Original subtitles

It is the 9th of October 1967.

A prisoner wounded and captured near the village of La Iguera in rural Bolivia is

sentenced to death for attempting to incite a revolution of the kind that had

shaken Cuba back in the 1950s. As his executioners approach, the man defiantly

states, I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward.

Moments later, shots ring out signaling the demise of one of history's most

iconic revolutionaries his name che guevara the poster boy

of revolution

the

man known to history as Ernesto Che Guevara, was born on the

14th of June 1928, in the city of Rosario, in the province of Santa Fe,

inland from Buenos Aires towards Córdoba.

His father was Ernesto Guevara Lynch.

He hailed from a family of Spanish and Irish immigrants with links to

Argentina, going back well beyond the influx of migrants that had arrived in

the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Ernesto Sr.'s family were affluent, upper middle class Argentines, though

the degree to which Ernesto's parents were wealthy as well has been somewhat

overstated. His father was an eccentric individual who tried his hand at many

business ventures, including yacht construction, eventually moving out to

Rosario. He and his wife had settled here with ambitions to develop a yerba

mate plantation to produce a kind of herbal tea grown in Argentina.

Ernesto's mother was Celia de la Serna Llosa.

She also came from a relatively affluent background.

her parents had disapproved of her marriage to ernesto senior celia was a

bohemian woman herself one who wore her hair slicked back and had not caved to

familial pressure marrying ernesto despite her family's objections ernesto

junior was the eldest of her five children guevara's first years were

spent in a relatively comfortable manner in rosario though hardly in immense

wealth. The family lived in an apartment in the city in his youth, one built in

the style of the apartment blocks of Paris.

Later, they moved to the town of Alta Gracia, where the family was hardly

rich.

Report has it that the local firewood delivery man would refuse to unload his

goods at the Guevara house until he was paid in cash, unwilling to offer lines

of credit.

Here, Ernesto excelled at school, displaying a considerable intellect,

fostered by his parents' library at home of several thousand books.

He read widely of literary figures like Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne, and John

Keats, and theorists like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

His intelligence and studiousness translated into academic success.

He headed to Buenos Aires and would eventually qualify as a medical doctor

in the early 1950s.

He was also energetic.

Despite suffering from violent asthma attacks, he played numerous sports and

was a particularly keen swimmer and rugby player.

His politics were inherited to a considerable degree from his parents.

His father had been a supporter of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil

War, which Argentines followed the progress of closely.

In the early 1940s, when the Second World War was underway in Europe,

Ernesto Sr.

heard about a meeting of locals in Rosario, who were sympathetic to the

Nazi cause.

Guevara and some other aliadofilos, as Argentines who favored the Allied cause

were known, stormed the hotel and broke up the meeting, slashing the tyres of

the Nazi sympathiser's cars outside as well.

Guevara grew up in a country that was gripped by difficult economic and social

circumstances.

Argentina had been one of the outstanding success stories of the age

of the Second Industrial Revolution and the mass migrations from Europe to the

Americas which accompanied it.

roughly between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

The railways opened up the interior and the south of the country to new

settlement, and millions of people arrived, particularly from Italy and

Ireland. The country's population would grow from little more than 1 million in

the middle of the 19th century to 10 million by the mid-1920s, and by that

latter time, Argentina had emerged as one of the ten wealthiest countries in

the world.

However, the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed

it hit Argentina very hard.

In some ways, the country has never fully recovered, experiencing a century

of battles with hyperinflation and economic crises ever since.

Guevara would have grown up seeing the misery this was creating, not just in

Argentina, but elsewhere in Latin America.

Moreover, to compound matters, the United States government, which since

the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, had considered all of the

Americas to be a sphere of US economic interest, had become particularly

interventionist in many South and Central American countries and in the

Caribbean, following the Spanish-American War of 1898, often

supporting dictatorial governments that allowed US companies to control the

trade in key commodities like coffee, sugar, and bananas, the origins

of the term Banana Republic.

These geopolitical and economic circumstances

were the background against which Guevara's political views evolved as a

young man.

Guevara's awareness of the poverty of Latin America was forged in his youth

through direct experience of other countries.

From a young age, Ernesto showed an interest in travel.

Early in 1950, he had travelled around much of Argentina on a bicycle that he

installed a makeshift engine onto.

He spent several months covering thousands of kilometres around northern

Argentina. He visited hospitals and medical centres along the way, including

a leprosy hospital near the city of Córdoba that was run by his friend

Alberto Granado.

He called this his Argentina Raid.

It was a precursor to a longer trip which Guevara and Granado embarked on

together early in 1952.

The expedition has become well known through the publication, in 1995, of the

diary Guevara kept during it and the making of a motion picture, the

Motorcycle Diaries, based thereon.

The pair travelled together on a 1939 Norton 500cc motorcycle, which they

dubbed La Poderosa, meaning the Mighty One.

The name was ironic, and the motorcycle was far from reliable.

On it they travelled from Argentina to southern Chile, then north all the way

up through Chile to Peru, and then to Colombia and Venezuela.

