yesOn the stone table, still on top of the stretchers on which they had taken him to the house, lay a corpse. He lacked the characteristic cap with the star that he wore on the posters that hung around the world, and his mouth did not hold the inseparable cigar, but, dead and all, he was unmistakable: Ernesto Che Guevara. It was the end of the guerrilla that Che had organized in the Bolivian region of Ñancahuazú, from where he intended to spread the revolution throughout South America.
Ernesto Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928. He was therefore 39 years old when he was assassinated by Captain Gary Prado. He studied in Buenos Aires and spent about two years wandering around Latin America in order to learn about his social situation. What perhaps, at first, was just curiosity and concern became a revolutionary obsession: fight for the rights of the disinherited and against US capitalism and its continuous interference south of the Rio Grande. Thus, in 1954 he was in Guatemala, fighting alongside Jacobo Arbenz against the US invasion and a year later he was in Mexico with Fidel Castro organizing an armed group that could reach Cuba.
He studied medicine and as a doctor he enlisted in Fidel Castro’s guerrilla
In 1956 he was among the 82 Gramma expeditionaries, where he was assigned the role of doctor, but the group was annihilated in a cane field in the Cuban province of Oriente. In the middle of the shooting, Guevara had to choose: «He had in front of him a backpack full of medicines and a box of bullets. The two were too heavy to carry together; I took the box of bullets, leaving the backpack, to cross the clearing that separated me from the reeds». He had opted for action and soon after was operating as a guerrilla against the Batista regime.
Fidel’s victorious entry into Havana
A year later, the Castro guerrillas had enough people to organize them into columns, seasoned leaders – among whom was Commander Guevara – and support throughout Cuba, to the point that in the spring of 1958 they had three open fighting fronts and disputed the province of Oriente with the Government troops.
The revolutionary advance was so evident that Batista decided to extirpate it in one fell swoop: he concentrated his best forces and expelled the guerrillas from the plain, rounding them up again in the Sierra Maestra and reducing them to about 300 troops. But the Castro brothers, Guevara and Camilo Torres reorganized themselves and, protected by the best knowledge of the terrain, they counterattacked. On January 3, 1959, Cienfuegos and Guevara entered Havana and organized the city and the triumphant reception for Fidel Castro, who arrived in the capital on the 8th.
He wrote a revolutionary manual and at the beginning of the Cuban revolution he was president of the National Bank and Minister of Industry
After the revolutionary victory, Guevara, who began to sign official documents like Che, held administrative positions, from head of the Department of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform – he abolished the large estates, nationalized a large part of the land and established a maximum of 400 hectares for private property – even minister. By then, the economic difficulties that awaited Castro’s Cuba due to its confrontation with the United States were already clearly noticeable.
In addition to the ideology, in the Cuban nationalizations the Americans lost assets valued at some 5,100 million dollars and the revolution drove many Cubans to the United States, causing a double problem: the impoverishment of Cuba and the creation in Florida of a powerful anti-Castro group .
In the failure of the Cuban opponents sponsored by the United States, in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Che was also the commander of the Revolutionary Army. From then on, Havana strengthened relations with Moscow, which began to install a network of rockets aimed at the United States on the island. In October 1962, the so-called “missile crisis” took place, in which the world was about to experience a nuclear war, which was avoided because the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, agreed to withdraw the missiles from Cuba, something that outraged both Castro and Guevara.
The reasons for his break with Fidel were never clarified by either of them. Be that as it may, in the spring of 1965, Ernesto Che Guevara disappeared
Between 1963 and 1965, Che evolved towards revolutionary idealism, while his boss and friend, Fidel Castro, asserted himself more and more in a possibilistic politics. Perhaps that was what distanced them, although the specific reasons were never clarified. Be that as it may, in the spring of 1965, Ernesto Che Guevara disappeared.
Located by the CIA, he was murdered in a school
In early 1966 he was seen fighting in the Congo. Perhaps due to pressure from China, Guevara had to leave Africa and was seen for the last time in Havana in March 1966. There he prepared the operation in Bolivia, an old dream that fit his purpose of extending the war against the United States: “How could we look at the bright and near future if two, three, many Vietnams flourished on the surface of the globe, with their share of death and immense tragedies, with their daily heroism, with their repeated blows to imperialism,” he wrote.
The CIA detected Che in Bolivia at the end of 1966 and Washington sent Green Berets to instruct the rangers native people. In October 1967, the guerrillas were located and surrounded. They tried to escape, but only a few succeeded. The wounded, Che among them, were transferred to the Higueritas school, where they were assassinated on the night of 9 to 10. Their remains, found in 1997, were transferred to Cuba, which paid them a national tribute on October 9, 1997. .
LIGHTS AND SHADOWS
Contradictions of a revolution
He was an idealist, as generous with the revolution as he was demanding with those around him. He is actually more revolutionary than politician and a man of action more than an ideologue. Young, and dynamic, he was the hero of an angry generation and the inventor of volunteer work to make possible the construction of infrastructure in Cuba.
It lacked the skill and realism to deal with political planning and solving real problems. He did not realize that the revolutionary triumph in Cuba was not easily exportable to the Andean jungles. With communism discredited and his model of revolution having failed, all that remains of Che today are yellowish posters and the slight trail of a myth.
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