Jean marcilly che guevara biography

When their small armed forces landed in Cuba on December 2, , Guevara was with them and among the few that survived the initial assault. Over the next few years, he would serve as a primary advisor to Castro and lead their growing guerrilla forces in attacks against the crumbling Batista regime. He was later appointed the president of the national bank and minister of industry and did much to assist in the country's transformation into a communist state.

In the early s, Guevara also acted as an ambassador for Cuba, traveling the world to establish relations with other countries, most notably the Soviet Union, and was a key player during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He also authored a manual on guerrilla warfare, and in delivered a speech to the United Nations in which he condemned U.

By , with the Cuban economy in shambles, Guevara left his post to export his revolutionary ideologies to other parts of the world. He traveled first to the Congo to train troops in guerrilla warfare in support of a revolution there but left later that year when it failed. After returning briefly to Cuba, in , Guevara departed for Bolivia with a small force of rebels to incite a revolution there.

A few weeks after the crisis, during an interview with the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker , Guevara was still fuming over the perceived Soviet betrayal and told correspondent Sam Russell that, if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off. Afterward, he denounced the Soviets almost as frequently as he denounced the Americans.

Economic decline in Cuba continued past , in the next year, sugar production was down by over a third of its level. In the article Guevara states that he committed "two principle errors": the diversification of agriculture, and dispersing resources evenly for various agricultural sectors. Specifically on the move away from sugar, Guevara states:. The entire economic history of Cuba had demonstrated that no other agricultural activity would give such returns as those yielded by the cultivation of the sugarcane.

At the outset of the Revolution many of us were not aware of this basic economic fact, because a fetishistic idea connected sugar with our dependence on imperialism and with the misery in the rural areas, without analysing the real causes: the relation to the uneven trade balance. In December , Che Guevara had emerged as a "revolutionary statesman of world stature" and thus traveled to New York City as head of the Cuban delegation to speak at the United Nations.

Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men—how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?

An indignant Guevara ended his speech by reciting the Second Declaration of Havana , decreeing Latin America a "family of million brothers who suffer the same miseries". To Guevara the conflict was a struggle of masses and ideas, which would be carried forth by those "mistreated and scorned by imperialism " who were previously considered "a weak and submissive flock".

With this "flock", Guevara now asserted, "Yankee monopoly capitalism" now terrifyingly saw their "gravediggers". Guevara closed his remarks to the General Assembly by hypothesizing that this "wave of anger" would "sweep the lands of Latin America" and that the labor masses who "turn the wheel of history" were now, for the first time, "awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected".

Guevara later learned there had been two failed attempts on his life by Cuban exiles during his stop at the UN complex. Afterwards Guevara commented on both incidents, stating that "it is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun", while adding with a languid wave of his cigar that the explosion had "given the whole thing more flavor".

The latter expressed his admiration, declaring Guevara "one of the most revolutionary men in this country right now" while reading a statement from him to a crowd at the Audubon Ballroom. When they found out, the television [station] came to ask me about the Lynch genealogy, but in case they were horse thieves or something like that, I didn't say much.

When he noticed it, he threw the book against the wall and yelled "how dare you have in our embassy a book by this foul faggot? During this voyage, he wrote a letter to Carlos Quijano, editor of a Uruguayan weekly, which was later retitled Socialism and Man in Cuba. He also laid out the reasoning behind his anti-capitalist sentiments, stating:.

The laws of capitalism, blind and invisible to the majority, act upon the individual without his thinking about it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists, who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller —whether or not it is true—about the possibilities of success.

The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller , and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this. Guevara ended the essay by declaring that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love" and beckoning on all revolutionaries to "strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into acts that serve as examples", thus becoming "a moving force".

In Algiers , Algeria, on 24 February , Guevara made what turned out to be his last public appearance on the international stage when he delivered a speech at an economic seminar on Afro-Asian solidarity. He proceeded to outline a number of measures which he said the communist bloc countries must implement in order to accomplish the defeat of imperialism.

He strongly supported communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War , and urged the peoples of other developing countries to take up arms and create "many Vietnams". Marx characterized the psychological or philosophical manifestation of capitalist social relations as alienation and antagonism ; the result of the commodification of labor and the operation of the law of value.