The nine-month trip is seen as being formative in Guevara's political

outlook. as he and Granado travelled through impoverished towns and villages,

where people lived very difficult lives as subsistence farmers who received low

prices for their crops.

All of this stood in contrast to their visits to Machu Picchu and other ruins

of proud former civilizations of South America, like the Incas.

At the end of Guevara's odyssey through the former lands of the Spanish Empire,

he flew to Miami, Florida, and spent three weeks there, where he would have

witnessed a level of prosperity that was in stark contrast to the countries he

had just passed through in Latin America.

He headed home to Argentina thereafter, and quickly completed his medical

degree. He had no intention of remaining in Argentina though, and left again

within a few months, spending several months travelling back through the

western side of South America.

before entering Central America.

He spent much of 1954 in Guatemala, a country which had experienced decades of

turbulence since the Great Depression.

A military strongman by the name of Jorge Ubico had emerged as the leader of

the country in 1931, as the landed elite threw their support behind him, but he

had been ousted from power in 1944

as a result of a wave of popular protests and demonstrations.

Nearly ten years later, the Guatemalan revolution that began in 1944

seemed to be resulting in success as reformers like Jacobo Arbenz

Guzman attempted sweeping land reforms that would redistribute land more

broadly and remove it from the hands of a small elite, many of whom traced their

wealth back to the days of the Spanish Empire and who were often acting more in

the interests of the United Fruit Company, a US entity that had

significant political and economic power in the smaller Central American

countries.

Guevara was impressed by the reforms which he saw occurring as the Guatemalan

revolution seemed to bear fruit and decided to settle down for a time in

Guatemala.

In Guatemala City, Guevara began moving in Marxist and socialist circles in a

period during which the Cold War was intensifying, bringing communist

movements to parts of the world that had no previous experience of radical

socialism.

Owing to the reforms that were occurring in Guatemala, many socialist thinkers

had moved here from other parts of Latin America.

Guevara was associating with them.

They included Helena Leyva de Holst, a Honduran communist who had spent time in

both the Soviet Union and China before settling in Guatemala in 1947, and

Hildegarde Acosta, an economist and communist from Peru.

He lived with de Holst for a time and began a relationship with Acosta not

long after settling in Guatemala.

It was while he was here that he acquired the nickname with which he has

become synonymous, Che.

Che is a word which is common in many South American countries, including

Guevara's Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

It is used as a discourse marker or interjection, a word that is regularly

introduced into speech which doesn't add to the substance of what a person is

saying. but is viewed as increasing the flow of speech.

Modern examples in English include words like right, so, and anyway.

Guevara apparently used the term Che so regularly that people in Guatemala City

began referring to him as Che.

Hence did Ernesto Guevara become Che Guevara.

It was while he was in Guatemala that Guevara was introduced to some of the

allies in exile of Fidel and Raul Castro.

The Castros had emerged as leading opponents of the Cuban government in the

course of the mid-1940s and had gradually adopted Marxism as their

political ideology.

They were not always engaged in violent unrest.

Instead, working within the Cuban system, to seek reform through the late

1940s and early 1950s.

Cuba had a complex political history.

It had been a Spanish colony until the very end of the 19th century, when,

after several failed independence attempts over the previous decades, it

was finally prized away from Spain by the US during the Spanish-American War

of 1898.

Thereafter, the US had gradually established an independent Cuban

government, but the island always retained the air of an American

protectorate, with US governments intervening to try and install favoured

candidates in power in Havana.

In the 1930s, they were offering support to the military dictatorship of

Fulgencio Batista.

He had subsequently retired to the US for much of the 1940s, but his return to

Cuba and his seizure of power in a coup in 1952 had led Castro and many others

to determine that armed resistance to the US-backed Batista regime was now

necessary. On the 26th of July 1953, Castro and some of his allies

launched a revolt by attacking the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.

Theirs was a small movement at this stage, And after a period of

imprisonment and engaging in guerrilla attacks over the next two years,

Fidel, his brother Raul, and several other supporters left Cuba for Central

America to try and obtain support and resources for a wider guerrilla war back

home in Cuba.

It was against this backdrop that Guevara began meeting some of Castro's

followers in Guatemala City, for the first time.

Events in Guatemala would quickly serve to radicalize Guevara further than he

already had been.

In February 1953, Alan Dulles, an American lawyer, politician, and

longtime U.S. Secret Service agent, had been promoted to become the Director of

the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.

Dulles had connections to the United Fruit Company, the US company that had

exerted huge influence in Guatemala over the decades, but which had been

sidelined, to some extent, by the Guatemalan Revolution and the reforms of

Arbenz's government.

Dulles, for instance, was a board member of Sullivan and Cromwell, the legal firm

that represented the United Fruit Company.

He and his brother, the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, were

also shareholders in the company.

More broadly, Dulles was a staunch interventionist when it came to American

foreign policy, and as soon as he became director of the CIA, he set about

organizing a coup in Guatemala.

His plans were put into action on the 18th of June 1954.

when a US-backed military revolt brought the military dictatorship of Carlos

Castillo Armas to power after a 10-day military standoff.

