Who is Che ?
Che is a Legendary Marxist Revolutionary, Statesman , Diplomat , Physician, Author, Guerrilla Leader, and Military Theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution (1956–59), and in South America. After his execution by the Bolivian army, he was regarded as a martyred hero by generations of leftists worldwide, and his image became an icon of leftist radicalism and anti-imperialism.
Throughout his life he fought for Social Justice and stood with Oppressed and Downtrodden across the World.
He gained Jesus a Christ like image in Latin and South Americas.
Pic : Iconic Image of Che - Symbol of Revolutionary Force against Oppressive and Repressive Regimes
Ernesto "Che" Guevara ( 14 June 1928[4] – 9 October 1967) , World Famous Revolutionary Leader and his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.
As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed. His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology.
Later in Mexico City, Guevara met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second in command and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.
Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba's armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and bringing Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba, which preceded the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Additionally, Guevara was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal guerrilla warfare manual, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful continental motorcycle journey. His experiences and studying of Marxism–Leninism led him to posit that the Third World's underdevelopment and dependence was an intrinsic result of imperialism, neocolonialism and monopoly capitalism, with the only remedy being proletarian internationalism and world revolution.
Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed.
Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. As a result of his perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a "new man" driven by moral rather than material incentives, Guevara has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist movements. In contrast, his ideological critics on the right accuse him of authoritarianism and sanctifying violence against his political opponents. Despite disagreements on his legacy,
Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him, titled Guerrillero Heroico, was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as "the most famous photograph in the world".
Che - The Stateman
Very brief Story of Che
Statement by Mr. Che Guevara (Cuba) before the United Nations General Assembly on 11 December 1964
Early Life
Ernesto Guevara was born to Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa, on 14 June 1928,in Rosario, Argentina. He was the eldest of five children in a middle-class Argentine family of Spanish (including Basque and Cantabrian) descent, as well as Irish by means of his patrilineal ancestor Patrick Lynch.[19][20][21] Although Guevara's legal name on his birth certificate was "Ernesto Guevara", his name sometimes appears with "de la Serna" and/or "Lynch" accompanying it.[22] Referring to Che's "restless" nature, his father declared "the first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels".
Very early on in life, Ernestito (as he was then called) developed an "affinity for the poor".[24] Growing up in a family with leftist leanings, Guevara was introduced to a wide spectrum of political perspectives even as a boy.His father, a staunch supporter of Republicans from the Spanish Civil War, often hosted many veterans from the conflict in the Guevara home.
Pic : 22-year-old Guevara in 1951
Despite suffering crippling bouts of acute asthma that were to afflict him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete, enjoying swimming, football, golf, and shooting, while also becoming an "untiring" cyclist.[27][28] He was an avid rugby union player,[29] and played at fly-half for Club Universitario de Buenos Aires.[30] His rugby playing earned him the nickname "Fuser"—a contraction of El Furibundo (raging) and his mother's surname, de la Serna—for his aggressive style of play.
Intellectual and literary interests
Guevara learned chess from his father, and began participating in local tournaments by the age of 12. During adolescence and throughout his life he was passionate about poetry, especially that of Pablo Neruda, John Keats, Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, and Walt Whitman.He could also recite Rudyard Kipling's "If—" and José Hernández's Martín Fierro by heart. The Guevara home contained more than 3,000 books, which allowed Guevara to be an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, with interests including Karl Marx, William Faulkner, André Gide, Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne. Additionally, he enjoyed the works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Vladimir Lenin and Jean-Paul Sartre; as well as Anatole France, Friedrich Engels, H. G. Wells and Robert Frost.
As he grew older, he developed an interest in the Latin American writers Horacio Quiroga, Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza, Rubén Darío and Miguel Asturias. Many of these authors' ideas he cataloged in his own handwritten notebooks of concepts, definitions, and philosophies of influential intellectuals. These included composing analytical sketches of Buddha and Aristotle, along with examining Bertrand Russell on love and patriotism, Jack London on society and Nietzsche on the idea of death. Sigmund Freud's ideas fascinated him as he quoted him on a variety of topics from dreams and libido to narcissism and the Oedipus complex. His favorite subjects in school included philosophy, mathematics, engineering, political science, sociology, history and archaeology.
