CHE GUEVARA

Ernesto Che Guevara was born on June 14 in Rosario, Argentina. He was the
eldest of five chidren in a middle-class family of Spanish-Irish descent and leftist
leanings. His parents were not very religious and were liberal closer to left .
During the Spanish civil war they had the supported the Republicans. His mother Celia
de la Serna was a rebellious girl who was a defending of the feminist movement from
the end of The First Wold War. In Buenos Aires, the most european city of Amrica
Latina, Celia became one of the first women who were criticized to be short-haired. She
drove her own car, signed her own cheques and folded ones legs in public. She usually
went to swimming because she thought it was good for her health. On May 2 she took
two years old Che with her to swimming, he caught cold and had his first asthma
attack from which he suffered all his life. It supposed a sad even for the family. The
doctors advised the family to move to the drier climate of Alta Gracia (Cordoba).
EDUCATION
He received Primary Education at home mostly by his mother who taught to read
and write since four years old. In 1941 he went to Secondary School in The Colegio
Nacional Dean Funes, Cordoba, where was being educated in English. In the meanwhile
he was also learning French from his mother. At the age of fourteen became a voracious
reader of Marx, Engels and Freud which all were available in his fathers library. He
especially loved French poetry, and he had a great passion for Boudelaires works.
When he was sixteen, he became an admirer of Neruda.. He excelled only in literarure
and sports. His favorite sport was the rugby so he played in The San Isidro team which
result of his asthma he had to leave it, by order of his parents. However he carried on
secretly playing rugby. With some friends he created a magazine called Tackle
(Placaje). Journalist Ernestos nicknames were: Chancho (cerdo), o Chang-Cho. He was
obligated to improve his asthma, the student played tennis, golf and began to pilot
planes with his uncle Jorge. He was obligated by his grandmothers agony, who died in
1947, and by understanding his own disease to study Medicine in Buenos Aires
University.

Nevertheless he wanted to work to earn his living. He worked as a male nurse in

an oil industry, in the municipal slaughterhouse and later in The Universitys library.
With a partner made an insecticide, el Atila which hadnt success.
I dont know how he could do many things. He, who looked like an untidy boy,
distributed his time very well. Said Ernesto Guevara father.
He took no part in revolutionary student movements and showed little interest in
politics at Buenos Aires University.
The university disappointed him, his dreamt was a vocation and in the university
they talked about an university degree. He longed for descover the world.
TRAVELS AROUND THE LATIN PROVINCES
He made long travels in Argentina and in other Latin America countries. In 1948
during his studient holidays, he made the first of his long journeys, exploring northem
Argentina on a bicycle to meet with his friend Alberto Granado who had already
finished his studies of medicin and was working with lepers in San Francisco del
Chaar (north of Cordoba). It was the first time coming into contact with the very poor
and the remnants of the Indian tribes. At the same time his critical views about the
expanding economic influence of the United States deepened. To run the 850 kilometres
which separated him from Alberto, he installed a little motor on his bycicle. He only
carried with himself a spare inne tube, some clothes and a Nehrus book.
At the end of his holidays he came back to Buenos Aires by secundary roads, runnig a
total of 4500 kilometres this time.
On December 29 in 1951 the two friends, Ernesto and Alberto, started a new trip
on an old Norton of 500 cm3 motorbike La Poderosa. At the back of the motorbike,
they carried two sleeping bags, a tent and some clothes. Ernesto had to promise to his
parents that he wouldnt forget his medicine against the asthma and that would come
back to finish his university degree.
First, he went to Miramar where met his first girlfriend Mara del Carmen, who
was called Chichina. Her father was the baron Ferreira so she was a rich glamorous
young of the argentinian aristocracy through she didnt think like his friends (inmatures
of daddy).
Chichina said: Opposite our snob style, emphasized his vulgar style. He bought his
shoes in opportunity shops and it looked that he chose them to give the impression he

had his feet of different size. He enjoyed with the criticism of the people and our gibes
were indifferent for him.