What sealed the fate of the Guatemalan Revolution was the fear amongst the

Guatemalan military that US Marines would be ordered to intervene directly.

They refused to fight.

Arbenz resigned on the 27th of June 1954 and Guatemala entered a period of

military rule which would result in a 36-year-long civil war between 1960

and 1996 and the attempted genocide of the native Maya people.

The Guatemalan coup d'état of the summer of 1954 would lead to the expulsion of

many left-wing sympathizers, communists and socialists from the country.

Guevara had joined a militia unit to support the Arbenz government as soon as

the coup began in mid-June.

As things intensified in the days that followed, and then as the Arbenz

government collapsed,

Che took refuge in the Argentine embassy in Guatemala City.

From there, he joined the exodus of people leaving Guatemala for Mexico in

the late summer and early autumn of 1954.

The coup confirmed all his worst suspicions about the nature of US

imperialism. Here was a government that had engaged in land reform in a deeply

unequal country, that had been overthrown by a US government staffed by

individuals who had vested interests in the United Fruit Company, whose

operations prospered once again under the military government from 1954

onwards. In Mexico, He lived with Hilda Gadea Acosta and worked at a

local hospital in Mexico City, while he also wrote extensively on topics such as

the poverty of Latin America and the nature of US imperialism in the region.

It was also while he was in Mexico that he directly met Fidel and Raul Castro

for the first time in the summer of 1955.

When he was introduced to them in June 1955,

Guevara immediately warmed to the Castro brothers.

Their politics were not aligned in all respects, as would become clear over the

years, but they shared a deep antipathy towards US imperialism in Latin America.

The Castros had spent a period in prison after the attack on the Moncada barracks

in 1953.

and had gained some attention for their cause as a result.

Nevertheless, they had little military support at home in Cuba and had come to

Central America to develop plans for a new campaign back home.

Over the next year, he and the Castros and their small band of followers began

preparing to return to Cuba and commence a guerrilla war there to oust Fulgencio

Batista from power.

and establish an anti-US, anti-imperialist government.

They trained in military tactics and created plans for how they would carry

out the war.

Meanwhile, Guevara married Hilda in September 1955, after she confirmed

that she was pregnant.

The child, a daughter named Hilda Beatriz, was born in February 1956.

Ten months later, In late November 1956, Guevara, the Castros,

and approximately 80 supporters set sail for Cuba on board the Granma,

an old converted cabin cruiser ship.

It was an inauspicious beginning.

They were attacked a few days after landing on the eastern end of the

island, and three-quarters of the men were either killed or captured.

Still, Guevara and the Castros were not amongst the dead, and their ragtag group

of just under two dozen men now set about relaunching the Cuban Revolution.

Guevara had joined the expedition to Cuba in November 1956 with the purpose

of primarily acting as the group's medic and doctor.

He was soon foisted into a position of military leadership.

Despite the poor start to the campaign in December 1956,

Guevara and the Castros soon managed to draw followers to them as they made

their base in the Sierra Maestra mountains.

They became a small but well-trained and disciplined army, one that engaged in

terrorist attacks and raids on government barracks and buildings.

Guevara became known for instilling a level of professionalism into the small

army. that had previously been lacking and he soon emerged as the pre-eminent

military commander within the m twenty six movement the first months of

nineteen fifty eight were a turning-point as batista's government

became increasingly unpopular as it resorted to indiscriminate killings to

try and crush the insurgency war so unpopular was the dictator

that the US government even refused to keep selling him weapons in the course

of 1958 and for a time offered some financial support to Castro's movement,

hoping to garner the goodwill of a revolution which now looked like it was

succeeding. When Batista delayed elections in the summer of 1958, it was

a turning point, one which led to a decisive shift in the political climate.

Having arrived at Cuba in December 1956,

in the most dubious of circumstances, the Cuban Revolution was on the verge of

success.

Guevara was in charge of the M26 forces in the decisive military engagement of

the war.

By the early winter of 1958, the guerrilla army had moved into central

Cuba and were pushing westwards towards Havana.

The next major target was the city of Santa Clara in central Cuba.

Batista had dispatched a train with reinforcements and munitions towards the

region in mid-December 1958, even as Guevara with a force of just over 300

guerrilla fighters was advancing on Santa Clara.

As they campaigned westwards, it became clear that support for the government

was evaporating.

with Cuban people cheering them as they advanced.

When they moved to intercept the train, it derailed and Batista's officers

surrendered immediately.

Some of the government soldiers joined the guerrillas, while the munitions and

arms on the train allowed them to arm extra men.

Those who refused to surrender were driven out of the train under a hail of

Molotov cocktails.

Thereafter, Guevara ordered a full advance on Santa Clara.

The Battle of Santa Clara, such as it was, was more like the surrender of

Santa Clara.

As Guevara's men entered the suburbs,

Batista's soldiers, of which there were thousands in the region, far

outnumbering the revolutionaries, surrendered en masse.

