Imperialism, as defined by ''The Dictionary of Human Geography'', is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years, as described by the above work, is primarily a western undertaking that employs "expansionist – mercantilism and latterly communist – systems." Geographical domains have included the German Empire, the Mongolian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Portuguese Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Empire, the Persian Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Empire, the Chinese Empire, and the British Empire, but the term can equally be applied to domains of knowledge, beliefs, values and expertise, such as the empires of Christianity (see Christendom) or Islam (see Caliphate). Imperialism is usually autocratic, and also sometimes monolithic (i.e. having a massive, unchanging structure that does not allow individual variation) in character. It can be fairly benign as in Canada, or murderously brutal as in the Congo Free State.

Overview

Imperialism has been found in the histories of Japan, the Assyrian Empire, the Chinese Empire, the Roman Empire, Greece, the Persian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, ancient Egypt, and India and was a basic component to the conquests of Genghis Khan and other warlords.

The word itself, derived from the Latin verb ''imperare'' (to command), the Roman concept of imperium, while the actual term 'Imperialism' was coined in the 16th century, reflecting what are now seen as the imperial policies of Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Imperialism not only describes colonial and territorial policies, but also economic and/or military dominance and influence.

Although normally used to imply forcible imposition of a more powerful foreign government's control on a weaker country, or over conquered territory that was previously without a unified government, "imperialism" is sometimes also used to describe loose or indirect political or economic influence or control of weak states by more powerful ones. If the dominant country's influence is felt in social and cultural circles, such as "foreign" music being popular with young people, it may be described as cultural imperialism.

Colonialism V Imperialism

The term 'imperialism' should not be confused with ‘colonialism’ as it often is. Edward Said suggests that imperialism involved “the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory’”. He goes on to say colonialism refers to the “implanting of settlements on a distant territory”. Robert Young supports this thinking as he puts forward that imperialism operates from the center, it is a state policy, and is developed for ideological as well as financial reasons whereas colonialism is nothing more than development for settlement or commercial intentions.

Age of Imperialism

The Age of Imperialism was a time period beginning around 1870 when modern, relatively developed nations were taking over less developed areas, colonizing them, or influencing them in order to expand their own power. Although imperialist practices have existed for thousands of years, the term "Age of Imperialism" generally refers to the activities of nations such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States in the mid 19th through the middle 20th centuries, e.g. the "The Great Game" in Persian lands, the "Scramble for Africa," and the "Open Door Policy" in China.

The ideas of imperialism put forward by historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson during the 19th century European imperialism were influential. They rejected the notion that "imperialism" required formal, legal control by one government over another country. "In their view, historians have been mesmerized by formal empire and maps of the world with regions colored red. The bulk of British emigration, trade, and capital went to areas outside the formal British Empire. A key to the thought of Robinson and Gallagher is the idea of empire 'informally if possible and formally if necessary.'"

Europe’s expansion into territorial imperialism had much to do with the great economic benefit from collecting resources from colonies, in combination with assuming political control often by military means. Most notably, the “British exploited the political weakness of the Mughal state, and, while military activity was important at various times, the economic and administrative incorporation of local elites was also of crucial significance”. Although a substantial number of colonies had been designed or subject to provide economic profit (mostly through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), Fieldhouse suggests that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in places such as Africa and Asia, this idea is not necessarily valid:

Modern empires were not artificially constructed economic machines. The second expansion of Europe was a complex historical process in which political, social and emotional forces in Europe and on the periphery were more influential than calculated imperialism. Individual colonies might serve an economic purpose; collectively no empire had any definable function, economic or otherwise. Empires represented only a particular phase in the ever-changing relationship of Europe with the rest of the world: analogies with industrial systems or investment in real estate were simply misleading.

During this time period, European merchants had the ability to “roam the high seas and appropriate surpluses from around the world (sometimes peaceably, sometimes violently) and to concentrate them in Europe.”

European expansion accelerated greatly in the 19th century. In order to obtain raw materials, Europe began importing them from other countries. Europeans sought raw materials such as dyes, cotton, vegetable oils, and metal ores from overseas. Europe was being transformed into the manufacturing center of the world.

Communication became much more advanced during the European expansion. The invention of railroads and telegraphs made it easier to communicate with other countries. Railroads assisted in transporting goods and in supplying large armies.

Along with advancements in communication, Europe also continued to developed its military technology. European chemists made deadly explosives that could be used in combat, and with the advancement of machinery they were able to create lighter, cheaper guns. The guns were also much faster and more accurate. By the late 19th century (1880s) the machine gun had become an effective battlefield weapon. This technology gave European armies an advantage over their opponents, as armies in less developed countries were still fighting with arrows, swords, and leather shields.

Right-wing accusations of Communist imperialism

Bolshevik leaders had effectively reestablished the Romanov empire by 1921, but with an internationalist ideology. Beginning in 1923, the policy of "Indigenization" [ korenizatsiia] helped native peoples develop their national cultures within a socialist framework. This was never formally revoked. Its cultural and linguistic concessions to non-Russians, however, stopped being implemented and enforced. After World War II, the Soviet Union installed friendly socialist regimes modelled on those it had installed in 1919–20 in the old Tsarist empire in areas its forces occupied in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union and People's Republic of China generously supported post–World War II anti-colonial national-liberation movements to advance their own interests but were not always successful.

The United States as "the world's policeman"

While the United States does not have a traditional empire in the later form, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries it nevertheless exerted tremendous power over other countries, sometimes through the use of military force, but more often from behind the scenes, just as in the earlier phases of many if not most of the earlier empires. In 2005, the United States had 737 military bases in foreign countries, according to official sources.

Justification

A controversial aspect of imperialism is the imperial power’s defense and justification of such actions. Most controversial of all is the justification of imperialism done on scientific grounds. J. A. Hobson identifies this justification: “It is desirable that the earth should be peopled, governed, and developed, as far as possible, by the races which can do this work best, i.e. by the races of highest 'social efficiency'.” This is clearly the racial argument, which pays heed to other ideas such as the “White Man’s Burden” prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century.

Technological and economic efficiency were often improved in territories subjected to imperialism through the building of roads and introduction of innovations. However, the majority of the rewards of such infrastructure improvements are usually shipped to the imperial state or utilized by the local administration. Similarly, the rapid adoption of the scientific method throughout the world was partly a side effect of the British Empire.

The principles of imperialism are often deeply connected to the policies and practices of British Imperialism "during the last generation, and proceeds rather by diagnosis than by historical description." British Imperialist strategy often but not always used the concept of ''terra nullius'' (Latin expression which stems from Roman law meaning ‘empty land’). The country of Australia serves as a case study in relation to British imperialism. British settlement and colonial rule of the island continent of Australia in the eighteenth century was premised on ''terra nullius'', for its settlers considered it unused by its sparse inhabitants.

This form of imperialism can also be seen in British Columbia, Canada. In the 1840s, the territory of British Columbia was divided into two regions, one space for the native population, and the other for non-natives. The indigenous peoples were often forcibly removed from their homes onto reserves. These actions were “justified by a dominant belief among British colonial officials that land occupied by Native people was not being used efficiently and productively.”

See also

Colonialism

Cultural imperialism

Empire

Feudalism

Hegemony

Imperialism in Leninist theory

John A. Hobson

List of empires

List of largest empires

Neocolonialism

New Imperialism

Oil imperialism theories

Scientific imperialism

Super-imperialism

Theories of New Imperialism

Tropical geography

Ultra-imperialism

Uneven and combined development

References

Further reading

Guy Ankerl, ''Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharatai, Chinese, and Western,'' Geneva, INU PRESS, 2000, ISBN 2-88155-004-5.

Robert Bickers/Christian Henriot, ''New Frontiers: Imperialism's New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953'', Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-7190-5604-7

Barbara Bush, ''Imperialism and Postcolonialism (History: Concepts,Theories and Practice),'' Longmans, 2006, ISBN 0582505836

John Darwin'', After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000,'' Penguin Books, 2008, ISBN 0141010223

Niall Ferguson, ''Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World,'' Penguin Books, 2004, ISBN 0141007540

Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, ''Empire,'' Harvard University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-674-00671-2

E.J. Hobsbawm, ''The Age of Empire, 1875–1914,'' Abacus Books, 1989, ISBN 0349105987

E. J. Hobsbawm, ''On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy,'' Pantheon Books, 2008, ISBN 0375425373

J. A. Hobson, ''Imperialism: A Study,'' Cosimo Classics, 2005, ISBN 1596052503

Michael Hudson, ''Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance,'' Pluto Press, 2003, ISBN 0745319890

V. I. Lenin, ''Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,'' International Publishers, New York, 1997, ISBN 0717800989

Rosa Luxemburg, ''The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism''

Petringa, Maria, ''Brazza, A Life for Africa'', Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006. ISBN: 978-1425911980

Edward Said, ''Culture and Imperialism,'' Vintage Books, 1998, ISBN 0099967502

Simon C. Smith, ''British Imperialism 1750–1970,'' Cambridge University Press, 1998, ISBN 052159930X

Stuchtey, Benedikt, ''Colonialism and Imperialism, 1450-1950'', European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2011, retrieved: July 13, 2011.

External links

J.A Hobson, Imperialism a Study 1902.

The Paradox of Imperialism by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. November 2006.

Imperialism Quotations

State, Imperialism and Capitalism by Joseph Schumpeter

Economic Imperialism by A.J.P.Taylor

Imperialism Entry in the Columbia Encyclopedia (Bartleby)

Imperialism by Emile Perreau-Saussine

The Nation-State, Core and Periphery: A Brief sketch of Imperialism in the 20th century.

Mehmet Akif Okur, Rethinking Empire After 9/11: Towards A New Ontological Image of World Order, Perceptions, Journal of International Affairs, Volume XII, Winter 2007, pp.61–93

Imperialism 101, Against Empire By Michael Parenti Published by City Lights Books, 1995, ISBN 0872862984, 9780872862982, 217 pages

Category:Economic theories Category:History of colonialism Category:Marxist theory * Category:Political economy Category:Political systems Category:Political theories

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{{infobox person | name

Tariq Ali | image Tariq Ali.jpg | caption Tariq Ali at Imperial College in 2006 | pseudonym | birth_name | birth_date October 21, 1943 | birth_place Lahore, British India | death_date | death_place | occupation Historian, novelist, activist | nationality British | period | genre Geopolitics, history, post-colonialism | subject Criticism, history | movement New Left Review | religion None (atheist) | spouse Susan Watkins | alma mater University of the PunjabUniversity of Oxford | signature | website }}

Tariq Ali (Punjabi, }}), (born 21 October 1943), is a British Pakistani military historian, novelist, journalist, filmmaker, public intellectual, political campaigner, activist, and commentator. He is a member of the editorial committee of the ''New Left Review'' and ''Sin Permiso'', and regularly contributes to ''The Guardian'', ''CounterPunch'', and the ''London Review of Books''.

He is the author of several books, including ''Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State'' (1991), ''Pirates Of The Caribbean: Axis Of Hope'' (2006), ''Conversations with Edward Said'' (2005), ''Bush in Babylon'' (2003), and ''Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity'' (2002), ''A Banker for All Seasons'' (2007), ''The Duel'' (2008) and ''The Obama Syndrome'' (2010).

Early life

Ali was born and raised in Lahore. The city was part of British India at the time of his birth in 1943, but became part of the newly independent nation of Pakistan four years later. He is the son of journalist Mazhar Ali Khan and activist mother Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan (daughter of Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan who led the Unionist Muslim League and was later Prime Minister of the Punjab from 1937–1942).

Ali's parents "both came from a very old, crusty, feudal family". His father had broken with the family's conventions in politics when he was a student, adopting communism and atheism. Ali's mother also belonged to the same family, and became radicalized upon meeting his father. However, Ali was taught the fundamentals of Islam in order to be able to argue against it. He stated in ''Islam, Empire, and the Left: Conversation with Tariq Ali'': "I grew up an atheist. I make no secret of it. It was acceptable. In fact, when I think back, none of my friends were believers. None of them were religious; maybe a few were believers. But very few were religious in temperament."

Emerging activism

While studying at the Punjab University, he organised demonstrations against Pakistan's military dictatorship. Ali's uncle was chief of Pakistan's Military Intelligence. His parents sent him to England to study at Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He was elected President of the Oxford Union, in 1965. Ali's tenure at the Union included a meeting with Malcolm X in December 1964 during which Malcolm X expressed deep consternation about his own risk of assassination.

Career

His public profile began to grow during the Vietnam War, when he engaged in debates against the war with such figures as Henry Kissinger and Michael Stewart. He testified at the Russell Tribunal over US involvement in Vietnam. As time passed, Ali became increasingly critical of American and Israeli foreign policies. He is also well known for his satirical work. He was also a vigorous opponent of American relations with Pakistan that tended to back military dictatorships over democracy. He was one of the marchers on the American embassy in London in 1968 in a demonstration against the Vietnam war.

Active in the New Left of the 1960s, he has long been associated with the ''New Left Review''. Drawn into revolutionary socialist politics through his involvement with ''The Black Dwarf'' newspaper, he joined a Trotskyist party, the International Marxist Group (IMG) in 1968. He was recruited to the leadership of the IMG and became a member of the International Executive Committee of the (reunified) Fourth International. He also befriended influential figures such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono.

