Che Guevara

Written by Anjali Cheung

Che Guevara (Ernest Guevara de La Serna) was the first of five children in a family of middle-class Irish and Spanish lineage with a leftist predilection. He was a gifted athlete and academic, finishing his studies in medicine in 1953. He spent the majority of his vacations travelling in South and Central America, and his reflections on the inordinate impoverishment of the people influenced his ultimate resolution that the only answer to the problem was through vehement upheaval and revolution. He eventually began to see Latin America as a socioeconomic body rather than an assortment of different countries; the liberty of such would entail the need for a transnational strategic approach. In 1953, Guevara visited Guatemala, where Jacobo Arbenz led a liberal regime that endeavoured to instigate a social revolt. During this time, Guevara was granted his infamous epithet ‘che’, stemming from an oral habit of Argentinians who interpose their dialogue with the exclamation ‘che’ (simply meaning ‘hey’.) The overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’ regime in 1954 by the Central Intelligence Agency USA (CIA) convinced Guevara that the US would never adopt a progressive leftist government. This directly became the foundation of his plot to give rise to socialism by virtue of an international revolution. It was in Guatemala where Guevara became a steadfast Marxist.

Guevara next went to Mexico, where he encountered the famous Cuban siblings Fidel and Raúl Castro, dogmatic émigrés who were planning to quash the autocracy of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Guevara became a part of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, which sent a body of 81 men (including Guevara) to the Cuban province ‘Oriente’ on December 2nd, 1956. Instantly discovered by Batista’s army, they were almost annihilated. There were a small number of survivors, of which included the injured Guevara. They reached the Sierra Maestra (a mountain range), where they became the core of a new guerrilla army. The protestors gradually expanded in strength, taking possession of weapons from Batista’s armed forces and gaining support and new soldiers. Guevara had primarily accompanied the force as the body’s doctor, but he was also skilled in the use of weaponry, and he soon became one of Castro’s right-hand advisors. Undeniably, the multifaceted Guevara, although qualified as a medic, from time to time, took the role as an executioner of alleged conspirators and absconders. He documented two years that he spent conquering Batista’s regime in ‘Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria’ (1963; Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1968).

Following Castro’s victorious troops entered Havana on January 8, 1959, Guevara served for several months in the ‘La Cabaña’ prison, where he superintended the executions of those deemed to be adversaries of the revolution. Guevara became a Cuban citizen, as significant in the recently recognised Marxist government as he was in the revolutionary army, representative of Cuba on many commercial assignments. Additionally, he became notable in the West for his antagonism to all systems of expansionism and colonialism and also for his attacks on American foreign policy. He acted as chief of the Industrial Department of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, president of the National Bank of Cuba (notoriously displaying his contempt for capitalism by signing currency off with his simple epithet “Che”). Throughout the early 1960s, he demarcated Cuba’s policies and exhibited his own views with the agency of countless speeches and works, particularly “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba” (1965; “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” 1967)—a scrutiny of Cuba’s new-fangled product of communism—and a decidedly substantial guide, La guerra de guerrillas (1960; Guerrilla Warfare, 1961). The latter of the two aforementioned comprised of Guevara’s explanation of his philosophy ‘foquismo’ (focalism) which was a principle of revolution in South and Central derived from the event of the Cuban Revolution and was founded off three key doctrines: One, Guerrilla forces are easily able to defeat the army; two, all the prerequisites for evoking a revolution do not necessarily have to be present in order to trigger revolution, as the insurgence itself can bring them about; and lastly, the rural area of the underdeveloped South and Central America can and should be utilized for armed battle.

Guevara exemplified the picture of a new socialist civilian who would labour for the benefit of society instead of for individual profit; that of which he found through his own hard work. Habitually, he slept in his office, and, in groundwork for the volunteer work programme that he had planned, he spent his day off working in a sugarcane field. He became progressively disheartened, nevertheless, as Cuba became a state of the Soviet Union, and he felt deceived by the Soviets when they eradicated their artillery from the island without the agreement of the Cuban guidance during the missile crisis during 1962. Guevara began to look towards the People’s Republic of China and its communist leader Mao Zedong for assistance.