By the afternoon of the 31st of December, 1958,

Guevara was able to radio to Castro that Santa Clara was almost entirely under

his control.

It was the most substantial victory the M26 fighters had won thus far in the

war.

Guevara continued his relentless drive to Havana immediately after capturing

Santa Clara.

There would be no fight for the capital against Batista though.

When he received news of the defeat at Santa Clara and the manner in which the

Cuban military had basically refused to fight for him, Batista realized that his

time as ruler of Cuba was up.

At a New Year's Eve party a few hours later, he told the guests that he was

leaving Cuba.

In the early hours of the 1st of January 1959, several planes took off from

Havana, carrying Batista, his family, and cabinet ministers, along with

hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of ill-gotten wealth.

Batista flew to the Dominican Republic first, though ultimately would live out

the rest of his life in Portugal and Spain.

Once Guevara and his soldiers received news of Batista's flight, they

accelerated their approach to Havana.

Hence, it was Che Guevara, not Fidel Castro.

who led the first M26 soldiers into Havana on the 2nd of January 1959.

The Cuban Revolution was victorious.

Castro arrived at the city nearly a week later after a long victory parade across

the island.

At that juncture, as the revolutionaries set about establishing a new government,

Guevara retreated to a country house in Terrarra.

He had suffered a serious bout of asthma attacks during the final campaign and

had also broken his hand shortly before the Battle of Santa Clara and needed

some time to recuperate.

In the weeks following the success of the Cuban Revolution, Hilda arrived at

Cuba. When she did, Shea told her that he had become involved with another

woman and wanted a divorce, to which Hilda consented.

The other woman was Aleda March Torres, a native of Santa Clara, who had joined

the revolutionary movement in its latter stages.

They were married in the summer of 1959.

They would have four children together, Aleda, Camilo, Celia, and Ernesto.

Their father, the Argentine who had led the Cuban Revolution with the Castro

brothers, was a complex individual.

He was a fiercely loyal and unswerving individual.

Part of why Guevara became admired by so many people was that he was

uncompromising, always staunch in his core beliefs, and never willing to bend

to accommodate others who challenged those beliefs.

Later, he was willing to criticize his allies within the Cuban government when

he did not agree with their actions.

At the same time, he was not a dour individual.

Guevara's humour and sarcastic wit were well known.

One time in the early 1960s, at a conference in Uruguay, he passed a

message to a US diplomat for President John F. Kennedy in which he thanked him

for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

It had, he stated, really strengthened the Cuban Revolution.

It was 14 months after the ousting of Batista and the capture of Havana that

the iconic image of Guevara, that has become famous throughout the world, was

produced. The photo is of Guevara in military dress, his familiar beret on

his head, hair long and his beard thick.

It was snapped by Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, who also went by the name of

Alberto Corda.

at the funeral of some Cuban port workers on the 5th of March 1960.

An explosion had caused the deaths and Fidel Castro was delivering a speech

while Che was looking on.

There is no denying it is a striking image.

Guevara's expression, resolute and strong.

The photo itself lay in Corda's house for years.

It only started to become well known.

after it was used on the cover of an edition of one of Guevara's books in the

late 1960s after his death.

Although Corda refused to hand over rights to the image for commercial use

down to his death in 2001, the image was still used on countless t-shirts and

other commercial products for decades and continues to be so down to the

present day.

It is not without some irony that this iconic image of a communist and anti

-capitalist revolutionary has become one of the most successful examples of

modern branding in capitalist economies.

Guevara and his second wife honeymooned at Terrarra, the beach community near

Havana, where Shea had gone after the capture of Havana to recuperate from his

asthma attack.

Here, he gathered a group of individuals around him in the course of 1959 who

were instrumental in conceptualizing how the new Cuba would be organized.

The new government was socialist, anti-imperialist, and would be headed by

Fidel Castro, but there were still many elements of the shape of the future

administration, especially in terms of economic policy and how it would

organize society.

that needed to be determined.

The Tarara group was influential in shaping the communist regime in the

years that followed.

It was also while here that Guevara wrote much of what became Guerrilla

Warfare, a guidebook for how to launch, conduct, and win guerrilla wars.

It was published in 1961.

Che did not intend for it to be a theoretical text.

He genuinely wanted anti-imperialist revolutionaries in other countries to

use the advice in it to overthrow their governments.

His total commitment to violence as a necessary means of revolutionary change

was further seen in the months ahead, when Che was appointed by Castro as the

head of the La Cabana Fortress Prison in Havana.

In this role, he was tasked with presiding over revolutionary tribunals,

that put thousands of individuals associated with the Batista regime on

trial. In this capacity Guevara ordered the execution of hundreds of people

over the space of six months in 1959.

There is little evidence to suggest that his conduct was excessive by the

standards of such military tribunals.

Most of those who were executed were high up in the Batista regime and had

been guilty of murder torture and other crimes.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Guevara was appointed to numerous

senior positions within the Castro government.

He played a major role in the passage of a transformative series of agrarian

reforms which limited the size of larger farms to 1,000 acres.

