Guevara, Che

orig. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna

born June 14, 1928, Rosario, Arg.

died October 1967, Bolivia

Theoretician and tactician of guerrilla warfare and prominent figure in Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba (1956–59).

Born to a middle-class family, he completed medical studies in 1953 and subsequently traveled widely in Latin America, eventually settling in Guatemala. The overthrow of Guatemala's Pres. Jacobo Arbenz persuaded him that the U.S. would always oppose leftist governments and that only violent revolution would end the poverty of the Latin American masses. He left Guatemala for Mexico, where he met Castro and joined his cause. After the Cuban revolution he held several key posts as one of Castro's most trusted aides; handsome and charismatic, he served as one of the revolution's most effective voices. He left Cuba in 1965 to organize guerrilla fighters in Congo and later Bolivia. Captured and shot by the Bolivian army, he immediately achieved international fame and the status of a martyred hero among leftists worldwide.

Che Guevara.

Lee Lockwood

Black Star

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▪ Argentine-Cuban revolutionary

byname of  Ernesto Guevara de la Serna  

born June 14, 1928, Rosario, Argentina

died October 1967, Bolivia

 theoretician and tactician of guerrilla warfare, prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution (1956–59), and later guerrilla leader in South America. After his execution by the Bolivian army, he was regarded as a martyred hero by generations of leftists worldwide, and his image became an 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 Arbenz (Arbenz (Guzmán), Jacobo) headed 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 interjection che.) The overthrow of the Arbenz regime in 1954 in a coup supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency persuaded 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 (Castro, Fidel) and Raúl Castro (Castro, Raúl), political exiles who were preparing an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (Batista, Fulgencio) 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.

Andrew Annandale Sinclair Ed.

Additional Reading

Andrew Sinclair, Che Guevara (1970), a sympathetic biography and study of Guevara's works; Ricardo Rojo, Mi amigo el Ché (My Friend Ché, 1968), an account of Guevara's life by a childhood friend; Michael Lowy, La Pensée de “Che” Guevara (1970; The Marxism of Che Guevara, 1973), a short but lucid introduction to Guevara's ideas; Leo Sauvage, Le Cas Guevara (1971; Che Guevara: The Failure of a Revolutionary, 1973), focusing on the years in Bolivia; Brian Loverman and Thomas Davies, eds., Guerrilla Warfare (1997), probably the best collection of his writings.

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