Ernesto "Che" Guevara (;Spanish: [ˈtʃe ɣeˈβaɾa]
June 14, 1928 – October 9, 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.As a young medical
student, Guevara traveled throughout South
America and was radicalized by the poverty,
hunger and disease he witnessed. 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.
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 U.S.-backed
Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara
soon rose to prominence among the insurgents,
was promoted to second in command and played
a pivotal role in the victorious two-year
guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista
regime.Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara
performed a number of key roles in the new
government. These included reviewing the appeals
and firing squads for those convicted as war
criminals during the revolutionary tribunals,
instituting agrarian land reform as minister
of industries, helping spearhead a successful
nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both
national bank president 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,
and bringing Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic
missiles to Cuba, which precipitated the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, Guevara
was a prolific writer and diarist, composing
a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, 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 remedy being proletarian internationalism
and world revolution. Guevara left Cuba in
1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully
in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where
he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces
and summarily executed.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, Guevara has evolved into a quintessential
icon of various leftist movements. Time magazine
named him one of the 100 most influential
people of the 20th century, while an Alberto
Korda photograph of him, titled Guerrillero
Heroico (shown), was cited by the Maryland
Institute College of Art as "the most famous
photograph in the world".
== Early life ==
Ernesto Guevara was born to Ernesto Guevara
Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa, on June
14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina, according
to his birth certificate, but the according
to biographer Jon Lee Anderson's book Che
Guevara: A Revolutionary Life Che's mother
confided to an astrologer friend that he was
actually born on May 14, 1928. The deception
was made to avoid the scandal of being already
three months pregnant, before getting marriage,
would create.He is the eldest of five children
in a middle-class Argentine family of Spanish
(including Basque and Cantabrian) descent,
as well as Irish by means of his patrilineal
ancestor Patrick Lynch. In accordance with
the flexibility allowed in Spanish naming
customs, his legal name (Ernesto Guevara)
will sometimes appear with "de la Serna" and/or
"Lynch" accompanying it. Referring to Che's
"restless" nature, his father declared "the
first thing to note is that in my son's veins
flowed the blood of the Irish rebels".Very
early on in life, Ernestito (as he was then
called) developed an "affinity for the poor".
Growing up in a family with leftist leanings,
Guevara was introduced to a wide spectrum
of political perspectives even as a boy. His
father, a staunch supporter of Republicans
from the Spanish Civil War, often hosted many
veterans from the conflict in the Guevara
home.Despite suffering crippling bouts of
acute asthma that were to afflict him throughout
his life, he excelled as an athlete, enjoying
swimming, football, golf, and shooting, while
also becoming an "untiring" cyclist. He was
an avid rugby union player, and played at
fly-half for Club Universitario de Buenos
Aires. His rugby playing earned him the nickname
"Fuser"—a contraction of El Furibundo (raging)
and his mother's surname, de la Serna—for
his aggressive style of play.
=== Intellectual and literary interests ===
Guevara learned chess from his father, and
began participating in local tournaments by
the age of 12. During adolescence and throughout
his life he was passionate about poetry, especially
that of Pablo Neruda, John Keats, Antonio
Machado, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela
Mistral, César Vallejo, and Walt Whitman.
He could also recite Rudyard Kipling's "If—"
and José Hernández's Martín Fierro by heart.
The Guevara home contained more than 3,000
books, which allowed Guevara to be an enthusiastic
and eclectic reader, with interests including
Karl Marx, William Faulkner, André Gide,
Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne. Additionally,
he enjoyed the works of Jawaharlal Nehru,
Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Vladimir Lenin
and Jean-Paul Sartre; as well as Anatole France,
Friedrich Engels, H. G. Wells and Robert Frost.As
he grew older, he developed an interest in
the Latin American writers Horacio Quiroga,
Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza, Rubén Darío
and Miguel Asturias. Many of these authors'
ideas he cataloged in his own handwritten
notebooks of concepts, definitions, and philosophies
of influential intellectuals. These included
composing analytical sketches of Buddha and
Aristotle, along with examining Bertrand Russell
on love and patriotism, Jack London on society
and Nietzsche on the idea of death. Sigmund
Freud's ideas fascinated him as he quoted
him on a variety of topics from dreams and
libido to narcissism and the Oedipus complex.
His favorite subjects in school included philosophy,
mathematics, engineering, political science,
sociology, history and archaeology.Years later,
a declassified CIA 'biographical and personality
report' dated February 13, 1958 made note
of Guevara's wide range of academic interests
and intellect, describing him as "quite well
read" while adding that "Che is fairly intellectual
for a Latino."
=== Motorcycle journey ===
In 1948, Guevara entered the University of
Buenos Aires to study medicine. His "hunger
to explore the world" led him to intersperse
his collegiate pursuits with two long introspective
journeys that fundamentally changed the way
he viewed himself and the contemporary economic
conditions in Latin America. The first expedition
in 1950 was a 4,500-kilometer (2,800 mi) solo
trip through the rural provinces of northern
Argentina on a bicycle on which he installed
a small engine. This was followed in 1951
by a nine-month, 8,000-kilometer (5,000 mi)
continental motorcycle trek through part of
South America. For the latter, he took a year
off from his studies to embark with his friend
Alberto Granado, with the final goal of spending
a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo
leper colony in Peru, on the banks of the
Amazon River.
In Chile, Guevara found himself enraged by
the working conditions of the miners in Anaconda's
Chuquicamata copper mine and moved by his
overnight encounter in the Atacama Desert
with a persecuted communist couple who did
not even own a blanket, describing them as
"the shivering flesh-and-blood victims of
capitalist exploitation". Additionally, on
the way to Machu Picchu high in the Andes,
he was struck by the crushing poverty of the
remote rural areas, where peasant farmers
worked small plots of land owned by wealthy
landlords. Later on his journey, Guevara was
especially impressed by the camaraderie among
those living in a leper colony, stating, "The
highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty
arise among such lonely and desperate people."
Guevara used notes taken during this trip
to write an account, titled The Motorcycle
Diaries, which later became a New York Times
best-seller, and was adapted into a 2004 award-winning
film of the same name.
The journey took Guevara through Argentina,
Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela,
Panama, and Miami, Florida, for 20 days, before
returning home to Buenos Aires. By the end
of the trip, he came to view Latin America
not as collection of separate nations, but
as a single entity requiring a continent-wide
liberation strategy. His conception of a borderless,
united Hispanic America sharing a common Latino
heritage was a theme that recurred prominently
during his later revolutionary activities.
Upon returning to Argentina, he completed
his studies and received his medical degree
in June 1953, making him officially "Dr. Ernesto
Guevara".Guevara later remarked that through
his travels in Latin America, he came in "close
contact with poverty, hunger and disease"
along with the "inability to treat a child
because of lack of money" and "stupefaction
provoked by the continual hunger and punishment"
that leads a father to "accept the loss of
a son as an unimportant accident". Guevara
cited these experiences as convincing him
that in order to "help these people", he needed
to leave the realm of medicine and consider
the political arena of armed struggle.
== Guatemala, Árbenz, and United Fruit ==
On July 7, 1953, Guevara set out again, this
time to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa
Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador.
On December 10, 1953, before leaving for Guatemala,
Guevara sent an update to his Aunt Beatriz
from San José, Costa Rica. In the letter
Guevara speaks of traversing the dominion
of the United Fruit Company, a journey which
convinced him that the Company's capitalist
system was a terrible one. This affirmed indignation
carried the more aggressive tone he adopted
in order to frighten his more Conservative
relatives, and ends with Guevara swearing
on an image of the then recently deceased
Joseph Stalin, not to rest until these "octopuses
have been vanquished". Later that month, Guevara
arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo
Árbenz Guzmán headed a democratically elected
government that, through land reform and other
initiatives, was attempting to end the latifundia
system. To accomplish this, President Árbenz
had enacted a major land reform program, where
all uncultivated portions of large land holdings
were to be expropriated and redistributed
to landless peasants. The biggest land owner,
and one most affected by the reforms, was
the United Fruit Company, from which the Árbenz
government had already taken more than 225,000
acres (91,000 ha) of uncultivated land. Pleased
with the road the nation was heading down,
Guevara decided to settle down in Guatemala
so as to "perfect himself and accomplish whatever
may be necessary in order to become a true
revolutionary."
In Guatemala City, Guevara sought out Hilda
Gadea Acosta, a Peruvian economist who was
well-connected politically as a member of
the left-leaning Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
Americana (APRA, American Popular Revolutionary
Alliance). She introduced Guevara to a number
of high-level officials in the Arbenz government.
Guevara then established contact with a group
of Cuban exiles linked to Fidel Castro through
the July 26, 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks
in Santiago de Cuba. During this period, he
acquired his famous nickname, due to his frequent
use of the Argentine filler syllable che (a
multi-purpose discourse marker, like the syllable
"eh" in Canadian English). During his time
in Guatemala, Guevara was helped by other
Central American exiles, one of whom, Helena
Leiva de Holst, provided him with food and
lodging, discussed her travels to study Marxism
in Russia and China, and to whom, Guevara
dedicated a poem, "Invitación al camino".In
May 1954, a shipment of infantry and light
artillery weapons was dispatched from Communist
Czechoslovakia for the Arbenz Government and
arrived in Puerto Barrios. As a result, the
United States government—which since 1953
had been tasked by President Eisenhower to
remove Arbenz from power in the multifaceted
CIA operation code named PBSUCCESS—responded
by saturating Guatemala with anti-Arbenz propaganda
through radio and dropped leaflets, and began
bombing raids using unmarked airplanes. The
United States also sponsored a force of several
hundred Guatemalan refugees and mercenaries
who were headed by Castillo Armas to help
remove the Arbenz government. On June 27,
Arbenz decided to resign. This allowed Armas
and his CIA-assisted forces to march into
Guatemala City and establish a military junta,
which elected Armas as President on July 7.
