Che Guevara
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Ernesto Guevara de la Serna
Alberto Korda's famous image of Guevara taken at the memorial service for the victims of the explosion of the ship La Coubre, March 5, 1960
Born June 14, 1928
Rosario, Argentina
Died October 9, 1967
La Higuera, Bolivia
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (June 14, 1928[›] – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara or el Che, was an Argentine-born, Marxist revolutionary, politician, and Cuban guerrilla leader. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara traveled "rough" throughout Latin America bringing him into direct contact with the poverty in which many lived. Through these experiences he became convinced that only revolution could remedy the region's economic inequality, leading him to study Marxism and become involved in Guatemala's social revolution under President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.
Later, Guevara became a member of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement that seized power in Cuba in 1959. After serving in various important posts in the new government and writing a number of articles and books on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the intention of fomenting revolutions first in the Congo-Kinshasa (later named the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and then in Bolivia, where he was captured in a CIA-organized military operation. Guevara died at the hands of the Bolivian Army in La Higuera near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967. Participants in and witnesses to the events of his final hours testify that his captors summarily executed him, perhaps to avoid a public trial followed by imprisonment in Bolivia.
After his death, Guevara became an icon of socialist revolutionary movements worldwide. An Alberto Korda photo of Guevara (right) has received wide distribution and modification, and has been called "the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century."[1]
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