On February 19 in 1952 the local newspaper from Temuco, a little town from
Chile, published: two argentinian experts in leprosy are running suthern America on
motorbike.
The doctor Granado and Ernesto Guevara crossed the rage of the Andes and
arrived to Chile but the Norton didnt work. They hitch-hiked and arrived at Valparaso,
where embarked like stowayways on a merchant ship. They arrived to Antofagasta,
from where visited the mines of Chuquicamata, which were explotated by
northamerican. It was a revelation of the injustice. Said Alberto: Like a trick goes them
away, the Indian tribes watch how their piece of land is transformated in money.
The two pals went to Peru, TheTiticaca lake, The Cuzco, The Machu Picchu,
and after that they went to Amazonia, where landed on the clinic of leprosy from San
Pablo. Fourty years after that, leper indians still remembered those two men who helped
them. The lepers were as grateful that built a raft for Alberto and Guevara who
continued their trip on Amazonas river.
At the end on July in 1952, the two friends sepereted in Caracas. Che graduated
from medical school as a doctor in March 1953. Theres no doubt that this was an
adventure trip because they travelled without a penny, eating whenever it was possible.
After getting his title as an allergist, his teacher, Dr. Pisani, offered Ernesto the
chance to work with him, but he didint want to take the job, he preferred to go to
Venezuela to work with his friend Alberto, but before getting there he went to Bolivia
where he met Ricardo Rojo, an antiperonist lawyer who was expelled from Argentina.
Ernesto made his way with this man, but Ricardo convinced him to go to Guatemala
(where a revolution was about to take place), instead of to Venezuela. He wasn`t still
25 years old, and the doctor Guevara early went on his way again.

In 1954 he went to Guatemala during socialist Arbenz presidency; although he

was by now a Marxist, well read in Lenin, he refused to join the Communist Party,
though this meant losing the chance of government medical appointment, and he was
penniless. Guevara radicalized and become convinced that the only way to bring about
change was by violent revolucion. In Guatemala Guevara met Hilda Gadea (his second
girlfriend) a Marxist of Indian stock who was his first wife and with who had a daughter
called Hilda Beatriz.
Hilda Gadea introduced him to Nico Lopez,one of Fidel Castros lieutenants. In
Guatemala he saw the CIA at work as the principal agents of counterevolution and was
confirmed in his view that Revolution could be made only be armed insurrection. When
Arbenz fell, Guevara went to Mexico City on September 21st 1954, with his new friend
Roberto Cceres. Exactly as in his trip with Alberto, he didnt have enough money, and
he had to buy a camera in order to be able to work. Hilda reached Mexico one month
later, and they gave birth to their first child. In Mexico he worked in the General
Hospital.

CASTROS GUERRILLA WAR AGAINST BATISTA WITH CHE

Hilda Gadea and Nico Lopez joined him, and he met the Cuban brothers, Fidel
and Ral Castro, political exiles who were preparing an attempt to overthrow the
dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. He joined other Castro followers at the farm
where the Cuban revolutionaries were being given a tough commando course of
professional training in guerrilla warfare by the Spanish Republican Army captain,
Alberto Bayo, author of Ciento cincueto preguntas a un guerrilleo Havana 1959 . Bayo
drew not only on his own experience but on the guerrilla teachings of Mao Tse-tung,
and Che, as the was now called (it means chum or buddy and is Italian origin),
became his star pupil and was made a leader of the class.
The war games at the farm attracted police attention, all the Cubans and Che
were arrested, but released a month later (June 1956) .They loaded 38-feet long motor
yacht Granma full of guerrillas and weapons and sailed to Cuban province of Oriente
on 2 December in 1956. Immediately detected by Batistas army, they were almost
wiped out; unfortunately, only 15 men (out of the 82 that arrived to Cuba) survuved,
including the wounded Guevara, reached the Sierra Maestra, where they became the

