Yesterday was the 40th death anniversary of the Latin American revolutionist Che Guevara. In this occasion I would like to share with my viewers a folio from the Che Guevara’s life.
Rising of a new star.
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che or just Che (‘Che’ variously translates as “Hey, you..”, or “Chum”, or “Buddy”, or “Pal”, or “The Kid”). He was an Argentine-born Marxist (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), revolutionary, political figure, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas. Guevara travelled throughout South America, bringing him into direct contact with the impoverished conditions in which many people lived, while he was studying medicine. From these trips he realized that the region’s socio-economic inequalities could only be remedied by revolution, prompting him to intensify his study of Marxism and travel to Guatemala to learn about the reforms being implemented there by President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. The twist in his life came when he came to Mexico in 1956 .Guevara joined Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement, which seized power from the regime of the dictator General Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Guevara was assigned the role of “supreme prosecutor” in the months after the success of the revolution, overseeing the trials and executions of hundreds of suspected war criminals from the previous regime. After serving in various important posts in the new government and writing a number of articles and books on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the intention of fomenting revolutions first in Congo-Kinshasa, and then in Bolivia. In Bolivia he was captured in a military operation supported by the CIA and the U.S. Army Special Forces. Guevara was summarily executed by the Bolivian Army in the town of La Higuera near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967. After his death, Guevara became an icon of socialist revolutionary movements and a key figure of modern pop culture worldwide.
Through the paths of Che.
Restless and complex, practical and idealistic, caring and brutal, self-serving and naive – and this is just scratching the surface of the contradictory personality that has fuelled the myth and legend of Che Guevara. On the one hand there is the temptation to dismiss Guevara as a frenetic dreamer consumed by the movement and romance of revolutionary action. On the other is an admiration for his total commitment to the utopian belief that a ‘New Man’ could create a just and equal society. Guevara’s preparedness to challenge the dominant world powers was also admirable. A bitter critic of the US, he also earned the enmity of socialist states. The Soviet Union opposed his fateful mission to Bolivia, reportedly because it involved a dispute with the “legitimate” Latin American communist parties favoured by the Soviets. There is much to admire in Guevara, and yet there is also uneasiness. The uneasiness over all the revolutionary clichés that Guevara was so skilled at employing. The uneasiness over all the leftist rhetoric so readily consumed and regurgitated by baby-boomer acolytes from the West. The uneasiness over the subsequent incorporation of the form of Che Guevara into a revolutionary myth while the substance of the man is overlooked. This image has stolen all the meaning. Guevara has been completely subsumed by a culture that he hated.