In 1967 Ali was in Camiri, Bolivia, not far from where Che Guevara was captured, to observe the trial of Régis Debray. He was accused of being a Cuban revolutionary by authorities. Ali then said "If you torture me the whole night and I can speak Spanish in the morning I'll be grateful to you for the rest of my life."

During this period he was an IMG candidate in Sheffield Attercliffe at the February 1974 UK general election and was co-author of ''Trotsky for Beginners'', a cartoon book. In 1981, the IMG dissolved when its members entered the Labour Party: the IMG was promptly proscribed. Ali then abandoned activism in the revolutionary left and supported Tony Benn in his bid to become deputy leader of the Labour Party that year.

In 1990, he published the satire ''Redemption'', on the inability of the Trotskyists to handle the downfall of the Eastern bloc. The book contains parodies of many well-known figures in the Trotskyist movement.

His book ''Bush in Babylon'' criticizes the 2003 invasion of Iraq by American president George W. Bush. This book has a unique style, using poetry and critical essays in portraying the war in Iraq as a failure. Ali believes that the new Iraqi government will fail.

His previous book, ''Clash of Fundamentalisms'', puts the events of the September 11 attacks in historical perspective, covering the history of Islam from its foundations.

Ali has remained a critic of modern neoliberal economics and was present at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil where he was one of 19 to sign the Porto Alegre Manifesto. He is a fan of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

He has been described as "the alleged inspiration" for the Rolling Stones' song "Street Fighting Man", recorded in 1968. John Lennon's "Power to the People" was inspired by an interview Lennon gave to Ali.

In an article published in ''CounterPunch'', he responded to the Pope Benedict XVI Islam controversy and said, "The Bavarian is a razor-sharp reactionary cleric. I think he knew what he was saying and why. In a neo-liberal world suffering from environmental degradation, poverty, hunger, repression, a ‘planet of slums’ (in the graphic phrase of Mike Davis), the Pope chooses to insult the founder of a rival faith. The reaction in the Muslim world was predictable, but depressingly insufficient."

Screenplay

Tariq Ali's ''The Leopard and The Fox'', first written as a BBC screenplay in 1985, is about the last days of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Never previously produced because of a censorship controversy, it was finally premiered in New York in October 2007, the day before former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned to her home country after eight years in exile.

in 2009, Ali, alongside Mark Weisbrot wrote the screenplay to the Oliver Stone documentary ''South of the Border''.

Personal life

He currently lives in Highgate, London with his girlfriend Susan Watkins, editor of the ''New Left Review''. He has three children: Natasha, Chengiz, and Aisha. He is friends with David Miliband and Ed Miliband both of whom are family friends.

Works (partial)

''Pakistan: Military Rule or People's Power'' (1970) ISBN 978-0224618649

''The Coming British Revolution'' (1971) ISBN 978-0224006309

''1968 and After: Inside the Revolution'' (1978) ISBN 978-0856340826

''Chile, Lessons of the Coup: Which Way to Workers Power'' (1978) ISBN 978-0856121074

''Trotsky for Beginners'' (1980) ISBN 978-0906495278

''Can Pakistan Survive?: The Death of a State'' (1983) ISBN 978-0805271942; (1991) ISBN 978-0860912606

''Who's Afraid of Margaret Thatcher? In Praise of Socialism'' (1984) ISBN 978-0860918028

''The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on 20th-Century World Politics'' (1984) ISBN 978-0931477560

''An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi Family'' (1985) ISBN 978-0399130748

''Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties'' (1987) ISBN 978-0002177795

''Revolution from Above: Soviet Union Now'' (1988) ISBN 978-0860912682

''Iranian Nights'' (1989) ISBN 978-1854590268

''Moscow Gold'' (1990) ISBN 978-1854590787

''Redemption'' (1990) ISBN 978-0701133948

''Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree'' (1992; 1st in the 'Islam Quintet') ISBN 978-0701139445

''Necklaces'' (1992)

''Ugly Rumours'' (1998) ISBN 978-1854594266

''1968: Marching in the Streets'' (1998) ISBN 978-0747537632

''Fear of Mirrors'' Arcadia Books (4 Aug 1998) ISBN 978-1900850100; University of Chicago Press (10 Aug 2010) ISBN 978-1906497156

''The Book of Saladin'' (1998; 2nd in the 'Islam Quintet') ISBN 978-1859848340

''Snogging Ken'' (2000) ISBN 978-1840021639

''The Stone Woman'' (2000; 3rd in the 'Islam Quintet') ISBN 978-1859847640

''Masters of the Universe: NATO's Balkan Crusade'' (2000) ISBN 978-1859847527

''Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity'' (2002) ISBN 978-1859846797

''Bush in Babylon'' (2003) ISBN 978-1859845837

''Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties'' (2005) ISBN 978-1844670291

''Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali'' (2005) ISBN 978-1565849549

''Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror'' (2005) ISBN 978-1844675456

''Conversations with Edward Said'' (2005) ISBN 978-1905422043

''A Sultan in Palermo'' (2005; featuring Muhammad al-Idrisi and Roger II of Sicily; 4th in the 'Islam Quintet') ISBN 978-1844670253

''The Leopard and the Fox'' (2006) ISBN 978-1905422296

''Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope'' (2006) ISBN 978-1844671021; revised ed. (2008) ISBN 978-1844672486

''A Banker for All Seasons: Bank of Crooks and Cheats Incorporated'' (2007) ISBN 978-1905422654

''The assassination: Who Killed Indira G?'' (2008) ISBN 978-1905422852

''The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power'' (2008) ISBN 978-1847373557

''The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom: and other Essays'' (2009) ISBN 978-1844673674

''The Idea of Communism'' (Non-fiction) (2009) ISBN 978-1906497262

''Night of the Golden Butterfly'' (2010; 5th in the 'Islam Quintet') ISBN 978-1844676118

''The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad'' (2010) ISBN 978-1844674497

References

External links

Tariq Ali Official webpage

Column archive at ''The Guardian''

Articles authored at ''Journalisted''

Tariq Ali: ''The Night of the Golden Butterfly'' - Shimmering Prose against the Clash of Civilisations

;Interviews and speeches

A Clash of Civilizations of Fundamentalisms? A Conversation with Tariq Ali on pg. 115

Harvard Law School on U.S. foreign policy and Afghanistan">Tariq Ali speaks at Harvard Law School on U.S. foreign policy and Afghanistan

Tariq Ali: Neoliberalism and Protectorate States in the post-Yugoslav Balkans (ZNet)

Tariq Ali transcript & video of ''Conversations with History - Islam, Empire, and the Left''

"Media Matters" interview with Robert McChesney, 14 November 2004

"We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane" (essay) - Tariq Ali

12-19-02 "On the Verge of War" talk - Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Gilbert Achcar and Isin Elicin

"Seven Oaks Magazine" interview with Charles Demers

"Naked Punch Review" interview

A Life in Writing: Tariq Ali by ''The Guardian''

10-26-06 "The Latin American Challenge: Chavez, Morales, Castro" (audio recording)

10-01-06 W.B.A.I. ''Behind The News'' interview with Doug Henwood

Audio recording of Tariq Ali speaking on his book ''Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope''

"The Ideas of Tariq Ali" on CBC Radio One’s ''Ideas''

Desert Island Discs Tariq Ali's choices for ''Desert Island Discs''

Ali: "Obama’s Afghan-Pak Syndrome" - video report by ''Democracy Now!''

Ali on his book ''The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad'' - video report by ''Democracy Now!''

;Profiles

Biography from the international literature festival berlin

Category:1943 births Category:Alumni of Exeter College, Oxford Category:Anti–Vietnam War activists Category:Atheism activists Category:British atheists Category:English people of Pakistani descent Category:British anti-war activists Category:British Marxists Category:British Trotskyists Category:Pakistani Trotskyists Category:Historical novelists Category:International Marxist Group members Category:Living people Category:Pakistani activists Category:Pakistani anti-war activists Category:Pakistani scholars Category:Pakistani writers Category:Pakistani military historians Category:Presidents of the Oxford Union Category:Pakistani atheists Category:Pakistani Marxists Category:Pakistani filmmakers Category:Pakistani historical novelists Category:Pakistani emigrants to the United Kingdom Category:Punjabi people Category:University of the Punjab alumni

ar:طارق علي de:Tariq Ali es:Tariq Ali eo:Tariq Ali fa:طارق علی fi:Tariq Ali fr:Tariq Ali hr:Tarik Ali id:Tariq Ali it:Tariq Ali mk:Тарик Али nl:Tariq Ali pt:Tariq Ali ro:Tariq Ali ru:Али, Тарик sr:Тарик Али sv:Tariq Ali tr:Tarık Ali ur:طارق علی

name	Che Guevara
birth name	Ernesto Guevara
birth date	June 14, 1928
birth place	Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina
death date	October 09, 1967
death place	La Higuera, Vallegrande, Bolivia
death cause	Executed
resting place	Che Guevara MausoleumSanta Clara, Cuba
organization	26th of July Movement, United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution, National Liberation Army (Bolivia)
religion	''None'' (Marxist humanist)
spouse	Hilda Gadea (1955–1959)Aleida March (1959-1967, his death)
children	Hilda (1956–1995), Aleida (b. 1960), Camilo (b. 1962), Celia (b. 1963), Ernesto (b. 1965)
signature	CheGuevaraSignature.svg
signature size	110

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (; June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia within popular culture.

As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout Latin America and was radically transformed by the endemic poverty and alienation he witnessed. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region's ingrained economic inequalities were an intrinsic result of capitalism, monopolism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being world revolution. This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara's political ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht, ''Granma'', with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.

Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, instituting agrarian reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful motorcycle journey across South America. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.

Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. As a result of his perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a "new man" driven by moral rather than material incentives; he has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist-inspired movements. ''Time'' magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled ''Guerrillero Heroico'' (shown), was declared "the most famous photograph in the world."

Early life

Ernesto Guevara was born to Celia de la Serna y Llosa and Ernesto Guevara Lynch on June 14, 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in an Argentine family of Spanish, Basque and Irish descent. In lieu of his parents' surnames, his legal name (Ernesto Guevara) will sometimes appear with de la Serna, or Lynch accompanying it. In reference to Che's "restless" nature, his father declared "the first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels." Very early on in life Ernestito (as he was then called) developed an "affinity for the poor." Growing up in a family with leftist leanings, Guevara was introduced to a wide spectrum of political perspectives even as a boy. His father, a staunch supporter of Republicans from the Spanish Civil War, often hosted many veterans from the conflict in the Guevara home.

Though suffering crippling bouts of acute asthma that were to afflict him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete, enjoying swimming, football, golf, and shooting; while also becoming an "untiring" cyclist. He was an avid rugby union player, and played at fly-half for Club Universitario de Buenos Aires. His rugby playing earned him the nickname "Fuser"—a contraction of ''El Furibundo'' (raging) and his mother's surname, de la Serna—for his aggressive style of play.

Guevara learned chess from his father and began participating in local tournaments by age 12. During adolescence and throughout his life he was passionate about poetry, especially that of Pablo Neruda, John Keats, Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, and Walt Whitman. He could also recite Rudyard Kipling's ''"If—"'' and José Hernández's ''"Martín Fierro"'' from memory. Additionally, he enjoyed the works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Vladimir Lenin, and Jean-Paul Sartre; as well as Anatole France, Friedrich Engels, H. G. Wells, and Robert Frost.

As he grew older, he developed an interest in the Latin American writers Horacio Quiroga, Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza, Rubén Darío, and Miguel Asturias. Many of these authors' ideas he cataloged in his own handwritten notebooks of concepts, definitions, and philosophies of influential intellectuals. These included composing analytical sketches of Buddha and Aristotle, along with examining Bertrand Russell on love and patriotism, Jack London on society, and Nietzsche on the idea of death. Sigmund Freud's ideas fascinated him as he quoted him on a variety of topics from dreams and libido to narcissism and the oedipus complex. His favorite subjects in school included philosophy, mathematics, engineering, political science, sociology, history and archaeology.

Years later, a February 13, 1958, declassified CIA 'biographical and personality report' would make note of Guevara’s wide range of academic interests and intellect, describing him as "quite well read" while adding that "Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino."

Motorcycle journey

In 1948, Guevara entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. His "hunger to explore the world" led him to intersperse his collegiate pursuits with two long introspective journeys that would fundamentally change the way he viewed himself and the contemporary economic conditions in Latin America. The first expedition in 1950 was a 4,500 kilometer (2,800 mi) solo trip through the rural provinces of northern Argentina on a bicycle on which he installed a small motor. This was followed in 1951 by a nine month 8,000 kilometer (5,000 mi) continental motorcycle trek through most of South America. For the latter, he took a year off from studies to embark with his friend Alberto Granado, with the final goal of spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo Leper colony in Peru, on the banks of the Amazon River.

In Chile, Guevara found himself enraged by the working conditions of the miners in Anaconda's Chuquicamata copper mine; and moved by his overnight encounter in the Atacama Desert with a persecuted communist couple who didn't even own a blanket, describing them as "the shivering flesh-and-blood victims of capitalist exploitation." Additionally, on the way to Machu Picchu high in the Andes, he was struck by the crushing poverty of the remote rural areas, where peasant farmers worked small plots of land owned by wealthy landlords. Later on his journey, Guevara was especially impressed by the camaraderie among those living in a Leper Colony, stating "The highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise among such lonely and desperate people." Guevara used notes taken during this trip to write an account entitled ''The Motorcycle Diaries'', which later became a ''New York Times'' best-seller, and was adapted into a 2004 award-winning film of the same name.