Years later, a declassified CIA 'biographical and personality report' dated 13 February 1958 made note of Guevara's wide range of academic interests and intellect, describing him as "quite well read" while adding that "Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino."
Early Life : Medical School And Motorcycle Diaries
Guevara was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family of Spanish-Irish descent and leftist leanings. Although suffering from asthma, he excelled as an athlete and a scholar, completing his medical studies in 1953.
Pic : Guevara (right) with Alberto Granado (left) in June 1952 on the Amazon River aboard their "Mambo-Tango" wooden raft, which was a gift from the lepers whom they had treated.
He spent many of his holidays traveling in Latin America, and his observations of the great poverty of the masses contributed to his eventual conclusion that the only solution lay in violent revolution. He came to look upon Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as a cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy.
Pic : A map of Guevara's 1952 trip with Alberto Granado (the red arrows correspond to air travel)
In particular, his worldview was changed by a nine-month journey he began in December 1951, while on hiatus from medical school, with his friend Alberto Granado. That trip, which began on a motorcycle they called “the Powerful” (which broke down and was abandoned early in the journey), took them from Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia, and on to Venezuela, from which Guevara traveled alone on to Miami, returning to Argentina by plane. During the trip Guevara kept a journal that was posthumously published under his family’s guidance as The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (2003) and adapted to film as The Motorcycle Diaries (2004). In 1953 Guevara went to Guatemala, where Jacobo Arbenz headed a progressive regime that was attempting to bring about a social revolution. (About that time Guevara acquired his nickname, from a verbal mannerism of Argentines who punctuate their speech with the interjection che.) The overthrow of the Arbenz regime in 1954 in a coup supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) persuaded Guevara that the United States would always oppose progressive leftist governments. This became the cornerstone of his plans to bring about socialism by means of a worldwide revolution. It was in Guatemala that Guevara became a dedicated Marxist.
Guevara with Hilda Gadea at Chichén Itzá on their honeymoon trip The Cuban Revolution
He left Guatemala for Mexico, where he met the Cuban brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro, political exiles who were preparing an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Guevara joined Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, which landed a force of 81 men (including Guevara) in the Cuban province of Oriente on December 2, 1956. Immediately detected by Batista’s army, they were almost wiped out. The few survivors, including the wounded Guevara, reached the Sierra Maestra, where they became the nucleus of a guerrilla army. The rebels slowly gained in strength, seizing weapons from Batista’s forces and winning support and new recruits. Guevara had initially come along as the force’s doctor, but he had also trained in weapons use, and he became one of Castro’s most-trusted aides. Indeed, the complex Guevara, though trained as a healer, also, on occasion, acted as the executioner (or ordered the execution) of suspected traitors and deserters. He recorded the two years spent overthrowing Batista’s government in Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria (1963; Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1968).
Pic : Che and Federal Castro in Procession.
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.
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. 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.
Pic : A member of the French communist party, wearing a T-shirt of legendary guerrilla Ernesto "Che" Guevara, demonstrates over pension reforms in Nice, southeastern France, on Saturday.
Pic : Turkish students demonstrate as one of them waves a flag with a poster of Latin American revolutionary legend Che Guevara during a protest rally against NATO and U. S. President Barack Obama, in Ankara, Turkey, Saturday, April 4, 2009. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)
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.
Pic : Protests in Romania
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.
Pic : Protests in New Delhi, India againt NEP 2020
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.
A Brief Story of Che
Movies on Che
Che: Part One - Trailer
Che (Part 2) - Trailer - Starring Benecio del Toro
Epilogue
Since his death, Guevara has become a legendary political figure. His name is often equated with rebellion, revolution and socialism. Others, however, remember that he could be ruthless and ordered prisoners executed without trial in Cuba. In any case, Guevara's life continues to be a subject of great public interest and has been explored and portrayed in numerous books and films, including The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), which starred Gael García Bernal as Guevara, and the two-part biopic Che (2008), in which Benicio Del Toro portrayed the revolutionary.
In Nutshell, Che has become One of the Greatest Legends of the World and His Story has become very Intense , Mesmarising and Inpirational across the World.
Probabaly, The Whole World can recognise a Person with Three Letter Word " Che " and He remains as a Revolutionary Guidling Force against Oprressive and Repressive Regimes across the Globe..,,!!
Long Live Che...!!
MM Rao
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