Through this, The larger estates that had been built up by the wealthy landed

elite who controlled the sugar industry that Cuba's economy was reliant on for

centuries were broken up and redistributed amongst the peasantry.

Towards the end of 1959, he was appointed as Minister of Industries.

In this capacity, he undertook a tour of Africa and Asia to sign trade deals with

numerous different countries like Morocco, Indonesia, and japan while also

examining the economies of those countries to see what could be learned

from the rapid industrialization of nations like japan when he returned to

cuba he gained a virtual monopoly of control over the cuban economy after he

added the ministry of finance to his brief as minister of industries and was

appointed as president of the national bank

His contempt for the capitalist system, which currencies were symptomatic of,

was indicated in his decision not to apply his full name to the banknotes

being issued by the National Bank under his name.

Instead, he simply had Shea printed on them.

He also finalized an absolutely enormous land transfer in 1960

one which saw nearly half a million acres of land that American companies

had controlled in Cuba being redistributed to Cuban farmers, an act

which infuriated the Eisenhower administration in Washington.

Guevara is primarily remembered as a revolutionary and a leader of guerrilla

wars in Latin America and Africa today.

However, his greatest legacy, is actually the Cuban educational system.

Prior to the revolution, literacy levels in some parts of Cuba were as low as

50%, and those who were literate had often only received a basic primary

education.

Mimicking a literacy drive which the Soviet Union had engaged in during the

1920s and 1930s, Guevara announced a drive to eliminate illiteracy.

the literacy campaign saw brigades of literate individuals formed to go and

teach people who were illiterate no matter what age they were to read and

write within the space of one or two years striking gains had been made

with well over half a million people being taught to read and write beyond

this new advanced schools and universities were established

the goal being to provide all Cubans with an advanced education.

Today, Cuba is, according to many metrics, the best educated country in

the world.

It does not have a university that compares with a Harvard or Oxford, but

there is almost universal access to higher education, unlike in countries

like the US and Britain, where university participation

is meritocratic, but also based on the ability to pay.

Moreover, there is a particular stress on the application of higher education

to society and so technical subjects.

Medicine and the practical sciences are widely studied and the Cuban medical

system is one of the best in the world.

Guevara would not live to see the full fruits of it, but he laid the seeds of

this educational system between 1959 and 1961.

Guevara's stress on education was entirely in keeping with his own

interests and approach to the Cuban Revolution.

He was a figure who read and wrote voraciously.

He kept extensive diaries, many of which have been published since his own

lifetime, casting light on his time in the Congo and Bolivia, as well as Cuba.

His diaries of his early travels have also formed the basis for the motorcycle

diaries. As we have seen, in 1961 he published Guerrilla Warfare.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he also composed many articles and short-form

narrative was his preferred medium.

In the early 1960s, for instance, he published a series of articles in the

Cuban Revolutionary Journal, Verde Olivo, which were a sort of memoir of

his experiences during the guerrilla war.

These were published as a book under the title Episodes of the Cuban

Revolutionary War.

He also wrote on the subject of medicine in Latin America and on Marxism.

Unlike many of the so-called Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries of the

Cold War era in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, many of whom adopted the

Marxist label simply as a means of acquiring Soviet military aid as they

sought to overthrow British or French colonial regimes or end American

imperialism in their country.

Guevara was actually knowledgeable about Marxist theory and socialist principles.

Finally, Che wrote poetry throughout his adult life.

His published speeches are also of a very high quality.

In short, he was an excellent writer and might, in another lifetime, have made a

considerable impact exclusively as a man of letters, but he sought to combine the

pen and the machine gun.

It is very well known that the government of the United States was

deeply unhappy with the course of events in Cuba and that the administration of

President Dwight Eisenhower had commenced efforts to undermine and, if

possible, destroy the Castro regime in 1959 and 1960.

This included sanctioning the CIA to plan the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion,

whereby 1,400 anti-communist Cuban exiles invaded the south coast of Cuba

on the 17th of April 1961.

By then, Eisenhower had left office and the plan for the Cubans, who had trained

in Central America, to invade Cuba was authorized by Eisenhower's successor,

President John F. Kennedy.

The US Air Force bombed strategic targets on Cuba before the land force

invaded.

As news of the invasion reached Havana, Guevara and Raul Castro were placed in

charge of the military response.

one which succeeded in crushing the invasion within a few days.

It is believed that the CIA had planned the operation in the expectation that

once the Cuban operation was underway, even if it ran into difficulty, Kennedy

would authorize the use of US Marines to bring an island that lay less than a

hundred miles away from Florida back under US control.

They were wrong.

and the Bay of Pigs invasion was defeated quickly, a development which

incidentally led to Kennedy dismissing Alan Dulles, the architect of the 1954

Guatemalan coup, from his position as director of the CIA.

It was not the only clandestine effort by the Americans to reverse the

revolution in Cuba.

Abortive plans were also hatched to have the Italian-American mafia whose

gambling operations had been destroyed on the island after Batista fell from

power, assassinate the Castro brothers and Guevara in 1960.

