Che Guevara

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who became one of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution alongside Fidel Castro. After serving as a guerrilla commander and then a senior official of the new Cuban state, he left to spread armed revolution to Africa and South America, and was captured and executed in Bolivia in 1967. Admirers remember him as a selfless idealist who fought for the poor; critics point to the executions he ordered and his role in building a repressive one-party state. His photographed face became one of the most reproduced images in the world.

Ernesto Guevara was born on 14 June 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest child of a middle-class family with left-leaning, anti-fascist views. He suffered from severe asthma all his life but played rugby and read widely, from poetry to Marx. He studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires and qualified as a doctor in 1953.

In 1952 he and his friend Alberto Granado travelled through South America, partly on an old motorcycle, visiting mines, villages and a leper colony in Peru. His account of the journey, published long after his death as The Motorcycle Diaries, describes how the poverty and exploitation he saw convinced him that Latin America's problems were shared and could only be solved by revolution. On a second journey he reached Guatemala, where the elected president Jacobo Árbenz was carrying out land reform. The CIA-backed coup that overthrew Árbenz in 1954 confirmed Guevara's view that the United States would crush any reformist government and that only armed struggle could succeed. It was in this period that Spanish-speaking friends began calling him "Che", an Argentine form of address.

In Mexico City in 1955 Guevara met Fidel and Raúl Castro, exiles planning to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and joined their expedition as its doctor. He was among the 82 men who landed from the yacht Granma in December 1956 and one of the few survivors of the first disastrous days. In the Sierra Maestra mountains he proved a capable and harsh commander, and in 1957 Castro promoted him to comandante, at the head of his own column. He enforced discipline severely and carried out or ordered the summary execution of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies; in February 1957 he personally shot a peasant guide, Eutimio Guerra, who had betrayed the rebels.

In late 1958 Guevara led a column westward across the island and won the Battle of Santa Clara at the end of December, capturing an armoured train. The defeat helped persuade Batista to flee on 1 January 1959.

Castro appointed Guevara commander of the La Cabaña fortress in Havana, where revolutionary tribunals tried officials, police and soldiers of the Batista regime. He oversaw the trials and reviewed appeals there from January to June 1959. Several hundred people were executed by firing squad across Cuba in that period, and estimates of the number shot under his jurisdiction at La Cabaña range from about 55 to more than 100. Many trials were summary affairs that did not meet basic standards of due process. Guevara defended the executions as revolutionary justice.

He was declared a Cuban citizen by birth and took on a series of senior posts: head of the industrial department of the land reform institute, president of the National Bank, whose banknotes he signed simply "Che", and from 1961 minister of industries. He pushed for rapid nationalisation and industrialisation on the Soviet model, which proved a failure and contributed to severe shortages. He promoted unpaid voluntary labour and wrote about creating a "new man" motivated by moral rather than material incentives. In 1960 he ordered the creation of a labour camp at Guanahacabibes to "rehabilitate" employees who had committed infractions at work. His book Guerrilla Warfare of 1960 argued that a small band of committed guerrillas could create the conditions for revolution in the countryside.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 he was among the most militant Cuban leaders, and he later said that the missiles would have been used had they been under Cuban control. He represented Cuba abroad, addressing the United Nations in 1964, but in a speech in Algiers in February 1965 he accused the Soviet Union of exploiting poor countries, which embarrassed the Cuban government.

In April 1965 Guevara disappeared from public life, and in October Castro read out a farewell letter in which he renounced his Cuban posts and citizenship. He had gone secretly to the eastern Congo with about a hundred Cuban fighters to support rebels, including Laurent-Désiré Kabila, against the government in Léopoldville. The rebels were divided and poorly trained, and he withdrew after seven months, calling the campaign a failure.

In November 1966 he entered Bolivia in disguise to start a guerrilla war that he hoped would spread across South America. His band, never more than about fifty fighters, received little help from local peasants or from the Bolivian Communist Party, and was hunted by the Bolivian army, trained and advised by the United States. On 8 October 1967 Guevara was wounded and captured in the Yuro ravine. The next day, on the orders of the Bolivian high command, he was shot by a soldier in the schoolhouse of the village of La Higuera. A CIA officer, the Cuban exile Félix Rodríguez, was present. His hands were cut off for identification and his body was secretly buried.

Guevara's remains were found near Vallegrande in 1997 and reburied in a mausoleum in Santa Clara. His diaries and writings, including the Bolivian Diary and Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, have been widely read. In death he became a symbol of rebellion for the student movements of the 1960s and for leftist movements in Latin America and beyond, and the 1960 photograph by Alberto Korda, known as Guerrillero Heroico, appears on posters, flags and T-shirts around the world, often stripped of political meaning. In Cuba he is honoured as a national hero.

Opinions remain sharply divided. Supporters credit him with personal austerity, courage and a lifelong commitment to the poor and to the independence of Latin America from foreign domination. Critics, including many Cuban exiles, stress the executions he oversaw, his advocacy of political violence, his hostility to democratic freedoms and the failure of his economic policies in the history of Cuba.