Consequently, the Armas regime then consolidated
power by rounding up and executing suspected
communists, while crushing the previously
flourishing labor unions and reversing the
previous agrarian reforms.Guevara himself
was eager to fight on behalf of Arbenz and
joined an armed militia organized by the Communist
Youth for that purpose, but frustrated with
the group's inaction, he soon returned to
medical duties. Following the coup, he again
volunteered to fight, but soon after, Arbenz
took refuge in the Mexican Embassy and told
his foreign supporters to leave the country.
Guevara's repeated calls to resist were noted
by supporters of the coup, and he was marked
for murder. After Hilda Gadea was arrested,
Guevara sought protection inside the Argentine
consulate, where he remained until he received
a safe-conduct pass some weeks later and made
his way to Mexico.The overthrow of the Arbenz
regime and establishment of the right-wing
Armas dictatorship cemented Guevara's view
of the United States as an imperialist power
that opposed and attempted to destroy any
government that sought to redress the socioeconomic
inequality endemic to Latin America and other
developing countries. In speaking about the
coup, Guevara stated:
The last Latin American revolutionary democracy
– that of Jacobo Arbenz – failed as a
result of the cold premeditated aggression
carried out by the United States. Its visible
head was the Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence,
was also a stockholder and attorney for the
United Fruit Company.
Guevara's conviction that Marxism achieved
through armed struggle and defended by an
armed populace was the only way to rectify
such conditions was thus strengthened. Gadea
wrote later, "It was Guatemala which finally
convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle
and for taking the initiative against imperialism.
By the time he left, he was sure of this."
== Mexico City and preparation ==
Guevara arrived in Mexico City on 21 September
1954, and worked in the allergy section of
the General Hospital and at the Hospital Infantil
de Mexico. In addition he gave lectures on
medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in the
National Autonomous University of Mexico and
worked as a news photographer for Latina News
Agency. His first wife Hilda notes in her
memoir My Life with Che, that for a while,
Guevara considered going to work as a doctor
in Africa and that he continued to be deeply
troubled by the poverty around him. In one
instance, Hilda describes Guevara's obsession
with an elderly washerwoman whom he was treating,
remarking that he saw her as "representative
of the most forgotten and exploited class".
Hilda later found a poem that Che had dedicated
to the old woman, containing "a promise to
fight for a better world, for a better life
for all the poor and exploited".During this
time he renewed his friendship with Ñico
López and the other Cuban exiles whom he
had met in Guatemala. In June 1955, López
introduced him to Raúl Castro, who subsequently
introduced him to his older brother, Fidel
Castro, the revolutionary leader who had formed
the 26th of July Movement and was now plotting
to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio
Batista. During a long conversation with Fidel
on the night of their first meeting, Guevara
concluded that the Cuban's cause was the one
for which he had been searching and before
daybreak he had signed up as a member of the
July 26 Movement. Despite their "contrasting
personalities", from this point on Che and
Fidel began to foster what dual biographer
Simon Reid-Henry deemed a "revolutionary friendship
that would change the world", as a result
of their coinciding commitment to anti-imperialism.By
this point in Guevara's life, he deemed that
U.S.-controlled conglomerates installed and
supported repressive regimes around the world.
In this vein, he considered Batista a "U.S.
puppet whose strings needed cutting". Although
he planned to be the group's combat medic,
Guevara participated in the military training
with the members of the Movement. The key
portion of training involved learning hit
and run tactics of guerrilla warfare. Guevara
and the others underwent arduous 15-hour marches
over mountains, across rivers, and through
the dense undergrowth, learning and perfecting
the procedures of ambush and quick retreat.
From the start Guevara was Alberto Bayo's
"prize student" among those in training, scoring
the highest on all of the tests given. At
the end of the course, he was called "the
best guerrilla of them all" by their instructor,
General Bayo.Guevara then married Gadea in
Mexico in September 1955, before embarking
on his plan to assist in the liberation of
Cuba.
== Cuban Revolution ==
=== Invasion, warfare, and Santa Clara ===
The first step in Castro's revolutionary plan
was an assault on Cuba from Mexico via the
Granma, an old, leaky cabin cruiser. They
set out for Cuba on November 25, 1956. Attacked
by Batista's military soon after landing,
many of the 82 men were either killed in the
attack or executed upon capture; only 22 found
each other afterwards. During this initial
bloody confrontation Guevara laid down his
medical supplies and picked up a box of ammunition
dropped by a fleeing comrade, proving to be
a symbolic moment in Che's life.
Only a small band of revolutionaries survived
to re-group as a bedraggled fighting force
deep in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where
they received support from the urban guerrilla
network of Frank País, the 26th of July Movement,
and local campesinos. With the group withdrawn
to the Sierra, the world wondered whether
Castro was alive or dead until early 1957
when the interview by Herbert Matthews appeared
in The New York Times. The article presented
a lasting, almost mythical image for Castro
and the guerrillas. Guevara was not present
for the interview, but in the coming months
he began to realize the importance of the
media in their struggle. Meanwhile, as supplies
and morale diminished, and with an allergy
to mosquito bites which resulted in agonizing
walnut-sized cysts on his body, Guevara considered
these "the most painful days of the war".During
Guevara's time living hidden among the poor
subsistence farmers of the Sierra Maestra
mountains, he discovered that there were no
schools, no electricity, minimal access to
healthcare, and more than 40 percent of the
adults were illiterate. As the war continued,
Guevara became an integral part of the rebel
army and "convinced Castro with competence,
diplomacy and patience". Guevara set up factories
to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread,
taught new recruits about tactics, and organized
schools to teach illiterate campesinos to
read and write. Moreover, Guevara established
health clinics, workshops to teach military
tactics, and a newspaper to disseminate information.
The man whom Time dubbed three years later
"Castro's brain" at this point was promoted
by Fidel Castro to Comandante (commander)
of a second army column.As second in command,
Guevara was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes
shot defectors. Deserters were punished as
traitors, and Guevara was known to send squads
to track those seeking to go AWOL. As a result,
Guevara became feared for his brutality and
ruthlessness. During the guerrilla campaign,
Guevara was also responsible for the sometimes
summary execution of a number of men accused
of being informers, deserters or spies. In
his diaries, Guevara described the first such
execution of Eutímio Guerra, a peasant army
guide who admitted treason when it was discovered
he accepted the promise of ten thousand pesos
for repeatedly giving away the rebel's position
for attack by the Cuban air force. Such information
also allowed Batista's army to burn the homes
of peasants sympathetic to the revolution.
Upon Guerra's request that they "end his life
quickly", Che stepped forward and shot him
in the head, writing "The situation was uncomfortable
for the people and for Eutimio so I ended
the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol
in the right side of the brain, with exit
orifice in the right temporal [lobe]." His
scientific notations and matter-of-fact description,
suggested to one biographer a "remarkable
detachment to violence" by that point in the
war. Later, Guevara published a literary account
of the incident, titled "Death of a Traitor",
where he transfigured Eutimio's betrayal and
pre-execution request that the revolution
"take care of his children", into a "revolutionary
parable about redemption through sacrifice".
Although he maintained a demanding and harsh
disposition, Guevara also viewed his role
of commander as one of a teacher, entertaining
his men during breaks between engagements
with readings from the likes of Robert Louis
Stevenson, Cervantes, and Spanish lyric poets.
Together with this role, and inspired by José
Martí's principle of "literacy without borders",
Guevara further ensured that his rebel fighters
made daily time to teach the uneducated campesinos
with whom they lived and fought to read and
write, in what Guevara termed the "battle
against ignorance". Tomás Alba, who fought
under Guevara's command, later stated that
"Che was loved, in spite of being stern and
demanding. We would (have) given our life
for him."His commanding officer Fidel Castro
described Guevara as intelligent, daring,
and an exemplary leader who "had great moral
authority over his troops". Castro further
remarked that Guevara took too many risks,
even having a "tendency toward foolhardiness".
Guevara's teenage lieutenant, Joel Iglesias,
recounts such actions in his diary, noting
that Guevara's behavior in combat even brought
admiration from the enemy. On one occasion
Iglesias recounts the time he had been wounded
in battle, stating "Che ran out to me, defying
the bullets, threw me over his shoulder, and
got me out of there. The guards didn't dare
fire at him ... later they told me he made
a great impression on them when they saw him
run out with his pistol stuck in his belt,
ignoring the danger, they didn't dare shoot."Guevara
was instrumental in creating the clandestine
radio station Radio Rebelde (Rebel Radio)
in February 1958, which broadcast news to
the Cuban people with statements by the 26th
of July movement, and provided radiotelephone
communication between the growing number of
rebel columns across the island. Guevara had
apparently been inspired to create the station
by observing the effectiveness of CIA supplied
radio in Guatemala in ousting the government
of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.To quell the rebellion,
Cuban government troops began executing rebel
prisoners on the spot, and regularly rounded
up, tortured, and shot civilians as a tactic
of intimidation. By March 1958, the continued
atrocities carried out by Batista's forces
led the United States to stop selling arms
to the Cuban government. Then in late July
1958, Guevara played a critical role in the
Battle of Las Mercedes by using his column
to halt a force of 1,500 men called up by
Batista's General Cantillo in a plan to encircle
and destroy Castro's forces. Years later,
Major Larry Bockman of the United States Marine
Corps analyzed and described Che's tactical
appreciation of this battle as "brilliant".
During this time Guevara also became an "expert"
at leading hit-and-run tactics against Batista's
army, and then fading back into the countryside
before the army could counterattack.
