Che Guevara - Revolutionary Icon

Biography

Born: 14 June 1928
Birthplace: Rosario, Argentina
Died: 9 October 1967 (execution)
Best Known As: Latin American Marxist revolutionary

Name at birth: Ernesto Guevara de la Serna

Ernest "Che" Guevara worked and studied medicine in various parts of Latin America before teaming up with Fidel Castro in 1959 to force a revolution in Cuba. After the revolution, Guevara was second only to Castro in power. In 1965 he left Cuba and travelled the world, working unsuccessfully toward Marxist/Leninist revolutions in the Congo and Bolivia. Known for his flamboyance and ruthless dedication to revolution, Guevara became an anti-capitalist icon in the 1960s. He was captured in Bolivia by U.S.-backed military forces and executed in 1967.


Guevara's remains were discovered in Bolivia in 1997 and moved to a mausoleum in Cuba... He was played by actor Benicio Del Toro in the 2008 film Che, directed by Steven Soderbergh.


Military History Companion: Ernesto Guevara
Guevara, Ernesto (1928-67), Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary and cultural ideal for a generation enamoured of style over substance, known as ‘Ché’ from a verbal mannerism distinctive of his native land. His contribution to military theory was the idea of a guerrilla ‘focus’ to create revolutionary conditions by attracting the disaffected and provoking repression, a variant of the French Revolutionaries' politique du pire (the politics of painting things as black as possible), which overlooks the fact that ruthless repression usually succeeds.

Of Spanish-Irish descent, he grew up in a provincial bourgeois home. Although he suffered from asthma, he was a vigorous athlete as well as a scholar who travelled extensively in Latin America and was appalled by the poverty he observed. After completing his first medical degree he witnessed the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup against the socialist Arbenz regime in Guatemala, which imbued him with an abiding hatred for the USA. Moving to Mexico, he met the Castro brothers and joined their November 1956 expedition against Cuban dictator Batista in Cuba. Wounded in an ambush shortly after landing, he was one of the handful who made it to the Sierra Maestra mountains.

The only thing that can be said in defence of his inaccurate account of the Cuban Revolution and the conclusions he drew from it is that he must have believed it, or else he would not have staked his life on repeating it elsewhere. It succeeded because revolutionaries in the cities absorbed Batista's attention, because his army was militarily useless, and because the USA cut off support. Once the dictator fled on 1 January 1959, the triumvirate of the Castro brothers and Guevara deliberately provoked the Americans to do their worst. When this proved to be the astoundingly inept Bay of Pigs invasion, the revolution was affirmed and Cuba's appeal both to the USSR as a beachhead in the western hemisphere and to wounded Latin American nationalism became irresistible.

Over the next years Guevara occupied key economic posts with an unbroken record of costly failure. Dogmatically committed to the idea that voluntarism could replace incentives, he preferred the glamour of propaganda and exhortation to the dreary work of trying to bring to completion the unrealistic projects he launched, and Cuba is still littered with rusting monuments to his crash industrialization programme. During his international forays he also trampled on Soviet sensibilities by questioning their world revolutionary leadership, but by 1964-5 Cuba was so deeply in debt to the USSR that its independence became tenuous and his own position untenable. Although his friendship with Fidel remained strong to the end, Cuba was also not big enough for two Messiahs.

In 1965 he resigned all offices and his citizenship in order to give Fidel a fig leaf of political deniability and went to Africa, where he led a Cuban contingent in the chaos of the ex-Belgian Congo, well after any possibility of making a difference had evaporated (see Congo, UN operations in). Meanwhile Fidel had found himself obliged to make his renunciation letters public and Guevara found himself with nowhere to go. In the face of his desire to return to certain death in Argentina, Fidel persuaded him to lead an expedition to Bolivia as a means to that end, while convincing the Bolivian communists that the intention was to create a centrally located continental guerrilla training school.

Guevara made a bad start worse by his doctrinaire commitment to the ‘focus’ concept in the absence of any local preconditions, and by a desire to record every detail of what he believed was a fresh new chapter in the history of Latin America. Once its attention was drawn to his presence, the Bolivian army had little difficulty in wiping out the ‘focus’ and capturing him. They shot him because he was less trouble to them dead than alive.

The dozens of idealistic Latin Americans who had already died seeking to emulate his example became thousands over the next decade. Internationally, he became the idol of the worldwide student revolts of 1968, for which his sexual promiscuity, undisciplined spontaneity, and massive ego made him an entirely appropriate icon.