"Che Guevara"

This is a brief biography about Che Guevara...
CHE GUEVARA

Che became a myth in his own lifetime and an international martyr-figure upon his death he was a revolutionary fighter,a military strategist,a social philosopher,an economist and a doctor."Che" Ernesto Guevara was born in 1928 and died in 1967.Che Guevara's birth certificate stated that he was born on June 14 1928 but he was actually born on may 14 1928 at 3:05 am in a city called Rosario in Argentina.In 1929 Che's mother Celia became pregnant for the second time and decided to hire a nanny to look after Che when he was less then one years old. Celia gave birth to her second child in December which was a girl and they named her Celia.one day in May 1930 Celia took Che to a yacht club for a swim and that night he developed a coughing fit.The doctor diagnosed Che with chronic asthma and that it would affect him for the rest of his life.In 1931 the Guvara's moved to Buenos Aires where Celia gave birth to her third child in May 1932 to a boy which they named Roberto.On the advice of doctors recommending they move to a dry climate to stabilize Che's asthma.So they moved to the central highlands of Cordoba province the family moved once again to Alta Gracia and it became their home for the next eleven years.Between 1932 and 1935 Paraguay and Bolivia fought an intermittent bloody conflict over control of the parched Chaco wilderness shared by the two countries.Ernesto Guevara Lynch followed the "Chaco war"closly in the newspapers and because of his time spent among Paraguayans in misiones he sided with there country.And at the age of seven Che was following in his fathers footsteps by following the war's.During the summer holidays in 1943 the Guevara's moved to Cordoba Guevara Lynch having finally found a partner in the city to launch a building firm.With Ernesto already commuting to school and his sister Celia about to enter a girls high school in Cordoba the move from Alta Gracia seamed a practical choice.Immediately after his grandmothers death Che informed his parents that he had decided to study medicine instead of engineering.Che Guevara himself never spilled out his exact reasons for having chosen a medical career instead of an engineering career one reason was to find a cure for his own asthma condition and he was passionately interested in the field of medicine.Along with his studies Ernesto held down a number of part-time jobs but of all of them the work he did at the clinica pisani an allergy-treatment clinic was the most absorbing as well as the longest lasting.Beginning first as one of Dr.Salvador pisanis patients for treatment of his own asthma condition Che showed a quick intelligence and curiosity in the field though soon led to pasani offering him a post as an unpaid research assistant.
For a young medical student it was a privileged opportunity to be involved in a new field of medical research. In 1951, after taking his penultimate exams, he made a much longer journey, accompanied by a friend, and earning his living by casual labor as he went : he visited southern Argentina, Chile, where he met Salvador Allende, Peru, where he worked for some weeks in the San Pablo leprosarium, Colombia at the time of La Violencia, and where he was arrested but soon released, Venezuela, and Miami. He returned home for his finals sure of only one thing, that he did not want to become a middle-class general practitioner. He qualified, specializing in dermatology, and went to La Paz, Bolivia, during the National Revolution which he condemned as opportunist. From there he went to Guatemala, earning his living by writing travel-cum-archaeological articles about Inca and Maya ruins. He reached Guatemala during the socialist Arbenz presidency; although he was by now a Marxist, well read in Lenin, he refused to join the Communist Party, though this meant losing the chance of government medical appointment, and he was penniless and in rags.He joined other Castro followers at the farm where the Cuban revolutionaries were being given a tough commando course of professional training in guerrilla warfare by the Spanish Republican Army captain, Alberto Bayo, author of Ciento cincueto preguntas a un guerrilleo, Havana 1959. Bayo drew not only on his own experience but on the guerrilla teachings of Mao Tse-tung, and 'Che', as he was now called (it means chum or buddy and is Italian origin), became his star pupil and was made a leader of the class. The war games at the farm attracted police attention, all the Cubans and Che were arrested, but released a month later (June 1956). When they invaded Cuba, Che went with them, first as doctor, soon as a Commandante of the revolutionary army of barbutos. He was the most aggressive, clever and successful of the guerrilla officers, and the most earnest in giving his men a Lenist education: he was also a ruthless disciplinarian who unhesitatingly shot defectors, as later he got a reputation for cold-blooded cruelty in the mass execution of recalcitrant supporters of the defeated president Batista. At the triumph of the Revolution Guevara became second only to Fidel Castro in the new government of Cuba, and the man chiefly responsible for pushing Castro towards communism, but a communism which was independent of the orthodox, Moscow-style communism of some of their colleagues. Che organized and directed the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria to administer the new agrarian laws expropriating the large land holders; ran its Department of Industries; was appointed President of the National Bank of Cuba; forced non-communist out of the government and key posts and acting obstinately against the advise of two eminent French Marxist economists who were called in by Fidel Castro and who wanted Che to advance much more slowly and of the Soviet advisers, he pushed the Cuban economy so fast into total Communism, and into crop and production diversification, that he temporarily ruined it.
In 1959 he married Aledia March and together they visited Egypt, India, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Yugoslavia. Back in Cuba, as Minister for Industry he signed (February 1960) a trade pact with the USSR which freed the Cuban sugar industry from dependence on the teeth of the US market; in it is foreshadowing his failure in the Congo and Bolivia, in an axiom which proved to be hopelessly misleading; ' It is not always necessary to wait until the conditions for revolution exist: the instructional focus can create them.' And, with Mao Tse-tung, he believed that the countryside must bring the revolution to the town in predominately peasant countries. Also at this time, he glorified his own kind of communist philosophy. ( published later in the Socialism and Man in Cuba, March 12 March 1965). It can be summed up in him ' Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity.' He was moving away from "Moscow", towards Mao, and beyond into what is essentially the old idealistic, Anarchism. His formal breach with the Soviet Communist came when, addressing the Organization for Afro-Asian Solidarity at Algiers (February 1965) he charged the USSR with being a 'tacit accomplice of imperialism' by not trading exclusively with the Communist bloc and by not giving underdeveloped socialist countries aid without any thought of return. He also attacked the Soviet government for its policy of coexistence; and for Revisionism. He initiated the Tricontiental Conference to realize a program of revolutionary, insurrectionary, guerrilla cooperation in Africa, Asia and South America. On the other hand, after a halfhearted attempt to come to some kind of terms with the USA, he was also attacking the North Americas, at the UN as Cuba's representative there, for their greedy and merciless imperialist activity in Latin America.
Che's intransigence towards both capitalist abd communist estabklishment forced Castro to drop him (1965), not offically, but in practice. For some months even his whereabouts were a secret and his death was widely rumoured: he was in various African countries, notably the Congo surveying the possiblities of turning the Kinshasa rebellion into a Communist revolution, by Cuban-style guerrilla tactics. He returned to Cuba to train volunteers for that project, andf took a force of 120 Cubans to the Congo. His men fought well, but the Kinshasa rebels did not, they were useless against the Belgian mercenaries and by autumn 1965 Che had to advise Castro to withdraw Cuban aid.Che's final revolutionary adventure was in Bolivia: he grossly misjudged the reveloutionary potential of that country with disastrous consegquences. The attempt ended in his being captured by a Bolivian army unit and he was shot on the same day as his capture.
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