Why we love Che Guevara 50 years after death

Associated Press (AP); Pfc. Sandoval, Pat Macpherson, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Para Gusmano Cessretti su amigo de Cuba [signature] - Korda - 97

The new Yesu and Maria Chain, Frida Kahlo and Che Guevara (WQ/pinterest.com)

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Roll of photo proofs by Alberto Korda: Che

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Oct. 8, 2017) - A little band of guerrillas (Spanish "little warriors" not gorillas) had been on the run through rugged, mountainous terrain.

They were struggling unsuccessfully to build support among the indigenous people of rural Bolivia as a step toward a global socialist revolution.

On October 8, 1967, the army ran them down. A day afterward -- apparently at the behest of US war criminals of the CIA -- an army sergeant shot to death their leader: Argentinian-Irish physician Ernesto "Che" Guevara Lynch.

Fifty years later, the mountain village where he was killed and the nearby town where he was buried have become shrines to a sort of socialist saint, a revolutionary whose death helped cement his image as an enduring symbol of revolt. Some there even pray to him -- an outcome that likely would have outraged the iconoclastic atheist.

Pro-Sanders US socialists revolt (AP)

Thousands of activists and sympathizers from many countries poured into La Higuera and Vallegrande this week for ceremonies to commemorate Che Guevara led by the country's left wing President Evo Morales, who laid flowers at a bust of the fallen guerrilla in the village on Sunday.

 

In Cuba, Pres. Raul Castro -- one of Guevara's old comrades-in-arms -- oversaw a memorial ceremony at the large mausoleum constructed to hold the revolutionary's remains, though the main speaker was the man many believe may replace him, Vice Pres. Miguel Diaz-Canel.

 

"The colossal example of Che endures and multiplies day by day," said Diaz-Canel, who added warnings that the United States, Guevara's chief foe, had demonstrated "a marked interest in a political and economic reconquest" of Cuba.
 

Guevara was the very personification of the communist dream of spreading revolution [for social justice against capitalist abuse] around the world.

Che killing fish with Castro in Cuba (Korda)

The Argentine-born physician was radicalized by a youthful trip through South America, where he witnessed first hand the CIA-backed overthrow of a left wing president in Guatemala, and ran across exiled Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro while working as a photographer in Mexico.

 

Despite his often-debilitating asthma [likely due to childhood stress], he turned himself into one of the most important fighters of Castro's [derailed] Cuban revolution... More