Penulis: Ernesto Che Guevara

ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on 14 June 1928. Both before and after graduating from medical school in 1953, he travelled extensively throughout Latin America. In Mexico, in the summer of 1955, he was introduced to Fidel Castro. He and Raúl Castro became the first two members selected by Fidel for the expeditionary force being organised by the Cuban 26 July Revolutionary Movement to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista. In late November 1956 eighty-two combatants set sail from Tuxpan, Mexico, aboard the yacht “Granma”. The rebel forces landed on Cuba’s south-eastern coast in Oriente province on 2 December to begin the revolutionary war from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Following Batista’s fall on 1 January 1959, Guevara carried a number of responsibilities in the new revolutionary government, including head of the Department of Industrialisation of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) and president of the National Bank, while continuing his duties as an officer in the Rebel Army and then the Revolutionary Armed Forces. He frequently represented Cuba internationally, and in other world forums. As a leader of the 26 July Movement, he helped bring about the unification of the 26 July Movement, Popular Socialist Party, and 13 March Revolutionary Directorate in a single political organisation, a process that culminated in the founding of the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965. After nine years of outstanding service in the leadership of the revolution – and consistent with a long-standing agreement with Fidel Castro – in March 1965 Guevara resigned his government and party posts, including his military commission and responsibilities, and left Cuba to continue fighting imperialism “in other lands”. Along with a number of Cuban internationalist volunteers, Guevara went first to the Congo to aid the movement founded by Patrice Lumumba. From November 1966 to October 1967 he led a guerrilla campaign in Bolivia against that country’s military dictatorship, seeking to link up with rising revolutionary struggles by workers and peasants throughout the region. Wounded and captured in the Yuro Ravine on 8 October 1967, by the Bolivian army in an operation organised together with the CIA, he was murdered the following day in the town of La Higuera.