Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈtʃe
ɣeˈβaɾa] June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967)was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary,
physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist. A major
figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous
countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.
As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout
South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger and disease he
witnessed. His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist
exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in
Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual
CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's
political ideology. Later in Mexico City, Guevara met Raúl and Fidel Castro,
joined their 26th of July Movement and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma
with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio
Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to
second-in-command and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year
guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.
Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number
of key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and
firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary
tribunals, instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping
spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national
bank president and instructional director for Cuba's armed forces, and
traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions
also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who
repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing the Soviet nuclear-armed
ballistic missiles to Cuba which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Additionally, Guevara was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal
manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his
youthful continental motorcycle journey. His experiences and studying of
Marxism–Leninism led him to posit that the Third World's underdevelopment and
dependence was an intrinsic result of imperialism, neocolonialism and monopoly
capitalism, with the only remedy being proletarian internationalism and world
revolution. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first
unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by
CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed.
Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical
figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies,
memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs and films. As a result of his perceived
martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle and desire to create the
consciousness of a "new man" driven by moral rather than material
incentives, Guevara has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist
movements. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of
the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him, titled Guerrillero
Heroico (shown), was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as
"the most famous photograph in the world".
Source: wikipedia
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