnant when she and Ernesto Guevara Lynch were married and that the date on the birth certificate of their son was forged to make it appear that he was born a month later than the actual date to avoid scandal. (Anderson 1997, pp. 3, 769.)
  2. ^ Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista de Cuba, a.k.a. PURSC.
  3. ^ How to pronounce Che Guevara – Forvo features various sound clips of international Spanish speakers enunciating his name.
  4. ^ Casey 2009, p. 128.
  5. ^ a b On Revolutionary Medicine Speech by Che Guevara to the Cuban Militia on 19 August 1960. "Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous or making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people."
  6. ^ Anderson 1997, pp. 90–91.
  7. ^ Beaubien, NPR Audio Report, 2009, 00:09–00:13.
  8. ^ "Castro's Brain", 1960.
  9. ^ Taibo 1999, p. 267.
  10. ^ Kellner 1989, pp. 69–70.
  11. ^ Anderson 1997, pp. 526–530.
  12. ^ "On Development" Speech delivered by Che Guevara at the plenary session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva, Switzerland on 25 March 1964. "The inflow of capital from the developed countries is the prerequisite for the establishment of economic dependence. This inflow takes various forms: loans granted on onerous terms; investments that place a given country in the power of the investors; almost total technological subordination of the dependent country to the developed country; control of a country's foreign trade by the big international monopolies; and in extreme cases, the use of force as an economic weapon in support of the other forms of exploitation."
  13. ^ "At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria - A speech by Che Guevara to the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity in Algiers, Algeria". 24 February 1965 – via Marxists Internet Archive. The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colonial or neocolonial shackles, which is being carried out by means of political weapons, arms, or a combination of the two, is not separate from the struggle against backwardness and poverty. Both are stages on the same road leading toward the creation of a new society of justice and plenty. ... Ever since monopoly capital took over the world, it has kept the greater part of humanity in poverty, dividing all the profits among the group of the most powerful countries. The standard of living in those countries is based on the extreme poverty of our countries. To raise the living standards of the underdeveloped nations, therefore, we must fight against imperialism. ... The practice of proletarian internationalism is not only a duty for the peoples struggling for a better future, it is also an inescapable necessity.
  14. ^ Guevara was coordinating with African liberation movements in exile such as the MPLA in Angola and MNR in Congo-Brazzaville, while stating that Africa represented one of "the more important fields of struggle against all forms of exploitation existing in the world". Guevara then envisioned crafting an alliance with African leaders such as Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria, Sékou Touré in Guinea, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, to foster a global dimension to his ensuing continental revolution in Latin America. See Anderson 1997, pp. 576, 584.
  15. ^ Ryan 1998, p. 4.
  16. ^ Footnote for Socialism and man in Cuba (1965): "Che argued that the full liberation of humankind is reached when work becomes a social duty carried out with complete satisfaction and sustained by a value system that contributes to the realization of conscious action in performing tasks. This could only be achieved by systematic education, acquired by passing through various stages in which collective action is increased. Che recognized that this to be difficult and time-consuming. In his desire to speed up this process, however, he developed methods of mobilizing people, bringing together their collective and individual interests. Among the most significant of these instruments were moral and material incentives, while deepening consciousness as a way of developing toward socialism. See Che's speeches: Homage to Emulation Prize Winners (1962) and A New Attitude to Work (1964)."
  17. ^ Dorfman 1999.
  18. ^ Maryland Institute of Art, referenced at BBC News 26 May 2001.