For Guevara, the challenge was to replace the individuals' alienation from the productive process , and the antagonism generated by class relations, with integration and solidarity, developing a collective attitude to production and the concept of work as a social duty. In Guevara's private writings from this time since released , he displays his growing criticism of the Soviet political economy, believing that the Soviets had "forgotten Marx ".

Guevara wanted the complete elimination of money , interest , commodity production , the market economy , and " mercantile relationships ": all conditions that the Soviets argued would only disappear when world communism was achieved. Two weeks after his Algiers speech and his return to Cuba, Guevara dropped out of public life and then vanished altogether.

His disappearance was variously attributed to the failure of the Cuban industrialization scheme he had advocated while minister of industries, to pressure exerted on Castro by Soviet officials who disapproved of Guevara's pro- Chinese communist stance on the Sino-Soviet split , and to serious differences between Guevara and the pragmatic Castro regarding Cuba's economic development and ideological line.

Still, rumors spread both inside and outside Cuba concerning the missing Guevara's whereabouts. There are various rumors from retired Cuban officials who were around the Castro brothers that the Castro brothers and Guevara had a strong disagreement after Guevara's Algiers speech. Whether Castro disagreed with Guevara's criticisms of the Soviet Union or just found them unproductive to express on the world stage remains unclear.

On 3 October , Castro publicly revealed an undated letter purportedly written to him by Guevara around seven months earlier which was later titled Che Guevara's "farewell letter". In the letter, Guevara reaffirmed his enduring solidarity with the Cuban Revolution but declared his intention to leave Cuba to fight for the revolutionary cause abroad.

Additionally, he resigned from all his positions in the Cuban government and communist party, and renounced his honorary Cuban citizenship. I tried to make them understand that the real issue was not the liberation of any given state, but a common war against the common master, who was one and the same in Mozambique and in Malawi, in Rhodesia and in South Africa, in the Congo and in Angola, but not one of them agreed.

In early , Guevara went to Africa to offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella , Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and so had enormous revolutionary potential. As an admirer of the late Lumumba, Guevara declared that his "murder should be a lesson for all of us".

Over the course of seven months, Ilanga grew to "admire the hard-working Guevara", who "showed the same respect to black people as he did to whites". These forces thwarted Guevara's movements from his base camp in the mountains near the village of Fizi on Lake Tanganyika in southeast Congo. They were able to monitor his communications and so pre-empted his attacks and interdicted his supply lines.

Although Guevara tried to conceal his presence in Congo, the United States government knew his location and activities. Valdez , a floating listening post that continuously cruised the Indian Ocean off Dar es Salaam for that purpose. Guevara's aim was to export the revolution by instructing local anti- Mobutu Simba fighters in Marxist ideology and foco theory strategies of guerrilla warfare.

In his Congo Diary book, he cites a combination of incompetence, intransigence, and infighting among the Congolese rebels as key reasons for the revolt's failure. With the support of Che and his Cubans, the Simbas put up substantial resistance. Regardless, the rebels were increasingly pushed back, lost their supply routes, and suffered under failing morale.

Guevara stated that he had planned to send the wounded back to Cuba and fight in the Congo alone until his death, as a revolutionary example. But after being urged by his comrades, and two Cuban emissaries personally sent by Castro, at the last moment he reluctantly agreed to leave Africa. During that day and night, Guevara's forces quietly took down their base camp, burned their huts, and destroyed or threw weapons into Lake Tanganyika that they could not take with them, before crossing the border by boat into Tanzania at night and traveling by land to Dar es Salaam.

In speaking about his experience in Congo months later, Guevara concluded that he left rather than fight to the death because: "The human element failed. There is no will to fight. The [rebel] leaders are corrupt. In a word Following the failure of the rebellion in the Congo, Guevara was reluctant to return to Cuba, because Castro had already made public Guevara's "farewell letter"—a letter intended to only be revealed in the case of his death—wherein he severed all ties in order to devote himself to revolution throughout the world.

I am happy for it to be so because he is giving the Yankees a real headache. During this time abroad, Guevara compiled his memoirs of the Congo experience and wrote drafts of two more books, one on philosophy and the other on economics. As Guevara prepared for Bolivia, he secretly traveled back to Cuba on 21 July to visit Castro, as well as to see his wife and to write a last letter to his five children to be read upon his death, which ended with him instructing them:.

