Brutal end for Che Guevara, pin-up boy of Cuban revolution
AS he farewelled Fidel Castro and their comrades in Havana at the end of 1965, Ernesto “Che” Guevara recalled one of the questions asked when he joined the Cuban revolution in 1955.
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AS he farewelled Fidel Castro and their comrades in Havana at the end of 1965, Ernesto “Che” Guevara recalled one of the questions asked when he joined the Cuban revolution in 1955.
“They asked who should be notified in case of death, and the real possibility of that fact affected all,” Guevara said in December 1965. “Later we knew that it was true, that in a revolution one wins or dies (if it is a real one). Many comrades fell along the way to victory.” Almost two years later, Guevara also fell for the revolution, executed 50 years ago on October 9, 1967, after being captured fighting in Bolivia.
It was 12 years since the disaffected Argentinian doctor had signed up with brothers Fidel and Raul Castro to topple the once progressive but later corrupt US- and Mafia-backed Cuban presidential dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Castro had proclaimed the Communist Party as Cuba’s dominant political force earlier in 1965, before Guevara’s departure, then immortalised as the pin-up boy of youthful rebellion in a 1960 image by Cuban newspaper photographer Alberto Korda.
Guevara was born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina. Spanish and Irish forebears on his father Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s side were among the richest in Argentina before fleeing the tyrannical rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas in the 1840s to seek fortunes in the Californian gold rush. His mother Celia de la Serna y Llosa was also from an aristocratic family. His father quit architecture studies to establish a yerba mate native tea plantation.
Growing up in a literary, left-leaning household, Guevara enjoyed poetry and played competitive chess from age 12. He also suffered asthma, and at 14 joined a rugby team, playing at halfback. As he studied medicine at Buenos Aires National University, Guevara founded a rugby magazine, Tackle, published for three months in 1951. It drew the attention of police for spreading communist propaganda in an article that commented on class differences in the practice of Argentinian rugby.
In late 1951 Guevara joined his rugby mate and biochemist Alberto Granado for a South American road trip on a 1939 Norton 500cc motorcycle they named La Poderosa II. Visiting Chile, Peru where they treated patients at a leper colony, Colombia and Venezuela, the trip was retold in The Motorcycle Diaries, later a Hollywood movie.
“We decided to motorbike around South America to experience direct contact with the reality of the illness because we had planned to study leprosy,” Granado later recalled. “The expedition was interrupted because we met Fidel Castro in Mexico. That day changed history.”
Guevara later explained the trip brought him into “close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money”. Latin Americans blamed much of their poverty on US foreign policy, from President William Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy, evident in extensive interventions in Venezuela, Cuba and Central America to safeguard American financial interests, followed in the 1930s by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. This called for more co-operation, but Latin Americans complained US dependence on vital resources in South America favoured oppressive dictators who co-operated with US interests.
Guevara returned to Buenos Aires in 1953 to graduate, quitting Juan Peron’s dictatorship in 1954 to join revolutionaries in Bolivia. In 1954 he arrived in Mexico City, which from 1936 offered asylum to Russian Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, who lived with artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. As a volunteer at the city hospital, Guevara learned Fidel and Raul Castro were expected after being released from jail in Cuba. Eager to meet active revolutionaries, Guevara first met Raul, a member of the Young Communist League who had visited the Soviet Union. In July 1955 Raul introduced him to Fidel, and the two forged an immediate political union.
Guevara, dubbed Che, Spanish slang for buddy, acted as a military adviser to lead Castro’s guerrilla troops in battles against Batista forces from the rugged eastern Sierra Maestra mountains in December 1956. As they fought to win power in 1959, Guevara and Castro devised radical reforms to redistribute farm land to peasants. Guevara also took charge of La Cabana Fortress prison, where he ordered the execution of up to 550 people.
In early 1967 Guevara arrived in disguise to join Bolivian rebels. They were betrayed by a peasant farmer as they approached the remote village of La Higuera. He was captured by Bolivian soldiers, trained and equipped by the US, on October 8, 1967, and executed the next day.
Originally published as Brutal end for Che Guevara, pin-up boy of Cuban revolution
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