As the war extended, Guevara led a new column
of fighters dispatched westward for the final
push towards Havana. Travelling by foot, Guevara
embarked on a difficult 7-week march, only
travelling at night to avoid ambush and often
not eating for several days. In the closing
days of December 1958, Guevara's task was
to cut the island in half by taking Las Villas
province. In a matter of days he executed
a series of "brilliant tactical victories"
that gave him control of all but the province's
capital city of Santa Clara. Guevara then
directed his "suicide squad" in the attack
on Santa Clara, which became the final decisive
military victory of the revolution. In the
six weeks leading up to the battle there were
times when his men were completely surrounded,
outgunned, and overrun. Che's eventual victory
despite being outnumbered 10:1 remains in
the view of some observers a "remarkable tour
de force in modern warfare".Radio Rebelde
broadcast the first reports that Guevara's
column had taken Santa Clara on New Year's
Eve 1958. This contradicted reports by the
heavily controlled national news media, which
had at one stage reported Guevara's death
during the fighting. At 3 am on January 1,
1959, upon learning that his generals were
negotiating a separate peace with Guevara,
Fulgencio Batista boarded a plane in Havana
and fled for the Dominican Republic, along
with an amassed "fortune of more than $300,000,000
through graft and payoffs". The following
day on January 2, Guevara entered Havana to
take final control of the capital. Fidel Castro
took six more days to arrive, as he stopped
to rally support in several large cities on
his way to rolling victoriously into Havana
on January 8, 1959. The final death toll from
the two years of revolutionary fighting was
2,000 people.In mid-January 1959, Guevara
went to live at a summer villa in Tarará
to recover from a violent asthma attack. While
there he started the Tarara Group, a group
that debated and formed the new plans for
Cuba's social, political, and economic development.
In addition, Che began to write his book Guerrilla
Warfare while resting at Tarara. In February,
the revolutionary government proclaimed Guevara
"a Cuban citizen by birth" in recognition
of his role in the triumph. When Hilda Gadea
arrived in Cuba in late January, Guevara told
her that he was involved with another woman,
and the two agreed on a divorce, which was
finalized on May 22. On June 2, 1959, he married
Aleida March, a Cuban-born member of the 26th
of July movement with whom he had been living
since late 1958. Guevara returned to the seaside
village of Tarara in June for his honeymoon
with Aleida. In total, Guevara had five children
from his two marriages.
=== La Cabaña, land reform, and literacy
===
The first major political crisis arose over
what to do with the captured Batista officials
who had been responsible for the worst of
the repression. During the rebellion against
Batista's dictatorship, the general command
of the rebel army, led by Fidel Castro, introduced
into the territories under its control the
19th century penal law commonly known as the
Ley de la Sierra (Law of the Sierra). This
law included the death penalty for serious
crimes, whether perpetrated by the Batista
regime or by supporters of the revolution.
In 1959, the revolutionary government extended
its application to the whole of the republic
and to those it considered war criminals,
captured and tried after the revolution. According
to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, this latter
extension was supported by the majority of
the population, and followed the same procedure
as those in the Nuremberg trials held by the
Allies after World War II.
To implement a portion of this plan, Castro
named Guevara commander of the La Cabaña
Fortress prison, for a five-month tenure (January
2 through June 12, 1959). Guevara was charged
with purging the Batista army and consolidating
victory by exacting "revolutionary justice"
against those considered to be traitors, chivatos
(informants) or war criminals. Serving in
the post as commander of La Cabaña, Guevara
reviewed the appeals of those convicted during
the revolutionary tribunal process. The tribunals
were conducted by 2–3 army officers, an
assessor, and a respected local citizen. On
some occasions the penalty delivered by the
tribunal was death by firing squad. Raúl
Gómez Treto, senior legal advisor to the
Cuban Ministry of Justice, has argued that
the death penalty was justified in order to
prevent citizens themselves from taking justice
into their own hands, as happened twenty years
earlier in the anti-Machado rebellion. Biographers
note that in January 1959, the Cuban public
was in a "lynching mood", and point to a survey
at the time showing 93% public approval for
the tribunal process. Moreover, a January
22, 1959, Universal Newsreel broadcast in
the United States and narrated by Ed Herlihy,
featured Fidel Castro asking an estimated
one million Cubans whether they approved of
the executions, and was met with a roaring
"¡Si!" (yes). With thousands of Cubans estimated
to have been killed at the hands of Batista's
collaborators, and many of the accused war
criminals sentenced to death accused of torture
and physical atrocities, the newly empowered
government carried out executions, punctuated
by cries from the crowds of "¡al paredón!"
([to the] wall!), which biographer Jorge Castañeda
describes as "without respect for due process".
Although there are varying accounts, it is
estimated that several hundred people were
executed nationwide during this time, with
Guevara's jurisdictional death total at La
Cabaña ranging from 55 to 105. Conflicting
views exist of Guevara's attitude towards
the executions at La Cabaña. Some exiled
opposition biographers report that he relished
the rituals of the firing squad, and organized
them with gusto, while others relate that
Guevara pardoned as many prisoners as he could.
What is acknowledged by all sides is that
Guevara had become a "hardened" man, who had
no qualms about the death penalty or summary
and collective trials. If the only way to
"defend the revolution was to execute its
enemies, he would not be swayed by humanitarian
or political arguments". This is further confirmed
by a February 5, 1959, letter to Luis Paredes
López in Buenos Aires where Guevara states
unequivocally "The executions by firing squads
are not only a necessity for the people of
Cuba, but also an imposition of the people."Along
with ensuring "revolutionary justice", the
other key early platform of Guevara's was
establishing agrarian land reform. Almost
immediately after the success of the revolution
on January 27, 1959, Guevara made one of his
most significant speeches where he talked
about "the social ideas of the rebel army".
During this speech, he declared that the main
concern of the new Cuban government was "the
social justice that land redistribution brings
about". A few months later on May 17, 1959,
the Agrarian Reform Law crafted by Guevara
went into effect, limiting the size of all
farms to 1,000 acres (400 ha). Any holdings
over these limits were expropriated by the
government and either redistributed to peasants
in 67-acre (270,000 m2) parcels or held as
state run communes. The law also stipulated
that sugar plantations could not be owned
by foreigners.
On June 12, 1959, Castro sent Guevara out
on a three-month tour of 14 mostly Bandung
Pact countries (Morocco, Sudan, Egypt, Syria,
Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand,
Indonesia, Japan, Yugoslavia, Greece) and
the cities of Singapore and Hong Kong. Sending
Guevara away from Havana allowed Castro to
appear to be distancing himself from Guevara
and his Marxist sympathies, which troubled
both the United States and some of Castro's
July 26 Movement members. While in Jakarta,
Guevara visited Indonesian president Sukarno
to discuss the recent revolution in Indonesia
and to establish trade relations between their
two nations. Both men quickly bonded, as Sukarno
was attracted to Guevara's energy and his
relaxed informal approach; moreover they shared
revolutionary leftist aspirations against
western imperialism. Guevara next spent 12
days in Japan (July 15–27), participating
in negotiations aimed at expanding Cuba's
trade relations with that nation. During the
visit, he refused to visit and lay a wreath
at Japan's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorating
soldiers lost during World War II, remarking
that the Japanese "imperialists" had "killed
millions of Asians". Instead, Guevara stated
that he was going to visit Hiroshima, where
the American military had detonated an atom-bomb
14 years earlier. Despite his denunciation
of Imperial Japan, Guevara also considered
President Truman a "macabre clown" for the
bombings, and after visiting Hiroshima and
its Peace Memorial Museum, he sent back a
postcard to Cuba stating, "In order to fight
better for peace, one must look at Hiroshima."Upon
Guevara's return to Cuba in September 1959,
it was evident that Castro now had more political
power. The government had begun land seizures
included in the agrarian reform law, but was
hedging on compensation offers to landowners,
instead offering low interest "bonds", a step
which put the United States on alert. At this
point the affected wealthy cattlemen of Camagüey
mounted a campaign against the land redistributions,
and enlisted the newly disaffected rebel leader
Huber Matos, who along with the anti-Communist
wing of the 26th of July Movement, joined
them in denouncing the "Communist encroachment".
During this time Dominican dictator Rafael
Trujillo was offering assistance to the "Anti-Communist
Legion of the Caribbean" which was training
in the Dominican Republic. This multi-national
force, composed mostly of Spaniards and Cubans,
but also of Croatians, Germans, Greeks, and
right-wing mercenaries, was plotting to topple
Castro's new regime.
Such threats were heightened when, on March
4, 1960, two massive explosions ripped through
the French freighter La Coubre, which was
carrying Belgian munitions from the port of
Antwerp, and was docked in Havana Harbor.
The blasts killed at least 76 people and injured
several hundred, with Guevara personally providing
first aid to some of the victims. Cuban leader
Fidel Castro immediately accused the CIA of
"an act of terrorism" and held a state funeral
the following day for the victims of the blast.
It was at the memorial service that Alberto
Korda took the famous photograph of Guevara,
now known as Guerrillero Heroico.These perceived
threats prompted Castro to further eliminate
"counter-revolutionaries", and to utilize
Guevara to drastically increase the speed
of land reform. To implement this plan, a
new government agency, the National Institute
of Agrarian Reform (INRA), was established
to administer the new Agrarian Reform law.
INRA quickly became the most important governing
body in the nation, with Guevara serving as
its head in his capacity as minister of industries.