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary. In late , Guevara's location was still not public knowledge, although representatives of Mozambique's independence movement, the FRELIMO , reported that they met with Guevara in Dar es Salaam regarding his offer to aid in their revolutionary project, an offer which they ultimately rejected.

Before he departed for Bolivia, Guevara altered his appearance by shaving off his beard and much of his hair, also dying it grey so that he was unrecognizable as Che Guevara. Three days after his arrival in Bolivia, Guevara left La Paz for the rural south east region of the country to form his guerrilla army. As a result of Guevara's units winning several skirmishes against Bolivian troops in the spring and summer of , the Bolivian government began to overestimate the true size of the guerrilla force.

Researchers hypothesize that Guevara's plan for fomenting a revolution in Bolivia failed for an array of reasons:. In addition, Guevara's known preference for confrontation rather than compromise, which had previously surfaced during his guerrilla warfare campaign in Cuba, contributed to his inability to develop successful working relationships with local rebel leaders in Bolivia, just as it had in the Congo.

The result was that Guevara was unable to attract inhabitants of the local area to join his militia during the eleven months he attempted recruitment. Many of the inhabitants willingly informed the Bolivian authorities and military about the guerrillas and their movements in the area. Near the end of the Bolivian venture, Guevara wrote in his diary: "Talking to these peasants is like talking to statues.

They do not give us any help. Worse still, many of them are turning into informants. On 7 October , an informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment in the Yuro ravine. I am Che Guevara and I am worth more to you alive than dead. Guevara was tied up and taken to a dilapidated mud schoolhouse in the nearby village of La Higuera on the evening of 8 October.

For the next half-day, Guevara refused to be interrogated by Bolivian officers and only spoke quietly to Bolivian soldiers. One of those Bolivian soldiers, a helicopter pilot named Jaime Nino de Guzman, describes Che as looking "dreadful". According to Guzman, Guevara was shot through the right calf, his hair was matted with dirt, his clothes were shredded, and his feet were covered in rough leather sheaths.

Despite his haggard appearance, he recounts that "Che held his head high, looked everyone straight in the eyes and asked only for something to smoke. The following morning on 9 October, Guevara asked to see the school teacher of the village, a year-old woman named Julia Cortez. She later stated that she found Guevara to be an "agreeable looking man with a soft and ironic glance" and that during their conversation she found herself "unable to look him in the eye" because his "gaze was unbearable, piercing, and so tranquil".

A little later, Guevara was asked by one of the Bolivian soldiers guarding him if he was thinking about his own immortality. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man! Guevara was pronounced dead at p. This included five times in his legs, once in the right shoulder and arm, and once in the chest and throat. Months earlier, during his last public declaration to the Tricontinental Conference , [ ] Guevara had written his own epitaph , stating: "Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons.

Put on display, as hundreds of local residents filed past the body, Guevara's corpse was considered by many to represent a "Christ-like" visage, with some even surreptitiously clipping locks of his hair as divine relics. Johnson from his National Security Advisor Walt Rostow , called the decision to kill Guevara "stupid" but "understandable from a Bolivian standpoint".

The hands were sent to Buenos Aires for fingerprint identification. They were later sent to Cuba. Also removed when Guevara was captured were his 30,word, hand-written diary, a collection of his personal poetry, and a short story he had authored about a young communist guerrilla who learns to overcome his fears. The diary tells how the guerrillas were forced to begin operations prematurely because of discovery by the Bolivian Army, explains Guevara's decision to divide the column into two units that were subsequently unable to re-establish contact, and describes their overall unsuccessful venture.

It also records the rift between Guevara and the Communist Party of Bolivia that resulted in Guevara having significantly fewer soldiers than originally expected, and shows that Guevara had a great deal of difficulty recruiting from the local populace, partly because the guerrilla group had learned Quechua , unaware that the local language was actually a Tupi—Guarani language.

He endured ever-worsening bouts of asthma, and most of his last offensives were carried out in an attempt to obtain medicine. Debray, who had lived with Guevara's band of guerrillas for a short time, said that in his view they were "victims of the forest" and thus "eaten by the jungle". Debray recounts that Guevara and the others had been suffering an "illness" which caused their hands and feet to swell into "mounds of flesh" to the point where you could not discern the fingers on their hands.