nucleus of a guerrilla army. The rebels slowly gained in strength, selzing weapons from
Batistas forces and winning suppot and new recruits. While Che fought, he decided to
help the natives to study and to shoot. Guevara became one of Castros most trusted
aides and recorded the two years spent in overthrowing Batistas government in
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1968).
When they invaded Cuba, Che went with them, first as doctor, soon as a
Commandante or the revolutionary army of barbutos. He was the most aggressive,
clever and successful of the guerrilla officers, and the most earnest in giving his men a
Lenist education. He wasaldo a ruthless disciplinarian who unhesitatingly shot
defectors, as later he got a reputation for cold-blooded cruelty in the mass execution of
recalcitrant supporters of the defeated president Batista.
This rebellion lasted for three years (1956-1959), and finally, on January the 1st,
the rebels won. Guevara commanded the greatest battlefield victory of Castros
revolution: the battle of Santa Clara in December 1958 that forced dictator Fulgencio
Batista into exile to Santo Domingo.
After Castros victorious troops entered Havana on January 2nd 1959 and
established a Marxist government. Everything in Cuba would change. Fidel and
Guevara discovered a different Cuba changed by U.E. The Americans controlled the
75% of the commercial changes. They had the 90% of the mines of the country and the
50% of the land. In a population of 65 millions of cuban only 500.000 didnt have
work. In the campside only the 4% of the sugar cane cutters could eat meat and only the
2% could eat eggs. Almost a quarter of the population were illiterates. But with Fidels
gobernment all the people would have a house and a job, and the children would study.
Guevara became a Cuban citizen, as prominent in the new government as he
had been in the revolutionary army, and of Ches dreams became true: know the
socialist countries. Ernesto met a girl named Aleida March, so he got divorced from
Hilda and married Aleida on June 2nd, with whom he had 4 more children. Together
they visited Egypt, India, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Yugoslavia.
From 1961 Guevara was named Minister for Industry and he quit the National
Banks presidency, signing the bank notes simply Che He negotiates and signs
commercial treatments with the Soviet Union, China, Hungary, Checoslovaquia,
Bulgaria, Korea and the German Democratic Republic. representing Cuba on many
commercial missions. He signed a trate pact with the USSR which freed the Cuban
sugar industry from dependence on the teeth of the US market, in it is foreshadowing

his failure in the Congo and Bolivia, in an axiom which proved to be hopelessly
misleading: It is not always necessary to wait until the conditions for revolution exist:
the instructional focus can create them. And, with Mao Tse-tung, he believed that the
countryside must bring the revolution to the town in predominately peasant countries.
Also at this time, he glorified his own kind of communist philosophy (published later in
the Socialism and Man in Cuba, on March 12 in 1965). It can be sumed up in him Man
really atains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by
physical need to sell himsef as a commodity. He was moving away from Moscow,
towards Mao, and beyond into what is essentially the old idealistic, Anarchism. His
formal breach with the Soviet Communist came when, addressing the Organization for
Afro-Asian Solidarity at Algiers (Rebruary 1965) he charged the USSR with being a
tacit accomplice of imperialism by not trading exclusively with the Communist bloc
and by not giving underdeveloped socialist countries aid without any thought of return.
He also attacked the Soviet government for its policy of coexistence; and for
Revisionism. He initiated the Tricontiental Conference to realize a program of
revolutionary, insurrectionary, guerrilla cooperation in Africa, Asia and South America.
On the other hand, after a halfhearted attempt to come to some kind of terms with the
USA, he was also attacking the North America, at the UN as Cubas representative
there, for their greedy and merciless imperialist activity in Latin America.
Ches intransigence towards both capitalist and communist estabklishment
forced Castro to drop him (1965), not offically, but in practice. For some months even
his whereabouts were a secret and his death was widely rumoured: he was in various
African countries; on January he moved to Brazzaville, Congo, where he discussed the
anti- imperialistic strubble in Africa with president Alphonse Masseba Debat. Then he
went through Guinea, Ghana, Dahomey, Algiers and Paris, where he received the news
about Masetti failure. In February he travelled to Banzania and he took part in the
Second Afroasiatic Solidarity Economic Seminary, in Algiers. On March 3, he got in
touch with Congos rebels again. Notably the Congo surveying the possibilies of turning
the kinshasa rebellion into a Communist revolution, by Cuban-style guerrilla tactics. He
returned to La Habana on March 14 to train volunteers for that project, and took a force
of 120 Cubans. In April he gave up all his official positions and his Cuban nationality in
front of Fidel Castro. In July, he secretly travelled to Congo through Cairo. On October
3, Fidel Castro showed the letter where Grevara had given up his nationality and his
charges of Minister and Commander.

