“In executing the man, they gave birth to the legend.” -Eduardo Galeano
“I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution for people who fight to free themselves, and I am consistent with my beliefs. Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am; but of a different kind—of those who risk their skins to test their truths. It may be that this will be the end……” ~Che Guevara (farewell letter to his parents)
Ernesto Che Guevara was a revolutionary, theoretician and tactician of guerrilla warfare. In his early twenties, Che traveled throughout Latin America by motorcycle. During this journey, he saw the crushing poverty of workers and peasants of Latin America. His worldview was shaped by two journeys (4,500 and 8,000 km) in 1950 and 1951, while on leave from medical school. Che completed his medical studies in 1953 but he didn’t practice medicine. Che made the decision that marked his destiny, he wrote: “I had before me a knapsack full of medicines and a box of bullets; together the two were too heavy to carry. I took the box of bullets, leaving the knapsack behind, when I crossed the clearing between me and the cane field.” In the already-mentioned farewell to his parents, Che said, “Almost ten years ago, I wrote you another farewell letter. As I remember, I lamented not being a better soldier and a better doctor; the second no longer interests me. I’m not such a bad soldier.” In 1953 Che went to Guatemala, where Jacobo Arbenz headed a progressive regime. The Arbenz regime was overthrown in 1954 in a coup supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. In Guatemala, Che became a Marxist. He left Guatemala for Mexico in 1955, where he met the Cuban brothers Fidel and Raul Castro, political exiles who were preparing an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in and learned guerrilla warfare. Despite the permanent challenge of asthma, Che was the best student of Colonel Bayo, in Mexico, when Castro’s men were training themselves for the revolution. Deported by the government, he fled from the airport and re-established contact with his comrades. Che joined Fidel Castro’s 26th July Movement. Immediately detected by Batista’s army, they were almost wiped out. The few survivors, including the wounded Che, reached the Sierra Maestra, where they became the nucleus of a guerrilla army. The rebels slowly gained strength, seizing weapons from Batista’s forces and winning support and new recruits. Che had initially come along as the force’s doctor, but he had also trained in weapons use, and he became one of Castro’s most trusted aides. After Castro’s victorious troops entered Havana on January 8,1959, Che played an extremely important role in the construction of socialism in Cuba. Che became a Cuban citizen and represented Cuba on many diplomatic and commercial missions. He also became well known in the West for his opposition to all forms of imperialism and neocolonialism and 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 (famously demonstrating his disdain for capitalism by signing currency simply “Che”), and minister of industry. After the ideological decline of the Soviet Union Che began looking to the People’s Republic of China and its leader Mao Zedong as an example. In 1965, he traveled to Congo with other Cuban guerrilla fighters to help the Patrice Lumumba Battalion, which was fighting a civil war there. After the failure of his efforts in the Congo, he went to Bolivia in the autumn of 1966, to inspire Bolivia’s poverty-stricken, oppressed peasantry to rise against the country’s then-dictator Rene Barrientos, a puppet of the CIA. He created and led a guerrilla group. After some initial combat successes, Che and his guerrilla band found themselves constantly on the run from the Bolivian army. On October 8, 1967, the group was almost annihilated by a special detachment of the Bolivian army aided by CIA advisers and CIA Special Activities Division commandos. Che, who was wounded in the attack, was captured and brought to a schoolhouse. Mario Terán, a soldier, was tasked with the assassination. Che looked at this quivering man. “Calm down and take good aim, You’re going to kill a man!” he told him Che died on his feet. Galeano wrote, “He placed himself in the path of death without asking for permission or excuses: he went to meet it in the dusty, broken land of the Yuro.” Since Che’s execution with the participation of the CIA in 1967, Latin America has existed in a state of constant turmoil, engaged in a neverending struggle to break free from the economic, geopolitical, and military chains of Washington. In the immediate decades after the Cuban Revolution failed to catalyze a region-wide revolutionary wave, Latin America existed under the iron heel of far-right military dictatorships that prioritized Washington’s interests over their own people’s.
Che was a staunch proponent of armed struggle. In an interview with Eduardo Galeano, he said, “Power, in Latin America, is taken by force of arms or not taken at all.” Che chose a post in the revolution’s front line, and he chose it forever, without allowing himself the benefit of doubt nor the right to change his mind; this is the unique case of a man abandoning a revolution already made by him and a handful of comrades, to throw himself into the launching of another. He didn’t live for the victory but for the struggle, the ever-necessary, never-ending struggle against imperialism. Until the end of capitalism, the soldiers of the Third World will believe they feel the luminous presence of Che in the fury of the guerrilla battles.
