Age, Biography, and Wiki
Ernesto "Che" Guevara was born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina, and died at age 39 on October 9, 1967. He is best known as a Marxist revolutionary and a key figure in the Cuban Revolution, where he worked alongside Fidel Castro to overthrow the Batista regime. Guevara became an international symbol of rebellion and anti-imperialism, admired by some and criticized by others for his uncompromising revolutionary stance. His Wikipedia page provides an extensive account of his life, political beliefs, and impact on world history.
| Occupation | Revolutionaries |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 14 June 1928 |
| Age | 97 Years |
| Birth Place | Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina |
| Horoscope | Gemini |
| Country | Argentina |
| Date of death | 9 October, 1967 |
| Died Place | La Higuera, Santa Cruz, Bolivia |
Height, Weight & Measurements
- Height: 5 feet 11 inches (1.82 meters)
- Weight: Not widely documented
- Measurements: No official records available
| Height | 5 feet 11 inches |
| Weight | |
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Dating & Relationship Status
Che Guevara was married to Hilda Gadea, a Peruvian economist and revolutionary, whom he met while living in Guatemala. The couple had a daughter, but their marriage ended before he became involved in the Cuban Revolution. Later, Guevara married Aleida March, with whom he had several children. Both relationships were closely tied to his revolutionary activities.
Although the legal name on his birth certificate was "Ernesto Guevara", his name sometimes appears with "de la Serna" or "Lynch" accompanying it. He was the eldest of five children in an upper-class Argentine family of pre-independence immigrants that have Spanish, Basque, and Irish ancestry. Two of Guevara's notable 18th-century ancestors included Luis María Peralta, a prominent Spanish landowner in colonial California, and Patrick Lynch, who emigrated from Ireland to the Río de la Plata Governorate. Referring 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". Che Guevara was fond of Ireland, and according to Irish actress Maureen O'Hara, "Che would talk about Ireland and all the guerilla warfare that had taken place there. He knew every battle in Ireland and all of its history" and told her that everything he knew about Ireland he learned on his grandmother's knee.
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, would host veterans from the conflict in the Guevara home. As a young man, he briefly contemplated a career selling insecticides, and set up a laboratory in his family's garage to experiment with effective mixtures of talc and gammaxene under the brand name Vendaval, but was forced to abandon his efforts after suffering a severe asthmatic reaction to the chemicals.
Despite numerous bouts of acute asthma that were to affect 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. Several sources say he first played for Estudiantes of Córdoba, then San Isidro Club (1947), Yporá Rugby Club (1948), and Atalaya Polo Club (1949), although other sources claim he played for Club Universitario de Buenos Aires (CUBA), at fly-half. His rugby playing earned him the nickname "Fuser"—a contraction of El Furibundo (furious) 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 the age of 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 by heart. The Guevara home contained more than 3,000 books, which allowed Guevara to be an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, with interests including Karl Marx, William Faulkner, André Gide, Emilio Salgari, and Jules Verne. 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.
Guevara later remarked that, through his travels in 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". Guevara cited these experiences as convincing him that to "help these people", he needed to leave the realm of medicine and consider the political arena of armed struggle.
Guevara arrived in Mexico City on 21 September 1954, and worked in the allergy section of the General Hospital and at the Hospital Infantil de Mexico. In addition he gave lectures on medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in 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".
| Parents | |
| Husband | Hilda Gadea (m. 1955-1959) Aleida March (m. 1959) |
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Net Worth and Salary
- Net Worth (Estimated, Lifetime): $50,000 (at time of death, based on modern valuations)
- Salary: No official salary records as a revolutionary and government official in Cuba, though he held high-ranking positions such as Minister of Industries and President of the National Bank
- Significance: Despite his influential roles, Guevara famously rejected personal wealth, symbolically signing the Cuban currency as “Che” to express his disdain for money and class distinctions
Career, Business, and Investments
- Primary Career: Revolutionary, physician, author, and government official
- Key Achievements:
- Co-led the Cuban Revolution alongside Fidel Castro
- Served as Minister of Industries and President of the National Bank of Cuba
- Advocated for the elimination of material incentives and championed volunteer labor
- Business/Investments: No known personal business ventures or investments; his efforts were focused on revolutionary and governmental work
- Legacy: Known for his role in spreading revolutionary ideals across Latin America and Africa; remains a controversial and iconic figure in global politics
As a young medical student, Guevara travelled throughout South America and was appalled by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed. His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology. Later in Mexico City, Guevara met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with the intention of overthrowing US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the two-year guerrilla campaign which deposed the Batista regime.