In total, the journey took Guevara through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and to Miami, before returning home to Buenos Aires. By trip's end, he came to view Latin America not as collection of separate nations, but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide liberation strategy. His conception of a borderless, united Hispanic America sharing a common 'Latino' heritage was a theme that prominently recurred during his later revolutionary activities. Upon returning to Argentina, he completed his studies and received his medical degree in June 1953, making him officially "Dr. Ernesto Guevara."

Guevara later remarked that through his travels of Latin America, he came in "close contact with poverty, hunger and disease" along with the "inability to treat a child because of lack of money" and "stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment" that leads a father to "accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident." It was these experiences which Guevara cites as convincing him that in order to "help these people", he needed to leave the realm of medicine, and consider the political arena of armed struggle.

Guatemala, Arbenz and United Fruit

On July 7, 1953, Guevara set out again, this time to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. On December 10, 1953, before leaving for Guatemala, Guevara sent an update to his Aunt Beatriz from San José, Costa Rica. In the letter Guevara speaks of traversing through the "dominions" of the United Fruit Company, which convinced him "how terrible" the "Capitalist octopuses" were. This affirmed indignation carried the "head hunting tone" that he adopted in order to frighten his more Conservative relatives, and ends with Guevara swearing on an image of the then recently deceased Joseph Stalin, not to rest until these "octopuses have been vanquished." Later that month, Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán headed a democratically elected government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to end the ''latifundia'' system. To accomplish this, President Arbenz had enacted a major land reform program, where all uncultivated portions of large land holdings were to be expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. The biggest land owner, and one most affected by the reforms, was the United Fruit Company, from which the Arbenz government had already taken more than 225,000 uncultivated acres. Pleased with the road the nation was heading down, Guevara decided to settle down in Guatemala so as to "perfect himself and accomplish whatever may be necessary in order to become a true revolutionary."

In Guatemala City, Guevara sought out Hilda Gadea Acosta, a Peruvian economist who was well-connected politically as a member of the left-leaning Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA, American Popular Revolutionary Alliance). She introduced Guevara to a number of high-level officials in the Arbenz government. Guevara then established contact with a group of Cuban exiles linked to Fidel Castro through the July 26, 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. During this period he acquired his famous nickname, due to his frequent use of the Argentine diminutive interjection ''che'', a vocative casual speech filler used to call attention or ascertain comprehension, similarly to both "bro" or the Canadian phrase "eh".

Guevara's attempts to obtain a medical internship were unsuccessful and his economic situation was often precarious. On May 15, 1954, a shipment of Škoda infantry and light artillery weapons was sent from Communist Czechoslovakia for the Arbenz Government and arrived in Puerto Barrios. As a result, the U.S. CIA sponsored an army which invaded the country and installed the right-wing dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas. Guevara was eager to fight on behalf of Arbenz and joined an armed militia organized by the Communist Youth for that purpose, but frustrated with the group's inaction, he soon returned to medical duties. Following the coup, he again volunteered to fight, but soon after, Arbenz took refuge in the Mexican Embassy and told his foreign supporters to leave the country. Guevara’s repeated calls to resist were noted by supporters of the coup, and he was marked for murder. After Hilda Gadea was arrested, Guevara sought protection inside the Argentine consulate, where he remained until he received a safe-conduct pass some weeks later and made his way to Mexico. He married Gadea in Mexico in September 1955.

The overthrow of the Arbenz regime cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an imperialist power that would oppose and attempt to destroy any government that sought to redress the socioeconomic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing countries. In speaking about the coup Guevara stated:

Guevara's conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such conditions was thus strengthened. Gadea wrote later, "It was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism. By the time he left, he was sure of this."

Mexico City and preparation

Guevara arrived in Mexico City in early September 1954, and worked in the allergy section of the General Hospital. In addition he gave lectures on medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and worked as a news photographer for Latina News Agency. His first wife Hilda notes in her memoir ''My Life with Che'', that for a while, Guevara considered going to work as a doctor in Africa and that he continued to be deeply troubled by the poverty around him. In one instance, Hilda describes Guevara's obsession with an elderly washerwoman whom he was treating, remarking that he saw her as "representative of the most forgotten and exploited class." Hilda later found a poem that Che had dedicated to the old woman, containing "a promise to fight for a better world, for a better life for all the poor and exploited."

During this time he renewed his friendship with Ñico López and the other Cuban exiles whom he had met in Guatemala. In June 1955, López introduced him to Raúl Castro who subsequently introduced him to his older brother, Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who had formed the 26th of July Movement and was now plotting to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. During a long conversation with Fidel on the night of their first meeting, Guevara concluded that the Cuban's cause was the one for which he had been searching and before daybreak he had signed up as a member of the July 26 Movement. Despite their "contrasting personalities", from this point on Che and Fidel began to foster what dual biographer Simon Reid-Henry deems a "revolutionary friendship that would change the world", as a result of their coinciding commitment to anti-imperialism.

By this point in Guevara’s life, he deemed that U.S.-controlled conglomerates installed and supported repressive regimes around the world. In this vein, he considered Batista a "U.S. puppet whose strings needed cutting." Although he planned to be the group's combat medic, Guevara participated in the military training with the members of the Movement. The key portion of training involved learning hit and run tactics of guerrilla warfare. Guevara and the others underwent arduous 15-hour marches over mountains, across rivers, and through the dense undergrowth, learning and perfecting the procedures of ambush and quick retreat. From the start Guevara was Alberto Bayo's "prize student" among those in training, scoring the highest on all of the tests given. At the end of the course, he was called "the best guerrilla of them all" by their instructor, General Bayo.

Cuban Revolution

Invasion, warfare and Santa Clara

The first step in Castro's revolutionary plan was an assault on Cuba from Mexico via the ''Granma,'' an old, leaky cabin cruiser. They set out for Cuba on November 25, 1956. Attacked by Batista's military soon after landing, many of the 82 men were either killed in the attack or executed upon capture; only 22 found each other afterwards. Guevara wrote that it was during this bloody confrontation that he laid down his medical supplies and picked up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade, finalizing his symbolic transition from physician to combatant.

Only a small band of revolutionaries survived to re-group as a bedraggled fighting force deep in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they received support from the urban guerrilla network of Frank País, the 26th of July Movement, and local campesinos. With the group withdrawn to the Sierra, the world wondered whether Castro was alive or dead until early 1957 when the interview by Herbert Matthews appeared in ''The New York Times''. The article presented a lasting, almost mythical image for Castro and the guerrillas. Guevara was not present for the interview, but in the coming months he began to realize the importance of the media in their struggle. Meanwhile, as supplies and morale diminished, and with an allergy to mosquito bites which resulted in agonizing walnut-sized cysts on his body, Guevara considered these "the most painful days of the war."

During Guevara’s time living hidden among the poor subsistence farmers of the Sierra Maestra mountains, he discovered that there were no schools, no electricity, minimal access to healthcare, and more than 40 percent of the adults were illiterate. As the war continued, Guevara became an integral part of the rebel army and "convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience." Guevara set up factories to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread, taught new recruits about tactics, and organized schools to teach illiterate campesinos to read and write. Moreover, Guevara established health clinics, workshops to teach military tactics, and a newspaper to disseminate information. The man who three years later would be dubbed by ''Time Magazine'': "Castro's brain", at this point was promoted by Fidel Castro to ''Comandante'' (commander) of a second army column.

As the only other ranked Comandante besides Fidel Castro, Guevara was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes shot defectors. Deserters were punished as traitors, and Guevara was known to send squads to track those seeking to go AWOL. As a result, Guevara became feared for his brutality and ruthlessness. During the guerrilla campaign, Guevara was also responsible for the sometimes summary execution of a number of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies. In his diaries, Guevara described the first such execution of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant army guide who admitted treason when it was discovered he accepted the promise of ten thousand pesos for repeatedly giving away the rebel's position for attack by the Cuban air force. Such information also allowed Batista's army to burn the homes of rebel-friendly peasants. Upon Guerra's request that they "end his life quickly", Che stepped forward and shot him in the head, writing "The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for Eutimio so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]." His scientific notations and matter-of-fact description, suggested to one biographer a "remarkable detachment to violence" by that point in the war. Later, Guevara published a literary account of the incident entitled "Death of a Traitor", where he transfigured Eutimio's betrayal and pre-execution request that the revolution "take care of his children", into a "revolutionary parable about redemption through sacrifice."

Although he maintained a demanding and harsh disposition, Guevara also viewed his role of commander as one of a teacher, entertaining his men during breaks between engagements with readings from the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Cervantes, and Spanish lyric poets. Together with this role, and inspired by José Martí's principle of "literacy without borders", Guevara further ensured that his rebel fighters made daily time to teach the uneducated campesinos with whom they lived and fought to read and write, in what Guevara termed the "battle against ignorance."

His commanding officer Fidel Castro has described Guevara as intelligent, daring, and an exemplary leader who "had great moral authority over his troops." Castro further remarked that Guevara took too many risks, even having a "tendency toward foolhardiness." Guevara's teenage lieutenant, Joel Iglesias, recounts such actions in his diary, noting that Guevara's behavior in combat even brought admiration from the enemy. On one occasion Iglesias recounts the time he had been wounded in battle, stating "Che ran out to me, defying the bullets, threw me over his shoulder, and got me out of there. The guards didn't dare fire at him ... later they told me he made a great impression on them when they saw him run out with his pistol stuck in his belt, ignoring the danger, they didn't dare shoot."

Guevara was instrumental in creating the clandestine radio station ''Radio Rebelde'' (Rebel Radio) in February 1958, which broadcast news to the Cuban people with statements by the 26th of July movement, and provided radiotelephone communication between the growing number of rebel columns across the island. Guevara had apparently been inspired to create the station by observing the effectiveness of CIA supplied radio in Guatemala in ousting the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

In late July 1958, Guevara played a critical role in the Battle of Las Mercedes by using his column to halt a force of 1,500 men called up by Batista's General Cantillo in a plan to encircle and destroy Castro's forces. Years later, Major Larry Bockman of the United States Marine Corps would analyze and describe Che's tactical appreciation of this battle as "brilliant." During this time Guevara also became an "expert" at leading hit and run tactics against Batista’s army, and then fading back into the countryside before the army could counterattack.

As the war extended, Guevara led a new column of fighters dispatched westward for the final push towards Havana. Travelling by foot, Guevara embarked on a difficult 7 week march only travelling at night to avoid ambush, and often not eating for several days. In the closing days of December 1958, Guevara’s task was to cut the island in half by taking Las Villas province. In a matter of days he executed a series of "brilliant tactical victories" that gave him control of all but the province’s capital city of Santa Clara. Guevara then directed his "suicide squad" in the attack on Santa Clara, that became the final decisive military victory of the revolution. In the six weeks leading up to the Battle of Santa Clara there were times when his men were completely surrounded, outgunned, and overrun. Che's eventual victory despite being outnumbered 10:1, remains in the view of some observers a "remarkable tour de force in modern warfare."

Radio Rebelde broadcast the first reports that Guevara's column had taken Santa Clara on New Year's Eve 1958. This contradicted reports by the heavily controlled national news media, which had at one stage reported Guevara's death during the fighting. At 3 am on January 1, 1959, upon learning that his generals were negotiating a separate peace with Guevara, Fulgencio Batista boarded a plane in Havana and fled for the Dominican Republic, along with an amassed "fortune of more than $ 300,000,000 through graft and payoffs." The following day on January 2, Guevara entered Havana to take final control of the capital. Fidel Castro took 6 more days to arrive, as he stopped to rally support in several large cities on his way to rolling victoriously into Havana on January 8, 1959. In mid-January 1959, Guevara went to live at a summer villa in Tarara to recover from a violent asthma attack. While there he started the Tarara Group, a group that debated and formed the new plans for Cuba's social, political, and economic development. In addition, Che began to write his book ''Guerrilla Warfare'' while resting at Tarara. When Hilda Gadea arrived in Cuba in late January, Guevara told her that he was involved with another woman, and the two agreed on a divorce, which was finalized on May 22. On June 2, 1959, he married Aleida March, a Cuban-born member of the 26th of July movement with whom he had been living since late 1958. Guevara returned to the seaside village of Tarara in June for his honeymoon with Aleida. Guevara had children from both his marriages, and one illegitimate child, as follows: With Hilda Gadea (married August 18, 1955; divorced May 22, 1959), Hilda Beatriz Guevara Gadea, born February 15, 1956 in Mexico City; died August 21, 1995 in Havana, Cuba; with Aleida March (married June 2, 1959), Aleida Guevara March, born November 24, 1960 in Havana, Cuba, Camilo Guevara March, born May 20, 1962 in Havana, Cuba, Celia Guevara March, born June 14, 1963 in Havana, Cuba, and Ernesto Guevara March, born February 24, 1965 in Havana, Cuba; and with Lilia Rosa López (extramarital), Omar Pérez, born March 19, 1964 in Havana, Cuba.

