Che Guevara

Che Guevara: The Doctor Who Chose the Gun

In March 1960 a photographer at a Havana memorial service raised his camera for a few seconds and caught a bearded man staring past him with an expression of controlled fury. Alberto Korda's *Guerrillero Heroico* has since been called the most famous photograph in the world by the Maryland Institute College of Art, and it has done something strange to its subject: it made an Argentine physician with a specific and heavily documented record into a shape on a T-shirt. The record is more interesting than the shape, and considerably less flattering.

Three Thousand Books and a Bad Chest

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born on 14 June 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, into an upper-class family of Spanish, Basque and Irish descent. His father backed the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, so left-wing argument was ordinary household noise. Chronic asthma shadowed his childhood; he compensated by playing sport hard enough to earn the rugby nickname "Fuser." The family home held some three thousand books, and he worked through them -- Marx, Faulkner, Neruda, Kafka -- developing durable interests in philosophy, history and political theory. A CIA assessment in 1958 described him as "quite well read" and "fairly intellectual," which is an unusual thing for an intelligence service to volunteer about an insurgent.

He entered the University of Buenos Aires in 1948 to study medicine. Two journeys reset him: a solo bicycle expedition across Argentina in 1950, and in 1952 a nine-month motorcycle trek through South America with Alberto Granado that included a stay at a Peruvian leper colony. He came back convinced that treating the sick one at a time was not a serious response to what he had seen.

Guatemala, and the Lesson

In 1954 Guevara was in Guatemala City, where he met the economist Hilda Gadea and watched President Jacobo Árbenz attempt land reform. When a CIA-backed coup removed Árbenz, Guevara drew the conclusion that governed the rest of his life: that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify conditions. He fled to Mexico City in September 1954 and worked as a physician and photographer. In June 1955 he met Raúl Castro, who introduced him to Fidel. Guevara decided before dawn that the Cuban's cause was the one he had been looking for and joined the 26th of July Movement. He married Gadea that September.

The Sierra Maestra

The yacht *Granma* sailed for Cuba on 25 November 1956 carrying eighty-two fighters. After catastrophic early losses only twenty-two regrouped in the mountains. Guevara rose to comandante and ran his column as something between a military unit and a civil administration: he set up schools, clinics and a newspaper after discovering that forty per cent of the adults around him could not read. He was also a severe disciplinarian who ordered the execution of deserters. Both facts belong in the same paragraph.

His reputation as a soldier rests on the Battle of Santa Clara in late December 1958, where his forces, outnumbered roughly ten to one, took the city -- described as a remarkable tour de force in modern warfare. Batista fled on 1 January 1959.

Minister

Guevara commanded La Cabaña prison from January to June 1959, reviewing death sentences for alleged war criminals of the old regime. Between fifty-five and one hundred and five executions were carried out under his authority. He defended them flatly: the firing squads were not only a necessity for the people of Cuba but an imposition of the people. His biographer Jon Lee Anderson has said he found no credible source showing Guevara executed an innocent, which is a defence of process, not of the process's severity. He divorced Gadea in 1959 and married Aleida March on 2 June that year.

He was appointed President of the National Bank, signing the currency simply "Che," and then Minister of Industries. His governing idea was *el Hombre Nuevo*, the New Man: a citizen motivated by solidarity rather than profit, driven by moral rather than material incentives. He nationalised industry, capped landholdings at a thousand acres and built the INRA militia. The literacy campaign was a genuine triumph -- 707,212 adults taught to read, national literacy rising to 96 per cent by 1961. The economics were not. Guevara admitted in March 1962 that the four-year industrialisation plan had been an absurd plan, disconnected from reality. Productivity fell, absenteeism climbed, and Cuba was rationing food that year.

Exit

He wrote *Guerrilla Warfare*, a manual that shaped insurgencies for decades, and kept the journals published in 1995 as *The Motorcycle Diaries*, which became a New York Times bestseller and a 2004 film. He toured the Bandung Pact nations in 1959 and went to Moscow in August 1962 to sign off on the missile deployment, then raged at Khrushchev for withdrawing it during the October crisis.

In 1965 he left Cuba to export revolution. The Congo campaign failed. He moved to Bolivia, where CIA-assisted Bolivian forces captured him on 8 October 1967 and shot him the next day at La Higuera. He was thirty-nine.

Why Che Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim is narrow and military. Santa Clara was a genuinely exceptional feat of command against ten-to-one odds, and *Guerrilla Warfare* codified a doctrine that practitioners on several continents actually used -- authorship of working military theory is a real intellectual achievement, not a poster's worth of charisma. The 1958 CIA report calling him well read and fairly intellectual is evidence from a hostile source, which makes it worth something. He also had the organisational imagination to run literacy programmes and clinics inside an active guerrilla column.

The counter-case is heavy. His signature political idea, the New Man, produced an economy he himself pronounced absurd and disconnected from reality within three years. His two attempts to repeat the Cuban model, in the Congo and in Bolivia, failed completely, the second fatally, suggesting he had generalised from a case he did not fully understand. The foco theory of insurgency he helped popularise led to a great many deaths in Latin America without producing another Cuba. And the executions at La Cabaña, however procedurally defended, describe a man comfortable with killing at scale.

He was a gifted field commander and a serious writer on war who was a poor economist and a worse prophet. *Time* named him among the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century, and influence is the accurate word. Genius, unqualified, is not.

Legacy

Guevara remains the most contested figure of the Latin American left: martyr to some, authoritarian to others, and to a very large number of people simply a graphic. Korda's photograph detached him from his own biography so completely that the image now sells in countries whose politics he despised. The manual outlived the man; so did the failures.

Achievements

• Minister of Industry of Cuba (1961–1965)
• Collar of the Order of the White Lion — 1960
• Grand Cross of the Order of the Southern Cross — 1961
• Order of the Republic — 1959
• Order of the White Lion
• Educated at University of Buenos Aires