Che Guevara

• 1. Introduction

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  Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna signed Cuba's paper currency with a single word: "Che." His long-time friend Ricardo Rojo said that the day he signed the bills, he "literally knocked the props from under the widespread belief that money was sacred." The man doing the signing was an Argentine medical doctor who had become president of the National Bank, a guerrilla commander, and a minister of industries all at once. He was born on the 14th of May 1928 and died on the 9th of October 1967, and in between he tried to remake not just Cuba's economy but the inner life of its citizens. His face, photographed by Alberto Korda, was later called by the Maryland Institute College of Art "the most famous photograph in the world." How does a doctor who set up a garage laboratory to mix insecticides become a man who shot prisoners and dreamed of a new kind of human being? Why did he keep denouncing the Soviet Union almost as often as the United States? And what made him leave the height of his power to fight and die in foreign jungles?

• 2. The Reader And The Athlete

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  Three thousand books filled the Guevara home, and the boy who grew up among them read across them with an appetite that never narrowed. He learned chess from his father and was entering tournaments by the age of 12. He memorized Rudyard Kipling's "If-" and Jose Hernandez's "Martin Fierro," and carried poetry through his whole life, especially Pablo Neruda, John Keats, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Walt Whitman. He kept notebooks of concepts drawn from Marx, Faulkner, Kafka, Lenin, Sartre, and Freud, sketching out Buddha and Aristotle and quoting Freud on dreams and the Oedipus complex.

  Asthma shadowed Ernestito, as his family called him, yet he drove his body hard. He swam, played football and golf, shot, and rode a bicycle that earned him the word "untiring." Rugby gave him the nickname "Fuser," a contraction of El Furibundo, the furious one, joined to his mother's surname de la Serna, a tribute to how aggressively he played. His father traced this restlessness to bloodline, declaring "the first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels." One ancestor, Patrick Lynch, had emigrated from Ireland to the Rio de la Plata Governorate. A 1958 CIA personality report would later describe Guevara as "quite well read," adding the backhanded line, "Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino."

• 3. The Open Road

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  A 4,500-kilometer solo trip in 1950 took the medical student through northern Argentina on a bicycle fitted with a small engine he had installed himself. It was the first of two journeys that changed how he saw himself and the economic conditions of Latin America. In 1952 he set out again, this time on a nine-month, 8,000-kilometer motorcycle trek with his friend Alberto Granado, aiming to volunteer at the San Pablo leper colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River.

  Chile gave him an education in anger. He was outraged by the working conditions of the miners at Anaconda's Chuquicamata copper mine. One night in the Atacama Desert he met a persecuted communist couple who did not even own a blanket, and he called them "the shivering flesh-and-blood victims of capitalist exploitation." On the road to Machu Picchu the poverty of the countryside stunned him, where peasants worked small plots owned by wealthy landlords. Among the people of the leper colony he found something else entirely, writing, "The highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise among such lonely and desperate people."

  The notes from this trip became The Motorcycle Diaries, not published until 1995, which turned into a New York Times best seller and a 2004 film. By the end of the trek, which carried him through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Miami, he no longer saw Latin America as separate nations. He saw a single entity needing a continent-wide liberation strategy. He received his medical degree in June 1953, then concluded he would have to leave medicine for the political arena of armed struggle.

• 4. Guatemala And The Octopus

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  On the 10th of December 1953, writing to his aunt Beatriz from San Jose, Costa Rica, Guevara swore an oath on an image of the recently deceased Joseph Stalin not to rest until the "octopuses have been vanquished." The octopus was the United Fruit Company, whose dominion he had just traveled through. Days later he reached Guatemala, where President Jacobo Arbenz led a democratically elected government redistributing uncultivated land to landless peasants. The largest landowner was United Fruit, from which the government had taken 225,000 acres.

  In Guatemala City he sought out Hilda Gadea Acosta, a Peruvian economist with connections inside the Arbenz government, and through Cuban exiles linked to the Moncada Barracks attack he first heard of Fidel Castro. Here too he acquired his name, from his constant use of the Argentine filler word "che." In May 1954 a ship of arms from communist Czechoslovakia arrived for Arbenz at Puerto Barrios. The United States, already running the CIA operation code-named PBSuccess, answered with propaganda, air-dropped leaflets, and bombing by unmarked planes, backing a force led by Carlos Castillo Armas.

  Arbenz was pressured to resign on the 27th of June, and Armas became president on the 7th of July. Guevara joined an armed militia of communist youth and tried to organize the defense of the capital, but the group's inaction frustrated him. Marked for murder, he took refuge in the Argentine consulate and eventually made his way to Mexico. Gadea later wrote, "It was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism. By the time he left, he was sure of this."

• 5. Sierra Maestra

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  An old, leaky cabin cruiser named Granma carried Castro's fighters from Mexico toward Cuba, setting out on the 25th of November 1956. Batista's military attacked soon after they landed, and of the 82 men, many were killed or executed on capture; only 22 found one another afterward. In that first chaos Guevara put down his medical supplies and picked up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade, a moment treated ever after as symbolic. The survivors regrouped deep in the Sierra Maestra mountains, supported by the urban network of Frank Pais, the 26th of July Movement, and the campesinos.

