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Ernesto Che Guevara

"A true internationalist is someone whose throat tightens whenever a human being is murdered in another part of the world and whose heart pounds whenever the flag of freedom is planted somewhere on earth." (Che)

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was born in Argentina on 14 June 1928. At the age of two, he developed asthma, from which he suffered his whole life. His family moved to Alta Gracia (Cordoba) because of its dry climate, but his health did not improve. He was educated mainly at home by his mother, Celia de la Serna.

Factory with a portrait of Che

Early in his life, he started reading the works of Marx, Engels, and Freud, all of which he found in his father's library. He probably read some of these works even before 1941, when he entered secondary school at the "Colegio Nacional Dean Funes" in Cordoba, where he only excelled in literature and sports. Encountering refugees of the Spanish civil war and witnessing the long political crises in Argentina, which culminated in the "Left Facism" of Juan Perón, had a lasting impact on him. He opposed Perón along with his parents. These events and influences aroused a strong aversion in the young Che against military politicians, the army, capitalist oligarchy, and in particular, against US-dollar imperialism. In 1947, he entered the University of Buenos Aires. Initially, he wanted to find out more about his own disease, but then showed an increasing interest in leprosy.

In 1949, he embarked upon the first of a number of longer tours, exploring Northern Argentina by bicycle. There he encountered the very poor as well remnants of the indigenous tribes. In 1951, after his penultimate exam, he went on a long trip together with a friend, earning money with odd jobs. He visited South Argentina, Venezuela, and Miami, met Salvador Allende in Chile and worked in the San Pablo leprosy hospital in Peru. Che was imprisoned in Colombia during the period of "La Violencia", a time of riots and violence, but was released very soon afterwards. When he returned home, he was sure of one thing: he did not want to become just another middle-class general practitioner. He graduated as a specialist in dermatology and moved to La Paz, Bolivia at the time of its national revolution. Afterwards, he moved on to Guatemala and earned his living as a writer of archaeological articles about the Inca and Maya ruins.

Ernesto Che Guevara

Che arrived in Guatemala during the socialist presidency of Arbenz Guzmán, and although he had become a Marxist and knew Lenin's works well, he refused to join the communist party. As a result, he had no chance to get a job in one of the public hospitals and ended up virtually destitute. He lived together with Hilda Gardea, a Marxist of indigenous origin who fomented his political education and introduced him to Nico Lopez, one of Fidel Castro's lieutenants. In Guatemala, he observed a CIA-engineered group inciting a contra-revolution and became convinced of the fact that a revolution can only be carried out through armed revolt. In September 1954, after Arbenz Guzmán was overthrown, Che left Guatemala and moved, together with Hilda Gardea and Nico Lopez, to Mexico City, where he worked at the General Hospital. In 1955, he met Raul and Fidel Castro, and in the latter he saw the "great leader" he had been looking for. He followed the supporters of Castro to a farm, where the Cuban revolutionaries learned everything about guerrilla warfare under the harsh command of Alberto Bayo, a Captain of the Spanish republican army. Bayo was well experienced as he himself had trained under Mao-Tse Tung. Guevara, who since then was called "Che" (an affectionate Argentinean expression for "buddy"), soon became Bayo's favourite trainee and the best of his group. The war games at the farm attracted the attention of the police, and in June, 1956, all the trainees and Che were imprisoned for a month.

Sign by the side of the roade

Invasion

During the invasion of Cuba, Che joined the Cubans, first as a doctor and then as the Commander of the Revolutionary Army, with the goal of overthrowing the dictator, Batista, who was supported by the US government. When the revolutionaries won, Che became the second most important individual in Castro's government. He was primarily responsible for moving Cuba toward communism, but not Moscow's orthodox variety. Che organised and ran the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria, the aim of which was to pass new land reform laws and to nationalize the large estates. He then became president of the National Bank of Cuba. He dismissed non-communists from the government and from other important positions, and he worked persistently to thwart the efforts of two respected French economists whom Castro had brought in and who wanted to introduce Cuba more slowly to communism. But Che forced the Cuban economy into communism so quickly t! ! ! ! hat it was temporarily ruined.