Debray described Guevara as "optimistic about the future of Latin America" despite the futile situation, and remarked that Guevara was "resigned to die in the knowledge that his death would be a sort of renaissance", noting that Guevara perceived death "as a promise of rebirth" and "ritual of renewal". On 15 October in Havana, Fidel Castro publicly acknowledged that Guevara was dead and proclaimed three days of public mourning throughout Cuba.

Those who believe his death is the defeat of his ideas, the defeat of his tactics, the defeat of his guerrilla conceptions, and the defeat of his thesis are mistaken. Because that man who fell as a mortal man, as a man who was exposed many times to bullets, as a soldier, as a leader, is a thousand times more capable than those who killed him with a stroke of luck.

If we wish to express what we want the men of future generations to be, we must say: Let them be like Che! If we wish to say how we want our children to be educated, we must say without hesitation: We want them to be educated in Che's spirit! If we want the model of a man, who does not belong to our times but to the future, I say from the depths of my heart that such a model, without a single stain on his conduct, without a single stain on his action, is Che!

After pictures of the dead Guevara began being circulated and the circumstances of his death were being debated, Che's legend began to spread. Demonstrations in protest against his "assassination" occurred throughout the world, and articles, tributes, and poems were written about his life and death. When a few months later riots broke out in Berlin , France , and Chicago , and the unrest spread to the American college campuses, young men and women wore Che Guevara T-shirts and carried his pictures during their protest marches.

In the view of military historian Erik Durschmied : "In those heady months of , Che Guevara was not dead. He was very much alive. Even in the United States, the government which Guevara so vigorously denounced, students began to emulate his style of dress, donning military fatigues, berets , and growing their hair and beards to show that they too were opponents of U.

As early as , the Yugoslav communist journal Borba observed the many half-completed or empty factories in Cuba, a legacy of Guevara's short tenure as Minister of Industries, "standing like sad memories of the conflict between pretension and reality". The definition of the "socialist new man" was often edited to justify certain labor programs.

A famous utilization of the "new man" concept was in the labelling of certain sectors of the Cuban population as "anti-socials", who had fallen outside the "new man" concept. Between and , these "anti-socials" were interned in UMAP labor camps. In , during Guevara's adventures abroad, the Cuban economy was reorganized on Guevarist moral lines.

Cuban propaganda stressed voluntarism and ideological motivations to increase productions. Material incentives were not given to workers who were more productive than others. Guevara's death in precipitated the abandonment of guerrilla warfare as an instrument of Cuban foreign policy, ushering in a rapprochement with the Soviet Union , and the reformation of the government along Soviet lines.

When Cuban troops returned to Africa in the s, it was as part of a large-scale military expedition, and support for insurrection movements in Latin America and the Caribbean became logistical and organizational rather than overt. Cuba also abandoned Guevara's plans for economic diversification and rapid industrialization which had ultimately proved to be impracticable in view of the country's incorporation into the COMECON system.

In , the Cuban economy was remodeled, inspired by Guevara's arguments in the Great Debate , from years earlier. All non-agricultural private businesses was nationalized, central planning was done more on an ad-hoc basis, and the entire Cuban economy was directed at producing a 10 million ton sugar harvest. A series of economic reforms in Cuba, officially titled the "Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies", were based in the economic ethos of Guevarism.

The reforms began in , and lasted until The policy changes were aimed at eliminating private businesses, trade markets, that had been introduced into the Cuban law and Cuban culture, during the s. The new reforms aimed to nationalize more of the economy and eliminate material incentives for extra labor, instead relying on moral enthusiasm alone.

Castro often justified this return to moral incentives by mentioning the moral incentives championed by Che Guevara, and often alluded to Guevarism when promoting these reforms. The economic reforms, and mass mobilizations, implemented during the Battle of Ideas — , were often conducted in homage to the philosophy of Che Guevara. These reforms stressed economic voluntarism, central planning, and radical consciousness as a driver of the economy.

