Ernesto (Che) Guevara: His Revolutionary Life and Inevitable Death

 

This was written in 2019 for the Oklahoma Chautauqua Companion Reader when I toured Tulsa, Enid, and Lawton as Che. At each venue I did a 45-minute presentation followed by 30 minutes of Q and A and two workshops.

The choice to include Che in the program was not without controversy.

I also portrayed Che for the Ed Kinney Lecture Series in Pleasanton, California, via video in 2020.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina, to middle-class parents.  The man who became the literal poster boy for revolution was a complex child and teen. As a toddler, he developed severe asthma, which directed the path of his life, including disqualification from the army. Despite his physical limitations, Che played sports, striving to be like other children, until it exhausted him. He then took to his bed, reading philosophers, novelists, and poets. He kept meticulous notes of the books he read and of his theories, a practice lasting until his death. His first nickname was “Teté” (mess and trouble). He was slovenly in dress, poor in hygiene, and yet the girls adored him.

His father, a failed businessman and philanderer, became alienated from his son, while Ernesto’s mother, Celia, drew closer. Near her life’s end she was jailed for supporting him, a burden she proudly bore.

Ernesto attended the University of Buenos Aires, planning to be an allergy researcher. He left school for a nine-month trip through South America with Alberto Granado (the odyssey chronicled in the book Motorcycle Diaries).  The journey changed his life. He witnessed incomprehensible poverty and illness among the peasants and indigenous peoples of the countries they visited. The two friends toured the ruins of once-great civilizations, and saw the abject conditions of leper colonies where they volunteered.

Returning to Argentina, Che researched cures for asthma.  Again leaving school, Che practiced photography and wrote articles during a solo journey. He also worked as a researcher at several hospitals.   But socialism’s pull was strong.

Che believed Marxism and Communism were the solution to global injustice. After nine months in Mexico, he met the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raúl.  They were planning a revolution after Fidel was released from twenty-two months’ imprisonment for masterminding an attack on Cuban barracks. The three men soon became friends. It was the Castros who dubbed Ernesto “Che” (friend) because he incessantly said it. When Che was imprisoned in July 1956 for expired papers, Fidel showed his loyalty, refusing to abandon him. When the Castros returned to Cuba in November 1956, Che was one of 82 revolutionaries crowded on a yacht named the Granma.

Che rose to prominence during the Revolution (1956–59), first as a doctor and then as a combatant, because of his discipline and organizational skills. A watershed moment came when he chose a box of ammunition over a box of medical supplies. Che was instrumental in garnering peasant support in the mountains and establishing communication networks. His efforts got him promoted to commandante and earned him a silver star for his beret. He was wounded early on and would be wounded again.

So why a revolution? Fulgencio Batista, who rose to power in 1952 in a bloodless coup, was a puppet of the United States. Havana was synonymous with decadence and known as a playground for the American mafia. Agrarian reform was key to Castro and Co.’s revolutionary aims. The United Fruit Company, owned by the Dulles and Rockefeller dynasties, had extensive land holdings in both Cuba and Guatemala and paid little for labor. When Guatemala nationalized its agriculture, the U.S. toppled the government.

Che devised a system of guerrilla warfare that situated guerrilla fighters as social reformers. This system, published as the book Guerilla Warfare, shows Che as theorist and innovator.

Fidel and Che committed themselves to a policy of strict discipline and controversial executions of spies and informers. If revolutionaries were guilty of insubordination, desertion, or defeatism, they were executed. Che carried out at least one execution and defended the practice. Executions, preceded by public trials, were continued post-revolution.

Fidel was in a difficult position following victory.  Che was Argentinean (although he was made a Cuban citizen), and his communist leanings were a liability in the coming negotiations with the U.S.  So he was banned from Havana and instead made president of the Cuban National Bank (he signed the banknotes “Che”).

Che also oversaw Cuban economic development as Minister of Industries, educating himself in math and economics and working exhausting hours for minimal pay. Che believed political sovereignty was key to economic independence, which meant moving Cuba into industries other than sugar to free it from reliance on foreign capital. Despite his efforts, Che could not get his theoretical models to work, and the economy failed. By March 1962 food was being rationed.  