The Bay of Pigs gave way in October 1962 to a much more serious diplomatic

standoff between the US, Cuba and the Soviet Union.

In August, Che travelled to the Soviet Union where he met with the head of the

USSR,

Nikita Khrushchev, and signed off on plans to have nuclear weapons

transported to Cuba and installed on the island as a deterrent against any

further American interventions against the communist regime there.

At that juncture, Guevara was anxious to make a public declaration of the

agreement, but the Soviets insisted on secrecy.

By the time he returned to Cuba, the US government was already deeply suspicious

of what was occurring, having tracked Guevara's movements to Moscow.

The events of the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed are well known.

Between the 16th and 28th of October 1962, as missile launch sites were being

assembled on Cuba and Soviet ships were inbound to the island,

Kennedy's administration placed Cuba under a naval blockade.

and the world teetered closer to nuclear war than at any other time in history.

Eventually, the Cubans and Soviets backed down, the Russian ships were sent

home, and the launch sites were dismantled.

Guevara, who had championed the idea of installing Soviet nuclear missiles on

Cuba, was deeply disappointed.

Ultimately, it was a disastrous endeavour for Cuba.

It achieved nothing from a military standpoint and led to the passage of the

Cuban assets control regulations being passed by the Kennedy administration in

the summer of 1963, measures which ended virtually all remaining economic

interactions between the United States and Cuba.

The Cuban Missile Crisis exacerbated an economic crisis which the Castro

regime had already been dealing with.

US sanctions had been in place since 1959, but they were increased in 1963,

and many US allies also sundered trading links with the Caribbean island.

In this quagmire, a debate developed within Cuba concerning the future of the

planned communist economy.

Guevara was central to this.

He stressed what he called the moral incentive as being the predominant form

of communist economics in Cuba.

By this he meant that Cubans should be encouraged to contribute to the

communist economy by persuading them of the moral benefits of the new economy,

one which aimed to create an equal society out of the very unequal one

which had preceded the revolution.

As Minister of Industries during this period, he also sought to progress the

scientific and industrial basis of the Cuban economy.

He theorized that under capitalist systems, profit was a primary motivating

factor in fueling scientific development.

This needed to be replaced with an alternative system of incentives in a

communist economy.

Guevara stressed the benefits of scientific development in order to

progress social development in Cuba and began the process of setting up new

industries to develop scientific methods of refining sugar and maximizing how the

byproducts of Cuban agriculture were utilized.

In this way, he began the process whereby elements of the Cuban economy

became self-sufficient.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevara started playing a greater role as a

representative of Cuba on the international stage.

He had attended meetings of the Organization of American States and also

became the Cuban representative at the United Nations.

A figure of international standing, he was sought out by socialist politicians

and thinkers from Europe, and was well regarded in many circles outside of the

Soviet camp in the Cold War.

On 11 December 1964, he gave a famous speech before the United Nations

Assembly in New York, in which he laid out a catalogue of issues which were

confronting the world.

It was an objective assessment, and throughout it Guevara attempted to

establish the fact that while Cuba was now a Marxist-Leninist state, it was

also capable of adopting its own independent line on foreign policy

matters. He critiqued the imperialism of the United States in the Western

Hemisphere, describing how it had intervened in the affairs of well over

half the sovereign nations of South America, Central America and the

Caribbean in recent decades.

Elsewhere, he condemned the growing conflict in Indochina, while also

addressing the situation in South Africa, where apartheid would continue

for another three decades.

In 1964 Guevara simply asked, can the United Nations do nothing

to stop this?

Evidently, many people were wondering what could be done about Che Guevara.

As he had been entering the UN headquarters, an anti-communist Cuban

woman had attempted to push forward and stab the revolutionary with a seven-inch

blade. More worryingly, while he was giving his speech, a bazooka rocket had

been fired from Queens across the East River at the building.

It fell fairly harmlessly into the Hudson River, 200 meters short of the

building, succeeding only in rattling the windows of the UN headquarters.

Guevara's speech at the UN in December 1964 and the two very different kinds of

assassination attempt garnered international headlines and was the

centerpiece of a world tour which he was undertaking at the time.

Before he arrived at New York, he had been in Moscow and after the UN meeting,

he headed back to Europe.

Over the next several months, He passed through and met socialist leaders and

theorists in France, Egypt, China, Ghana, Guinea, Mali,

Algeria and Czechoslovakia.

It was during this time that his changing political views became

apparent. A diary that he kept while travelling through Africa in early 1965,

and which is found in the Centro de Estudios Che Guevara in Havana today,

points towards his increasing view that many socialist states were just as

guilty of imperialism as the United States, Britain or France were.

From this it is clear that Guevara's views on the Soviet Union under the

leadership of Nikita Khrushchev had soured.

This was in the context of the wider Sino-Soviet split of 1961 in which Mao

Zedong, the leader of the People's Republic of China, had condemned the

drift of Soviet communism.

It confirms two elements of Guevara's political outlook.

First, he was something of an unreformed Stalinist, preferring the old Soviet

dictator to the more moderate Communists who prevailed in the Kremlin in the

1950s and 1960s.

