Che Guevara still inspires, four decades after death
04 OCT 2007 08:14STAFF REPORTER
Forty years after the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the turbulent life of Cuba's revolutionary hero continues to inspire films and books, while his stoic image and self-sacrifice have become iconic for leftists worldwide. His legacy remains as vivid today in communist-ruled Cuba as it was, with schoolchildren still instructed to pledge each morning that: "Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che."
Forty years after the death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the turbulent life of Cuba’s revolutionary hero continues to inspire films and books, while his stoic image and self-sacrifice have become iconic for leftists worldwide.
His legacy remains as vivid today in communist-ruled Cuba as it was, with schoolchildren still instructed to pledge each morning that: “Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che.”
A 1960 Alberto Korda photograph of a defiant-looking Guevara, his long, dark hair flying from beneath a beret, is considered one of the best known photos in the world and a classic image of the 20th century.
On October 8 1967, the Bolivian army and two Cuban-American CIA agents captured Che in the village of La Higuera, Bolivia, where he had been leading a clutch of rebels who survived clashes, hunger and illness.
Che was taken to an abandoned school and the following afternoon he was summarily executed by Bolivian sergeant Mario Teran. He was 39.
The Argentine-born Cuban hero will be given anniversary honors in the small city of Santa Clara, Cuba where he led a key battle of the Cuban Revolution and where a mausoleum has held his remains since 1997.
In Cuba, ailing leader Fidel Castro, 81, was not expected to be seen at the commemorations of Che’s death. Interim President Raul Castro, leading Cuba since his brother’s intestinal surgery over a year ago, and who was said not to be as close to Che, could fill in for Fidel.
In Bolivia, a ceremony is also planned with marchers expected to trudge through the night and light a tribute flame for Che in La Higuera on October 7. In neighbouringVillagrande, where his remains were found in 1997, a political-themed ceremony is set for October 8.
Evo Morales, the Andean nation’s first ethnic indigenous president and a close ally of Fidel Castro, is effusive in his praise for the Argentine-born doctor by training, free spirit and socialist inspiration.
In President Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, Che’s image is also somewhat of an unofficial icon.
After years of waning attention, Che’s revolutionary mythology was aggressively revived in 1997 with the discovery of his remains amid some controversy, and then their dispatch to Cuba—in the midst of severe economic hardship—by Fidel Castro’s government.
The remains were paraded amid great fanfare through Havana streets before being interred in Santa Clara with Fidel Castro looking on.
Some critical analysts said Cuba used the events to distract from economic problems at home. Other more sympathetic observers noted that whatever the motivating factors or timing, the communist government often spotlights Che’s symbolic legacy as self-sacrificing to appeal to Cubans to endure hardship.
The far left in 1960s Europe led the world in latching onto Che internationally. Now that famous Korda image adorns countless T-shirts and backpacks worn by young people and sports stars.
Gandhi he was not—Guevara was a declared supporter of political violence.
After studying medicine in his home country, Che hooked up with Fidel and Raul Castro in Mexico before joining the bearded guerrillas who toppled United States-backed leader Fulgencio Batista and took power in Havana in January 1959.
For six months, Che supervised the repression of counter-revolutionaries, and went on to head the Cuban Central Bank and the Industry Ministry before opting to head overseas again to spread the fight, first in Congo in 1965 (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and then in Bolivia.
Guevara helped steer revolutionary Cuba into Moscow’s orbit but he later broke with the Soviet notion of peaceful coexistence with the West in favor of seeking power militarily, closer to Maoism.
Che Guevara had a daughter with a Peruvian revolutionary, both of whom are dead. He had four children with his Cuban wife Aleida March: Aleida, Camilo, Celia and Ernesto, all of whom are still alive. - AFP
Che Guevara Biography
Britannica Encyclopedia Online Database
Che Guevara,byname ofErnesto Guevara de la Serna(bornJune 14, 1928,Rosario,Argentina—diedOctober 9, 1967,La Higuera,Bolivia),theoretician and tactician ofguerrilla warfare, prominent communist figure in theCuban Revolution(1956–59), and 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.
Medical school andMotorcycle Diaries: early life
Guevara was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family of Spanish-Irish descent and leftist leanings. Although suffering fromasthma, 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 greatpovertyof the masses contributed to his eventual conclusion that the only solution lay in violentrevolution. 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 particular, his worldview was changed by a nine-month journey he began in December 1951, while on hiatus from medical school, with his friend Alberto Granado. That trip, which began on a motorcycle they called “the Powerful” (which broke down and was abandoned early in the journey), took them from Argentina throughChile,Peru,Colombia, and on toVenezuela, from which Guevara traveled alone on toMiami, returning to Argentina by plane. During the trip Guevara kept a journal that was posthumously published under his family’s guidance asThe Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey(2003) and adapted to film asThe Motorcycle Diaries(2004).
In 1953 Guevara went toGuatemala, whereJacoboArbenzheaded a progressive regime that was attempting to bring about a social revolution. (About that 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 Agency (CIA)persuaded Guevara that the United States would always oppose progressive leftist governments. This became the cornerstone of his plans to bring aboutsocialismby means of a worldwide revolution. It was in Guatemala that Guevara became a dedicatedMarxist.
