Cover photo: Alberto Korda, "Guerrillero Heroico" (1960) — public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Che Guevara: The Man and the Icon
The doctor who became a guerrilla and a minister — and, in the end, the most reproduced photograph in history.
About
In nineteen fifty-one, a twenty-three-year-old medical student crossed Latin America on a battered motorcycle and saw a poverty that looked far from accidental. Ten years later he was a comandante of a victorious revolution, a bank president, a government minister — and the commander of a fortress where he signed death sentences without full trials.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara voluntarily resigned from every position he held in Cuba to fight first in the Congo, then in Bolivia, where he was captured and executed without trial in nineteen sixty-seven, at the age of thirty-nine — the same fate he had imposed on others eight years earlier. A few years before his death, a photograph that wasn't even published when it was taken turned him into the most reproduced face of the twentieth century.
A story about the incorruptible idealist and the dogmatic executioner who lived in the same man — and about how little of him survives on a printed T-shirt.
Sources
- Wikipedia — "Che Guevara" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara
- Britannica — "Che Guevara" — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Che-Guevara
- Wikipedia — "Alberto Korda" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Korda
- Wikipedia — "Guerrillero Heroico" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrillero_Heroico
- Wikipedia — "1954 Guatemalan coup d'état" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
- Wikipedia — "Bolivian campaign (Che Guevara)" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivian_campaign
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