Under Guevara's command, INRA established
its own 100,000 person militia, used first
to help the government seize control of the
expropriated land and supervise its distribution,
and later to set up cooperative farms. The
land confiscated included 480,000 acres (190,000
ha) owned by United States corporations. Months
later, as retaliation, US President Dwight
D. Eisenhower sharply reduced United States
imports of Cuban sugar (Cuba's main cash crop),
thus leading Guevara on July 10, 1960, to
address over 100,000 workers in front of the
Presidential Palace at a rally called to denounce
United States "economic aggression". Time
magazine reporters who met with Guevara around
this time described him as "guid(ing) Cuba
with icy calculation, vast competence, high
intelligence, and a perceptive sense of humor."
Along with land reform, Guevara stressed the
need for national improvement in literacy.
Before 1959 the official literacy rate for
Cuba was between 60–76%, with educational
access in rural areas and a lack of instructors
the main determining factors. As a result,
the Cuban government at Guevara's behest dubbed
1961 the "year of education" and mobilized
over 100,000 volunteers into "literacy brigades",
who were then sent out into the countryside
to construct schools, train new educators,
and teach the predominantly illiterate guajiros
(peasants) to read and write. Unlike many
of Guevara's later economic initiatives, this
campaign was "a remarkable success". By the
completion of the Cuban Literacy Campaign,
707,212 adults had been taught to read and
write, raising the national literacy rate
to 96%.Accompanying literacy, Guevara was
also concerned with establishing universal
access to higher education. To accomplish
this, the new regime introduced affirmative
action to the universities. While announcing
this new commitment, Guevara told the gathered
faculty and students at the University of
Las Villas that the days when education was
"a privilege of the white middle class" had
ended. "The University" he said, "must paint
itself black, mulatto, worker, and peasant."
If it did not, he warned, the people were
going to break down its doors "and paint the
University the colors they like."
=== Marxist ideological influence ===
The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces
a qualitative change in the history of social
thought. He interprets history, understands
its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition
to predicting it (which would satisfy his
scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary
concept: the world must not only be interpreted,
it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the
slave and tool of his environment and converts
himself into the architect of his own destiny.
In September 1960, when Guevara was asked
about Cuba's ideology at the First Latin American
Congress, he replied, "If I were asked whether
our revolution is Communist, I would define
it as Marxist. Our revolution has discovered
by its methods the paths that Marx pointed
out." Consequently, when enacting and advocating
Cuban policy, Guevara cited the political
philosopher Karl Marx as his ideological inspiration.
In defending his political stance, Guevara
confidently remarked, "There are truths so
evident, so much a part of people's knowledge,
that it is now useless to discuss them. One
ought to be Marxist with the same naturalness
with which one is 'Newtonian' in physics,
or 'Pasteurian' in biology." According to
Guevara, the "practical revolutionaries" of
the Cuban Revolution had the goal of "simply
fulfill(ing) laws foreseen by Marx, the scientist."
Using Marx's predictions and system of dialectical
materialism, Guevara professed that "The laws
of Marxism are present in the events of the
Cuban Revolution, independently of what its
leaders profess or fully know of those laws
from a theoretical point of view."
=== Economic vision and the "New Man" ===
Man truly achieves his full human condition
when he produces without being compelled by
the physical necessity of selling himself
as a commodity.
At this stage, Guevara acquired the additional
position of Finance Minister, as well as President
of the National Bank. These appointments,
combined with his existing position as Minister
of Industries, placed Guevara at the zenith
of his power, as the "virtual czar" of the
Cuban economy. As a consequence of his position
at the head of the central bank, it became
Guevara's duty to sign the Cuban currency,
which per custom bore his signature. Instead
of using his full name, he signed the bills
solely "Che". It was through this symbolic
act, which horrified many in the Cuban financial
sector, that Guevara signaled his distaste
for money and the class distinctions it brought
about. Guevara's long time friend Ricardo
Rojo later remarked that "the day he signed
Che on the bills, (he) literally knocked the
props from under the widespread belief that
money was sacred."
In an effort to eliminate social inequalities,
Guevara and Cuba's new leadership had moved
to swiftly transform the political and economic
base of the country through nationalizing
factories, banks, and businesses, while attempting
to ensure affordable housing, healthcare,
and employment for all Cubans. However, in
order for a genuine transformation of consciousness
to take root, it was believed that such structural
changes had to be accompanied by a conversion
in people's social relations and values. Believing
that the attitudes in Cuba towards race, women,
individualism, and manual labor were the product
of the island's outdated past, all individuals
were urged to view each other as equals and
take on the values of what Guevara termed
"el Hombre Nuevo" (the New Man). Guevara hoped
his "new man" to be ultimately "selfless and
cooperative, obedient and hard working, gender-blind,
incorruptible, non-materialistic, and anti-imperialist".
To accomplish this, Guevara emphasized the
tenets of Marxism–Leninism, and wanted to
use the state to emphasize qualities such
as egalitarianism and self-sacrifice, at the
same time as "unity, equality, and freedom"
became the new maxims. Guevara's first desired
economic goal of the new man, which coincided
with his aversion for wealth condensation
and economic inequality, was to see a nationwide
elimination of material incentives in favor
of moral ones. He negatively viewed capitalism
as a "contest among wolves" where "one can
only win at the cost of others" and thus desired
to see the creation of a "new man and woman".
Guevara continually stressed that a socialist
economy in itself is not "worth the effort,
sacrifice, and risks of war and destruction"
if it ends up encouraging "greed and individual
ambition at the expense of collective spirit".
A primary goal of Guevara's thus became to
reform "individual consciousness" and values
to produce better workers and citizens. In
his view, Cuba's "new man" would be able to
overcome the "egotism" and "selfishness" that
he loathed and discerned was uniquely characteristic
of individuals in capitalist societies. To
promote this concept of a "new man", the government
also created a series of party-dominated institutions
and mechanisms on all levels of society, which
included organizations such as labor groups,
youth leagues, women's groups, community centers,
and houses of culture to promote state-sponsored
art, music, and literature. In congruence
with this, all educational, mass media, and
artistic community based facilities were nationalized
and utilized to instill the government's official
socialist ideology. In describing this new
method of "development", Guevara stated:
There is a great difference between free-enterprise
development and revolutionary development.
In one of them, wealth is concentrated in
the hands of a fortunate few, the friends
of the government, the best wheeler-dealers.
In the other, wealth is the people's patrimony.
A further integral part of fostering a sense
of "unity between the individual and the mass",
Guevara believed, was volunteer work and will.
To display this, Guevara "led by example",
working "endlessly at his ministry job, in
construction, and even cutting sugar cane"
on his day off. He was known for working 36
hours at a stretch, calling meetings after
midnight, and eating on the run. Such behavior
was emblematic of Guevara's new program of
moral incentives, where each worker was now
required to meet a quota and produce a certain
quantity of goods. As a replacement for the
pay increases abolished by Guevara, workers
who exceeded their quota now only received
a certificate of commendation, while workers
who failed to meet their quotas were given
a pay cut. Guevara unapologetically defended
his personal philosophy towards motivation
and work, stating:
This is not a matter of how many pounds of
meat one might be able to eat, or how many
times a year someone can go to the beach,
or how many ornaments from abroad one might
be able to buy with his current salary. What
really matters is that the individual feels
more complete, with much more internal richness
and much more responsibility.
In the face of a loss of commercial connections
with Western states, Guevara tried to replace
them with closer commercial relationships
with Eastern Bloc states, visiting a number
of Marxist states and signing trade agreements
with them. At the end of 1960 he visited Czechoslovakia,
the Soviet Union, North Korea, Hungary and
East Germany and signed, for instance, a trade
agreement in East Berlin on December 17, 1960.
Such agreements helped Cuba's economy to a
certain degree but also had the disadvantage
of a growing economic dependency on the Eastern
Bloc. It was also in East Germany where Guevara
met Tamara Bunke (later known as "Tania"),
who was assigned as his interpreter, and who
joined him years later, and was killed with
him in Bolivia.
Whatever the merits or demerits of Guevara's
economic principles, his programs were unsuccessful,
and accompanied a rapid drop in productivity
and a rapid rise in absenteeism. In a meeting
with French economist Rene Dumont, Guevara
blamed the inadequacy of the Agrarian Reform
Law enacted by the Cuban government in 1959,
which turned large plantations into farm co-operatives
or split up land amongst peasants. In Guevara's
opinion, this situation continued to promote
a "heightened sense of individual ownership"
in which workers could not see the positive
social benefits of their labor, leading them
to instead seek individual material gain as
before. Decades later, the director of Radio
Martí Ernesto Betancourt, an early ally turned
Castro-critic and Che's former deputy, accused
Guevara of being "ignorant of the most elementary
economic principles." In reference to the
collective failings of Guevara's vision, reporter
I. F. Stone who interviewed Guevara twice
during this time, remarked that he was "Galahad
not Robespierre", while opining that "in a
sense he was, like some early saint, taking
refuge in the desert. Only there could the
purity of the faith be safeguarded from the
unregenerate revisionism of human nature".
=== Bay of Pigs, and missile crisis ===
On April 17, 1961, 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban
exiles invaded Cuba during the Bay of Pigs
Invasion. Guevara did not play a key role
in the fighting, as one day before the invasion
a warship carrying Marines faked an invasion
off the West Coast of Pinar del Río and drew
forces commanded by Guevara to that region.
However, historians give him a share of credit
for the victory as he was director of instruction
for Cuba's armed forces at the time. Author
Tad Szulc in his explanation of the Cuban
victory, assigns Guevara partial credit, stating:
"The revolutionaries won because Che Guevara,
as the head of the Instruction Department
of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in charge
of the militia training program, had done
so well in preparing 200,000 men and women
for war." It was also during this deployment
that he suffered a bullet grazing to the cheek
when his pistol fell out of its holster and
accidentally discharged.