The Cuban Revolution
He left Guatemala for Mexico, where he met the Cuban brothersFidelandRaúl Castro, political exiles who were preparing an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship ofFulgencio BatistainCuba. Guevara joined Fidel Castro’s26th of July Movement, which landed a force of 81 men (including Guevara) 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 theSierra 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. Guevara had initially come along as the force’s doctor, but he had also trained in weapons use, and he became one of Castro’s most-trusted aides. Indeed, the complex Guevara, though trained as a healer, also, on occasion, acted as the executioner (or ordered the execution) of suspected traitors and deserters. He recorded the two years spent overthrowing Batista’sgovernmentinPasajes de la guerrarevolucionaria(1963;Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1968).
After Castro’s victorious troops enteredHavanaon January 2, 1959, Guevara served for several months at La Cabaña prison, where he oversaw the executions of individuals deemed to be enemies of the revolution. Guevara became a Cuban citizen, as prominent in the newly established Marxist 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 ofimperialismandneocolonialismand 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 (famously demonstrating his disdain forcapitalismby signing currency simply “Che”), 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,Laguerra de guerrillas(1960;GuerrillaWarfare, 1961). The last book included Guevara’s delineation of hisfocotheory (foquismo), a doctrine of revolution in Latin America drawn from the experience of the Cuban Revolution and predicated on three main tenets: 1) guerrilla forces are capable of defeating the army; 2) all the conditions for making a revolution do not have to be in place to begin a revolution, because the rebellion itself can bring them about; and 3) the countryside of underdeveloped Latin America is suited for armed combat.
Guevara expounded a vision of a new socialist citizen who would work for the good ofsocietyrather than for personal profit, a notion he embodied through his own hard work. Often he slept in his office, and, in support of the volunteer labour program he had organized, he spent his day off working in a sugarcane field. He grew increasingly disheartened, however, as Cuba became a client state of theSoviet Union, and he felt betrayed by the Soviets when they removed their missiles from the island without consulting the Cuban leadership during theCuban missile crisis of 1962. Guevara began looking to the People’s Republic of China and its leaderMao Zedongfor support and as an example.
The Congo, Bolivia, and death
In December 1964 Guevara traveled to New York City, where he condemned U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs and incursions into Cuban airspace in an address to theUnited Nations General Assembly. Back in Cuba, increasingly disillusioned with the direction of the Cuban social experiment and its reliance on the Soviets, Guevara began focusing his attention on fostering revolution elsewhere. After April 1965 he dropped out of public life. His movements and whereabouts for the next two years remained secret. It was later learned that he had traveled to what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo with other Cuban guerrilla fighters in what proved to be a futile attempt to help thePatrice LumumbaBattalion, which was fighting a civil war there. During that period Guevara resigned his ministerial position in the Cuban government and renounced his Cuban citizenship. After the failure of his efforts in the Congo, he fled first toTanzaniaand then to a safe house in a village nearPrague.
In the autumn of 1966 Guevara went toBolivia, incognito (beardless and bald), to create and lead a guerrilla group in the region of Santa Cruz. After some initial combat successes, Guevara and his guerrilla band found themselves constantly on the run from the Bolivian army. On October 8, 1967, the group was almost annihilated by a special detachment of the Bolivian army aided by CIA advisers. Guevara, who was wounded in the attack, was captured and shot. Before his body disappeared to be secretly buried, his hands were cut off; they were preserved informaldehydeso that his fingerprints could be used to confirm his identity.
In 1995 one of Guevara’s biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, announced that he had learned that Guevara and several of his comrades had been buried in a mass grave near the town of Vallegrande in central Bolivia. In 1997 a skeleton that was believed be that of the revolutionary and the remains of his six comrades were disinterred and transported to Cuba to be interred in a massive memorial and monument inSanta Claraon the 30th anniversary of Guevara’s death. (On the 80th anniversary of his birth, another memorial to Guevara, a statue, was dedicated in his hometown,Rosario, Argentina, in 2008, after decades of acrimonious debate among its citizens over his legacy.) In 2007 a French and a Spanish journalist made a case that the body brought to Cuba was not actually Guevara’s. The Cuban government refuted the claim, citing scientific evidence from 1997 (including dental structure) that, it said, proved that the remains were those of Guevara.
Che the icon: legacy
Guevara would live on as a powerful symbol, bigger in some ways in death than in life. He was almost always referenced simply as Che—likeElvis Presley, so popular an icon that his first name alone was identifier enough. Many on the political right condemned him as brutal, cruel, murderous, and all too willing to employ violence to reach revolutionary ends. On the other hand, Guevara’s romanticized image as a revolutionary loomed especially large for the generation of young leftist radicals in Western Europe and North America in the turbulent 1960s. Almost from the time of Guevara’s death, his whiskered face adorned T-shirts and posters. Framed by a red-star-studded beret and long hair, his face frozen in a resolute expression, the iconic image was derived from a photo taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960, at a ceremony for those killed when a ship that had brought arms to Havana exploded. At first the image of Che was worn as a statement of rebellion, then as the epitome of radical chic, and, with the passage of time, as a kind of abstract logo whose original significance may even have been lost on its wearer.