Che Guevara

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (June 14, 1928 - October 9, 1967) was an Argentine physician and Marxist revolutionary whose trajectory from radicalization in Guatemala through military leadership of the Cuban Revolution to his capture and execution in Bolivia with CIA assistance made him one of the defining figures of Cold War revolutionary politics. His iconic image - based on a 1960 photograph by Alberto Korda - became the most reproduced photographic portrait of the twentieth century.¹

Guatemala and Radicalization

Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, to a middle-class family of Irish and Spanish descent. He trained as a physician and undertook two extended motorcycle journeys across Latin America in the early 1950s - the experiences documented in his Motorcycle Diaries - that exposed him to the poverty and exploitation of the continent's rural and indigenous populations.

In 1954, Guevara was in Guatemala City when the CIA's Operation PBSUCCESS overthrew President Jacobo Arbenz. He was in the country as an idealistic young doctor who supported Arbenz's reform program. The coup - and the speed with which it ended a democratically elected government attempting land reform - transformed his political views. He drew the conclusion that the United States would never permit peaceful reformist change in Latin America that threatened American corporate or strategic interests, and that armed revolution was therefore the only viable path to structural change. This conclusion shaped the rest of his life.¹

Cuban Revolution

Guevara fled Guatemala after the coup and eventually reached Mexico City, where he met Fidel Castro and his brother Raul Castro in 1955. He joined the July 26 Movement as the group's doctor and was one of the eighty-two men who sailed from Mexico on the Granma to Cuba in November 1956 in the expedition that launched the guerrilla campaign against Fulgencio Batista's government.

Guevara proved to be an effective guerrilla commander as well as a political organizer within the Sierra Maestra campaign. He commanded the rebel forces at the Battle of Santa Clara in December 1958 - the decisive engagement that collapsed the Batista government's military position and opened the path to Havana. When Batista fled on January 1, 1959, Guevara's column entered Havana.

In the revolutionary government, Guevara served in several capacities: as head of the National Bank (signing currency as simply "Che" in a gesture of contempt for the financial system), as Minister of Industries, and as a key figure in the Bay of Pigs response and the Cuban Missile Crisis management. He was an advocate for aggressive confrontation with the United States and a skeptic of the Soviet relationship, which he considered compromised by Soviet self-interest.¹

Post-Cuba Revolutionary Activities

Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to pursue revolutionary struggle elsewhere, writing a letter to Castro that was read publicly after his departure. He traveled to Congo, attempting to organize guerrilla operations alongside Laurent-Désiré Kabila's forces - a campaign he later described in his diary as a failure, attributing it to the lack of revolutionary commitment among the Congolese fighters.

From Congo he moved to Bolivia in late 1966 under a false identity, intending to use Bolivia as the base for a continental revolutionary movement. The Bolivian campaign was undermined by the failure to build a peasant support base, the hostility of the Bolivian Communist Party (which took orders from Moscow and was skeptical of Guevara's guerrilla-foco theory), and CIA intelligence support for the Bolivian military.¹

Capture and Execution

CIA officer Felix Rodriguez - a Cuban-American veteran of the Bay of Pigs who had joined the CIA - was deployed to Bolivia to assist the Bolivian Army's efforts to locate and destroy Guevara's guerrilla column. Rodriguez worked directly with Bolivian military forces and communicated the location intelligence that enabled Guevara's capture.

On October 8, 1967, Bolivian Rangers captured Guevara wounded in the Yuro ravine near La Higuera. He was taken to a schoolhouse in La Higuera. Rodriguez photographed him and communicated with CIA headquarters; the decision to execute rather than hold Guevara for interrogation was made at the level of Bolivian military and civilian leadership. On October 9, 1967, Sergeant Mario Teran shot Guevara after being ordered to do so by Bolivian Army Colonel Joaquin Zenteno Anaya. Rodriguez was present.

Guevara's hands were cut off to enable fingerprint verification of his identity. His body was buried in an unmarked grave near Vallegrande; the grave was located in 1997 and his remains returned to Cuba for burial.²

Legacy

The Alberto Korda photograph of Guevara at a funeral in Havana in March 1960 - distributed by an Italian publisher in 1967 following his death - became the iconic image of revolutionary romanticism globally. Guevara's post-death cultural significance exceeded his actual revolutionary achievements and was almost entirely disconnected from his politics. His image appeared on merchandise, posters, and clothing across the ideological spectrum.

For Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolutionary tradition, Guevara's death provided a martyr. For CIA analysts and Cold War strategists, the Bolivian campaign demonstrated that the guerrilla-foco theory - Guevara's belief that a small revolutionary vanguard could create the conditions for broader revolution - was not transferable without local political conditions, and that intelligence support for counter-guerrilla operations could be decisive.