La Cabaña, land reform, and literacy

The first major political crisis arose over what to do with the captured Batista officials who had been responsible for the worst of the repression. During the rebellion against Batista's dictatorship, the general command of the rebel army, led by Fidel Castro, introduced into the liberated territories the 19th century penal law commonly known as the ''Ley de la Sierra'' (Law of the Sierra). This law included the death penalty for extremely serious crimes, whether perpetrated by the Batista regime or by supporters of the revolution. In 1959, the revolutionary government extended its application to the whole of the republic and to those it considered war criminals, captured and tried after the revolution. According to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, this latter extension was supported by the majority of the population, and followed the same procedure as those in the Nuremberg Trials held by the Allies after World War II.

To implement a portion of this plan, Castro named Guevara commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison, for a five-month tenure (January 2 through June 12, 1959). Guevara was charged with purging the Batista army and consolidating victory by exacting "revolutionary justice" against those considered to be traitors, ''chivatos'' (informants) or war criminals. Serving in the post as commander of La Cabaña, Guevara reviewed the appeals of those convicted during the revolutionary tribunal process. On some occasions the penalty delivered by the tribunal was death by firing squad. Raúl Gómez Treto, senior legal advisor to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, has argued that the death penalty was justified in order to prevent citizens themselves from taking justice into their own hands, as happened twenty years earlier in the anti-Machado rebellion. Biographers note that in January 1959, the Cuban public was in a "lynching mood", and point to a survey at the time showing 93% public approval for the tribunal process. Moreover, a January 22, 1959, Universal Newsreel broadcast in the U.S. and narrated by Ed Herlihy, featured Fidel Castro asking an estimated one million Cubans whether they approved of the executions, and was met with a roaring "''¡Si!''" (yes). With 20,000 Cubans estimated to have been killed at the hands of Batista's collaborators, and many of the war criminals sentenced to death accused of torture and physical atrocities, the newly empowered government carried out executions, punctuated by cries from the crowds of ''"¡paredón!"'' (to the wall), which biographer Jorge Castañeda describes as "without respect for due process."

Although there are differences between different accounts, it is estimated that several hundred people were executed nationwide during this time, with estimates for Guevara's jurisdictional death total at La Cabaña ranging from 55 to 164. Conflicting views exist of Guevara's attitude towards the executions at La Cabaña. Some exiled opposition biographers report that he relished the rituals of the firing squad, and organized them with gusto, while others relate that Guevara pardoned as many prisoners as he could. What is acknowledged by all sides is that Guevara had become a "hardened" man, who had no qualms about the death penalty or summary and collective trials. If the only way to "defend the revolution was to execute its enemies, he would not be swayed by humanitarian or political arguments." This is further confirmed by a February 5, 1959, letter to Luis Paredes López in Buenos Aires where Guevara states unequivocally "The executions by firing squads are not only a necessity for the people of Cuba, but also an imposition of the people."

Along with ensuring "revolutionary justice", the other key early platform of Guevara's was establishing agrarian land reform. Almost immediately after the success of the revolution on January 27, 1959, Guevara made one of his most significant speeches where he talked about "the social ideas of the rebel army." During this speech, he declared that the main concern of the new Cuban government was "the social justice that land redistribution brings about." A few months later on May 17, 1959, the Agrarian Reform Law crafted by Guevara went into effect, limiting the size of all farms to . Any holdings over these limits were expropriated by the government and either redistributed to peasants in parcels or held as state run communes. The law also stipulated that sugar plantations could not be owned by foreigners.

On June 12, 1959, Castro sent Guevara out on a three-month tour of 14 mostly Bandung Pact countries (Morocco, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Yugoslavia, Greece) and the cities of Singapore and Hong Kong. Sending Guevara away from Havana allowed Castro to appear to be distancing himself from Guevara and his Marxist sympathies, which troubled both the United States and some of Castro's July 26 Movement members. Guevara spent 12 days in Japan (July 15–27), participating in negotiations aimed at expanding Cuba's trade relations with that nation. During the visit, he refused to visit and lay a wreath at Japan's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorating soldiers lost during World War II, remarking that the Japanese "imperialists" had "killed millions of Asians." In its place, Guevara stated that he would instead visit Hiroshima, where the American military had detonated an atom-bomb 14 years earlier. Despite his denunciation of Imperial Japan, Guevara also considered President Truman a "macabre clown" for the bombings, and after visiting Hiroshima and its Peace Memorial Museum, he sent back a postcard to Cuba stating "In order to fight better for peace, one must look at Hiroshima."

Upon Guevara's return to Cuba in September 1959, it was evident that Castro now had more political power. The government had begun land seizures included in the agrarian reform law, but was hedging on compensation offers to landowners, instead offering low interest "bonds", a step which put the U.S. on alert. At this point the affected wealthy cattlemen of Camagüey mounted a campaign against the land redistributions, and enlisted the newly disaffected rebel leader Huber Matos, who along with the anti-Communist wing of the 26th of July Movement, joined them in denouncing the "Communist encroachment." During this time Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was offering assistance to the "Anti-Communist Legion of the Caribbean" which was training in the Dominican Republic. This multi-national force, composed mostly of Spaniards and Cubans, but also of Croatians, Germans, Greeks, and right-wing mercenaries, was plotting to topple Castro's new regime.

Such threats were heightened when, on March 4, 1960, two massive explosions ripped through the French freighter ''La Coubre'', which was carrying Belgian munitions from the port of Antwerp, and was docked in Havana Harbor. The blasts killed at least 76 people and injured several hundred, with Guevara personally providing first aid to some of the victims. Cuban leader Fidel Castro immediately accused the CIA of "an act of terrorism" and held a state funeral the following day for the victims of the blast. It was at the memorial service that Alberto Korda took the famous photograph of Guevara, now known as ''Guerrillero Heroico''.

These perceived threats prompted Castro to further eliminate "counter-revolutionaries", and to utilize Guevara to drastically increase the speed of land reform. To implement this plan, a new government agency, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), was established to administer the new Agrarian Reform law. INRA quickly became the most important governing body in the nation, with Guevara serving as its head in his capacity as minister of industries. Under Guevara's command, INRA established its own 100,000 person militia, used first to help the government seize control of the expropriated land and supervise its distribution, and later to set up cooperative farms. The land confiscated included owned by U.S. corporations. Months later, as retaliation, U.S President Dwight D. Eisenhower sharply reduced U.S. imports of Cuban sugar (Cuba’s main cash crop), thus leading Guevara on July 10, 1960, to address over 100,000 workers in front of the Presidential Palace at a rally called to denounce U.S. "economic aggression."

Along with land reform, one of the primary areas that Guevara stressed needed national improvement was in the area of literacy. Before 1959 the official literacy rate for Cuba was between 60–76%, with educational access in rural areas and a lack of instructors the main determining factors. As a result, the Cuban government at Guevara's behest dubbed 1961 the "year of education", and mobilized over 100,000 volunteers into "literacy brigades", who were then sent out into the countryside to construct schools, train new educators, and teach the predominately illiterate ''Guajiros'' (peasants) to read and write. Unlike many of Guevara's later economic initiatives, this campaign was "a remarkable success." By the completion of the Cuban Literacy Campaign, 707,212 adults had been taught to read and write, raising the national literacy rate to 96%.

Accompanying literacy, Guevara was also concerned with establishing universal access to higher education. To accomplish this, the new regime introduced affirmative action to the universities. While announcing this new commitment, Guevara told the gathered faculty and students at the University of Las Villas that the days when education was "a privilege of the white middle class" had ended. "The University" he said, "must paint itself black, mulatto, worker, and peasant." If it didn’t, he warned, the people would break down its doors "and paint the University the colors they like."

The "New Man", Bay of Pigs and Missile Crisis

At this stage, Guevara acquired the additional position of Finance Minister, as well as President of the National Bank. These appointments, combined with his existing position as Minister of Industries, placed Guevara at the zenith of his power, as the "virtual czar" of the Cuban economy. As a consequence of his position at the head of the central bank, it was now Guevara's duty to sign the Cuban currency, which per custom would bear his signature. Instead of using his full name, he signed the bills solely "''Che''." It was through this symbolic act, which horrified many in the Cuban financial sector, that Guevara signaled his distaste for money and the class distinctions it brought about. Guevara's long time friend Ricardo Rojo later remarked that "the day he signed ''Che'' on the bills, (he) literally knocked the props from under the widespread belief that money was sacred."

Guevara's first desired economic goal, which coincided with his aversion for wealth, was to see a nation-wide elimination of material incentives in favor of moral ones. He viewed capitalism as a "contest among wolves" where "one can only win at the cost of others," and thus desired to see the creation of a "new man and woman." Guevara continually stressed that a socialist economy in itself is not "worth the effort, sacrifice, and risks of war and destruction" if it ends up encouraging "greed and individual ambition at the expense of collective spirit." A primary goal of Guevara's thus became to reform "individual consciousness" and values to produce better workers and citizens. In his view, Cuba's "new man" would be able to overcome the "egotism" and "selfishness" that he loathed and discerned was uniquely characteristic of individuals in capitalist societies. In describing this new method of "development", Guevara stated:

A further integral part of fostering a sense of "unity between the individual and the mass", Guevara believed, was volunteer work and will. To display this, Guevara "led by example", working "endlessly at his ministry job, in construction, and even cutting sugar cane" on his day off. He was known for working 36 hours at a stretch, calling meetings after midnight, and eating on the run. Such behavior was emblematic of Guevara's new program of moral incentives, where each worker was now required to meet a quota and produce a certain quantity of goods. As a replacement for the pay increases abolished by Guevara, workers who exceeded their quota now only received a certificate of commendation, while workers who failed to meet their quotas were given a pay cut. Guevara unapologetically defended his personal philosophy towards motivation and work, stating:

In the face of a loss of commercial connections with Western states, Guevara tried to replace them with closer commercial relationships with Eastern Bloc states, visiting a number of Marxist states and signing trade agreements with them. At the end of 1960 he visited Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R., North Korea, Hungary and East Germany and signed, for instance, a trade agreement in East Berlin on December 17, 1960. Such agreements helped Cuba's economy to a certain degree but also had the disadvantage of a growing economic dependency on the Eastern Bloc. It was also in East Germany where Guevara met Tamara Bunke (later known as "Tania"), who was assigned as his interpreter, and who would years later join him and be killed with him in Bolivia.

Whatever the merits or demerits of Guevara’s economic principles, his programs were unsuccessful. Guevara's program of "moral incentives" for workers caused a rapid drop in productivity and a rapid rise in absenteeism. In reference to the collective failings of Guevara's vision, reporter I.F. Stone who interviewed Guevara twice during this time, remarked that he was "Galahad not Robespierre", while opining that "in a sense he was, like some early saint, taking refuge in the desert. Only there could the purity of the faith be safeguarded from the unregenerate revisionism of human nature."

On April 17, 1961, 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles invaded Cuba during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Guevara did not play a key role in the fighting, as one day before the invasion a warship carrying Marines faked an invasion off the West Coast of Pinar Del Rio and drew forces commanded by Guevara to that region. However, historians give him a share of credit for the victory as he was director of instruction for Cuba’s armed forces at the time. Author Tad Szulc in his explanation of the Cuban victory, assigns Guevara partial credit, stating: "The revolutionaries won because Che Guevara, as the head of the Instruction Department of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in charge of the militia training program, had done so well in preparing 200,000 men and women for war." It was also during this deployment that he suffered a bullet grazing to the cheek when his pistol fell out of its holster and accidentally discharged.

In August 1961, during an economic conference of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Che Guevara sent a note of "gratitude" to U.S. President John F. Kennedy through Richard N. Goodwin, a young secretary of the White House. It read "Thanks for Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs). Before the invasion, the revolution was shaky. Now it's stronger than ever." In response to U.S. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon presenting the Alliance for Progress for ratification by the meeting, Guevara antagonistically attacked the United States claim of being a "democracy", stating that such a system was not compatible with "financial oligarchy, discrimination against blacks, and outrages by the Ku Klux Klan." Guevara continued, speaking out against the "persecution" that in his view "drove scientists like Oppenheimer from their posts, deprived the world for years of the marvelous voice of Paul Robeson, and sent the Rosenbergs to their deaths against the protests of a shocked world." Guevara ended his remarks by insinuating that the United States was not interested in real reforms, sardonically quipping that "U.S. experts never talk about agrarian reform; they prefer a safe subject, like a better water supply. In short they seem to prepare the revolution of the toilets."

Guevara, who was practically the architect of the Soviet-Cuban relationship, then played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. A few weeks after the crisis, during an interview with the British communist newspaper the ''Daily Worker'', Guevara was still fuming over the perceived Soviet betrayal and told correspondent Sam Russell that, if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off. While expounding on the incident later, Guevara reiterated that the cause of socialist liberation against global "imperialist aggression", would ultimately have been worth the possibility of "millions of atomic war victims." The missile crisis further convinced Guevara that the two World's superpowers (U.S. & U.S.S.R.) used Cuba as a pawn in their own global strategies. Afterward he denounced the Soviets almost as frequently as he denounced the Americans.

