Although more commonly referred to by the nickname Che, Che Guevara was actually born Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna. He was born on June 14, 1928 into a middle class liberal family in the small town of Rosario in Argentina.
He had a left-leaning, and literary family life before beginning his studies in medicine at Buenos Aires University in 1948. Two years later, Guevara started the first of two motorcycle journeys through Latin America which in successive years would help shape his political views and sense of purpose. Guevara became convinced (as documented in his Motorcycle Diaries) during his journeys that the solutions to the widespread poverty and oppression he had witnessed were armed revolution and communism. Furthermore, his tutelage in revolutionary thought came from his experiences amongst the leprosy patients of Venezuela and the tin miners of Bolivia, amongst the revolutionaries of Argentina and the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Reality radicalised him. Only later would he recount that he had been influenced by, as he put it, ‘the doctrine of San Carlos’, his sly reference to Karl Marx. As a renowned author, Che penned treatises on Marxism and guerrilla warfare, and sought to export socialism worldwide. The legacy of Che Guevara is constantly evolving in the collective imagination. As a ubiquitous symbol of counterculture worldwide, Guevara is one of the most recognisable and influential revolutionary figures of the 20th century. Like Trotsky, Guevara was a revolutionary theorist of considerable talent, and his writings on culture, politics and revolution are all of interest and relevance.
