Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (1928–1967), known as "Che," was born in Rosario, Argentina, and trained as a physician at the University of Buenos Aires. His travels through Latin America in the early 1950s — later recounted in The Motorcycle Diaries — exposed him to regional poverty and U.S. corporate influence, radicalizing his politics. In Guatemala he witnessed the 1954 CIA-backed coup against Jacobo Árbenz, which he cited as decisive in his turn toward armed revolution.

In Mexico City in 1955 Guevara met Fidel and Raúl Castro and joined the 26th of July Movement. He sailed with them aboard the Granma in 1956 and fought in the Sierra Maestra campaign, becoming a comandante. After the revolution's victory on 1 January 1959, he held senior posts in the new Cuban state: commander of La Cabaña fortress (where he oversaw revolutionary tribunals and executions of Batista-era figures), president of the National Bank of Cuba (1959–1961), and Minister of Industries (1961–1965).

Guevara was a principal architect of Cuba's alignment with the Soviet bloc and of its centrally planned economy, though he favored moral incentives over material ones, a position he developed in essays such as Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965). Internationally he denounced U.S. policy at the UN General Assembly in December 1964 and criticized Soviet trade terms with the developing world at Algiers in February 1965.

He then left Cuba to export revolution, leading an unsuccessful Cuban column in the Congo in 1965 before launching a guerrilla foco in Bolivia in 1966. Bolivian Army units, assisted by U.S. CIA advisers, captured him at the Yuro ravine on 8 October 1967 and executed him the following day at La Higuera.

His image — Alberto Korda's 1960 photograph Guerrillero Heroico — became one of the most reproduced political symbols of the 20th century.