In August 1961, during an economic conference
of the Organization of American States in
Punta del Este, Uruguay, Che Guevara sent
a note of "gratitude" to United States President
John F. Kennedy through Richard N. Goodwin,
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs. It read "Thanks for Playa Girón
(Bay of Pigs). Before the invasion, the revolution
was shaky. Now it's stronger than ever." In
response to United States Treasury Secretary
Douglas Dillon presenting the Alliance for
Progress for ratification by the meeting,
Guevara antagonistically attacked the United
States claim of being a "democracy", stating
that such a system was not compatible with
"financial oligarchy, discrimination against
blacks, and outrages by the Ku Klux Klan".
Guevara continued, speaking out against the
"persecution" that in his view "drove scientists
like Oppenheimer from their posts, deprived
the world for years of the marvelous voice
of Paul Robeson, and sent the Rosenbergs to
their deaths against the protests of a shocked
world." Guevara ended his remarks by insinuating
that the United States was not interested
in real reforms, sardonically quipping that
"U.S. experts never talk about agrarian reform;
they prefer a safe subject, like a better
water supply. In short, they seem to prepare
the revolution of the toilets." Nevertheless,
Goodwin stated in his memo to President Kennedy
following the meeting that Guevara viewed
him as someone of the "newer generation" and
that Guevara, whom Goodwin alleged sent a
message to him the day after the meeting through
one of the meeting's Argentine participants
whom he described as "Darretta," also viewed
the conversation which the two had as "quite
profitable."Guevara, who was practically the
architect of the Soviet–Cuban relationship,
then played a key role in bringing to Cuba
the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles
that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis
in October 1962 and brought the world to the
brink of nuclear war. A few weeks after the
crisis, during an interview with the British
communist newspaper the Daily Worker, Guevara
was still fuming over the perceived Soviet
betrayal and told correspondent Sam Russell
that, if the missiles had been under Cuban
control, they would have fired them off. While
expounding on the incident later, Guevara
reiterated that the cause of socialist liberation
against global "imperialist aggression" would
ultimately have been worth the possibility
of "millions of atomic war victims". The missile
crisis further convinced Guevara that the
world's two superpowers (the United States
and the Soviet Union) used Cuba as a pawn
in their own global strategies. Afterward,
he denounced the Soviets almost as frequently
as he denounced the Americans.
== International diplomacy ==
In December 1964, Che Guevara had emerged
as a "revolutionary statesman of world stature"
and thus traveled to New York City as head
of the Cuban delegation to speak at the United
Nations. On December 11, 1964, during Guevara's
hour-long, impassioned address at the UN,
he criticized the United Nations' inability
to confront the "brutal policy of apartheid"
in South Africa, asking "Can the United Nations
do nothing to stop this?" Guevara then denounced
the United States policy towards their black
population, stating:
Those who kill their own children and discriminate
daily against them because of the color of
their skin; those who let the murderers of
blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore
punishing the black population because they
demand their legitimate rights as free men—how
can those who do this consider themselves
guardians of freedom?
An indignant Guevara ended his speech by reciting
the Second Declaration of Havana, decreeing
Latin America a "family of 200 million brothers
who suffer the same miseries". This "epic",
Guevara declared, would be written by the
"hungry Indian masses, peasants without land,
exploited workers, and progressive masses".
To Guevara the conflict was a struggle of
masses and ideas, which would be carried forth
by those "mistreated and scorned by imperialism"
who were previously considered "a weak and
submissive flock". With this "flock", Guevara
now asserted, "Yankee monopoly capitalism"
now terrifyingly saw their "gravediggers".
It would be during this "hour of vindication",
Guevara pronounced, that the "anonymous mass"
would begin to write its own history "with
its own blood" and reclaim those "rights that
were laughed at by one and all for 500 years".
Guevara closed his remarks to the General
Assembly by hypothesizing that this "wave
of anger" would "sweep the lands of Latin
America" and that the labor masses who "turn
the wheel of history" were now, for the first
time, "awakening from the long, brutalizing
sleep to which they had been subjected".Guevara
later learned there had been two failed attempts
on his life by Cuban exiles during his stop
at the UN complex. The first from Molly Gonzales,
who tried to break through barricades upon
his arrival with a seven-inch hunting knife,
and later during his address by Guillermo
Novo, who fired a timer-initiated bazooka
from a boat in the East River at the United
Nations Headquarters, but missed and was off
target. Afterwards Guevara commented on both
incidents, stating that "it is better to be
killed by a woman with a knife than by a man
with a gun", while adding with a languid wave
of his cigar that the explosion had "given
the whole thing more flavor".
While in New York, Guevara appeared on the
CBS Sunday news program Face the Nation, and
met with a wide range of people, from United
States Senator Eugene McCarthy to associates
of Malcolm X. The latter expressed his admiration,
declaring Guevara "one of the most revolutionary
men in this country right now" while reading
a statement from him to a crowd at the Audubon
Ballroom.On December 17, Guevara left New
York for Paris, France, and from there embarked
on a three-month world tour that included
visits to the People's Republic of China,
North Korea, the United Arab Republic, Algeria,
Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Dahomey, Congo-Brazzaville
and Tanzania, with stops in Ireland and Prague.
While in Ireland, Guevara embraced his own
Irish heritage, celebrating Saint Patrick's
Day in Limerick city. He wrote to his father
on this visit, humorously stating "I am in
this green Ireland of your ancestors. When
they found out, the television [station] came
to ask me about the Lynch genealogy, but in
case they were horse thieves or something
like that, I didn't say much."During this
voyage, he wrote a letter to Carlos Quijano,
editor of a Uruguayan weekly, which was later
retitled Socialism and Man in Cuba. Outlined
in the treatise was Guevara's summons for
the creation of a new consciousness, a new
status of work, and a new role of the individual.
He also laid out the reasoning behind his
anti-capitalist sentiments, stating:
The laws of capitalism, blind and invisible
to the majority, act upon the individual without
his thinking about it. He sees only the vastness
of a seemingly infinite horizon before him.
That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists,
who purport to draw a lesson from the example
of Rockefeller—whether or not it is true—about
the possibilities of success. The amount of
poverty and suffering required for the emergence
of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity
that the accumulation of a fortune of such
magnitude entails, are left out of the picture,
and it is not always possible to make the
people in general see this.
Guevara ended the essay by declaring that
"the true revolutionary is guided by a great
feeling of love" and beckoning on all revolutionaries
to "strive every day so that this love of
living humanity will be transformed into acts
that serve as examples", thus becoming "a
moving force". The genesis for Guevara's assertions
relied on the fact that he believed the example
of the Cuban Revolution was "something spiritual
that would transcend all borders".
=== Algiers, the Soviets, and China ===
In Algiers, Algeria, on February 24, 1965,
Guevara made what turned out to be his last
public appearance on the international stage
when he delivered a speech at an economic
seminar on Afro-Asian solidarity. He specified
the moral duty of the socialist countries,
accusing them of tacit complicity with the
exploiting Western countries. He proceeded
to outline a number of measures which he said
the communist-bloc countries must implement
in order to accomplish the defeat of imperialism.
Having criticized the Soviet Union (the primary
financial backer of Cuba) in such a public
manner, he returned to Cuba on March 14 to
a solemn reception by Fidel and Raúl Castro,
Osvaldo Dorticós and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez
at the Havana airport.
As revealed in his last public speech in Algiers,
Guevara had come to view the Northern Hemisphere,
led by the U.S. in the West and the Soviet
Union in the East, as the exploiter of the
Southern Hemisphere. He strongly supported
Communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War,
and urged the peoples of other developing
countries to take up arms and create "many
Vietnams". Che's denunciations of the Soviets
made him popular among intellectuals and artists
of the Western European left who had lost
faith in the Soviet Union, while his condemnation
of imperialism and call to revolution inspired
young radical students in the United States,
who were impatient for societal change.
In Guevara's private writings from this time
(since released), he displays his growing
criticism of the Soviet political economy,
believing that the Soviets had "forgotten
Marx". This led Guevara to denounce a range
of Soviet practices including what he saw
as their attempt to "air-brush the inherent
violence of class struggle integral to the
transition from capitalism to socialism",
their "dangerous" policy of peaceful co-existence
with the United States, their failure to push
for a "change in consciousness" towards the
idea of work, and their attempt to "liberalize"
the socialist economy. Guevara wanted the
complete elimination of money, interest, commodity
production, the market economy, and "mercantile
relationships": all conditions that the Soviets
argued would only disappear when world communism
was achieved. Disagreeing with this incrementalist
approach, Guevara criticized the Soviet Manual
of Political Economy, correctly predicting
that if USSR did not abolish the law of value
(as Guevara desired), it would eventually
return to capitalism.Two weeks after his Algiers
speech and his return to Cuba, Guevara dropped
out of public life and then vanished altogether.
His whereabouts were a great mystery in Cuba,
as he was generally regarded as second in
power to Castro himself. His disappearance
was variously attributed to the failure of
the Cuban industrialization scheme he had
advocated while minister of industries, to
pressure exerted on Castro by Soviet officials
who disapproved of Guevara's pro-Chinese Communist
stance on the Sino-Soviet split, and to serious
differences between Guevara and the pragmatic
Castro regarding Cuba's economic development
and ideological line. Pressed by international
speculation regarding Guevara's fate, Castro
stated on June 16, 1965, that the people would
be informed when Guevara himself wished to
let them know. Still, rumors spread both inside
and outside Cuba concerning the missing Guevara's
whereabouts.
On October 3, 1965, Castro publicly revealed
an undated letter purportedly written to him
by Guevara around seven months earlier which
was later titled Che Guevara's "farewell letter".