International diplomacy

By December 1964, Che Guevara had emerged as a "revolutionary statesman of world stature" and thus traveled to New York City as head of the Cuban delegation to speak at the United Nations. During his impassioned address, he criticized the United Nations inability to confront the "brutal policy of apartheid" in South Africa, proclaiming "can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?" Guevara then denounced the United States policy towards their black population, stating:

An indignant Guevara ended his speech by reciting the ''Second Declaration of Havana'', decreeing Latin America a "family of 200 million brothers who suffer the same miseries." This "epic", Guevara declared, would be written by the "hungry Indian masses, peasants without land, exploited workers, and progressive masses." To Guevara the conflict was a struggle of mass and ideas, which would be carried forth by those "mistreated and scorned by imperialism" who were previously considered "a weak and submissive flock." With this "flock", Guevara now asserted, "Yankee monopoly capitalism" now terrifyingly saw their "gravediggers." It would be during this "hour of vindication" Guevara pronounced, that the "anonymous mass" would begin to write its own history "with its own blood", and reclaim those "rights that were laughed at by one and all for 500 years." Guevara ended his remarks to the United Nations general assembly by hypothesizing that this "wave of anger” would "sweep the lands of Latin America", and that the labor masses who "turn the wheel of history", for the first time were "awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected.

Guevara later learned that there were two failed attempts on his life by Cuban exiles during his stop at the U.N. complex. The first from Molly Gonzales who tried to break through barricades upon his arrival with a seven-inch hunting knife, and later during his address by Guillermo Novo with a timer-initiated bazooka that was fired off target from a boat in the East River at the United Nations Headquarters. Afterwards, Guevara commented on both incidents stating that "it is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun", while adding with a languid wave of his cigar that the explosion had "given the whole thing more flavor."

While in New York City, Guevara also appeared on the CBS Sunday news program ''Face the Nation'' and met with a range of people, from U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy to associates of Malcolm X. Malcolm X expressed his admiration, declaring Guevara "one of the most revolutionary men in this country right now" while reading a statement from him to a crowd at the Audubon Ballroom.

On December 17, Guevara left for Paris and embarked on a three-month tour that included the People's Republic of China, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Dahomey, Congo-Brazzaville and Tanzania, with stops in Ireland and Prague. While in Ireland, Guevara embraced his own Irish heritage, celebrating Saint Patrick's Day in Limerick City. He wrote to his father on this visit, humorously stating "I am in this green Ireland of your ancestors. When they found out, the television [station] came to ask me about the Lynch genealogy, but in case they were horse thieves or something like that, I didn't say much."

During this voyage, he wrote a letter to Carlos Quijano, editor of a Uruguayan weekly, which was later re-titled ''Socialism and Man in Cuba''. Outlined in the treatise was Guevara's summons for the creation of a new consciousness, status of work, and role of the individual. He also laid out the reasoning behind his anti-capitalist sentiments, stating:

Guevara ended the essay by declaring that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love" and beckoning on all revolutionaries to "strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into acts that serve as examples", thus becoming "a moving force." The genesis for Guevara's assertions relied on the fact that he believed the example of the Cuban Revolution was "something spiritual that would transcend all borders."

Algiers, the Soviets and China

In Algiers, Algeria on February 24, 1965, Guevara made what turned out to be his last public appearance on the international stage when he delivered a speech at an economic seminar on Afro-Asian solidarity. He specified the moral duty of the socialist countries, accusing them of tacit complicity with the exploiting Western countries. He proceeded to outline a number of measures which he said the communist-bloc countries must implement in order to accomplish the defeat of imperialism. Having criticized the Soviet Union (the primary financial backer of Cuba) in such a public manner, he returned to Cuba on March 14 to a solemn reception by Fidel and Raúl Castro, Osvaldo Dorticós and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez at the Havana airport.

As revealed in his last public speech in Algiers, Guevara had come to view the Northern Hemisphere, led by the U.S. in the West and the Soviet Union in the East, as the exploiter of the Southern Hemisphere. He strongly supported Communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War, and urged the peoples of other developing countries to take up arms and create "many Vietnams."

Moreover, the coincidence of Guevara's views with those expounded by the Chinese Communist leadership under Mao Zedong was increasingly problematic for Cuba as the nation's economy became more and more dependent on the Soviet Union. Since the early days of the Cuban revolution, Guevara had been considered by many an advocate of Maoist strategy in Latin America and the originator of a plan for the rapid industrialization of Cuba which was frequently compared to China's "Great Leap Forward." Castro became weary of Guevara's opposition to Soviet conditions and recommendations; measures that Castro saw as necessary, but which Guevara described as corrupt and "pre-monopolist."

In Guevara's private writings from this time (since released), he displays his growing criticism of the Soviet political economy, believing that they had "forgotten Marx". This led Guevara to denounce a range of Soviet practices including what he saw as their attempt to "air-brush the inherent violence of class struggle integral to the transition from capitalism to socialism", their "dangerous" policy of peaceful co-existence with the United States, their failure to push for a "change in consciousness" towards the idea of work, and their attempt to "liberalise" the socialist economy. It was Guevara's desire to see the complete elimination of money, interest, commodity production, the market economy, and "mercantile relationships"; all conditions that the Soviets argued would only disappear when world communism was achieved. Disagreeing with this incrementalist approach, Guevara's critique of the ''Soviet Manual of Political Economy'' was encapsulated with him correctly predicting that since the Soviets were not willing to abolish the law of value (as Guevara desired), they would eventually return to capitalism.

Two weeks after his Algiers speech, Guevara dropped out of public life and then vanished altogether. His whereabouts were a great mystery in Cuba, as he was generally regarded as second in power to Castro himself. His disappearance was variously attributed to the failure of the industrialization scheme he had advocated while minister of industry, to pressure exerted on Castro by Soviet officials disapproving of Guevara's pro-Chinese Communist stance on the Sino-Soviet split, and to serious differences between Guevara and the pragmatic Castro regarding Cuba's economic development and ideological line. Pressed by international speculation regarding Guevara's fate, Castro stated on June 16, 1965 that the people would be informed when Guevara himself wished to let them know. Still, rumors spread both inside and outside Cuba. On October 3, Castro revealed an undated letter purportedly written to him by Guevara some months earlier: in it, Guevara reaffirmed his enduring solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, but declared his intention to leave Cuba to fight for the revolutionary cause abroad. Additionally, he resigned from all his positions in the government and party, and renounced his honorary Cuban citizenship.

Congo

In early 1965, Guevara went to Africa to offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and therefore had enormous revolutionary potential. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had fraternal relations with Che dating back to his 1959 visit, saw Guevara's plans to fight in the Congo as "unwise" and warned that he would become a "Tarzan" figure, doomed to failure. Despite the warning, Guevara traveled to the Congo while using the alias Ramón Benítez. Guevara led the Cuban operation in support of the Marxist Simba movement, which had emerged from the ongoing Congo Crisis. Guevara, his second-in-command Victor Dreke, and 12 other Cuban expeditionaries arrived in the Congo on April 24, 1965 and a contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans joined them soon afterward. They collaborated for a time with guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had previously helped supporters of the overthrown Patrice Lumumba lead an unsuccessful revolt months earlier. As an admirer of the late Lumumba, Guevara declared that his "murder should be a lesson for all of us." Guevara, with limited knowledge of Swahili and the local languages was assigned a teenage interpreter Freddy Ilanga. Over the course of seven months Ilanga grew to "admire the hard-working Guevara", who according to Mr. Ilanga, "showed the same respect to black people as he did to whites." However, Guevara soon became disillusioned with the discipline of Kabila's troops and later dismissed him, stating "nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour."

As an additional obstacle, white South African mercenaries, led by Mike Hoare in concert with Cuban exiles and the CIA, worked with the Congo National Army to thwart Guevara in the mountains near the village of Fizi on Lake Tanganyika. They were able to monitor his communications, and so pre-empted his attacks and interdicted his supply lines. Despite the fact that Guevara sought to conceal his presence in the Congo, the U.S. government was aware of his location and activities: The National Security Agency was intercepting all of his incoming and outgoing transmissions via equipment aboard the , a floating listening post that continuously cruised the Indian Ocean off Dar es Salaam for that purpose.

Guevara's aim was to export the revolution by instructing local anti-Mobutu Simba fighters in Marxist ideology and foco theory strategies of guerrilla warfare. In his ''Congo Diary'', he cites the incompetence, intransigence and infighting of the local Congolese forces as key reasons for the revolt's failure. Later that year on November 20, 1965, in ill health with dysentery, suffering from acute asthma, and disheartened after seven months of frustrations, Guevara left the Congo with the Cuban survivors (Six members of his 12-man column had died). At one point Guevara considered sending the wounded back to Cuba, and fighting in Congo alone until his death, as a revolutionary example; after being urged by his comrades and pressed by two emissaries sent by Castro, at the last moment he reluctantly agreed to leave Africa. In speaking about his experience in the Congo months later, Guevara concluded that he left rather than fight to the death because: "The human element failed. There is no will to fight. The leaders are corrupt. In a word... there was nothing to do." Guevara also declared that "we can't liberate by ourselves a country that does not want to fight." A few weeks later, when writing the preface to the diary he kept during the Congo venture, he began: "This is the history of a failure."

Guevara was reluctant to return to Cuba, because Castro had made public Guevara's "farewell letter"—a letter intended to only be revealed in the case of his death—wherein he severed all ties in order to devote himself to revolution throughout the world. As a result, Guevara spent the next six months living clandestinely in Dar es Salaam and Prague. During this time he compiled his memoirs of the Congo experience, and wrote drafts of two more books, one on philosophy and the other on economics. He then visited several Western European countries to test his new false identity papers, created by Cuban Intelligence for his later travels to South America. As Guevara prepared for Bolivia, he secretly traveled back to Cuba to visit Castro, as well as to see his wife and to write a last letter to his five children to be read upon his death, which ended with him instructing them:

Bolivia

In late 1966, Guevara's location was still not public knowledge, although representatives of Mozambique's independence movement, the FRELIMO, reported that they met with Guevara in late 1966 or early 1967 in Dar es Salaam regarding his offer to aid in their revolutionary project, which they ultimately rejected. In a speech at the 1967 International Workers' Day rally in Havana, the Acting Minister of the armed forces, Major Juan Almeida, announced that Guevara was "serving the revolution somewhere in Latin America".

Before he departed for Bolivia, Guevara altered his appearance by shaving off his beard and part of the top of his head as well as dyeing it grey so he would be unrecognizable as Che Guevara. On November 3, 1966, Guevara secretly arrived in La Paz, Bolivia on a flight from Montevideo, Uruguay under the false name Adolfo Mena González, and posed as a Uruguayan businessman working for the Organization of American States.

Guevara's first base camp was located in the montane dry forest in the remote Ñancahuazú region. Training at the camp in the Ñancahuazú valley proved to be hazardous and little was accomplished in the way of building a guerrilla army. Former Stasi operative Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, better known by her ''nom de guerre'' "Tania", who had been installed as his primary agent in La Paz, was reportedly also working for the KGB and in several Western sources she is inferred to have unwittingly served Soviet interests by leading Bolivian authorities to Guevara's trail.

Guevara's guerrilla force, numbering about 50 and operating as the ELN (''Ejército de Liberación Nacional de Bolivia''; "National Liberation Army of Bolivia"), was well equipped and scored a number of early successes against Bolivian army regulars in the difficult terrain of the mountainous Camiri region. As a result of Guevara’s units winning several skirmishes against Bolivian troops in the spring and summer of 1967, the Bolivian government began to overestimate the true size of the guerrilla force. But in September, the Army managed to eliminate two guerrilla groups in a violent battle, reportedly killing one of the leaders.

Researchers hypothesize that Guevara's plan for fomenting revolution in Bolivia failed, for an array of reasons:

He had expected to deal only with the Bolivian military, who were poorly trained and equipped, and was unaware that the U.S. government had sent a team of the CIA's Special Activities Division commandos and other operatives into Bolivia to aid the anti-insurrection effort. The Bolivian Army would also be trained, advised, and supplied by U.S. Army Special Forces including a recently organized elite battalion of Rangers trained in jungle warfare that set up camp in La Esperanza, a small settlement close to the location of Guevara's guerrillas. Guevara had expected assistance and cooperation from the local dissidents which he did not receive, nor did he receive support from Bolivia's Communist Party, under the leadership of Mario Monje, which was oriented toward Moscow rather than Havana. In Guevara's own diary captured after his death, he wrote about the Communist Party of Bolivia, which he characterized as "distrustful, disloyal and stupid."

He had expected to remain in radio contact with Havana. The two shortwave transmitters provided to him by Cuba were faulty; thus the guerrillas were unable to communicate with and be resupplied, leaving them isolated and stranded.

In addition, Guevara's known preference for confrontation rather than compromise, which had previously surfaced during his guerrilla warfare campaign in Cuba, contributed to his inability to develop successful working relationships with local leaders in Bolivia, just as it had in the Congo. This tendency had existed in Cuba, but had been kept in check by the timely interventions and guidance of Fidel Castro.

The end result was that Guevara was unable to attract inhabitants of the local area to join his militia during the 11 months he attempted recruitment. Near the end of the venture Guevara wrote in his diary that "the peasants do not give us any help, and are turning into informers."

Capture and execution

Félix Rodríguez, a Cuban exile turned CIA Special Activities Division operative, advised Bolivian troops during the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia. In addition, the 2007 documentary ''My Enemy's Enemy'', directed by Kevin Macdonald, alleges that Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie aka ''"The Butcher of Lyon"'', advised and possibly helped the CIA orchestrate Guevara's eventual capture.

On October 7, an informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment in the Yuro ravine. On October 8, they encircled the area with 1,800 soldiers, and Guevara was wounded and taken prisoner while leading a detachment with Simeón Cuba Sarabia. Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson reports Bolivian Sergeant Bernardino Huanca's account: that a twice wounded Guevara, his gun rendered useless, shouted "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead."