Ernesto Guevara spent just over nine months in Guatemala. On 7 July 1953, Guevara set out again, this time to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. On 10 December 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 the dominion of the United Fruit Company, a journey which convinced him that the company's capitalist system was disadvantageous to the average citizen. He adopted an aggressive tone to frighten his more conservative relatives, and the letter 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 Árbenz headed a democratically elected government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to end the latifundia agricultural system. To accomplish this, President Árbenz had enacted a major land reform program, where all uncultivated portions of large land holdings were to be appropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. The largest land owner, and the one most affected by the reforms, was the United Fruit Company, from which the Árbenz government had already taken more than 225,000 acre of uncultivated land. Pleased with the direction in which the nation was heading, Guevara decided to make his home in Guatemala to "perfect himself and accomplish whatever may be necessary in order to become a true revolutionary".
"The last Latin American revolutionary democracy – that of Jacobo Árbenz – failed as a result of the cold premeditated aggression carried out by the United States. Its visible head was the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence, was also a stockholder and attorney for the United Fruit Company."
Social Network
While Che Guevara lived before the era of social media, his image and legacy are widely distributed across digital platforms:
- Wikipedia: Comprehensive biography and history
- Other Online Presence: Memes, merchandise, and social media accounts dedicated to his image, especially among leftist and revolutionary communities
- Official Representation: No official social media accounts, but his likeness is frequently used for political and cultural commentary
In Guatemala City, Guevara sought out Hilda Gadea Acosta, a Peruvian economist who was politically well-connected as a member of the left-leaning, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA). She introduced Guevara to a number of high-level officials in the Árbenz government. Guevara then established contact with a group of Cuban exiles linked to Fidel Castro through the 26 July 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 filler expression che (a multi-purpose discourse marker, like the syllable "eh" in Canadian English). During his time in Guatemala, Guevara was hosted by other Central American exiles, one of whom, Helena Leiva de Holst, provided him with food and lodging, discussed her travels to study Marxism in Russia and China, and to whom Guevara dedicated a poem, "Invitación al camino".
Education
- Medical School: Graduated as a physician from the University of Buenos Aires in 1953
- Further Studies: No advanced degrees, but his travels and political involvement served as a form of experiential education
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, Guevara has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist movements. In contrast, his critics on the political right accuse him of promoting authoritarianism and endorsing violence against his political opponents. Despite disagreements on his legacy, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him, titled Guerrillero Heroico, was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as "the most famous photograph in the world".
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. A CIA "biographical and personality report", dated 13 February 1958 and declassified decades later, made note of Guevara's range of academic interests and intellect – describing him as "quite well read", while adding that "Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino".
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 fundamentally changed 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 had installed a small engine. Guevara then spent six months working as a nurse at sea on Argentina's merchant marine freighters and oil tankers. His second expedition, in 1951, was a nine-month, 8,000-kilometer (5,000 mi) continental motorcycle trek through part of South America. For the latter, he took a year off from his 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.
The journey took Guevara through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Miami, Florida, for 20 days, before returning home to Buenos Aires. By the end of the trip, he came to view Latin America not as a 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 recurred prominently during his later revolutionary activities. Upon returning to Argentina, he completed his studies and received his medical degree in June 1953.
By this point in Guevara's life, he deemed that US-controlled conglomerates had 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 instructor 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 named "the best guerrilla of them all" by General Bayo.
