Ernesto "Che" Guevara

(1928-67) By Maria TROKOZ

The leftist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was passionately devoted to world revolution through guerrilla warfare. He believed that the only way to end the great poverty of the masses in the developing world was armed revolution to establish socialist governments. He played a major military role in the Cuban Revolution of the late 1950s, and in the early years of Fidel Castros Marxist government, Guevara made significant contributions to Cubas new economic order. He later led guerrilla fighters in Africa and South America and wrote about the theories and tactics involved in guerrilla warfare. Guevara became an icon of leftist radicalism and anti-imperialism. He was executed by the Bolivian army, with the assistance of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. 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. During the early 1960s, he defined Cubas policies and his own views in many speeches and writings. 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 (see on the left) and shot. Yet Guevara would live on as a powerful symbol, bigger in some ways in death than in life. He was almost always referenced simply as Chelike Elvis Presley, so popular an icon that his first name alone was identifier enough. Guevaras 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 his death, Guevaras whiskered faceframed by a beret and long hairhas adorned Tshirts, initially 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.