Guevara was tied up and taken to a dilapidated mud schoolhouse in the nearby village of La Higuera on the night of October 8. For the next half day, Guevara refused to be interrogated by Bolivian officers and would only speak quietly to Bolivian soldiers. One of those Bolivian soldiers, helicopter pilot Jaime Nino de Guzman, describes Che as looking "dreadful". According to Guzman, Guevara was shot through the right calf, his hair was matted with dirt, his clothes were shredded, and his feet were covered in rough leather sheaths. Despite his haggard appearance, he recounts that "Che held his head high, looked everyone straight in the eyes and asked only for something to smoke." De Guzman states that he "took pity" and gave him a small bag of tobacco for his pipe, with Guevara then smiling and thanking him. Later on the night of October 8, Guevara, despite having his hands tied, kicked Bolivian Officer Espinosa into the wall, after the officer entered the schoolhouse in order to snatch Guevara's pipe from his mouth as a souvenir. In another instance of defiance, Guevara spat in the face of Bolivian Rear Admiral Ugarteche shortly before his execution.

The following morning on October 9, Guevara asked to see the ''"maestra"'' (school teacher) of the village, 22-year-old Julia Cortez. Cortez would later state that she found Guevara to be an "agreeable looking man with a soft and ironic glance" and that during their conversation she found herself "unable to look him in the eye", because his "gaze was unbearable, piercing, and so tranquil." During their short conversation, Guevara pointed out to Cortez the poor condition of the schoolhouse, stating that it was "anti-pedagogical" to expect campesino students to be educated there, while "government officials drive Mercedes cars" ... declaring "that's what we are fighting against."

Later that morning on October 9, Bolivian President René Barrientos ordered that Guevara be killed. The order was relayed by Félix Rodríguez despite the U.S. government’s desire that Guevara be taken to Panama for further interrogation. The executioner was Mario Terán, a half-drunken sergeant in the Bolivian army who had requested to shoot Che on the basis of the fact that three of his friends from B Company, all named "Mario", had been killed in an earlier firefight with Guevara's band of guerrillas. To make the bullet wounds appear consistent with the story the government planned to release to the public, Félix Rodríguez ordered Terán to aim carefully to make it appear that Guevara had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army. Gary Prado, the Bolivian captain in command of the army company that captured Guevara, said that the reasons Barrientos ordered the immediate execution of Guevara is so there would be no possibility that Guevara would escape from prison, and also so there would be no drama in regard to a trial.

Moments before Guevara was executed he was asked by a Bolivian soldier if he was thinking about his own immortality. "No", he replied, "I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution." When Sergeant Terán entered the hut, Che Guevara then told his executioner, "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!" Terán hesitated, then opened fire with his semiautomatic rifle, hitting Guevara in the arms and legs. Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently biting one of his wrists to avoid crying out. Terán then fired several times again, wounding him fatally in the chest at 1:10 pm, according to Rodríguez. In all, Guevara was shot nine times. This included five times in the legs, once in the right shoulder and arm, once in the chest, and finally in the throat.

Months earlier, during his last public declaration to the Tricontinental Conference, Guevara wrote his own epitaph, stating "Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons."

Post-execution, remains and memorial

After his execution, Guevara's body was lashed to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown to nearby Vallegrande, where photographs were taken of him lying on a concrete slab in the laundry room of the Nuestra Señora de Malta. Several witnesses were called to confirm that it was Guevara, key amongst them British journalist Richard Gott, the only witness to have met Guevara when he was alive.

Put on public show, as hundreds of local residents filed past the body, many of them considered Guevara's corpse to represent a "Christ-like" visage, with some of them even surreptitiously clipping locks of his hair as divine relics. Such comparisons were further extended when two weeks later upon seeing the post-mortem photographs, English art critic John Berger observed that they resembled two famous paintings: Rembrandt's ''The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp'' and Andrea Mantegna's ''Lamentation over the Dead Christ''. There were also four correspondents present when Guevara's body arrived in Vallegrande, including Bjorn Kumm of the Swedish ''Aftonbladet'', who described the scene in an November 11, 1967, exclusive for ''The New Republic''.

A declassified memorandum dated October 11, 1967 to United States President Lyndon B. Johnson from his National Security Advisor, Walt Whitman Rostow, called the decision to kill Guevara "stupid" but "understandable from a Bolivian standpoint." After the execution, Rodríguez took several of Guevara's personal items, including a Rolex GMT Master wristwatch which he continued to wear many years later, often showing them to reporters during the ensuing years. Today, some of these belongings, including his flashlight, are on display at the CIA. After a military doctor amputated his hands, Bolivian army officers transferred Guevara's body to an undisclosed location and refused to reveal whether his remains had been buried or cremated. The hands were preserved in formaldehyde to be sent to Buenos Aires for fingerprint identification. (His fingerprints were on file with the Argentine police.) They were later sent to Cuba.

On October 15, Fidel Castro acknowledged that Guevara was dead and proclaimed three days of public mourning throughout the island. On October 18, Castro addressed a crowd of one million mourners in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución and spoke about Guevara's character as a revolutionary. Fidel Castro closed his impassioned eulogy thusly:

French intellectual Régis Debray, who was captured in April 1967 while with Guevara in Bolivia, gave an interview from prison, in August 1968, where he enlarged on the circumstances of Guevara's capture. Debray, who had lived with Guevara's band of guerrillas for a short time, said that in his view they were "victims of the forest" and thus "eaten by the jungle." Debray described a destitute situation where Guevara's men suffered malnutrition, lack of water, absence of shoes, and only possessed six blankets for 22 men. Debray recounts that Guevara and the others had been suffering an "illness" which caused their hands and feet to swell into "mounds of flesh" to the point where you could not discern the fingers on their hands. Despite the futile situation, Debray described Guevara as "optimistic about the future of Latin America" and remarked that Guevara was "resigned to die in the knowledge that his death would be a sort of renaissance", noting that Guevara perceived death "as a promise of rebirth" and "ritual of renewal."

In late 1995, retired Bolivian General Mario Vargas revealed to Jon Lee Anderson, author of ''Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life'', that Guevara's body was located near a Vallegrande airstrip. The result was a multi-national search for the remains, which would last more than a year. In July 1997, a team of Cuban geologists and Argentine forensic anthropologists discovered the remnants of seven bodies in two mass graves, including one man with amputated hands (like Guevara). Bolivian government officials with the Ministry of Interior later identified the body as Guevara when the excavated teeth "perfectly matched" a plaster mold of Che's teeth, made in Cuba prior to his Congolese expedition. The "clincher" then arrived when Argentine forensic anthropologist Alejandro Inchaurregui inspected the inside hidden pocket of a blue jacket dug up next to the handless cadaver and found a small bag of pipe tobacco. Nino de Guzman, the Bolivian helicopter pilot who had given Che a small bag of tobacco, later remarked that he "had serious doubts" at first and "thought the Cubans would just find any old bones and call it Che"; he stated "after hearing about the tobacco pouch, I have no doubts." On October 17, 1997, Guevara's remains, with those of six of his fellow combatants, were laid to rest with military honors in a specially built mausoleum in the Cuban city of Santa Clara, where he had commanded over the decisive military victory of the Cuban Revolution.

Removed when Guevara was captured were his 30,000-word, hand-written diary, a collection of his personal poetry, and a short story he authored about a young Communist guerrilla who learns to overcome his fears. His diary documented events of the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia with the first entry on November 7, 1966 shortly after his arrival at the farm in Ñancahuazú, and the last dated October 7, 1967, the day before his capture. The diary tells how the guerrillas were forced to begin operations prematurely because of discovery by the Bolivian Army, explains Guevara's decision to divide the column into two units that were subsequently unable to re-establish contact, and describes their overall unsuccessful venture. It also records the rift between Guevara and the Communist Party of Bolivia that resulted in Guevara having significantly fewer soldiers than originally expected and shows that Guevara had a great deal of difficulty recruiting from the local populace, partly because of the fact that the guerrilla group had learned Quechua, unaware that the local language was actually a Tupí–Guaraní language. As the campaign drew to an unexpected close, Guevara became increasingly ill. He suffered from ever-worsening bouts of asthma, and most of his last offensives were carried out in an attempt to obtain medicine.

The Bolivian Diary was quickly and crudely translated by ''Ramparts'' magazine and circulated around the world. There are at least four additional diaries in existence—those of Israel Reyes Zayas (Alias "Braulio"), Harry Villegas Tamayo ("Pombo"), Eliseo Reyes Rodriguez ("Rolando")—each of which reveals additional aspects of the events. In July 2008, the Bolivian government of Evo Morales unveiled Guevara's formerly sealed diaries composed in two frayed notebooks, along with a logbook and several black-and-white photographs. At this event, Bolivia's vice minister of culture, Pablo Groux, expressed that there were plans to publish photographs of every handwritten page later in the year. Meanwhile, in August 2009, anthropologists working for Bolivia's Justice Ministry discovered and unearthed five of Guevara's fellow guerrillas near the Bolivian town of Teoponte.

Legacy

Over forty years after his execution, Che's life and legacy still remain a contentious issue. The contradictions of his ethos at various points in his life have created a complex character of unending duality.

An array of notable individuals have lauded Guevara as a hero; for example, Nelson Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom" while Jean-Paul Sartre described him as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age." Others who expressed their admiration include authors Graham Greene who remarked that Che "represented the idea of gallantry, chivalry, and adventure", and Susan Sontag who expounded that "(Che's) goal was nothing less than the cause of humanity itself." In the black community, philosopher Frantz Fanon professed Guevara to be "the world symbol of the possibilities of one man", while Black Panther Party head Stokely Carmichael eulogized that "Che Guevara is not dead, his ideas are with us." Praise has been reflected throughout the political spectrum, with the anarcho-capitalist / libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard extolling Guevara as a "heroic figure", lamenting after his death that "more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, (Che) was the living embodiment of the principle of revolution", while journalist Christopher Hitchens commented that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do—fought and died for his beliefs." Guevara remains a beloved national hero to many in Cuba, where his image adorns the $3 Cuban Peso and school children begin each morning by pledging "We will be like Che." In his homeland of Argentina, where high schools bear his name, numerous Che museums dot the country, which in 2008 unveiled a bronze statue of him in his birth city of Rosario. Additionally, Guevara has been sanctified by some Bolivian campesinos as "Saint Ernesto", to whom they pray for assistance.

Conversely, Jacobo Machover, an exiled opposition author, dismisses the hero-worshipping and portrays him as a ruthless executioner. Detractors have theorized that in much of Latin America, Che-inspired revolutions had the practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism and internecine conflict for many years. In an assessment of Guevara, British historian Hugh Thomas opines that Che was a "brave, sincere and determined man who was also obstinate, narrow, and dogmatic." At the end of his life, according to Thomas, "he seems to have become convinced of the virtues of violence for its own sake", while "his influence over Castro for good or evil" grew after his death, as Fidel took up many of his views. In Thomas' assessment "as in the case of Martí, or Lawrence of Arabia, failure has brightened, not dimmed the legend." Alvaro Vargas Llosa of The Independent Institute has hypothesized that Guevara’s contemporary followers "delude themselves by clinging to a myth", while describing Guevara as "Marxist Puritan" who employed his rigid power to suppress dissent, while also operating as a "cold-blooded killing machine". Llosa has also accused Guevara's "fanatical disposition" as being the linchpin of the "Sovietization" of the Cuban revolution, speculating that he possessed a "total subordination of reality to blind ideological orthodoxy." Guevara remains a hated figure amongst many in the Cuban exile and Cuban-American community of the United States, who view him with animosity as "the butcher of La Cabaña."

Despite his polarized status, a high-contrast monochrome graphic of his face, created in 1968 by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, has become one of the world's most universally merchandized and objectified images, found on an endless array of items, including t-shirts, hats, posters, tattoos, and bikinis, ironically contributing to the consumer culture Guevara despised. Yet, he still remains a transcendent figure both in specifically political contexts and as a wide-ranging popular icon of youthful rebellion.