Secondly, Guevara's writings and speeches, which he gave during this

time, confirm that Guevara was an anti-imperialist above all other things.

After visiting Czechoslovakia in March 1965,

Guevara was set to fly back to Havana, his months-long world tour seemingly

over. Things took an unexpected twist at this juncture.

A few hours after leaving Prague, his plane had to make an unexpected stop at

Shannon Airport.

on the west coast of ireland shea decided he wanted to visit the country

of his forebears an ancestor patrick lynch having hailed from ireland before

becoming one of many irish people who settled in south america during the

eighteenth century when he arrived at buenos ayres in seventeen forty nine he

got off the plane and spent several days in the west of ireland visiting the city

of limerick and being interviewed by local reporters.

Yet beyond a desire to tour the land of his ancestor,

Guevara was delaying as he contemplated his next move.

It had, perhaps, been made clear to him, in light of his anti-Soviet declarations

while abroad, that it would be best if his official roles within the Cuban

government were wound down.

The regime in Havana would always deny rumours of a split, But it is entirely

plausible that Castro had soured on his ally who was generating all kinds of

international attention in ways which the Cuban government did not want

Guevara did return to Havana after his Irish detour But it would

only be for a couple of weeks before he left again Guevara's split with

the Castro's if indeed it was a split led to him leaving Havana again very

quickly. In April 1965, he arrived at the Congo.

After nearly a century of Belgian rule, the region had acquired its independence

in 1960.

A civil war had followed immediately as a pro-Western Congolese military

commander, Joseph Mobutu, was supported by the US and other Western governments

in essentially overthrowing Patrice Lumumba.

the democratically elected Prime Minister who had entered office in the

summer of 1960.

Lumumba had been overthrown and killed early in 1961.

A civil war had raged ever since then, with Lumumba's former supporters now

under the leadership of Laurent Désiré Kabila in the east of the country.

Guevara, who had admired Lumumba as a committed left-wing leader, decided to

head to the Congo after his brief return to Havana and began operating with

Kabila's followers against the government with a small band of Cuban

veterans. His goal now was to export the Cuban Revolution to other countries.

It was a disastrous expedition.

He spent seven months in the jungle, during which he suffered from dysentery

and soon came to the conclusion that Kabila's followers were simply not

committed enough to the cause.

He left later in 1965, as Mobutu was beginning to consolidate control over

the country.

Guevara slipped over the border to Tanzania and spent several months in the

capital Dar es Salaam, and then in Prague, in communist Czechoslovakia,

contemplating his next move.

guevara would eventually be drawn back to south america after his period of

reflection on his next move in tanzania and czechoslovakia his destination when

he did return to latin america was bolivia bolivia is the only country in

latin america where indigenous groups outnumber hispanic people and even

amongst people of spanish descent many are mestizo or of mixed heritage

Post-independence in the 19th century, this translated into the country being

one of the most unequal in the Western Hemisphere, with land monopolized by a

post-colonial elite and masses of people mired in poverty, working in the

country's extensive mines and on large agricultural estates.

In 1952, in response to these issues, the Bolivian National Revolution began.

Reformers introduced adult universal suffrage for the first time, giving all

Bolivians the right to vote.

The country's minds were nationalized, educational reform was promoted, and the

economic system was overhauled.

The revolution made good progress for over a decade, but in 1964 a coup d'état

was launched by the Bolivian military to overthrow the left-wing president,

Victor Paz Estensoro.

Afterwards, a US-aligned military ruler, René Barrientos, became president.

An air of legitimacy was lent to his rule when fresh elections were held in

1966, and he was elected as president, but these were not free and fair, as

the main opposition parties had been prohibited from running candidates.

Guevara now decided to lead an expedition to Bolivia to attempt to

instill fresh energy into efforts to overthrow Barrientos' military regime

and revive the Bolivian national revolution.

In order to gain entry into Bolivia, without arousing any suspicion, he

shaved off his iconic beard and much of his hair to make it look as though he

had a receding hairline.

He also dyed what was left of it grey.

The result was transformative.

Guevara is almost unrecognizable in the photos attached to a passport he used to

enter Bolivia under the name of Adolfo Mena González, posing as a Uruguayan

businessman.

After arriving at La Paz in early October 1966, he left the capital after

a few days and headed for southern Bolivia.

There he made contact with a Soviet agent from East Germany, Tamara Bunker,

and several other operatives.

They formed a small brigade of guerrilla fighters called the National Liberation

Army of Bolivia, but it was a difficult few months in the winter of 1966 and

into early 1967.

The conditions in the mountainous country were different to what Guevara

was used to, and the kind of popular support he had expected to materialize

was not forthcoming.

By the spring of 1967 he had little more than a few dozen followers.

With these he was able to launch some small raids on government buildings, but

it was not the makings of a broad guerrilla war that might conceivably

overthrow a military government.

While it is clear today that Guevara was meeting with little success in Bolivia,

his arrival there worried many individuals, both in La Paz and in

Washington. After all, Castro's revolt in Cuba had begun with little more than

a hundred men attacking Moncada barracks in 1953.

