Ernesto Guevara was born in Argentina in 1928, trained as a doctor, became a guerrilla commander in Cuba, helped run a revolutionary government, and died at thirty-nine in a remote Bolivian village, captured after a failed attempt to start a new revolution. Within a few decades, his face became one of the most reproduced images in the world, printed on T-shirts, posters, and flags from Havana to London to New York. The three words in the title of this chapter — doctor, revolutionary, murderer — hold the tension that makes him so difficult to judge fairly. Each word describes a real part of his life. None of them, on its own, tells the whole story, and the image that swallowed all three tells almost nothing at all.
The Doctor Who Rode Across South America
Guevara studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, qualifying as a doctor in 1953, and his early travels shaped him more than his textbooks did. In late 1951, he and his friend Alberto Granado set out on a motorcycle journey, later made famous as the Motorcycle Diaries, that took them through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. The motorcycle, nicknamed La Poderosa, broke down repeatedly, and much of the journey was completed on foot, by truck, and by boat. Along the way, Guevara worked in a leper colony in Peru, treated patients in poor villages, and saw at close hand the inequality that marked Latin American life: vast estates beside landless peasants, mines worked by men who lived in shacks, and hospitals that served the rich while the poor went without care.
The Revolutionary Who Helped Take Cuba
Guevara sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma in December 1956 with Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and about eighty other men. The landing was a near disaster. Batista’s forces attacked the rebels almost immediately, killing or capturing most of them, and only a small group survived to reach the Sierra Maestra mountains. There, over two years of guerrilla war, Guevara proved himself not only as a capable fighter but as a disciplined organizer, a strict commander, and a ruthless enforcer of revolutionary discipline. He rose to the rank of comandante, led a column of his own, and became one of Castro’s most trusted lieutenants.
La Cabana and the Firing Squads
The hardest part of Guevara’s record to examine calmly is his role at La Cabana fortress in Havana in the first months of 1959. As its commander, Guevara oversaw the revolutionary tribunals that tried men accused of crimes under Batista, including former policemen, soldiers, and informers. Many of those convicted were executed by firing squad. The trials were summary affairs, held in a revolutionary atmosphere in which the new government was determined to punish the old regime quickly and publicly. Supporters of the revolution argued that the men executed had committed torture and murder under Batista, and that the trials were a form of justice long denied. Critics, including many who had supported the overthrow of Batista, argued that the proceedings lacked due process, that the outcomes were often predetermined, and that Guevara himself showed little doubt or mercy.
Minister, Theorist, and Exporter of Revolution
In 1966, he went to Bolivia, where he led a small guerrilla group in the mountains, hoping to spark a wider uprising. The conditions were harsh, local support was thin, the Bolivian army was trained and advised by the United States, and his group was gradually hunted down. On October 8, 1967, Guevara was captured near the village of La Higuera, wounded in the leg. The next day, he was executed by a Bolivian soldier on the orders of the Bolivian government. He was thirty-nine years old. His body was buried in a secret grave, and his hands were cut off for identification. When his remains were later found and returned to Cuba, he was buried with honors in Santa Clara, the city he had captured, and became a national hero.
What the Video Contributes
The video at the center of this chapter presents Guevara through the three roles in its title, and its value lies in refusing to let one role erase the others. It traces his path from the motorcycle journey to the Sierra Maestra, from the firing squads at La Cabana to the guerrilla campaigns in Africa and Bolivia, and it asks viewers to weigh the romantic image against the record of violence. For viewers who know Guevara only as a T-shirt, the film is a corrective. For viewers who know him only as a villain, it is a reminder of the genuine idealism, courage, and self-sacrifice that drew people to him. He lived simply, gave away his possessions, worked alongside laborers, and died for a cause he believed in. Those qualities made him attractive, and they do not cancel out the executions, the authoritarianism, or the failure of his later campaigns.
How the T-Shirt Swallowed the Man
The most famous photograph of Guevara, taken by Alberto Korda in 1960, shows a young man with long hair and a beret, staring into the distance. That image, endlessly reproduced, has become a symbol of rebellion in general, detached from the specific politics of the man it depicts. Students wear it, advertisers use it, and activists wave it, often without knowing much about La Cabana, the Congo, or Bolivia. The irony is sharp. Guevara was a committed Marxist who despised commercial culture, and his face became one of the most successful commercial images of the twentieth century. The icon has swallowed the man, and it has made serious discussion of his life harder, because the symbol invites either uncritical admiration or uncritical hatred.
The lesson of Guevara’s life is not simple, and it should not be. He was a doctor who wanted to heal the poor, a revolutionary who helped overthrow a dictator, and a commander who ordered and defended executions. He was brave, idealistic, disciplined, and utterly convinced of his own rightness, and that conviction led him to both great achievements and grave crimes. The world he tried to change is still marked by the problems he diagnosed, and it is also marked by the failures of the methods he chose. To remember him honestly is to hold all three lives together, and to refuse the comfort of reducing him to a single word, whether it is hero or murderer.