Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
Che Guevara was an Argentine doctor who helped take Cuba, failed to repeat it twice, and became the most reproduced photograph in history. Born in Rosario in 1928 to a middle-class family of some radical sympathies, he was severely asthmatic all his life and played rugby anyway. He qualified in medicine in 1953 after two long journeys through South America — the second on a motorcycle with a friend — which he later said showed him the poverty of the continent as a single condition rather than a series of local misfortunes. He was in Guatemala in 1954 when the CIA removed the elected president Jacobo Árbenz, and drew the conclusion that reform without arms would always be overturned. He met Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1955 and sailed on the Granma with eighty-one others in 1956, of whom about twenty survived the landing. He rose from expedition doctor to comandante, and his column took Santa Clara in December 1958 by derailing an armoured train, which ended the war. In power he ran the agrarian reform, presided over the tribunals at La Cabaña that executed several hundred people, and served as president of the national bank and minister of industry. He left in 1965 to export the revolution, failed in the Congo in seven months, and was captured by Bolivian rangers with CIA advisers in October 1967 and shot the next day. Alberto Korda's 1960 photograph, taken at a funeral and given away free, did the rest. The image has been printed on more objects than any other photograph ever taken, which is a fate he would have found difficult to explain.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 1967 CE
- Nationality: Argentine-Cuban
- Roles: revolutionary, guerrilla_leader, government_minister