Five years later, it had overthrown the Batista regime and established a

communist state on the doorstep of America.

Accordingly, by the summer of 1967, the Central Intelligence Agency was working

in collaboration with the Bolivian government to try and apprehend Guevara.

They were aided by Nicolaus Barbie, a former member of the SS and Gestapo who

had headed the Nazi security services in Vichy France during the Second World War

before fleeing to Bolivia in 1951.

On the 8th of October 1967, a joint operation led to the capture of Guevara

after his position was located in the Euro Ravine.

A gunfight followed, in which Guevara was wounded.

He was taken alive to a local school and was kept there overnight.

The US wanted Guevara.

to be taken to Panama, where the Canal Zone was still under US control and

questioned there, but Barrientos was fearful that if he escaped, Che would

spark a more violent guerrilla war, while he also did not want to attract

public attention to the episode.

He therefore ordered the soldiers who were detaining Guevara to kill him in

such a way as to make it look like he had died during a gunfight.

Thus, shortly after midday, on the 9th of October 1967,

Guevara was executed by being shot ten times in various parts of his body.

He was 39 years of age.

Guevara's body was taken to Valle Grande, where photographs were taken of

it on display.

An autopsy was carried out, during which Guevara's hands were dismembered so that

they could be sent back to Argentina for fingerprint confirmation that it was in

fact him.

His body was then buried at an undisclosed location, although in 1997

a grave with several unidentified skeletons outside Valle Grande was

reported as containing his remains.

In Cuba, Castro confirmed the death of Che on the 15th of October and announced

three days of national mourning.

A million people attended the final day on the 18th of October.

A monument, the Che Guevara Mausoleum, was erected in Santa Clara, the city

which had fallen to Guevara's forces at the end of 1958, leading to the fall of

the Batista regime on the 1st of January 1959.

A 22-foot bronze statue of Guevara is to be seen there today.

His purported remains were repatriated from Bolivia and interred here in

1997. A diary that Guevara had kept of his Bolivia campaign and which

stretched to some 30,000 words describing the events of late 1966

down to October 1967, soon became publicly available and was published,

documenting the final months of his life and the difficulties that the attempted

Bolivian guerrilla war had run into.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Guevara's politics, there really isn't

any denying that the situation in Latin America deteriorated in the period after

he died.

and that much of this was owing to US interference in many different countries

to support military regimes that have since been found to have committed many

human rights abuses.

An infamous example is the role Richard Nixon's administration played in

overthrowing the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973,

and the support it provided through the 1970s and 1980s for Augusto

Pinochet as dictator of the country.

Tens of thousands of people were killed, tortured or illegally detained by the

Pinochet regime.

Similar military juntas were supported in Argentina and Brazil, ones which were

responsible for similar atrocities, while numerous Central American

countries like Nicaragua experienced civil war and authoritarian governments

in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of US involvement in their affairs.

By the 1980s, the implications of this activity had become clear as the

administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush had to re

-intervene in several countries to aid the overthrow of the strongmen they had

helped seize power in the first place.

The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a decline in

such manipulation of the domestic affairs of Latin American nations.

But the negative impact of decades of such interventions has been enduring,

with many countries like Guevara's Argentina still experiencing fractious

politics and turbulent economic situations.

Ernesto Che Guevara is one of the most divisive figures of the 20th century.

His political outlook was shaped by his experiences in South America during his

youth, and then galvanized by his time in Guatemala in 1954, where he saw

directly the intervention of the United States in the affairs of a sovereign

Latin American nation to install a military dictatorship.

Radicalized by this experience, when he met the Castro brothers Fidel and Raul

in Mexico the following year, he began planning a return to Cuba with them to

overthrow the US-backed dictator there, Fulgencio Batista.

Though he had initially traveled to Cuba with the goal of being the expedition's

chief doctor, he was transformed into their leading military commander in

1957.

and 1958.

He played the crucial role in the final overthrow of Batista at the very end of

1958.

Thereafter, he played a major role in the formation of the communist regime,

though more controversially, he was also somewhat responsible for fermenting the

Cuban Missile Crisis.

His purist approach to communist and anti-imperialist policies possibly

alienated Fidel Castro in the end, and after his world tour in late

1964 and early 1965, Guevara decided to find a new cause

overseas.

He was never as successful therein as he had been in Cuba.

In the Congo, he failed to achieve anything of consequence, and in Bolivia,

he met his demise after the Bolivian regime.

and the CIA tracked his movements there in 1967.

Today, there is a lot of mythology around Guevara.

He was, above all, an anti-imperialist, reflecting the degree to which US

foreign policy involved intervention in Latin America throughout the 20th

century.

What do you think of Ernesto Che Guevara?

Was he an idealistic revolutionary who was justified in his opposition to the

imperialism of the United States in Latin America?

Or was his reputation tarnished by his associations with the Castro regime and

its crimes in Cuba after seizing power?

Please let us know in the comment section.

And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.