  Among the poor farmers of those mountains, Guevara found no schools, no electricity, minimal healthcare, and adult illiteracy at 40 percent. He set up factories to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread, opened health clinics, and started schools to teach the campesinos to read. He created a newspaper, and in February 1958 he was instrumental in founding the clandestine station Radio Rebelde, inspired by how effective CIA-supplied radio had been against Arbenz in Guatemala. Time would dub him "Castro's brain," and Castro promoted him to Comandante of a second army column.

  Mosquito bites left agonizing walnut-sized cysts on his body, and Guevara called this stretch "the most painful days of the war." In July 1958 he played a critical role in the Battle of Las Mercedes, halting a force of 1,500 men called up by Batista's General Cantillo. Major Larry Bockman of the United States Marine Corps later described his handling of the battle as "brilliant."

• 6. The Disciplinarian

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  Eutimio Guerra, a peasant who had guided the guerrillas, admitted treason after it emerged he had accepted the promise of ten thousand pesos for repeatedly betraying the rebels' positions to the air force. He asked that his life be ended quickly. Guevara stepped forward and shot him, recording in his diary that he ended the problem "with a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain." The matter-of-fact scientific notation suggested what one account called a "remarkable detachment to violence."

  As second-in-command Guevara was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes shot defectors and sent squads to track those who tried to abandon their duties. He became feared for his ruthlessness, responsible for summary executions of accused informers, deserters, and spies. Yet he saw himself as a teacher too. Between engagements he read his men Robert Louis Stevenson, Miguel de Cervantes, and Spanish lyric poets, and following Jose Marti's principle of "literacy without borders," he set daily time for fighters to teach campesinos to read in what he called the "battle against ignorance."

  Tomas Alba, who fought under him, said "Che was loved, in spite of being stern and demanding. We would have given our life for him." His teenage lieutenant Joel Iglesias recalled being carried off the battlefield on Guevara's shoulder under fire, and how the enemy, seeing him charge with his pistol stuck in his belt, "didn't dare shoot." Castro praised his daring but warned of a "tendency toward foolhardiness." In the closing days of December 1958, Guevara marched a column west by night for seven weeks, often not eating for days, to cut the island in half by taking Las Villas province.

• 7. Revolutionary Justice

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  Colonel Rojas, the chief of police in Santa Clara, was executed on the 7th of January 1959 in one of the first killings ever aired on television. His family had received a letter implying he would be released, and they watched the footage relieved to see him alive, then began to scream as he was placed before a firing squad and shot. Guevara had ordered it. Days earlier, after a victory in which his forces were said to be outnumbered ten to one, Radio Rebelde announced he had taken Santa Clara on New Year's Eve, contradicting national media that had once reported his death.

  Castro named Guevara commander of the La Cabana Fortress prison from the 2nd of January to the 12th of June 1959, charged with exacting "revolutionary justice" against those judged traitors, informants, or war criminals. The tribunals were run by two or three army officers, an assessor, and a respected local citizen. Biographers describe a Cuban public in a "lynching mood," with 93 percent approving the process and crowds crying "al paredon," to the wall. Estimates of Guevara's death total at La Cabana range from 55 to 105.

  Views of his attitude conflict. Some exiled biographers say he relished the rituals of the firing squad; others say he pardoned as many prisoners as he could. In a 1959 letter to Luis Paredes Lopez he wrote without hedging, "The executions by firing squads are not only a necessity for the people of Cuba, but also an imposition of the people." By February the government had proclaimed him "a Cuban citizen by birth."

• 8. The New Man

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  On the 10th of July 1960 Guevara stood before 100,000 workers at the Presidential Palace to denounce US "economic aggression" after Eisenhower cut imports of Cuban sugar. By then he was minister of industries, finance minister, president of the National Bank, and head of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, a near-total command of the economy. His agrarian law limited farms to 1,000 acres and barred foreigners from owning sugar plantations, and the land seized included 480,000 acres owned by American corporations. Time reporters said he guided Cuba with "icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence, and a perceptive sense of humor."

  Literacy was the cause he chased hardest. The government named 1961 the "year of education" and sent 100,000 volunteers in "literacy brigades" into the countryside. By the campaign's end, 707,212 adults had been taught to read and write, raising the rate to 96 percent, an effort even critics called "a remarkable success." At the University of Las Villas he told faculty and students that the days when education was "a privilege of the white middle class" had ended, warning that the university "must paint itself black, mulatto, worker, and peasant."

  Behind all this stood the figure he called "el Hombre Nuevo," the New Man, who would be "selfless and cooperative, obedient and hard working, gender-blind, incorruptible, non-materialistic, and anti-imperialist." Guevara wanted to replace material incentives with moral ones, viewing capitalism as "a contest among wolves." He led by example, working 36 hours at a stretch and cutting sugar cane on his day off. In 1960 he also ordered the construction of the Guanahacabibes camp, a labor camp to "rehabilitate" employees who had committed infractions at work.