The result was a multi-national search for the remains, which lasted more than a year. In July , a team of Cuban geologists and Argentine forensic anthropologists discovered the remnants of seven bodies in two mass graves, including one man without hands as Guevara would have been. Bolivian government officials with the Ministry of Interior later identified the body as Guevara when the excavated teeth "perfectly matched" a plaster mold of Che's teeth made in Cuba prior to his Congolese expedition.

The "clincher" then arrived when Argentine forensic anthropologist Alejandro Inchaurregui inspected the inside hidden pocket of a blue jacket dug up next to the handless cadaver and found a small bag of pipe tobacco. Nino de Guzman, the Bolivian helicopter pilot who had given Che a small bag of tobacco, later remarked that he "had serious doubts" at first and "thought the Cubans would just find any old bones and call it Che"; but "after hearing about the tobacco pouch, I have no doubts.

In July , the Bolivian government of Evo Morales unveiled Guevara's formerly-sealed diaries composed in two frayed notebooks, along with a logbook and several black-and-white photographs. At this event Bolivia's vice-minister of culture, Pablo Groux , expressed that there were plans to publish photographs of every handwritten page later in the year.

The discovery of Che's remains metonymically activated a series of interlinked associations—rebel, martyr, rogue figure from a picaresque adventure, savior, renegade, extremist—in which there was no fixed divide among them. The current court of opinion places Che on a continuum that teeters between viewing him as a misguided rebel, a coruscatingly brilliant guerrilla philosopher, a poet-warrior jousting at windmills, a brazen warrior who threw down the gauntlet to the bourgeoisie, the object of fervent paeans to his sainthood, or a mass murderer clothed in the guise of an avenging angel whose every action is imbricated in violence—the archetypal Fanatical Terrorist.

Guevara's life and legacy remain contentious. The perceived contradictions of his ethos at various points in his life have created a complex character of duality, one who was "able to wield the pen and submachine gun with equal skill", while prophesying that "the most important revolutionary ambition was to see man liberated from his alienation ".

A secular humanist and sympathetic practitioner of medicine who did not hesitate to shoot his enemies, a celebrated internationalist leader who advocated violence to enforce a utopian philosophy of the collective good , an idealistic intellectual who loved literature but refused to allow dissent, an anti-imperialist Marxist insurgent who was radically willing to forge a poverty-less new world on the apocalyptic ashes of the old one, and finally, an outspoken anti-capitalist whose image has been commoditized.

Che's history continues to be rewritten and re-imagined. As such, various notable individuals have lauded Guevara; for example, Nelson Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom", [ ] while Jean-Paul Sartre described him as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age". Conversely, Jacobo Machover, an exiled opposition author, dismisses all praise of Guevara and portrays him as a callous executioner.

In a mixed assessment, British historian Hugh Thomas opined that Guevara was a "brave, sincere and determined man who was also obstinate, narrow, and dogmatic". Yet, he still remains a transcendent figure both in specifically political contexts [ ] and as a wide-ranging popular icon of youthful rebellion. Addressing the wide-ranging flexibility of his legacy, Trisha Ziff, director of the documentary Chevolution , has remarked that "Che Guevara's significance in modern times is less about the man and his specific history, and more about the ideals of creating a better society.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Ernesto shared a very deep bond with his mother, and bidding goodbye to her, he promised to write regularly. His father, with all his apprehensions still supported his decision to travel and provided him a gun for his safety, took him aside before he left. Ernesto and Alberto along with La Poderosa were now moving towards their dream trip, riding down the dusty road, devouring kilometres on their journey northward.

La Poderosa II made an unflattering sound, which left pedestrians and spectators staring at them. According to the route planned, they would travel through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Columbia, Venezuela and finally reach their pit stop Miami, in the United States of America. The route was decided in a manner to accommodate a stopover in Miramar for Ernesto to meet with Chichina.

The differences in their relationship were now becoming very apparent. While he was there, Ernesto tried very hard to have Chichina to commit to wait for him, but she did not give him her promise. After his meet, the trio then carried on with their journey and travelled northward. Weeks later, Ernesto received a letter when he reached San Carlos de Bariloche.