Timeline

Archival media

Video footage

Guevara interviewed in 1964 on a visit to Dublin, Ireland, (2:53), English translation, from RTÉ Libraries and Archives, Video Clip

Guevara reciting a poem, (1:00), English subtitles, from ''El Che: Investigating a Legend'' – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip

Guevara showing support for Fidel Castro, (0:22), English subtitles, from ''El Che: Investigating a Legend'' – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip

Guevara speaking about labor, (0:28), English subtitles, from ''El Che: Investigating a Legend'' – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip

Guevara speaking about the Bay of Pigs, (0:17), English subtitles, from ''El Che: Investigating a Legend'' – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip

Guevara speaking against imperialism, (1:20), English subtitles, from ''El Che: Investigating a Legend'' – Kultur Video 2001, Video Clip

Audio recording

Guevara interviewed on ABC's ''Issues and Answers'', (23:53), English translation, narrated by Lisa Howard, March 24, 1964, Audio clip

List of works

Originally written in Spanish by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, later translated into English ''A New Society: Reflections for Today's World'', Ocean Press, 1996, ISBN 1-875284-06-0 ''Back on the Road: A Journey Through Latin America'', Grove Press, 2002, ISBN 0-8021-3942-6 ''Che Guevara, Cuba, and the Road to Socialism'', Pathfinder Press, 1991, ISBN 0-87348-643-9 ''Che Guevara on Global Justice'', Ocean Press (AU), 2002, ISBN 1-876175-45-1 ''Che Guevara: Radical Writings on Guerrilla Warfare, Politics and Revolution,'' Filiquarian Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1-59986-999-3 ''Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics & Revolution'', Ocean Press, 2003, ISBN 1-876175-69-9 ''Che Guevara Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings'', Pathfinder Press (NY), 1980, ISBN 0-87348-602-1 ''Che Guevara Talks to Young People'', Pathfinder, 2000, ISBN 0-87348-911-X ''Che: The Diaries of Ernesto Che Guevara'', Ocean Press (AU), 2008, ISBN 1-920888-93-4 ''Colonialism is Doomed'', Ministry of External Relations: Republic of Cuba, 1964, ASIN B0010AAN1K ''Critical Notes on Political Economy: A Revolutionary Humanist Approach to Marxist Economics'', Ocean Press, 2008, ISBN 1-876175-55-9 ''Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956–58'', Pathfinder Press (NY), 1996, ISBN 0-87348-824-5 ''Guerrilla Warfare: Authorized Edition'', Ocean Press, 2006, ISBN 1-920888-28-4 ''Latin America: Awakening of a Continent'', Ocean Press, 2005, ISBN 1-876175-73-7 ''Marx & Engels: An Introduction'', Ocean Press, 2007, ISBN 1-920888-92-6 ''Our America And Theirs: Kennedy And The Alliance For Progress'', Ocean Press, 2006, ISBN 1-876175-81-8 ''Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War: Authorized Edition'', Ocean Press, 2005, ISBN 1-920888-33-0 ''Self Portrait Che Guevara'', Ocean Press (AU), 2004, ISBN 1-876175-82-6 ''Socialism and Man in Cuba'', Pathfinder Press (NY), 1989, ISBN 0-87348-577-7 ''The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo'', Grove Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8021-3834-9 ''The Argentine'', Ocean Press (AU), 2008, ISBN 1-920888-93-4 ''The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara'', Pathfinder Press, 1994, ISBN 0-87348-766-4 ''The Great Debate on Political Economy'', Ocean Press, 2006, ISBN 1-876175-54-0 ''The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America'', London: Verso, 1996, ISBN 1-85702-399-4 ''The Secret Papers of a Revolutionary: The Diary of Che Guevara'', American Reprint Co, 1975, ASIN B0007GW08W ''To Speak the Truth: Why Washington's "Cold War" Against Cuba Doesn't End'', Pathfinder, 1993, ISBN 0-87348-633-1

See also

Main:

Che Guevara (photo)

Che Guevara in popular culture

Legacy of Che Guevara

Guevarism

Books:

The Motorcycle Diaries (book)

''Guerrilla Warfare'' (book)

''Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War'' (book)

Films:

''Che – Part 1 & Part 2'' (2008 film)

''The Motorcycle Diaries'' (film)

''Che!'' (1969 film)

''The Hands of Che Guevara'' (film)

Notes

References

Almudevar, Lola (October 9, 2007). "Bolivia marks capture, execution of 'Che' Guevara 40 years ago". ''San Francisco Chronicle''.

Anderson, Jon Lee (1997). ''Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life''. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-1600-0.

Bamford, James (2002). ''Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency'' (Reprint edition). New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-49908-6.

BBC News (January 17, 2001). "Profile: Laurent Kabila". Accessed April 10, 2008.

BBC News (May 26, 2001). ''Che Guevara photographer dies''. Accessed January 4, 2006.

BBC News (October 9, 2007). "Cuba pays tribute to Che Guevara". ''BBC News, International version''.

Ben Bella, Ahmed (October 1997). "Che as I knew him". ''Le Monde diplomatique''. mondediplo.com. Accessed February 28, 2008.

Bockman, USMC Major Larry James (April 1, 1984). ''The Spirit of Moncada: Fidel Castro's Rise to Power 1953–1959''. United States: Marine Corps Command and Staff College.

Castañeda, Jorge G (1998). ''Che Guevara: Compañero''. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-75940-9.

Castro, Fidel (editors Bonachea, Rolando E. and Nelson P. Valdés; 1972). ''Revolutionary Struggle 1947–1958''. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-02065-3.

DePalma, Anthony (2006). ''The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times''. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 1-58648-332-3.

Dorfman, Ariel (June 14, 1999). ''Time 100: Che Guevara''. ''Time magazine''.

Dorschner, John and Roberto Fabricio (1980). ''The Winds of December: The Cuban Revolution of 1958''. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegen. ISBN 0-698-10993-7.

Dumur, Jean (interviewer) (1964). ''L'interview de Che Guevara'' (Video clip; 9:43; with English subtitles).

Gálvez, William (1999). ''Che in Africa: Che Guevara's Congo Diary''. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999. ISBN 1-876175-08-7.

Gómez Treto, Raúl (Spring 1991). "Thirty Years of Cuban Revolutionary Penal Law". ''Latin American Perspectives'' 18(2), Cuban Views on the Revolution. 114–125.

Gott, Richard (August 11, 2005). "Bolivia on the Day of the Death of Che Guevara". ''Le Monde diplomatique''. Accessed February 26, 2006.

Grant, Will (October 8, 2007). "CIA man recounts Che Guevara's death". ''BBC News''. Accessed February 29, 2008.

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1995). ''Motorcycle Diaries''. London: Verso Books.

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (editor Waters, Mary Alice) (1996). ''Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War 1956–1958''. New York: Pathfinder. ISBN 0-87348-824-5.

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1965). "Che Guevara's Farewell Letter".

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1967a). "English Translation of Complete Text of his ''Message to the Tricontinental''"

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1967b). ''"Diario (Bolivia)"''. Written 1966–1967.

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (editors Bonachea, Rolando E. and Nelson P. Valdés; 1969). ''Che: Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara'', Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-52016-8

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (1972). ''Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria''.

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (translated from the Spanish by Patrick Camiller; 2000). ''The African Dream''. New York: Grove Publishers. ISBN 0-8021-3834-9.

Guevara, Ernesto "Che" (2005). "Socialism and man in Cuba" (First published March 12, 1965 as "From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today"). ''Che Guevara Reader''. (1997). Ocean Press. ISBN 1-875284-93-1

Guevara Lynch, Ernesto (2000). ''Aquí va un soldado de América''. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés Editores, S.A. ISBN 84-01-01327-5.

Hall, Kevin (2004). "In Bolivia, Push for Che Tourism Follows Locals' Reverence". ''Common Dreams''. commondreams.org. Accessed November 15, 2008.

Haney, Rich (2005). ''Celia Sánchez: The Legend of Cuba's Revolutionary Heart''. New York: Algora Pub. ISBN 0-87586-395-7.

Hari, Johann (October 6, 2007). "Johann Hari: Should Che be an icon? No". ''The Independent''.

Hart, Joseph (2004). ''Che: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of a Revolutionary''. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1-56025-519-6.

Ireland's Own (August 12, 2000). ''From Cuba to Congo, Dream to Disaster for Che Guevara''. Accessed January 11, 2006.

Kornbluh, Peter (1997). ''Electronic Briefing Book No. 5''. National Security Archive. Accessed March 25, 2007.

Lacey, Mark (October 26, 2007). "Lone Bidder Buys Strands of Che's Hair at U.S. Auction". ''New York Times''.

Lacey, Mark (October 9, 2007). "A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini". ''The New York Times''.

Lago, Armando M (September 2005). "". ''Cuba: the Human Cost of Social Revolution''. (Manuscript pending publication.) Summit, New Jersey: Free Society Project. |page=5}}

Mittleman, James H (1981). ''Underdevelopment and the Transition to Socialism – Mozambique and Tanzania''. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-500660-8

Moynihan, Michael. "Neutering Sartre at Dagens Nyheter". ''Stockholm Spectator''. Accessed February 26, 2006.

Murray, Edmundo (November–December 2005). "Guevara, Ernesto [Che (1928–1967)]". ''Irish Migration Studies in Latin America'' (www.irlandeses.org).

Che Guevara, by Frank Niess, Haus Publishers Ltd, 2007, ISBN 1-904341-99-3.

O'Hagan, Sean (July 11, 2004). "Just a pretty face?". ''The Guardian''. Accessed October 25, 2006.

Ramonez, Ignacio (2007). Translated by Andrew Hurley. ''Fidel Castro: My Life'' London: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780141026268

Rodriguez, Félix I. and John Weisman (1989). ''Shadow Warrior/the CIA Hero of a Hundred Unknown Battles''. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-66721-1.

Ryan, Henry Butterfield (1998). ''The Fall of Che Guevara: A Story of Soldiers, Spies, and Diplomats''. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511879-0.

Sanati, Kimia (October 3, 2007). "Islamist, Socialist Revolutions Don't Mix". IPS News. (Reporting from Tehran, Iran). Accessed October 13, 2010.

Schipani, Andres (September 23, 2007). "The Final Triumph of Saint Che". ''The Observer''. (Reporting from La Higuera.)

Selvage, Major Donald R. – USMC (April 1, 1985). ''Che Guevara in Bolivia''. Globalsecurity.org. Accessed January 5, 2006.

Time Magazine (October 12, 1970). "Che: A Myth Embalmed in a Matrix of Ignorance".

Time Magazine cover story (August 8, 1960). "Castro's Brain".

U.S. Army (April 28, 1967). ''Memorandum of Understanding Concerning the Activation, Organization and Training of the 2d Ranger Battalion – Bolivian Army''. Accessed June 19, 2006.

Vargas Llosa, Alvaro (July 11, 2005). "The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand". ''The Independent Institute''. Accessed November 10, 2006.

"World Combined Sources" (October 2, 2004). "Che Guevara remains a hero to Cubans". ''People's Weekly World''.

External links

BBC Audio Archive: Profile of Che Guevara

BBC News – Che Guevara Images:   Set 1, Set 2, Set 3

Central Intelligence Agency: Reports on Che Guevara

Che Guevara Internet Archive: Speeches, Images

Democracy Now: "Life & Legacy of Che Guevara"

Discovery Channel: ''Ernesto "Che" Guevara''

Documentary: ''Che Guevara: Guerrilla to the End''

Documentary: ''Che Guevara, The Body & The Legend''

History International: ''Tracing Che: A Motorcycle Journey''

In Defense of Marxism: 40th Anniversary Part 1 --- Part 2

Life Magazine Gallery: Che Guevara, Revolutionary Life

MSNBC Slideshow: "In Cuba, Che Still Sells Revolution"

National Security Archive: The Death of Che Guevara

New York Post: Ernesto "Che" Guevara Photo Gallery

NPR Audio Report: Che Guevara

NY Times Interactive Gallery: "A Revolutionary Afterlife"

Slate Magazine: Picture Essay of Che

Slideshow: ''Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship''

State of Nature: Interview on Che with Jon Lee Anderson

The Guardian: "Making of a Marxist" ~ Che's Early Journals

The History Channel: ''The True Story of Che Guevara''

Wall Street Journal Gallery: "The Ubiquitous Che"

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Seumas Milne (born 1958) is a British journalist and writer known for his left-wing views. A columnist and associate editor at ''The Guardian'' newspaper, he is author of a best-selling book about the 1984-5 British miners' strike, ''The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners'', which focuses on the role of MI5 and Special Branch in the dispute.

Early life

The younger son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, Milne attended Winchester College and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford and Economics at Birkbeck College, London University. His sister, Kirsty, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University and a journalist in The Scotsman. The New Statesman, New Society and the BBC.

Career

Milne was the business manager of ''Straight Left'', a monthly publication of the factional group inside the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Milne worked as a staff journalist for three years on ''The Economist'' before joining ''The Guardian'', where he has been a news reporter, Labour Correspondent (Europe), Labour Editor, and Comment Editor (for six years, 2001-7).

Milne has reported for ''The Guardian'' from the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia, and also written for ''Le Monde Diplomatique'' and the ''London Review of Books.'' He has been a long-term member of the Labour Party and served on the executive committee of the National Union of Journalists for ten years. He was joint winner of the 1999 ''What the Papers Say'' Scoop of the Year award.

Political orientation

Milne has been described as a "staunch socialist" in the ''Evening Standard''. Following an article he published in September 1995 in the Guardian, Milne "became characterised as a 'far-left activist' and member of the Socialist Workers Party". Peter Popham argued that connecting Milne to the SWP was a "smear", but "there is no mistaking that Seumas is on the far left of the Labour Party, of which he has been a member for 20 years". Daniel Hannan described Milne as a Marxist.

Views

On British politics

Milne has been a strong critic of New Labour, in particular over its support for foreign wars, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy. He has argued that David Cameron's "makeover" of the Conservative Party is "skin deep" and attacked the party for its links with "rightwing fringe" parties in eastern Europe and support for "small state" public spending cuts.

On the Muslim community in Britain

Milne was one of the speakers in a public meeting titled "Kafa - Enough: Stop attacks on the Muslim community", which was held on 26 June 2010. Other speakers beside Milne were Daud Abdullah from the Muslim Council of Britain, left-wing politician George Galloway, Anas Al-Tikriti from British Muslim Initiative, Labour party MP Diane Abbott, Ismail Patel founder of Friends of Al-Aqsa, Lindsey German from Stop the War Coalition and Abdulrahman Jafar from Muslim Safety Forum. In his speech, Milne argued that there is a basic process that can be seen across all of the British media:

A racist portrayal of Muslims and Islam in general, a tendency to hype all bogus terror plots into something utterly beyond the pale... A process which is verged on incitement, and has played a central role I think in isolating and intimidating the community, and as we seen in places like Luton and elsewhere, effectively fueling violence on the streets and attacks on Muslim institutions and mosques in particular.

