Che Guevara "Heroic Guerrilla"

      Che Guevara was a prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution (1956–59) who went on to become a guerrilla leader in South America. Executed by the Bolivian army in 1967, he has since been regarded as a martyred hero by generations of leftists worldwide. Guevara’s image remains a prevalent icon of leftist radicalism and anti-imperialism.

     

      Guevara was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family of Spanish-Irish descent and leftist leanings. Although suffering from asthma, he excelled as an athlete and a scholar, completing his medical studies in 1953. He spent many of his holidays traveling in Latin America, and his observations of the great poverty of the masses convinced him that the only solution lay in violent revolution. He came to look upon Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as a cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy.

In 1953 Guevara went to Guatemala, where Jacobo Arbenzheaded a progressive regime that was attempting to bring about a social revolution. (Around this time Guevara acquired his nickname, from a verbal mannerism of Argentines who punctuate their speech with the interjectionche.) The overthrow of the Arbenz regime in 1954 in a coup supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencypersuaded Guevara that the United States would always oppose progressive leftist governments. This conviction became the cornerstone of his plans to bring about socialism by means of a worldwide revolution.

He left Guatemala for Mexico, where he met the Cuban brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro, political exiles who were preparing an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship ofFulgencio Batista in Cuba. Guevara joined Fidel Castro's force, which landed in the Cuban province of Oriente late in November 1956. Immediately detected by Batista's army, they were almost wiped out; the few survivors, including the wounded Guevara, reached the Sierra Maestra, where they became the nucleus of a guerrilla army. The rebels slowly gained in strength, seizing weapons from Batista's forces and winning support and new recruits, and Guevara became one of Castro's most-trusted aides. Guevara recorded the two years spent overthrowing Batista's government in Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria (1963;Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1968).

After Castro's victorious troops entered Havana on Jan. 2, 1959, and established a Marxist government, Guevara became a Cuban citizen, as prominent in the new government as he had been in the revolutionary army, representing Cuba on many commercial missions. He also became well known in the West for his opposition to all forms of imperialism and neocolonialism and for his attacks on U.S. foreign policy. He served as chief of the Industrial Department of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, president of the National Bank of Cuba, and minister of industry.

During the early 1960s, he defined Cuba's policies and his own views in many speeches and writings, notably El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1965; Man and Socialism in Cuba, 1967)—an examination of Cuba's new brand of communism—and a highly influential manual, La guerra de guerrillas (1960; Guerrilla Warfare , 1961). After April 1965 Guevara dropped out of public life. His movements and whereabouts for the next two years remained secret; it was later learned that he had spent some time in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo with other Cuban guerrilla fighters, helping to organize the Patrice Lumumba Battalion, which fought in the civil war there.

In the autumn of 1966 Guevara went to Bolivia, incognito, to create and lead a guerrilla group in the region of Santa Cruz. On Oct. 8, 1967, the group was almost annihilated by a special detachment of the Bolivian army. Guevara, who was wounded in the attack, was captured and shot...