In the letter, Guevara reaffirmed his enduring
solidarity with the Cuban Revolution but declared
his intention to leave Cuba to fight for the
revolutionary cause abroad. Additionally,
he resigned from all his positions in the
Cuban government and communist party, and
renounced his honorary Cuban citizenship.
== Congo ==
In early 1965, Guevara went to Africa to offer
his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla
to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According
to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara
thought that Africa was imperialism's weak
link and so had enormous revolutionary potential.
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who
had fraternal relations with Che since his
1959 visit, saw Guevara's plan to fight in
Congo as "unwise" and warned that he would
become a "Tarzan" figure, doomed to failure.
Despite the warning, Guevara traveled to Congo
using the alias Ramón Benítez. He led the
Cuban operation in support of the Marxist
Simba movement, which had emerged from the
ongoing Congo crisis. Guevara, his second-in-command
Víctor Dreke, and 12 other Cuban expeditionaries
arrived in Congo on April 24, 1965, and a
contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans
joined them soon afterward. For a time, they
collaborated with guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré
Kabila, who had helped supporters of the overthrown
president Patrice Lumumba to lead an unsuccessful
revolt months earlier. As an admirer of the
late Lumumba, Guevara declared that his "murder
should be a lesson for all of us". Guevara,
with limited knowledge of Swahili and the
local languages, was assigned a teenage interpreter,
Freddy Ilanga. Over the course of seven months,
Ilanga grew to "admire the hard-working Guevara",
who "showed the same respect to black people
as he did to whites". However, Guevara soon
became disillusioned with the poor discipline
of Kabila's troops and later dismissed him,
stating "nothing leads me to believe he is
the man of the hour".As an additional obstacle,
white mercenary troops of the Congo National
Army, led by Mike Hoare and supported by anti-Castro
Cuban pilots and the CIA, thwarted Guevara's
movements from his base camp in the mountains
near the village of Fizi on Lake Tanganyika
in southeast Congo. They were able to monitor
his communications and so pre-empted his attacks
and interdicted his supply lines. Although
Guevara tried to conceal his presence in Congo,
the United States government knew his location
and activities. The National Security Agency
was intercepting all of his incoming and outgoing
transmissions via equipment aboard the USNS
Private Jose F. Valdez (T-AG-169), a floating
listening post that continuously cruised the
Indian Ocean off Dar es Salaam for that purpose.
Guevara's aim was to export the revolution
by instructing local anti-Mobutu Simba fighters
in Marxist ideology and foco theory strategies
of guerrilla warfare. In his Congo Diary book,
he cites the incompetence, intransigence and
infighting among the Congolese rebels as key
reasons for the revolt's failure. Later that
year, on November 20, 1965, suffering from
dysentery and acute asthma, and disheartened
after seven months of defeats, Guevara left
Congo with the six Cuban survivors of his
12-man column. Guevara stated that he had
planned to send the wounded back to Cuba and
fight in Congo alone until his death, as a
revolutionary example. But after being urged
by his comrades, and two emissaries sent by
Castro, at the last moment he reluctantly
agreed to leave Africa. During that day and
night, Guevara's forces quietly took down
their base camp, burned their huts, and destroyed
or threw weapons into Lake Tanganyika that
they could not take with them, before crossing
the border into Tanzania at night and traveling
by land to Dar es Salaam. In speaking about
his experience in Congo months later, Guevara
concluded that he left rather than fight to
the death because: "The human element failed.
There is no will to fight. The [rebel] leaders
are corrupt. In a word ... there was nothing
to do." Guevara also declared that "we can't
liberate by ourselves a country that does
not want to fight." A few weeks later, he
wrote the preface to the diary he kept during
the Congo venture, that began: "This is the
story of a failure."Guevara was reluctant
to return to Cuba, because Castro had made
public Guevara's "farewell letter"—a letter
intended to only be revealed in the case of
his death—wherein he severed all ties in
order to devote himself to revolution throughout
the world. As a result, Guevara spent the
next six months living clandestinely at the
Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam and later at
a safehouse in Prague. While in Europe, Guevara
made a secret visit to former Argentine president
Juan Perón who lived in exile in Francoist
Spain. There Perón warned Guevara that his
plans were suicidal. Later, Perón remarked
that Guevara was "an immature utopian–but
one of us–I am happy for it to be so because
he is giving the yankees a real headache."During
this time abroad, Guevara compiled his memoirs
of the Congo experience and wrote drafts of
two more books, one on philosophy and the
other on economics. As Guevara prepared for
Bolivia, he secretly traveled back to Cuba
on July 21, 1966 to visit Castro, as well
as to see his wife and to write a last letter
to his five children to be read upon his death,
which ended with him instructing them:
Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply
any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere
in the world. This is the most beautiful quality
in a revolutionary.
== Bolivia ==
In late 1966, Guevara's location was still
not public knowledge, although representatives
of Mozambique's independence movement, the
FRELIMO, reported that they met with Guevara
in late 1966 in Dar es Salaam regarding his
offer to aid in their revolutionary project,
an offer which they ultimately rejected. In
a speech at the 1967 International Workers'
Day rally in Havana, the acting minister of
the armed forces, Major Juan Almeida, announced
that Guevara was "serving the revolution somewhere
in Latin America".Before he departed for Bolivia,
Guevara altered his appearance by shaving
off his beard and much of his hair, also dying
it grey so that he was unrecognizable as Che
Guevara. On November 3, 1966, Guevara secretly
arrived in La Paz on a flight from Montevideo
under the false name Adolfo Mena González,
posing as a middle-aged Uruguayan businessman
working for the Organization of American States.
Three days after his arrival in Bolivia, Guevara
left La Paz for the rural south east region
of the country to form his guerrilla army.
Guevara's first base camp was located in the
montane dry forest in the remote Ñancahuazú
region. Training at the camp in the Ñancahuazú
valley proved to be hazardous, and little
was accomplished in way of building a guerrilla
army. The Argentine-born East German operative
Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, better known by
her nom de guerre "Tania", had been installed
as Che's primary agent in La Paz.Guevara's
guerrilla force, numbering about 50 men and
operating as the ELN (Ejército de Liberación
Nacional de Bolivia; "National Liberation
Army of Bolivia"), was well equipped and scored
a number of early successes against Bolivian
army regulars in the difficult terrain of
the mountainous Camiri region during the early
months of 1967. As a result of Guevara's units'
winning several skirmishes against Bolivian
troops in the spring and summer of 1967, the
Bolivian government began to overestimate
the true size of the guerrilla force. But
in August 1967, the Bolivian Army managed
to eliminate two guerrilla groups in a violent
battle, reportedly killing one of the leaders.Researchers
hypothesize that Guevara's plan for fomenting
a revolution in Bolivia failed for an array
of reasons:
Guevara had expected assistance and cooperation
from the local dissidents that he did not
receive, nor did he receive support from Bolivia's
Communist Party under the leadership of Mario
Monje, which was oriented toward Moscow rather
than Havana. In Guevara's own diary captured
after his death, he wrote about the Communist
Party of Bolivia, which he characterized as
"distrustful, disloyal and stupid".
He had expected to deal only with the Bolivian
military, who were poorly trained and equipped,
and was unaware that the United States government
had sent a team of the CIA's Special Activities
Division commandos and other operatives into
Bolivia to aid the anti-insurrection effort.
The Bolivian Army was also trained, advised,
and supplied by U.S. Army Special Forces,
including an elite battalion of U.S. Rangers
trained in jungle warfare that set up camp
in La Esperanza, a small settlement close
to the location of Guevara's guerrillas.
He had expected to remain in radio contact
with Havana. The two shortwave radio transmitters
provided to him by Cuba were faulty; thus,
the guerrillas were unable to communicate
and be resupplied, leaving them isolated and
stranded.In addition, Guevara's known preference
for confrontation rather than compromise,
which had previously surfaced during his guerrilla
warfare campaign in Cuba, contributed to his
inability to develop successful working relationships
with local rebel leaders in Bolivia, just
as it had in the Congo. This tendency had
existed in Cuba, but had been kept in check
by the timely interventions and guidance of
Fidel Castro.The end result was that Guevara
was unable to attract inhabitants of the local
area to join his militia during the eleven
months he attempted recruitment. Many of the
inhabitants willingly informed the Bolivian
authorities and military about the guerrillas
and their movements in the area. Near the
end of the Bolivian venture, Guevara wrote
in his diary that "the peasants do not give
us any help, and they are turning into informers."
=== 
Capture and death ===
Félix Rodríguez, a Cuban exile turned CIA
Special Activities Division operative, advised
Bolivian troops during the hunt for Guevara
in Bolivia. In addition, the 2007 documentary
My Enemy's Enemy alleges that Nazi war criminal
Klaus Barbie advised and possibly helped the
CIA orchestrate Guevara's eventual capture.On
October 7, 1967, an informant apprised the
Bolivian Special Forces of the location of
Guevara's guerrilla encampment in the Yuro
ravine. On the morning of October 8, they
encircled the area with two battalions numbering
1,800 soldiers and advanced into the ravine
triggering a battle where Guevara was wounded
and taken prisoner while leading a detachment
with Simeón Cuba Sarabia. Che biographer
Jon Lee Anderson reports Bolivian Sergeant
Bernardino Huanca's account: that as the Bolivian
Rangers approached, a twice-wounded Guevara,
his gun rendered useless, threw up his arms
in surrender and shouted to the soldiers:
"Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and I am worth
more to you alive than dead."
Guevara was tied up and taken to a dilapidated
mud schoolhouse in the nearby village of La
Higuera on the evening of October 8. For the
next half day, Guevara refused to be interrogated
by Bolivian officers and only spoke quietly
to Bolivian soldiers. One of those Bolivian
soldiers, a helicopter pilot named Jaime Nino
de Guzman, describes Che as looking "dreadful".