Che helped move trade partnerships from the U.S. to the Soviet Union, negotiating favorable deals on oil and sugar to undermine the U.S. and strengthen the Cuba economy.

His vision of pure socialism focused on a “New Man” who did not work to accumulate wealth for imperialists, multinational corporations, and his pocket but to better all humanity. Work was a moral necessity and a “pleasant social duty.” Che stressed volunteerism. He worked on Saturdays beside textile and sugar plantation workers despite his exhausting duties in the ministry.

He oversaw the building of hospitals and clinics and spearheaded education. Within two years, Cuba raised its literacy rate to almost 100 percent and added 10,000 teachers.

Che’s vision of a world where work was meaningful and education and healthcare were rights drove him repeatedly to ignore his growing family and deny them things like a car or gifts from visitors.

As Fidel navigated the treacherous waters of the Cold War, Che became a further liability. In mid-1959 Fidel sent him on a three-month tour of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was during this tour that the gap between Che’s vision and reality was widest—he ignored human rights abuses in Indonesia, focusing solely on what aligned with his agenda.

Che worked to export the Cuban revolutionary model to countries where the colonial system fueled by American imperialism and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) support held sway.

The CIA had thick files on Che and Raúl Castro and the U.S. government devised a multi-pronged campaign to end Castro’s reign.  At the end of 1960, the U.S. cut its sugar quota and attacked sugar fields and a refinery in Cuba from the air.

Two major events that followed were the “Bay of Pigs” in 1961, when 1,300 CIA-trained Cuban exiles in boats loaned by the United Fruit Company attempted to invade Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1963. The latter was a power play under the direction of Nikita Khrushchev. When Krushchev secretly negotiated with the U.S. to end the standoff, Fidel and Che realized Cuba was merely a pawn in the Cold War.

Che was now frustrated with the impure direction of Soviet socialism, and his public statements caused difficulties for Fidel. He thought he had found a better model in China, again ignoring human rights abuses.

In 1963–64 the U.S. froze Cuban assets and suspended aid to several European countries for trading with Cuba.

On December 11, 1964, Che addressed the United Nations about the evils of imperialism and the rights of all to necessities denied by imperialism.  In his speech, he admonished the body for allowing the atrocities happening in Laos, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, and the Congo.

A secret visit to Argentina resulted in scandal and resignations. Che was now infamous.  After returning to Cuba, he resigned his minister’s post and Cuban citizenship, and again answered the call to adventure.  Married twice, with five legitimate children and another born out of wedlock, Che’s mind and heart were always focused on the global rather than the local and domestic.

Adopting aliases and elaborate disguises that fooled even his children, Che left Cuba in secret, thinking he would not return. His first mission was in the Congo, where conditions were so deteriorated that he had no hope of success. Exhausting his body, he convalesced in Dar es Salaam before returning to Cuba for further recovery.

But the die was cast. Cuba was not home. Although Che intended to foment revolution in Argentina, Fidel knew it was political suicide.  Fidel engineered a mission in Bolivia, where Che met constant defeat for nearly a year.  Che was executed by the Bolivian Army in October 1967 under orders from the CIA. His hands were removed as proof of identity, and his body was dumped in a mass grave where it would not be found for thirty years.

Few have made greater impacts on the Western world than Che. So strong was his belief in a better world that he endured asthma, dysentery, starvation, separation from his family, and numerous bullet wounds on his path to an early death. And the world watched as he did so, making of him a martyr and beacon for social justice for generation after generation of those who wish to make the earth a fairer place to live.

Because of his influence on the protests and would-be revolutions of the 1960s and his continued influence on political and social thinking, Che lives on in mass media and merchandizing, inspiring new generations to take up the mantle of equality and justice.

Bibliography available on request (joeymadiawriter@gmail.com)

For more on my Chautauqua and historical education characters:

https://joeymadiastoryteller.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-work-as-chautauqua-scholar-and.html

For my thoughts on the future of Chautauqua and historical education:

https://joeymadiastoryteller.blogspot.com/2025/04/some-thoughts-on-past-present-and.html