Sinclair - Che Guevara

Che Guevara

Series Editor C.S. Nicholls

Highly readable brief lives of those who have played a significant part in history, and whose contributions still influence contemporary culture.

ANDREW SINCLAIR

THE HISTORY PRESS

First published in 1998 by Sutton Publishing

Reprinted in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 (twice), 2006

This edition first published in 2007

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

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Andrew Sinclair, 1998, 2007, 2013

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9465 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

I was born in Argentina, I fought in Cuba, and I began to be a revolutionary in Guatemala. These words summed up what Che Guevara called his autobiographical synthesis. They also described a continent always in tension between reactionary governments and utopian rebels. Guevara was the first man since Simon Bolvar with a serious plan to unite the squabbling neighbours of Latin America. His own life displayed all the contradictions of his place and time.

He was the child of aristocrats, the first son of Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa, one of whose family had been a Spanish Viceroy of Peru, another a celebrated Argentinian general. The Spanish and Irish Guevaras and Lynchs had come as immigrants to Argentina twelve generations before, while the de la Sernas had much property and radical sympathies. Che Guevaras grandmother, Ana Lynch, also had American blood and was born in California, and his mother Celia, with her reforming beliefs, was the dominant influence on Ches life until he met Fidel Castro.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born prematurely on 14 June 1928 in his fathers birthplace at Rosario: he was later nicknamed Che. Subject to pneumonia and asthma, he was taken to the mountains at Alta Gracia on the foothills of the Crdoba Sierra to help his breathing. His mother Celia taught the wheezing boy to read and write, while his father pursued his business in construction engineering and shipbuilding. Che went briefly to state schools. His radical mother helped him to get on with whoever was there, but the huge difference between the privileged children like himself and the rest of his schoolmates from poor backgrounds was made clear. His uncle, the poet Cayetano Crdova Itrburu, a member of the Communist Party, reported on the Spanish Civil War, sending back to Argentina his dispatches from the Republican Front. These influenced the young Che, who never revolted against his free-thinking home, but against the oppression of his continent. As Ricardo Rojo, a friend of the family, testified, This home conditioning naturally led to a sense of rebelliousness, which, once he could understand the social problems of South America, was to make Che into a revolutionary.

Che acted as if he were a youth as a boy and a man as a youth. A classmate found him incredibly sure of himself and totally independent in his opinions... very dynamic, restless and unconventional.made Ches later assertion plausible, that a man at fifteen already knows what he wants to die for and is not afraid of giving his life if he has found an ideal which makes the sacrifice easy.

However, Che had not yet found an ideal. With General Francos victory in Spain, Fascist movements emerged in many South American nations. Against the reactionaries stood the Guevara family, who founded a local branch of Accin Argentina and enrolled Che as a youth member. With the outbreak of the Second World War, these radical groups opposed the local backers of Hitler. Accin Argentina also opposed the rise to power of Colonel Juan Domingo Pern after the end of the global conflict, although Che was then more interested in sport than politics. He learned to play football and rugby, as a scrum-half, although his asthma often forced him to leave the field. By temperament, he looked on difficulties as tests of will. Disabilities were to be defeated, barriers to be broken. He reduced a six-year university course to three years, passing sixteen major examinations in six months in spite of forty-five serious asthma attacks. His aunt said of this time, We would listen to him gasping, studying as he lay on the floor to ease his breathing, but he never complained. For By the greatest irony of all, a board of army doctors declared him unfit for any sort of military service, once he was eighteen. His training in warfare had to wait a while. There is justice after all, his mother later said.