(Rosario, Argentina, 1928 - Higueras, Bolivia, 1967) Latin American revolutionary. Together with Fidel Castro, whose movement he joined in 1956, he was one of the main architects of the triumph of the Cuban revolution (1959). He later held positions of great relevance in the new government, but, dissatisfied with the ineffectiveness of the offices and faithful to his purpose of extending the revolution to other Latin American countries, in 1966 he resumed his guerrilla activity in Bolivia, where he would be captured and executed a year later.

Thus, Che Guevara became the greatest revolutionary myth of the twentieth century, having given his life in the struggle against imperialism and dictatorship. He was immediately an icon of the youth of May '68, and his figure has remained as a timeless symbol of ideals of freedom and justice that, like the heroes of yesteryear, he considered more valuable than life itself. Even today, in protest actions, that profile of him based on Alberto Korda's famous photograph is still frequently exhibited.

Biography

Ernesto Che Guevara was born into a well-to-do family in Argentina, where he studied medicine. His leftist militancy led him to participate in the opposition against Juan Domingo Perón; from 1953 he traveled through Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Guatemala, discovering the dominant misery among the masses of Latin America and the omnipresence of North American imperialism in the region, and participating in multiple protest movements, experiences that inclined him definitively towards Marxism.

In 1955 Ernesto Che Guevara met Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl Castro in Mexico, who were preparing a revolutionary expedition to Cuba. Guevara befriended the Castros, joined the group as a doctor and disembarked with them in Cuba in 1956. Once the guerrillas were installed in Sierra Maestra, Guevara became Fidel's lieutenant and commanded one of the two columns that left the eastern mountains to the west to conquer the island. He participated in the decisive battle for the capture of Santa Clara (1958) and finally entered Havana in 1959, putting an end to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

The triumph of the revolution, carried out with scarce means, was facilitated by the unsustainable situation of the country in those years. Despite registering the highest per capita income in Latin America, wealth was concentrated in few hands; this very strong social imbalance was repeated in the marked contrasts between the countryside and the city. On the political level, corruption, clientelistic mechanisms and ineffectiveness had been accentuated to unsuspected limits under the despotic and authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista; his government managed to bring together against him the most disparate sectors of opinion and interests. The Cuban economy, extremely conditioned by the presence of the United States, was based on tourism in urban areas and on a capitalist agriculture that had generated a large rural proletariat, a determining factor in the revolutionary process.

From revolution to politics

The new revolutionary government granted Guevara Cuban nationality and appointed him head of the Militia and director of the Agrarian Reform Institute (1959), then president of the National Bank and Minister of Economy (1960), and finally Minister of Industry (1961). In those years, Guevara represented Cuba in several international forums, where he denounced U.S. imperialism head-on. In a trip around the world he met Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sukarno and Josip Broz Tito (1959); in another trip he met several Soviet leaders and the Chinese Zhou EnLai and Mao Zedong.

In the task of building a new society in Cuba, and especially in the field of economy, Che Guevara was one of the most tireless collaborators of Fidel Castro. In the economic plan that took place at the beginning of the new government, he opted for an original, creative and non-bureaucratic and non-institutionalized interpretation of Marxist principles. Seeking a path for the real independence of Cuba, he strove for the industrialization of the country, linking it to the help of the Soviet Union, once the attempted invasion of the island by the United States had failed and the socialist character of the Cuban revolution had been clarified (1961).

His restlessness as a professional revolutionary, however, made him secretly leave Cuba in 1965 and go to the Congo, where he fought in support of the revolutionary movement in progress, convinced that only armed insurrectional action was effective against imperialism.

In Bolivia

Released from his positions in the Cuban State, Che Guevara returned to Latin America in 1966 to launch a revolution that he hoped would be continental in scope: valuing the strategic position of Bolivia, he chose that country as a center of operations to install a guerrilla movement that could spread its influence to Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Paraguay. At the head of a small group he tried to put into practice his theory, according to which it was not necessary to wait for social conditions to produce a popular insurrection, but that armed action itself could create the conditions for a revolutionary movement to be unleashed; such ideas were collected in his book La guerra de guerrillas (1960).

However, his action did not catch on among the Bolivian masses. From the beginning his group, baptized as the National Liberation Army and composed of Cuban veterans of the Sierra Maestra and some Bolivian communists, encountered a lack of support from the peasants, who were completely alienated from the movement. Without any popular support in the rural world, and without support in the big cities due to the rejection of the communist political organizations, the possibilities of success diminished drastically.

Isolated in a jungle region where he suffered the aggravation of his asthmatic ailment, Ernesto Guevara was betrayed by local peasants and fell into an ambush by the Bolivian army in the Valle Grande region, where he was wounded and captured on October 8, 1967. Since Che had already become a symbol for young people around the world, the Bolivian military, advised by the CIA, wanted to destroy the revolutionary myth, assassinating him and then exposing his corpse, photographing him and burying him in secret. In 1997 the remains of Che Guevara were located, exhumed and transferred to Cuba, where they were buried with full honors by Fidel Castro's government.

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."

• Che Guevara

Che guevara internet archive :caught-in-4che:

Statement by Mr. Che Guevara (Cuba) before the United Nations General Assembly on 11 December 1964 :che-cigar:

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