Guevara Essay Research Paper Guevara Che

Guevara Essay, Research Paper

Guevara, Che

Guevara, Che, real name Ernesto Guevara (1928-1967), Latin American guerrilla leader and revolutionary theorist, who became a hero to the New Left radicals of the 1960s. Born into a middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina, Guevara received a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1953. Convinced that revolution was the only remedy for Latin America’s social inequities, in 1954 he went to Mexico, where he joined exiled Cuban revolutionaries under Fidel Castro. In the late 1950s, he played an important role in Castro’s guerrilla war against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and when Castro came to power, he served as Cuba’s minister of industry (1961-1965). A strong opponent of U.S. influence in the Third World, he helped guide the Castro regime on its leftward and pro-Communist path. The author of two books on guerrilla warfare, Guevara advocated peasant-based revolutionary movements in the developing countries. He disappeared from Cuba in 1965, reappearing the following year as an insurgent leader in Bolivia. He was captured by the Bolivian army and shot near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967.

byname of ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA theoretician and tactician of guerrilla warfare, prominent Communist figure in the Cuban Revolution (1956-59), and later guerrilla leader in South America.

Guevara was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family of Spanish-Irish descent and leftist leanings. Though suffering from asthma, he excelled as an athlete and a scholar, completing his medical studies in 1953. He spent many of his holidays travelling in Latin America, and his observations of the great poverty of the masses convinced him that the only solution lay in violent revolution. He came to look upon Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as a cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy.

In 1953 Guevara went to Guatemala, where Jacobo Arbenz headed a progressive regime that was attempting to bring about a social revolution. (Around this time Guevara acquired his nickname, from a verbal mannerism of Argentines who punctuate their speech with the interjection che.)

The overthrow of the Arbenz regime in 1954 in a coup supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency persuaded Guevara that the United States would always oppose progressive leftist governments. This conviction became the cornerstone of his plans to bring about Socialism by means of a worldwide revolution.

He left Guatemala for Mexico, where he met the Cuban brothers, Fidel and Ra*l Castro, political exiles who were preparing an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Guevara joined Castro’s force, which landed in the Cuban province of Oriente late in November 1956. Immediately detected by Batista’s army, they were almost wiped out; the few survivors, including the wounded Guevara, reached the Sierra Maestra, where they became the nucleus of a guerrilla army. The rebels slowly gained in strength, seizing weapons from Batista’s forces and winning support and new recruits. Guevara became one of Castro’s most trusted aides and recorded the two years spent in overthrowing Batista’s government in Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria (1963; Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1968).

After Castro’s victorious troops entered Havana on Jan. 2, 1959, and established a Marxist government, Guevara became a Cuban citizen, as prominent in the new government as he had been in the revolutionary army, representing Cuba on many commercial missions. He also became well known in the West for his opposition to all forms of imperialism and neocolonialism and for his attacks on U.S. foreign policy. He served as chief of the Industrial Department of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, president of the National Bank of Cuba, and minister of industry.

During the early 1960s, he defined Cuba’s policies and his own views in many speeches and writings, notably “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba” (1965; “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” 1967)–an examination of Cuba’s new brand of Communism–and a highly influential manual, La guerra de guerrillas (1960; Guerrilla Warfare, 1961). After April 1965 Guevara dropped out of public life. His movements and whereabouts for the next two years remained secret; it was later learned that he had spent some time in what is now Congo (Kinshasa) with other Cuban guerrilla fighters, helping to organize the Patrice Lumumba Battalion, which fought in the civil war there.

In the autumn of 1966, Guevara went to Bolivia, incognito, to create and lead a guerrilla group in the region of Santa Cruz. On Oct. 8, 1967, the group was almost annihilated by a special detachment of the Bolivian Army. Guevara was captured after being wounded and was shot soon afterward.

In the United States the generation of the 1960’s spoke often about love and peace, yet this generation carried the image of a man who advocated the use of hatred as a means to an end into their marches and into their dormitories. The image of Che Guevara hanging in the College dorms of young student radicals in the 90’s may be cliche, but his message is not. In his Message to the Tricontinental Guevara argued that hatred was something to be harnessed and used for as he put it, “an element of struggle.” Not onl