Che Guevara

Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina on June 14, 1928. The oldest of five children in a genteel, middle-class family, his liberal parents—especially his mother, Celia—were political activists. Guevara’s asthma led the family to relocate near Cordoba when he was a boy, where the drier climate lessened his attacks. And while he participated in sports, he also became a voracious reader. As a teen, he began to cultivate a political ideology and joined detractors of Argentine dictator Juan Perón. Did you know? Che Guevara has been the subject of a number of films, including “The Motorcycle Diaries,” which was based in part on Che’s own account of his nine-month journey across South America in 1951–52, an experience that shaped his leftist beliefs. In 1948, Guevara entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine but left to embark on what would be known as his “motorcycle diaries” journeys. First, traveling solo across northern Argentina in 1950 on a makeshift motorcycle that consisted of a small engine attached to a bicycle, and, in 1951-1952, on an 8,000-mile, eight-month trip across much of South America and north to Miami. With friend Alberto Granado along for the ride, Guevara witnessed extreme poverty and injustices. The trip fueled his growing interest in communism—and a hatred for capitalism, and he grew to believe a solution could only be achieved by violent revolution. His Motorcycle Diaries, penned during the trip, would be published in 1993. “I will be on the side of the people,” he wrote in his diaries. “… I will take to the barricades and the trenches, screaming as one possessed, will stain my weapons with blood, and, mad with rage, will cut the throat of any vanquished foe I encounter.” Guevara returned to school and graduated with a medical degree in 1953. He soon traveled again around Latin America and eventually to Guatemala, where he joined an unsuccessful armed effort to defend the CIA-backed overthrowing of the presidency of leftist reformist Jacobo Arbenz. That experience cemented his commitment to Marxism, as well as his disdain for the United States.

Source: www.history.com