Che Brief Biography of Che

Che

Brief Biography of Che Guevara

Communism has lost its international appeal since the death of the Soviet empire. Fidel Castro is discredited, and Cuba is an island of repression in a sea of capitalist expansion taking place within almost all formerly communist countries. So why does the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara continue to have such a powerful hold upon the public's imagination? The ideas Guevara died for have become largely discredited, even though the poverty that stimulated his revolutionary fervor and anger remain a fact of life in many Latin American countries.

Part of it may be due to the fact that, unlike his other Latin American revolutionary communist patriots, Guevara was ennobled by an early death. "Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man!" he supposedly said before his killers shot him and hacked off his hands. Guevara died at the relatively age of thirty-nine but he lives on, on coffee mugs and posters in student dorms, "jingles at the end of key rings and jewelry" on fashionable young urban revolutionaries, and he has even popped up in the lyrics of rock operas like "Evita." (Dorfman, 2003, p.2)! No lo vamos an olvidar! The Cuban people cried when he died -- he will not be forgotten, after he was assassinated the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967. (Dorfman, 2003, p.1)

Guevara was born into relative privilege in Argentina. Growing up, an asthmatic intellectual, he did not fit the image of a likely champion of the people. As a student at his university, he read Marx and Lenin, but was not overly active in student politics. Shortly after graduating, Guevara rode on his old motorbike around South America and was horrified by the impoverishment of the native people there. This awakened his social conscience. His life would never be the same. ("Ernesto, 'Che' Guevara, Books and Writers, 2003)

After the American intervention in Guatemala in 1954 that overthrew the democratically elected, anti-American leftist president, Guevara become convinced that the only way to bring about change was by violent revolution. "I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated." ("Ernesto, 'Che' Guevara, Books and Writers, 2003) Guevara gave up a potentially successful life and career as a doctor in his native land to set the poor free. He joined Fidel Castro to overthrow the right-wing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1957. The revolution proved successful. But even more successful proved Guevara's charisma and his voicing of the ways ordinary people could wage revolution: "Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against oppression." (Cited by "Ernesto 'Che' Guevara," Books and Writers. 2003, from Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare, 1960)