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Che was born
Che Guevara was born on June 14th, 1928. He was also known as Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. Che was the oldest of his 5 brothers and sisters. -
Medical Studies
Che’s worldview was changed by a nine month journey he began in December 1951, while on break from medical school, with his friend Alberto Granado. That trip took them from Argentina through Chile,Peru, Colombia, and on to Venezuela, from which Guevara traveled alone on to Miami, returning to Argentina by plane. In 1953, Che suffered from asthma but he excelled as a athlete and a scholar completing his medical studies. -
Fidel and Raúl Castro
Che left Guatemala for Mexico, where he met the Cuban brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro, political exiles who were preparing an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Guevara joined Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. It landed a force of 81 men in the Cuban province of Oriente late in November 1956. -
Becoming a Cuban Citizen
After Castro’s victorious troops entered Havana on January 2, 1959, Guevara served for several months at La Cabaña prison, where he oversaw the executions of individuals deemed to be enemies of the revolution. Guevara became a Cuban citizen, as prominent in the newly established Marxist 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. -
Speeches and Writings
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”—an examination of Cuba’s new brand of communism—and a highly influential manual, La guerra de guerrillas. The last book included Guevara’s delineation of his focotheory, a doctrine of revolution in Latin America drawn from the experience of the Cuban Revolution and predicated on three main tenets. 1) guerrilla forces are capable of defeating the army. -
Cuban missle crisis
Guevara expounded a vision of a new socialist citizen who would work for the good of society rather than for personal profit, a notion he embodied through his own hard work. Often he slept in his office, and, in support of the volunteer labour program he had organized, he spent his day off working in a sugarcane field. He grew increasingly disheartened, however, as Cuba became a client state of the Soviet Union, and he felt betrayed by the Soviets when they removed their missiles in 1962. -
Welcome to New York
In December 1964 Guevara traveled to New York City, where he condemned U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs and incursions into Cuban airspace in an address to the United Nations General Assembly. Back in Cuba, increasingly disillusioned with the direction of the Cuban social experiment and its reliance on the Soviets, Guevara began focusing his attention on fostering revolution elsewhere. After April 1965 he dropped out of public life. His movements and whereabouts for the next two years, secret. -
Che passes away
Guevara, who was wounded in an attack, he was then captured and shot. Before his body disappeared to be secretly buried, his hands were cut off; they were preserved in formaldehyde so that his fingerprints could be used to confirm his identity. Che Guevara died in October of 1967. -
In memory...
In 1995 one of Guevara’s biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, announced that he had learned that Guevara and several of his comrades had been buried in a mass grave near the town of Vallegrande in central Bolivia. In 1997 a skeleton that was believed be that of the revolutionary and the remains of his six comrades were disinterred and transported to Cuba to be interred in a massive memorial and monument. Santa Clara on the 30th anniversary of Guevara’s death. -
Powerful Symbols
Guevara would live on as a powerful symbol, bigger in some ways in death than in life. He was almost always referenced simply as Che—like Elvis Presley, so popular an icon that his first name alone was identifier enough. Many on the political right condemned him as brutal, cruel, murderous, and all too willing to employ violence to reach revolutionary ends. On the other hand, Guevara’s romanticized image as a revolutionary loomed especially large for the generation of young leftist radicals.