Milne also attended the second conference titled "Stop Islamophobia: Defend the Muslim Community", which was held on 5 June 2010. The conference was organised by Stop the War Coalition and British Muslim Initiative and supported by various British Islamic organizations. Speakers in this conference included amongst others Tony Benn, the president of Stop the War Coalition, Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, Muhammad Habibur-Rahman from Islamic Forum of Europe and others.

On Capitalism and Communism

Capitalism

Milne has argued that the financial and economic crisis of 2007-9 has discredited the neoliberal model of capitalism "that dominated the world for a generation". He has argued for full public ownership of banks in Britain to support economic recovery and overcome the credit crisis.

Communism

Milne has attacked what he calls "the creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate Nazism and communism", which he argues has tended to "relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure". He has written that communism's "crimes are now so well rehearsed that they are in danger of obliterating any understanding of its achievements, both of which have lessons for the future of progressive politics and the search for a social alternative to globalised capitalism".

Milne has argued:

For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment... Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.

Milne has also criticised the Council of Europe and others for adopting "as fact the wildest estimates of those 'killed by communist regimes'". He has argued that, while "the numbers remain a focus of huge academic controversy", the real records of repression now available from the Soviet archives are horrific enough (799,455 people were recorded as executed between 1921 and 1953 and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million at its peak) without engaging in an ideologically-fuelled inflation game".

al-Qaeda terror attacks on the west and the western response

September 11 attacks

Milne argued that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington were the product of "longstanding grievances" over US intervention in the Middle East: "not only western indulgence of Israeli military occupation, but decades of oil-lubricated support for despots from Iran to Oman, Egypt to Saudi Arabia and routine military interventions to maintain US control". On 13 September 2001, Milne wrote that "most Americans simply don't get.. why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world". Milne argued that in the aftermath of "such atrocities", only a minority were likely to "make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world. But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated." He wrote that the US was "reaping a dragon's teeth harvest" it had itself sowed in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Afghanistan and Iraq wars

Seumas Milne has been a vocal critic of the "war on terror" and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Milne argued in 2001 that war in Afghanistan would fail to "stamp out anti-western terrorism" and if the US invaded Iraq, "it risks a catastrophe". In relation to Iraq, Milne has argued that:

Given that the invasion of Iraq was regarded as illegal by the majority of the UN security council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion, it must by the same token be seen as a war crime: what the Nuremberg tribunal deemed the "supreme international crime" of aggression. If it weren't for the fact that there is not the remotest prospect of any mechanism to apply international law to powerful states, Bush and Blair would be in the dock at the Hague.

Milne has argued for a "negotiated withdrawal" from Afghanistan based on a "political settlement, including the Taliban and regional powers".

7/7 London bombings

A week after the 7 July 2005 London bombings Milne linked the attacks with the British involvement in the war in Iraq. Milne argued:

We can't of course be sure of the exact balance of motivations that drove four young suicide bombers to strike last Thursday, but we can be certain that the bloodbath unleashed by Bush and Blair in Iraq - where a 7/7 takes place every day - was at the very least one of them. What they did was not "home grown", but driven by a worldwide anger at US-led domination and occupation of Muslim countries.

Motivations of al-Qaeda

Milne argued after the London bombings that it was "an insult to the dead" and a "piece of disinformation long peddled by champions of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan" to claim that al-Qaeda and its followers were motivated by "a hatred of western freedoms and way of life" and "that their Islamist ideology aims at global domination", rather than "the withdrawal of US and other western forces from the Arab and Muslim world" and an end to support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and despotic regimes in the region. Victor J. Seidler, a Professor of Social Theory from the University of London, argued in relation to Milne's article that we have to be careful "not to ''dismiss'' and Islamist rejection of the freedoms of Western urban cultures". Seidler argued that contrary to Milne's claims, the 7/7 terrorists were "home grown" and that they were at least partly motivated by "Islamist religious doctrine". After quoting Milne's viewes about al-Qaida, seidler argued:

The questions we face are more complex and involve questioning a reductionist conception of ideology, often informed by an orthodox reading of Marx, that assumes it exists primarily as expressions of material inequalities and social injustices. al-Qaida's religious conservatism and dreams of restoring the medieval caliphate also have to be taken seriously as part of a rejection of what the West has to offer.

On Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran

Milne has stated that since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, "Iran and its allies offer the only effective challenge to US domination of the Middle East and its resources". After the 2009 presidential election in Iran, Milne argued that the evidence suggested Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had in fact won the elections, despite allegations of fraud. Milne wrote that "it's hard to believe that rigging alone could account for the 11 million-vote gap between the main contenders". Milne has described Ahmadinejad's "toying with Holocaust denial" as "morally repugnant and factually absurd". But he argued that, while for the western media Ahmadinejad is "nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic... the other Ahmadinejad, who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority is largely invisible".

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

In the Middle East, Milne has argued that "commitment to Palestinian rights should first of all be a question of justice. But, given the toxicity this conflict brings to the entire relationship with the Muslim world, it is also a matter of obvious western self-interest". He has written that "far from supporting the Palestinian national unity necessary to make any peace agreement stick", the US and its allies "are doing everything possible to deepen the split between Hamas and Abbas's Fatah movement".

1948 Arab–Israeli War

Milne has argued that "it is to Britain's historic shame that having played such a central role in the creation of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the dispossession of a people it had promised to protect". Milne claimed that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians had been orchestrated by Israel months before the end of the British Mandate for Palestine.

Battle of Jenin

Milne described the Battle of Jenin (April 1–11, 2002) during Operation Defensive Shield as an "unleashing of state terror" by the Israeli government whilst describing the fierce fighting of Palestinian militants as "desperate Palestinian resistance". Milne claimed during the fighting in Jenin that as "in other West Bank towns and camps, reports of beatings and executions of prisoners abound, and Israel appears to be preparing the ground for evidence of atrocities". Milne also stated that "Hundreds [of Palestinians] are reported killed, including many civilians. Milne echoed the massacre allegations made by Palestinian officials and residents of Jenin (The actual number of casualties in Jenin were 23 dead and 52 wounded Isareli sodiers and 53 dead, hundreds wounded and 200 captured on the Palestinians - 5 dead civilians and 48 militants according to the IDF and 27 militants and 22 civilians according to HRW).

Gaza War

In the aftermath of the Gaza War (27 December 2008-18 January 2009) Milne cited allegations of Israeli war crimes to argue: "With such powerful evidence of violations of the rules of war now emerging from the rubble of Gaza, the test must be this: is the developing system of international accountability for war crimes only going to apply to the west's enemies – or can the western powers and their closest allies also be brought to book?"

Melanie Phillips, in an article titled "The Guardian Goes to Pallywood" on her ''Spectator'' blog, highly criticized the factual truth of the research and the anti-Israeli stance of the Guardian, describing it as "an evil newspaper". At the end of this long article Phillips criticized Milne's commentary as:

Lazy, malicious use of partisan, uncorroborated, thin, ambiguous and on occasion demonstrably absurd allegations, with the purpose and effect of demonising and delegitimising the Israeli victims of terrorism by painting them as the terrorists and their Palestinian attackers as their victims.

On Latin America

Milne has written in support of what he calls "the wave of progressive change in Latin America", which he has described as "the most hopeful development in global politics in the past two decades".

Milne described the restoration of the sight of Mario Terán, the former Bolivian sergeant who killed Che Guevara, by Cuban doctors "paid for by revolutionary Venezuela in the radicalised Bolivia of Evo Morales", one of "1.4 million free eye operations carried out by Cuban doctors in 33 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa", as "an emblem both of the humanity of Fidel Castro and Guevara's legacy" and the transformation of Latin America.

Milne has also argued that Hugo Chávez's presidency has been the target of "unfounded accusations of dictatorship" in the western media. Milne claimed that Chávez proposed referendum to eliminate term limits (which passed on 15 February 2009 after previously rejected on August 2007), was "bring[ing] the country into line with the rules in France and Britain".

Praise and criticism

Praise

Milne was described by the left-wing writer Naomi Klein in her book ''The Shock Doctrine'' as having turned the ''Guardian'''s comment section into a "truly global debating forum".

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan claimed that Milne's greatest achievement "was to take full advantage of the expansion of the Guardian’s comment pages, which he edited until last year, making them the most thought-provoking opinion section in Britain". Hannan also praised Milne as "a sincere, eloquent and uncomplicated Marxist".

Criticism

Milne was singled out by Tony Blair in a December 2001 dossier as one of ten media critics of the war in Afghanistan and the US-British response to the 9/11 attacks whose views he claimed had "proved to be wrong". He was described by the novelist Robert Harris as "a Stalinist Rip van Winkle" in a September 2001 article supporting the war on terrorism. The journalist Melanie Phillips portrayed Milne as a "Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas mouthpiece".

Publications

''The Enemy Within: the Secret War Against the Miners'', 1994, 1995 and 2004, ISBN 0-86091-461-5, Verso Books/Macmillan Publishers

''Beyond the Casino Economy'', with Nicholas Costello and Jonathan Michie, 1989, ISBN 0-86091-967-6 Verso Books

See also

Straight Left

References

External links

''Guardian'' profile

''The Enemy Within'' at the ''Guardian'' bookshop

Video clips

At a rally in Manchester in 2008

Category:1958 births Category:Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Category:Alumni of Birkbeck, University of London Category:British anti–Iraq War activists Category:British journalists Category:British non-fiction writers Category:British trade unionists Category:The Guardian journalists Category:Labour Party (UK) people Category:Living people Category:Old Wykehamists

no:Seumas Milne

name	Rizwan Khan
birth date
birth place	Aden, South Yemen
education	University of Wales Medical Physiology (B.Sc.) University of Portsmouth Radio Journalism (B.A.)
occupation	Reporter and Anchor at Al Jazeera
years active
website	}}

Rizwan "Riz" Khan (born April 1962) is a British television news reporter and interviewer who until April 2011 hosted his own eponymous television show on Al Jazeera English. He first rose to prominence while working for the BBC and CNN.

Life and career

Khan was born in Aden, South Yemen, to a Punjabi father and Gujarati mother. His father's roots hail from Pakistan-administered Kashmir while his mother's roots go back to Kutch, Gujarat. He considers himself as a British Pakistani. Khan moved with his family to London, at the age of four. He attended both Springwell Junior and Hounslow Manor Comprehensive Schools and joined the Air Training Corps, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Medical Physiology from the University of Wales, and then completed a postgraduate course in Radio Journalism at the University of Portsmouth.

In 1987 he was selected for the BBC News Trainee scheme - a two-year BBC training system, usually taking only 6 people per course. Khan progressed to jobs as a BBC reporter, producer, and writer, working in both television and radio, and would later become one of the founding News Presenters on BBC World Service Television News. He hosted the news bulletin that launched BBC World Service Television News in 1991. In 1993, he moved to CNN International, where he became a senior anchor for the network's global news shows. Events he covered included the 1996 and 1999 coverage of elections in India; the 1997 historic election in Britain; and in April 1998 the unprecedented live coverage from the Muslim pilgrimage, the Hajj.

In 1996 he launched his interactive interview show ''CNN: Q&A; with Riz Khan'', and he has conducted interviews with guests including former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former US Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, and genomic scientist J. Craig Venter. Khan also secured the world exclusive with Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf following his coup in October 1999. Khan also hosted ''Q&A-Asia; with Riz Khan''. These interactive shows put world newsmakers and celebrities up for viewer questions live by phone, e-mail, video-mail and fax, along with questions and comments taken from the real-time chatroom that opens half-an-hour before each show.

Khan hosted his show, ''Riz Khan'', on Al Jazeera English, interviewing analysts and policy makers and allows viewers to interact with them via phone, email, SMS messages or fax. The show came to an end in April 2011.

Khan speaks Urdu and Hindi and also understands other South Asian languages such as Punjabi and Kutchi. He has studied French, and can understand some other European languages, including Swedish.

In 2005 he authored his first book, ''Al-Waleed: Businessman Billionaire Prince'', published by Harper Collins.

In 2011 he authored a preface for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) annual report "Attacks on the Press 2010", which examined working conditions for journalists in more than 100 countries.

References

"Why I'm Joining Al Jazeera", op-ed by Riz Khan, ''The Wall Street Journal'', 13 June 2005, p. A1

"Q&A; CNN Anchor: Riz Khan". ''India Today''. February 19, 2001.

External links

Riz Khan's official website

Profile at Al Jazeera English

MySpace Profile

Interview with Baron Dave Romm of KFAI-FM at the Republican National Convention Sept. 2, 2008 and picture

Category:1962 births Category:Al Jazeera people Category:Alumni of Cardiff University Category:Alumni of the University of Portsmouth Category:British Muslims Category:British people of Indian descent Category:English people of Pakistani descent Category:British journalists Category:British television presenters Category:Living people Category:Punjabi people Category:Gujarati people Category:People from Aden

ar:ريز خان he:ריז ח'אן sw:Riz Khan no:Riz Khan