According to Guzman, Guevara was shot through
the right calf, his hair was matted with dirt,
his clothes were shredded, and his feet were
covered in rough leather sheaths. Despite
his haggard appearance, he recounts that "Che
held his head high, looked everyone straight
in the eyes and asked only for something to
smoke." De Guzman states that he "took pity"
and gave him a small bag of tobacco for his
pipe, and that Guevara then smiled and thanked
him. Later on the night of October 8, Guevara—despite
having his hands tied—kicked a Bolivian
army officer, named Captain Espinosa, against
a wall after the officer entered the schoolhouse
and tried to snatch Guevara's pipe from his
mouth as a souvenir while he was still smoking
it. In another instance of defiance, Guevara
spat in the face of Bolivian Rear Admiral
Ugarteche, who attempted to question Guevara
a few hours before his execution.The following
morning on October 9, Guevara asked to see
the school teacher of the village, a 22-year-old
woman named Julia Cortez. She later stated
that she found Guevara to be an "agreeable
looking man with a soft and ironic glance"
and that during their conversation she found
herself "unable to look him in the eye" because
his "gaze was unbearable, piercing, and so
tranquil". During their short conversation,
Guevara pointed out to Cortez the poor condition
of the schoolhouse, stating that it was "anti-pedagogical"
to expect campesino students to be educated
there, while "government officials drive Mercedes
cars", and declaring "that's what we are fighting
against."
Later that morning on October 9, Bolivian
President René Barrientos ordered that Guevara
be killed. The order was relayed to the unit
holding Guevara by Félix Rodríguez reportedly
despite the United States government's desire
that Guevara be taken to Panama for further
interrogation. The executioner who volunteered
to kill Guevara was Mario Terán, an alcoholic
27-year-old sergeant in the Bolivian army
who had personally requested to shoot Guevara
because three of his friends from B Company,
all with the same first name of "Mario", had
been killed in an earlier firefight several
days earlier with Guevara's band of guerrillas.
To make the bullet wounds appear consistent
with the story that the Bolivian government
planned to release to the public, Félix Rodríguez
ordered Terán not to shoot Guevara in the
head, but to aim carefully to make it appear
that Guevara had been killed in action during
a clash with the Bolivian army. Gary Prado,
the Bolivian captain in command of the army
company that captured Guevara, said that the
reasons Barrientos ordered the immediate execution
of Guevara were so there could be no possibility
for Guevara to escape from prison, and also
so there could be no drama of a public trial
where adverse publicity might happen.About
30 minutes before Guevara was killed, Félix
Rodríguez attempted to question him about
the whereabouts of other guerrilla fighters
who were currently at large, but Guevara continued
to remain silent. Rodríguez, assisted by
a few Bolivian soldiers, helped Guevara to
his feet and took him outside the hut to parade
him before other Bolivian soldiers where he
posed with Guevara for a photo opportunity
where one soldier took a photograph of Rodríguez
and other soldiers standing alongside Guevara.
Afterwards, Rodríguez told Guevara that he
was going to be executed. A little later,
Guevara was asked by one of the Bolivian soldiers
guarding him if he was thinking about his
own immortality. "No," he replied, "I'm thinking
about the immortality of the revolution."
A few minutes later, Sergeant Terán entered
the hut to shoot him, whereupon Guevara reportedly
stood up and spoke to Terán what were his
last words: "I know you've come to kill me.
Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill
a man!" Terán hesitated, then pointed his
self-loading M2 carbine at Guevara and opened
fire, hitting him in the arms and legs. Then,
as Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently
biting one of his wrists to avoid crying out,
Terán fired another burst, fatally wounding
him in the chest. Guevara was pronounced dead
at 1:10 pm local time according to Rodríguez.
In all, Guevara was shot nine times by Terán.
This included five times in his legs, once
in the right shoulder and arm, and once in
the chest and throat.Months earlier, during
his last public declaration to the Tricontinental
Conference, Guevara had written his own epitaph,
stating: "Wherever death may surprise us,
let it be welcome, provided that this our
battle cry may have reached some receptive
ear and another hand may be extended to wield
our weapons."
== Post-execution and memorial ==
After his execution, Guevara's body was lashed
to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown
to nearby Vallegrande, where photographs were
taken of him lying on a concrete slab in the
laundry room of the Nuestra Señora de Malta.
Several witnesses were called to confirm his
identity, key amongst them the British journalist
Richard Gott, the only witness to have met
Guevara when he was alive. Put on display,
as hundreds of local residents filed past
the body, Guevara's corpse was considered
by many to represent a "Christ-like" visage,
with some even surreptitiously clipping locks
of his hair as divine relics. Such comparisons
were further extended when English art critic
John Berger, two weeks later upon seeing the
post-mortem photographs, observed that they
resembled two famous paintings: Rembrandt's
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and
Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead
Christ. There were also four correspondents
present when Guevara's body arrived in Vallegrande,
including Björn Kumm of the Swedish Aftonbladet,
who described the scene in a November 11,
1967, exclusive for The New Republic.A declassified
memorandum dated October 11, 1967, to United
States President Lyndon B. Johnson from his
National Security Advisor Walt Whitman Rostow,
called the decision to kill Guevara "stupid"
but "understandable from a Bolivian standpoint".
After the execution, Rodríguez took several
of Guevara's personal items, including a watch
which he continued to wear many years later,
often showing them to reporters during the
ensuing years. Today, some of these belongings,
including his flashlight, are on display at
the CIA. After a military doctor amputated
his hands, Bolivian army officers transferred
Guevara's body to an undisclosed location
and refused to reveal whether his remains
had been buried or cremated. The hands were
sent to Buenos Aires for fingerprint identification.
They were later sent to Cuba.
On October 15 in Havana, Fidel Castro publicly
acknowledged that Guevara was dead and proclaimed
three days of public mourning throughout Cuba.
On October 18, Castro addressed a crowd of
one million mourners in Havana's Plaza de
la Revolución and spoke about Guevara's character
as a revolutionary. Fidel Castro closed his
impassioned eulogy thus:
If we wish to express what we want the men
of future generations to be, we must say:
Let them be like Che! If we wish to say how
we want our children to be educated, we must
say without hesitation: We want them to be
educated in Che's spirit! If we want the model
of a man, who does not belong to our times
but to the future, I say from the depths of
my heart that such a model, without a single
stain on his conduct, without a single stain
on his action, is Che!
Also removed when Guevara was captured were
his 30,000-word, hand-written diary, a collection
of his personal poetry, and a short story
he had authored about a young Communist guerrilla
who learns to overcome his fears. His diary
documented events of the guerrilla campaign
in Bolivia, with the first entry on November
7, 1966, shortly after his arrival at the
farm in Ñancahuazú, and the last dated October
7, 1967, the day before his capture. The diary
tells how the guerrillas were forced to begin
operations prematurely because of discovery
by the Bolivian Army, explains Guevara's decision
to divide the column into two units that were
subsequently unable to re-establish contact,
and describes their overall unsuccessful venture.
It also records the rift between Guevara and
the Communist Party of Bolivia that resulted
in Guevara having significantly fewer soldiers
than originally expected, and shows that Guevara
had a great deal of difficulty recruiting
from the local populace, partly because the
guerrilla group had learned Quechua, unaware
that the local language was actually a Tupí–Guaraní
language. As the campaign drew to an unexpected
close, Guevara became increasingly ill. He
suffered from ever-worsening bouts of asthma,
and most of his last offensives were carried
out in an attempt to obtain medicine. The
Bolivian diary was quickly and crudely translated
by Ramparts magazine and circulated around
the world. There are at least four additional
diaries in existence—those of Israel Reyes
Zayas (Alias "Braulio"), Harry Villegas Tamayo
("Pombo"), Eliseo Reyes Rodriguez ("Rolando")
and Dariel Alarcón Ramírez ("Benigno")—each
of which reveals additional aspects of the
events.
French intellectual Régis Debray, who was
captured in April 1967 while with Guevara
in Bolivia, gave an interview from prison
in August 1968, in which he enlarged on the
circumstances of Guevara's capture. Debray,
who had lived with Guevara's band of guerrillas
for a short time, said that in his view they
were "victims of the forest" and thus "eaten
by the jungle". Debray described a destitute
situation where Guevara's men suffered malnutrition,
lack of water, absence of shoes, and only
possessed six blankets for 22 men. Debray
recounts that Guevara and the others had been
suffering an "illness" which caused their
hands and feet to swell into "mounds of flesh"
to the point where you could not discern the
fingers on their hands. Debray described Guevara
as "optimistic about the future of Latin America"
despite the futile situation, and remarked
that Guevara was "resigned to die in the knowledge
that his death would be a sort of renaissance",
noting that Guevara perceived death "as a
promise of rebirth" and "ritual of renewal".To
a certain extent, this belief by Guevara of
a metaphorical resurrection came true. While
pictures of the dead Guevara were being circulated
and the circumstances of his death were being
debated, Che's legend began to spread. Demonstrations
in protest against his "assassination" occurred
throughout the world, and articles, tributes,
and poems were written about his life and
death. Rallies in support of Guevara were
held from "Mexico to Santiago, Algiers to
Angola, and Cairo to Calcutta". The population
of Budapest and Prague lit candles to honor
Guevara's passing; and the picture of a smiling
Che appeared in London and Paris. When a few
months later riots broke out in Berlin, France,
and Chicago, and the unrest spread to the
American college campuses, young men and women
wore Che Guevara T-shirts and carried his
pictures during their protest marches. In
the view of military historian Erik Durschmied:
"In those heady months of 1968, Che Guevara
was not dead. He was very much alive."