In 1959, he married Aledia March and the two of them travelled to Egypt, India, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Yugoslavia. Back in Cuba, he bacame Minister of Industry and in 1960, he signed a trade agreement with the USSR, which freed Cuba from its dependence on the US market.

The young Ernesto

Che developed his own communist philosophy, which upset Moscow. He increasingly moved away from Moscow and toward Peking. He finally broke completely with the USSR when he called it the "silent accomplice of imperialism". He also attaced the Soviet Union because of its policies of coexistence and revisionism. He founded the tri-continental conference to develop a network of guerilla operations in Africa, Asia and South America. He made a half-hearted attempt to establish some sort of relationship with the US, and then, as Cuba's representative to the UN, he attacked the US for its voracious, pitiless and imperialistic activities in Latin America. Che´s unwillingness to compromise with the capitalist and communist establishments forced Castro to dro him, but not officially. For a few months, his wherabouts were unknown and there were rumors that he was already dead. During this time he visited a number of African countries and looked into the possibility of turning the Kinshasa revolution in the Congo into a communist revolution with Cuban guerilla fighters. He returned to Cuba to train voluntters, and then took a force of 120 Cubans back to the Congo. While his men fought well, the Kinshasa rebels were powerless against the Belgian mercenaries, and in the fall of 1965, Che had to recommend to Castro that Cuban assistance be halted.



Che's Time in Bolivia
At that time, a major guerilla offensive on the scale of the Cuban revolution was being planned. Che was naturally involved. A camp was set up in the Bolivian Andes, with Guevara as its leader.

Ernesto Che Guevara

Che's men had to undergo hard training, going on marches which sometimes lasted more than 20 days. After a few months, Che commanded a troop of over a hundred men. Only a few days later, the first fights between the rebels and the army occurred, in which some soldiers were killed. Due to this fight, the army knew about the location of the guerilla camp. Therefore, Che had to change tactics earlier than planned and fight without having a base camp. Over the course of time, Guevara lost more and more men due to the high physical strain.
On 7 October 1967, Che was exploring one of the numerous Bolivian canyons with a small group of men. Che had just told his men to walk in the water, so they would not leave any tracks, when the soldiers suddenly started shooting at them. The guerilleros were trapped in the canyon, under fire from both sides. The rebels shot back without even knowing where the enemy were hiding. Suddenly, Che screamed in pain; a bullet had hit his lower leg. The soldiers realized that they had won and climbed down, shooting some of the rebels as they went. Guevara and two other men were captured. Only with great effort was Che able to climb the hill. His men wanted to help him, but he insisted on making it alone, and he dragged himself, clutching his weapon and his diary up the slope. Che was held prisoner by the government in a schoolhouse to await trial. There he realized that the entire endeavour had been hopeless right from the beginning because the farmers had no revolutionary ambitions at all.
On 9 October, a simple soldier was ordered to shoot Che, who was 39 at the time. Che was never tried or put before an execution squad. He was simply shot by a simple soldier, "for the good of the country". The last words of the already legendary Ernesto "Che" Guevara were: "Damn coward! You are shooting a man just because you are afraid of the government." Che's body was buried at a secret spot, and was only found again recently.

The most famous picture taken of Che

Due to his wild appearance and his steadfastness in the face of every type of establishment, as well as his decision to commit himself to violent resistance, Che became an idol to the disenchanted and revolutionary youth of the 1960s and early '70s.

Even 30 years after his death, the myth of Che Guevara still lives on. Almost everyone knows his face and the crossover group "Rage against the Machine" put his image on its first album cover (Bombtrack). Even industry discovered and misused Che for its purposes, putting his picture on advertisements and even using him as the motif for a Swatch. At the end of June 1997, Che's remains were found in Bolivian and shortly thereafter returned to Cuba.