Che Guevara — Revolutionary and Global Icon

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born into an upper-middle-class Argentine family of part-Irish descent. Asthma from childhood shaped his determined character; his family's left-leaning politics and his extensive reading marked him early, but his path was initially medicine rather than revolution.

Location: Rosario, Argentina

As a medical student, Guevara traveled by motorcycle and hitchhiking across South America, working at a leper colony in Peru and witnessing mining exploitation and landless poverty. His journal of the trip, published posthumously as The Motorcycle Diaries, records the journey that by his own account transformed him from observer of injustice to advocate of armed change.

Location: South America

Guevara was in Guatemala when a CIA-backed military coup overthrew the elected reformist president Jacobo Arbenz. He watched as the government he had come to serve as a physician collapsed and left-wing figures were hunted. The experience convinced him that US-backed forces would always reverse peaceful reform — the conclusion that drove the rest of his life.

Location: Guatemala City, Guatemala

In exile in Mexico City, Guevara met the Cuban lawyer Fidel Castro, who was organizing an expedition to overthrow the Batista dictatorship. Guevara joined the 26th of July Movement, initially as its medic — the Cuban comrades' habit of calling him "Che," after his Argentine interjection, gave the world the name.

Location: Mexico City, Mexico

The overloaded yacht Granma landed 82 expeditionaries on Cuba's southeastern coast. Batista's forces ambushed them, and fewer than 20 reached the Sierra Maestra mountains alive. From that nucleus, the guerrilla war grew — with Guevara, no longer just a medic, commanding his own column and disciplining recruits as the movement hardened.

Location: Niquero, Cuba

Guevara's column derailed an armored train and took the city of Santa Clara, the decisive blow of the revolutionary war. Batista fled Cuba on 1 January 1959, and Guevara's troops entered Havana as the new government formed. He was declared a naturalized Cuban citizen.

Location: Santa Clara, Cuba

The new government placed Guevara in command of La Cabana fortress, where revolutionary tribunals tried and executed officials of the Batista regime. Historians estimate over 150 executions during his tenure; critics have condemned the summary proceedings ever since, while defenders describe them as the conduct of a revolution consolidating against a dictatorship's death squads. The episode remains the most contested part of his record.

Location: Havana, Cuba

Guevara was named president of the National Bank of Cuba — reportedly to the amusement of officials who learned the guerrilla hero had no interest in money — and signed the banknotes simply "Che." In February 1961 he became Minister of Industries, championing central planning and "moral incentives" over material ones, in a program of rapid industrialization whose shortfalls he would later acknowledge.

Location: Havana, Cuba

Guevara addressed the UN General Assembly, denouncing US policy in Latin America and the Congo and defending revolution as the continent's only path. During the visit, he was targeted by hostile actions including a bazooka shell fired at the UN building and a CIA-linked assassination plot, and he debated students and businesses in New Jersey on capitalism and revolution.

Location: New York, United States

Guevara secretly left Cuba and led roughly 100 Cuban volunteers into the Congo (Zaire) to support rebels fighting the Western-backed government after the murder of Patrice Lumumba. Riven by internal rivalries and facing well-supplied mercenaries, the campaign failed, and Guevara withdrew after seven months, writing a bitter account of the experience that was published decades later.

Location: Kibumba, Congo

Attempting to start a continental guerrilla front in Bolivia, far from his Andean strongholds and with faltering local support, Guevara was wounded and captured on 8 October 1967. The next day he was executed in the schoolhouse at La Higuera on the orders of the Bolivian high command, with CIA advisers present. His body was buried in a hidden mass grave to prevent a shrine.

Location: La Higuera, Bolivia

After a decades-long search, a team located Guevara's remains near the Vallegrande airstrip and returned them to Cuba, where they were interred in a mausoleum in Santa Clara — the city he had taken in 1958. His image, from Alberto Korda's 1960 photograph Guerrillero Heroico, had by then become one of the most reproduced photographs of the 20th century, adopted by student movements, artists, and advertisers alike — an icon whose meanings are still contested between revolutionary solidarity and commodity.

Location: Santa Clara, Cuba