A local post office in Bariloche had been formerly decided to be the spot where Ernesto would pick his mail before he carried on his journey further. On his arrival there, he had a letter from Chichina awaiting him. He was disastrously greeted with the news that she had decided to move on and not wait for him. He was shattered to read the news as she was his first love, but he gathered himself together after realizing that he could not convince her to change her decision.

The very next day, Alberto and Ernesto crossed into Chile. La Poderosa was already showing signs of exhaustion and was now beginning to trouble the two. They wondered if the motorcycle could carry on the journey till the very end. Numerous tire punctures and unexpected halts caused their journey to be elongated and on February 27, , the trio was disintegrated with La Poderosa taking her last gasp in Los Angeles, Chile.

They made many vain attempts to bring La Poderosa back on the road. Alberto and Ernesto then somehow managed to arrange for a lift for themselves and La Poderosa to Santiago. They halted at a garage where the mechanic informed them that La Poderosa was in a state of no repair. Its life span had been exhausted, and therefore they bid their final goodbye and left the corpse behind in the garage in Santiago.

The two were left distressed over leaving La Poderosa, but were also worried of how they would continue their journey ahead. They were not travellers devouring kilometres anymore, but were sniffing dust as they slowly crawled the vast distance. With La Poderosa not being with them anymore, their speed decreased exponentially. They had to now depend on walking and bumming a ride and their freeloading skills were put to test.

Though they were running low on money and were worried about food and shelter as well, yet, nothing could deter them off the path to their South American Odyssey. They carried on with their journey taking one day at a time. Travelling through Chile, Ernesto was deeply touched and had a change of conscience due to the circumstances and situations he witnessed.

He stated in his diary an incident about an old woman who had a weak heart and was also suffering from asthma. He mentioned of the poor state in which she lived, with the stench of stale sweat and dust filled in the air. He elaborated her miserable state by mentioning that the only luxury in her house was the dusty armchairs. Ernesto felt powerless as a doctor when he glanced at her living conditions.

For him, her situation was the condition of the proletariat, and this saddened him. While in Chile, Alberto and Ernesto visited the largest copper mine of the country at Chuquicamata. On the way, the two made an acquaintance with an elderly couple, who displayed again the suffering of the people. The elderly couple was an example of the suffering of the poor and the working class of the world.

The open pit copper mine in Chiquicamata was U. S owned and the working conditions were unfavourable and hazardous for the Chilean workers. The mine workers received very little wages for the work they did and the risk they undertook for their life. Ernesto also mentioned in his diary that their guide had informed them that the mine workers were planning a strike against the U.

S Corporation for the unruly treatment. The company was ready to lose thousands of pesos a day to the strike, but was not ready to pay the poor workers a little extra wages. Ernesto was enraged by the inhumane treatment of the working individuals at the mine. The horror they witnessed carried on as they travelled to Peru, where Ernesto saw another example of oppression and exploitation with the native Indians.

In his diary, Ernesto made references to the injustice suffered by the Indians at the hands of the Whites and the Mestizos a mixture of European and American Indian roots. Their journey carried on and so did their encounters of watching the suffering of the people. The 8 month trip brought Ernesto adventure and learning, but most importantly, it provided him a glimpse into his very own conscience.

He became aware of the ill-effects of imperialism on the proletariat. He saw firsthand the indifference and the agony of the poor and felt an urge to do something to help bring a change in their situation. The journey was coming to its end, but Ernesto was now beginning the journey into his conscience. Alberto decided to stay back in Caracas where he was offered a job and Ernesto returned back to Buenos Aires to complete his medical studies.

Ernesto touched many lives during his trip, but the many people whom the bourgeoisie thought to be insignificant, touched and changed his life dramatically. Ernesto returned home but his thirst for adventure and learning was yet to be quenched. They set out for their journey on July 7, It was during this trip that Ernesto attained a deeper understanding of the situation of the proletariat.

His outlook changed from being a medical doctor from Argentina to following the revolutionary path. Ernesto and Calica travelled from Argentina to Bolivia. During this trip, when Ernesto arrived in La Paz, he met with a group of Argentine exiles, one of them being a young lawyer named Ricardo Rojo. He also met people with strong political ideologies, but he himself was still uncertain about the mission of his life.

