Che Guevara
June 14, 1928 — October 9, 1967 — Argentina / Cuba
Ernesto "Che" Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, and guerrilla commander who was a central figure in the Cuban Revolution of the late 1950s. After serving in Fidel Castro's government, he attempted to export revolution to Africa and South America, where he was captured and executed in Bolivia. His image — Alberto Korda's photograph of him in a beret — became the most reproduced photograph in history and a global symbol of rebellion.
From Argentina to the Cuban Revolution
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born on June 14, 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, into a middle-class family with leftist sympathies. He suffered from severe asthma throughout his life, which paradoxically may have toughened his will. He studied medicine in Buenos Aires and, before completing his degree, undertook what he later mythologized as the transformative motorcycle journey through South America depicted in his memoir The Motorcycle Diaries. His encounters with Latin American poverty radicalized him; he came to believe that only armed revolution could end the continent's exploitation. After completing his medical degree, he went to Guatemala, was present when the CIA-backed coup overthrew the leftist government of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, and fled to Mexico. There he met Fidel and Raúl Castro and joined their revolutionary movement, training as a guerrilla fighter. He sailed on the Granma to Cuba in 1956 with eighty-two men.
Cuba and the World Stage
In the Cuban guerrilla campaign, Guevara proved himself one of Castro's most effective commanders. He led the crucial battle of Santa Clara in December 1958, capturing an armored train and opening the road to Havana. After the revolution succeeded in January 1959, he served as head of the National Bank of Cuba and then as Minister of Industries. He also represented Cuba internationally and helped establish training camps for revolutionaries from across Latin America and Africa. But he was restless in government. In 1965 he resigned all his positions and disappeared — first going to the Congo to support a revolutionary movement there, then to Bolivia in 1966, where he attempted to ignite a continent-wide guerrilla uprising. The campaign was a failure from the start; local peasant support never materialized, and the Bolivian army, with CIA assistance, tracked down his small band. His writings remain widely read.
Did You Know?
Alberto Korda's iconic photograph of Guevara — titled "Guerrillero Heroico" — was taken at a Havana memorial service in March 1960. Korda was the official photographer of the event, and snapped the image in passing; he didn't consider it particularly remarkable. The photograph wasn't widely published until after Guevara's death in 1967, when it was used on posters. It has since appeared on more objects — t-shirts, flags, walls, mugs — than arguably any other photograph in history.
Capture, Death, and Enduring Symbol
Guevara was captured on October 8, 1967, wounded in the leg in a combat ambush. The following day, October 9, he was executed in the village of La Higuera, Bolivia, on orders from the Bolivian government with U.S. approval. He was thirty-nine. His last reported words to his executioner were: "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man." His hands were cut off, his body taken to a secret location, and the official announcement made that he had died fighting. His remains were not found until 1997, when he was reburied in Cuba with state honors. The gap between his ruthless actions — he authorized executions during and after the Cuban Revolution — and his romantic symbolic status represents one of the stranger contradictions of 20th-century political iconography.