LETTER TO FIDEL
Fidel: At this moment I remember many things -- when I met you in Mara
Antonia's house, when you suggested my coming, all the tensions involved in the
preparations.
One day they asked who should be notified in case of death, and the real possibility of
that fact affected us all. Later we knew that it was true, that in revolution one wins or
dies (if it is a real one). Many comrades fell along the way to victory.
Today everything is less dramatic, because we are more mature. But the fact is repeated.
I feel that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that tied me to the Cuban Revolution in its
territory, and I say good-bye to you, the comrades, your people, who are already mine.
I formally renounce my positions in the national leadership of the party, my post as
minister, my rank of major, and my Cuban citizenship. Nothing legal binds me to Cuba.
The only ties are of another nature -- those which cannot be broken as appointments
can.
Recalling my past life, I believe I have worked with sufficient honor and dedication to
consolidate the revolutionary triumph. My only serious failing was not having confided
more in you from the first moments in the Sierra Maestra, and not having understood
quickly enough your qualities as a leader and a revolutionary.
I have lived magnificent days, and I felt at your side the pride of belonging to our
people in the brilliant yet sad days of the Caribbean crisis.
Seldom has a statesman been more brilliant than you in those days. I am also proud of
having followed you without hesitation, identified with your way of thinking and of
seeing and appraising dangers and principles. Other nations of the world call for my
modest efforts. I can do that which is denied you because of your responsibility as the
head of Cuba, and the time has come for us to part.
I want it known that I do it with mixed feelings of joy and sorrow: I leave here the
purest of my hopes as a builder, and the dearest of those I love. And I leave a people
who received me as a son. That wounds me deeply. I carry to new battlefronts the faith
that you taught me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of fulfilling the
most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever it may be. This comforts
and heals the deepest wounds.
I state once more that I free Cuba from any responsibility, except that which stems from
its example. If my final hour finds me under other skies, my last thought will be of this

people and especially of you. I am thank- ful for your teaching, your example, and I will
try to be faithful to the final consequences of my acts.
I have always been identified with the foreign policy of our revolution, and I will
continue to be. Wherever I am, I will feel the responsibility ofbeing a Cuban
revolutionary, and as such I shall behave. I am not sorry that I leave my children and my
wife nothing material. I am happy it is that way. I ask nothing for them, as I know the
state will provide enough for their expenses and education.
I would like to say much to you and to our people, but I feel it is not necessary. Words
cannot express what I would want them to, and I don't think it's worth while to banter
phrases.
Ever onward to victory! Our country or death! I embrace you with all my revolutionary
fervor.

His men fought well, but the Kinshasa rebels did not, they were useless against
the Belgian mercenaries and by autumn 1965 Che had to advise Castro to withdraw
Cuban aid. On March in 1966, he had to leave Congo and went to Cuba. From March to
June he travelled through Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia. There he
turned up incognito and trained and led a guerrilla war in the Santa Cruz region (that
also failed), in order to make other of his dreams become true: to build lots of Vietnams.
However, he failed to win the support of the peasants and his group was surrounded
near Vallegrande by American- trained Bolivian troops. His life would come to a
violent end on October 8th 1967, when he was captured and executed by Bolivian
soldiers. His body was put on display by the Bolivians and then put into a secret,
unmarded grave along with some other revolutionaries.
On June 1997 Ches body was found, dug up, and returned to Cuba. His remains
were net by Castro and members of Guevaras family. Eventually his body will be
placed in a mausoleum in the square that bears his name.
Che a symbol of hope to young Argentines
But, as it braces itself for greater public attention, the museum has
launched a special humanitarian aid project to benefit the beleaguered Caribbean
island in which Che played out his revolutionary ideals - Cuba.

"Why do people admire Guevara?" asked museum director Euladio Gonzalez

Rodriguez. "Because they are admiring themselves in depth for something they
already have inside, but that they have to exercise. And, unfortunately,
nowadays they are told that ideals are not possible.
"And this is a lie. Ideals are possible. How are they going to squeeze out life,
saying we cannot be human, we cannot be generous with other human beings?"
Many of Argentina's young regard Che as a symbol of hope and freedom for
people in need, and that he harks back to an age of higher ideals.
"Che created -- or he was one of the consolidators, let's say -- of a different set
of political ethics. Of a policy conceived as a policy for the common people, of
the common people and by the common people," says Pablo Bomaro, who
promotes various Guevara-related enterprises.
"He offered himself to the people during his whole life. They killed him because
of fighting for the people."
Events commemorating Guevara's death are being planned in Cuba, but the
movies and the sale of paraphernalia and posters elsewhere are doing their part
to keep his legend alive.