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Che Guevara.
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YOUR KNOWLEDGE
nd Cuba
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” (1965; “Man and
Socialism in Cuba,” 1967)—an examination of Cuba’s new brand of communism—
and a highly influential manual, La guerra de guerrillas (1960; Guerrilla Warfare,
1961). The last book included Guevara’s delineation of his foco theory (foquismo), 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; 2) all the conditions for making a revolution do not have to be in
place to begin a revolution, because the rebellion itself can bring them about; and 3)
the countryside of underdeveloped Latin America is suited for armed combat.
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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 from the island without
consulting the Cuban leadership during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Guevara
began looking to the People’s Republic of China and its leader Mao Zedong for
support and as an example.
THE CONGO, BOLIVIA, AND DEATH
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
remained secret. It was later learned that he had traveled to what is now
the Democratic Republic of the Congo with other Cuban guerrilla fighters in what
proved to be a futile attempt to help the Patrice Lumumba Battalion, which was
fighting a civil war there. During that period Guevara resigned his ministerial position
in the Cuban government and renounced his Cuban citizenship. After the failure of his
efforts in the Congo, he fled first to Tanzania and then to a safe house in a village
near Prague.
CONNECT WITH BRITANNICA
In the autumn of 1966 Guevara went to Bolivia, incognito (beardless and bald), to
create and lead a guerrilla group in the region of Santa Cruz. After some initial
combat successes, Guevara and his guerrilla band found themselves constantly on the
run from the Bolivian army. On October 8, 1967, the group was almost annihilated by
a special detachment of the Bolivian army aided by CIA advisers. Guevara, who was
wounded in the attack, was 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.
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 in Santa
Clara on the 30th anniversary of Guevara’s death. (On the 80th anniversary of his
birth, another memorial to Guevara, a statue, was dedicated in his hometown, Rosario,
Argentina, in 2008, after decades of acrimonious debate among its citizens over his
legacy.) In 2007 a French and a Spanish journalist made a case that the body brought
to Cuba was not actually Guevara’s. The Cuban government refuted the claim, citing
scientific evidence from 1997 (including dental structure) that, it said, proved that the
remains were those of Guevara.
CHE THE ICON: LEGACY
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 in
western Europe and North America in the turbulent 1960s. Almost from the time of
Guevara’s death, his whiskered face adorned T-shirts and posters. Framed by a red-
star-studded beret and long hair, his face frozen in a resolute expression,
the iconic image was derived from a photo taken by Cuban photographer Alberto
Korda on March 5, 1960, at a ceremony for those killed when a ship that had brought
arms to Havana exploded. At first the image of Che was worn as a statement of
rebellion, then as the epitome of radical chic, and, with the passage of time, as a kind
of abstract logo whose original significance may even have been lost on its wearer,
though for some he remains an enduring inspiration for revolutionary action.