He mentioned in his diary that he had visited the archaeological site before with Alberto and missed him immensely. Their journey carried on to Ecuador, where Ernesto met with Ricardo and three other leftist Argentine law students. This spontaneous thought stuck with Ernesto and he decided to move towards Guatemala with Gaulo and reached there by the end of December While in transit, Ernesto met with a number of revolutionaries and political leaders like Juan Bosch, the famous revolutionary nationalist leader of the Dominican Republic, exiled Venezuelan political leader Romulo Belancourt and Costa Rican Communist leader Manual Mora Valverde.

She had found political asylum in Guatemala due to the dictatorial regime of General Manuel Odria, as they tagged them as outlaws and began to persecute them. The Jacobo Arbenz government at this stage, provided refuge to a lot many political exiles all over Latin America. Hilda helped arrange a place for Ernesto and Gaulo to stay. She described their first meeting saying, Ernesto had a commanding voice but fragile appearance.

His movements were quick and continuous, but he also portrayed himself to be a very relaxed and calm person.

Jean marcilly che guevara biography

He was intelligent and very precise with his comments. She noticed, they were dressed in casual clothes but when she spoke with them, she realized there were many layers to their personality. With time, Hilda became close friends with Ernesto and he discussed with her the details about his previous trips and adventures. He told her about his friends from childhood and also about his first girlfriend Chichina.

Ernesto spoke at length about his family, which impressed Hilda immensely. The way he spoke, she could recognize the admiration and warmth he felt for his mother. Through Hilda, Ernesto met with many other political refugees and exiles. They met with a group of Cubans, who were part of an unsuccessful assault on the Moncoda military barracks led by the famous Cuban communist revolutionary Fidel Castro, in Santiago de Chile on 26 th July, , against the dictatorial rule in Cuba.

Ernesto carried on living in Guatemala, but had no proper job and stable form of income. He kept in touch with Hilda and met with personalities of great political views through her. He had written a book on Marxism and asked Hilda if she could help him translate it to Spanish. She also knew Ernesto had his pride and would not take money from anyone, so she recommended Ernesto to White.

However, since Hilda spoke better English and Ernesto knew more about Marx, the two began working together on the book. The friendship between Hilda, White and Ernesto grew over time, with White and Ernesto discussing topics varying from Marxism , Lenin Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist , Engels German political theorist and author who put together the Marxist theory along with Karl Marx , Stalin Russian leader and the head of the government of the then USSR and Sigmund Freud Austrian neurologist and the founding father of psychoanalysis.

By this time, Ernesto was also romantically interested in Hilda, but she did not encourage him. In February , Ricardo Rojo and Eduardo Gaulo Garcia made plans to leave Guatemala, but Ernesto decided to stay due to his romantic interest in Hilda and the revolutionary activities. By March , Ernesto asked Hilda if she was interested in him and that he eventually intended to marry her.

Hilda graciously accepted she loved him, but her involvement in the revolution was more important to her. His letter showcased his want to denounce the rich, elite and bourgeois life and his intention to develop his being into a socialist and a revolutionary; and most importantly, the letter described his want to always remain a traveller.

A change occurred in the situation in Guatemala when an aircraft flew across the border and began open firing at people and military bases in broad day light. The attack came as a complete shock and caused great losses. After the attack, Ernesto enlisted himself in the medical brigades and the youth patrol to assist during the situation of turmoil.

During this time, there were high probabilities of Ernesto being imprisoned or even executed had he not taken refuge in the Argentinean embassy. During these trying times, the love between Ernesto and Hilda began to deepen. Due to the situation of unrest that had engulfed Guatemala, Ernesto then decided to head to Mexico, but Hilda chose to stay back.

But in Mexico we will get married. During the time he lived in Mexico, Ernesto made ends meet by working as a street photographer. Hilda on the other hand, would journey to Mexico time and again to meet him. The two developed a deep sense of disdain for the U. S government. Ernesto and Hilda both blamed the U. He is remembered far more for the momentous events that took place less than a year after he perished, when in hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets in dozens of capitals and universities across the globe and changed the way they, their children and today their grandchildren live.

You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States. Your Profile. Email Updates. Che Guevara. Read more. Cuban Revolution The Cuban Revolution was an armed uprising led by Fidel Castro that eventually toppled the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista by Photographer Alberto Korda holds his famous photo of Che Guevara.