Who was Che Guevara ?

He recorded the two years spent overthrowing Batista’s government in Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria (1963; Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1968).

After Castro’s victorious troops entered Havana on January 8, 1959, Guevara served for several months at La Cabaña prison, where he oversaw the executions of individuals deemed to be enemies of the revolution.

Guevara became a Cuban citizen, as prominent in the newly established Marxist government as he had been in the revolutionary army, representing Cuba on many commercial missions.

He also became well known in the West for his opposition to all forms of imperialism and neocolonialism and for his attacks on U.S. foreign policy.

He served as chief of the Industrial Department of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, president of the National Bank of Cuba (famously demonstrating his disdain for capitalism by signing currency simply “Che”), and minister of industry.

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.

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.)