=== Retrieval of remains ===
In late 1995, the retired Bolivian General
Mario Vargas revealed to Jon Lee Anderson,
author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,
that Guevara's corpse lay near a Vallegrande
airstrip. The result was a multi-national
search for the remains, which lasted more
than a year. In July 1997 a team of Cuban
geologists and Argentine forensic anthropologists
discovered the remnants of seven bodies in
two mass graves, including one man with amputated
hands (like Guevara). Bolivian government
officials with the Ministry of Interior later
identified the body as Guevara when the excavated
teeth "perfectly matched" a plaster mold of
Che's teeth made in Cuba prior to his Congolese
expedition. The "clincher" then arrived when
Argentine forensic anthropologist Alejandro
Inchaurregui inspected the inside hidden pocket
of a blue jacket dug up next to the handless
cadaver and found a small bag of pipe tobacco.
Nino de Guzman, the Bolivian helicopter pilot
who had given Che a small bag of tobacco,
later remarked that he "had serious doubts"
at first and "thought the Cubans would just
find any old bones and call it Che"; but "after
hearing about the tobacco pouch, I have no
doubts." On October 17, 1997, Guevara's remains,
with those of six of his fellow combatants,
were laid to rest with military honors in
a specially built mausoleum in the Cuban city
of Santa Clara, where he had commanded over
the decisive military victory of the Cuban
Revolution.In July 2008, the Bolivian government
of Evo Morales unveiled Guevara's formerly-sealed
diaries composed in two frayed notebooks,
along with a logbook and several black-and-white
photographs. At this event Bolivia's vice-minister
of culture, Pablo Groux, expressed that there
were plans to publish photographs of every
handwritten page later in the year. Meanwhile,
in August 2009 anthropologists working for
Bolivia's Justice Ministry discovered and
unearthed the bodies of five of Guevara's
fellow guerrillas near the Bolivian town of
Teoponte.
== Legacy ==
The discovery of Che's remains metonymically
activated a series of interlinked associations—rebel,
martyr, rogue figure from a picaresque adventure,
savior, renegade, extremist—in which there
was no fixed divide among them. The current
court of opinion places Che on a continuum
that teeters between viewing him as a misguided
rebel, a coruscatingly brilliant guerrilla
philosopher, a poet-warrior jousting at windmills,
a brazen warrior who threw down the gauntlet
to the bourgeoisie, the object of fervent
paeans to his sainthood, or a mass murderer
clothed in the guise of an avenging angel
whose every action is imbricated in violence—the
archetypal Fanatical Terrorist.
Guevara's life and legacy remain contentious.
The perceived contradictions of his ethos
at various points in his life have created
a complex character of duality, one who was
"able to wield the pen and submachine gun
with equal skill", while prophesying that
"the most important revolutionary ambition
was to see man liberated from his alienation".
Guevara's paradoxical standing is further
complicated by his array of seemingly diametrically
opposed qualities. A secular humanist and
sympathetic practitioner of medicine who did
not hesitate to shoot his enemies, a celebrated
internationalist leader who advocated violence
to enforce a utopian philosophy of the collective
good, an idealistic intellectual who loved
literature but refused to allow dissent, an
anti-imperialist Marxist insurgent who was
radically willing to forge a poverty-less
new world on the apocalyptic ashes of the
old one, and finally, an outspoken anti-capitalist
whose image has been commoditized. Che's history
continues to be rewritten and re-imagined.
Moreover, sociologist Michael Löwy contends
that the many facets of Guevara's life (i.e.
doctor and economist, revolutionary and banker,
military theoretician and ambassador, deep
thinker and political agitator) illuminated
the rise of the "Che myth", allowing him to
be invariably crystallized in his many metanarrative
roles as a "Red Robin Hood, Don Quixote of
communism, new Garibaldi, Marxist Saint Just,
Cid Campeador of the Wretched of the Earth,
Sir Galahad of the beggars ... and Bolshevik
devil who haunts the dreams of the rich, kindling
braziers of subversion all over the world".As
such, various notable individuals have lauded
Guevara as a great person; for example, Nelson
Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration
for every human being who loves freedom",
while Jean-Paul Sartre described him as "not
only an intellectual but also the most complete
human being of our age". Others who have expressed
their admiration include authors Graham Greene,
who remarked that Guevara "represented the
idea of gallantry, chivalry, and adventure",
and Susan Sontag, who supposed that "[Che's]
goal was nothing less than the cause of humanity
itself." In the Pan-African community philosopher
Frantz Fanon professed Guevara to be "the
world symbol of the possibilities of one man",
while Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael
eulogized that "Che Guevara is not dead, his
ideas are with us." Praise has been reflected
throughout the political spectrum, with libertarian
theorist Murray Rothbard extolling Guevara
as a "heroic figure" who "more than any man
of our epoch or even of our century, was the
living embodiment of the principle of revolution",
while journalist Christopher Hitchens reminisced
that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and
countless like me at the time, he was a role
model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois
romantics insofar as he went and did what
revolutionaries were meant to do—fought
and died for his beliefs."
Conversely, Jacobo Machover, an exiled opposition
author, dismisses all praise of Guevara and
portrays him as a callous executioner. Exiled
former Cuban prisoners have expressed similar
opinions, among them Armando Valladares, who
declared Guevara "a man full of hatred" who
executed dozens without trial, and Carlos
Alberto Montaner, who asserted that Guevara
possessed "a Robespierre mentality", wherein
cruelty against the revolution's enemies was
a virtue. Álvaro Vargas Llosa of The Independent
Institute has hypothesized that Guevara's
contemporary followers "delude themselves
by clinging to a myth", describing Guevara
as a "Marxist Puritan" who employed his rigid
power to suppress dissent, while also operating
as a "cold-blooded killing machine". Llosa
also accuses Guevara's "fanatical disposition"
as being the linchpin of the "Sovietization"
of the Cuban revolution, speculating that
he possessed a "total subordination of reality
to blind ideological orthodoxy". On a macro-level,
Hoover Institution research fellow William
Ratliff regards Guevara more as a creation
of his historical environment, referring to
him as a "fearless" and "head-strong Messiah-like
figure", who was the product of a martyr-enamored
Latin culture which "inclined people to seek
out and follow paternalistic miracle workers".
Ratliff further speculates that the economic
conditions in the region suited Guevara's
commitment to "bring justice to the downtrodden
by crushing centuries-old tyrannies"; describing
Latin America as being plagued by what Moisés
Naím referred to as the "legendary malignancies"
of inequality, poverty, dysfunctional politics
and malfunctioning institutions.
In a mixed assessment, British historian Hugh
Thomas opined that Guevara was a "brave, sincere
and determined man who was also obstinate,
narrow, and dogmatic". At the end of his life,
according to Thomas, "he seems to have become
convinced of the virtues of violence for its
own sake", while "his influence over Castro
for good or evil" grew after his death, as
Fidel took up many of his views. Similarly,
the Cuban-American sociologist Samuel Farber
lauds Che Guevara as "an honest and committed
revolutionary", but also criticizes the fact
that "he never embraced socialism in its most
democratic essence". Nevertheless, Guevara
remains a national hero in Cuba, where his
image adorns the 3 peso banknote and school
children begin each morning by pledging "We
will be like Che." In his homeland of Argentina,
where high schools bear his name, numerous
Che museums dot the country and in 2008 a
12-foot (3.7 m) bronze statue of him was unveiled
in the city of his birth, Rosario. Guevara
has been sanctified by some Bolivian campesinos
as "Saint Ernesto", who pray to him for assistance.
In contrast, Guevara remains a hated figure
amongst many in the Cuban exile and Cuban-American
community of the United States, who view him
with animosity as "the butcher of La Cabaña".
Despite this polarized status, a high-contrast
monochrome graphic of Che's face, created
in 1968 by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, became
a universally merchandized and objectified
image, found on an endless array of items,
including T-shirts, hats, posters, tattoos,
and bikinis, contributing to the consumer
culture Guevara despised. Yet, he still remains
a transcendent figure both in specifically
political contexts and as a wide-ranging popular
icon of youthful rebellion.
=== Honours ===
Guevara received several honors of state during
his life.
1960: Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the
White Lion
1961: Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the
Southern Cross
== 
Timeline ==
== Archival media ==
=== Video footage ===
Guevara addressing the United Nations General
Assembly on December 11, 1964, (6:21), public
domain footage uploaded by the UN, video clip
Guevara interviewed by Face the Nation on
December 13, 1964, (29:11), from CBS, video
clip
Guevara interviewed in 1964 on a visit to
Dublin, Ireland, (2:53), English translation,
from RTÉ Libraries and Archives, video clip
Guevara reciting a poem, (0:58), English subtitles,
from El Che: Investigating a Legend – Kultur
Video 2001, video clip
Guevara showing support for Fidel Castro,
(0:22), English subtitles, from El Che: Investigating
a Legend – Kultur Video 2001, video clip
Guevara speaking about labor, (0:28), English
subtitles, from El Che: Investigating a Legend
– Kultur Video 2001, video clip
Guevara speaking about the Bay of Pigs, (0:17),
English subtitles, from El Che: Investigating
a Legend – Kultur Video 2001, video clip
Guevara speaking against imperialism, (1:20),
English subtitles, from El Che: Investigating
a Legend – Kultur Video 2001, video clip
Guevara interviewed in Paris and speaking
French in 1964, (4:47), English subtitles,
interviewed by Jean Dumur, video clip
=== Audio recording ===
Guevara interviewed on ABC's Issues and Answers,
(22:27), English translation, narrated by
Lisa Howard, March 24, 1964, audio clip
== List of English-language works ==
== See also ==
== 
References ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
