---
What would people think of Ernesto “Che” Guevara if he were around today? This leader of the 1959 Cuban revolution was anything but a moderate. He believed with extreme passion in the beautiful possibilities of humankind. Many considered him impatient and fanatical, but he simply saw no reason to “moderate” his desire to make the world a better place.
Che arrived at his political convictions by confronting the realities of ordinary people. During his travels through Latin America in the early 1950s, while still an Argentinian medical student, he saw first hand what is usually kept at arms length. In a 1960 speech “On revolutionary medicine”, he spoke of this time: “I came into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued punishment cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child is an unimportant accident”. Helping those people became his life’s work.
He realised though that this could not be done from a distance. Che chose to throw his lot in with the actual struggles people were waging for their liberation. In 1954, Che found himself in Guatemala, where he became politically active and witnessed the CIA-backed invasion that toppled the Arbenz government, which had initiated social reforms potentially threatening of US interests.
He fled to Mexico and soon made contact with more leaders of the Cuban revolutionary movement, including Fidel Castro. “Then I realised a fundamental thing... the isolated effort, the individual effort, the purity of ideals, the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals goes for naught if that effort is made alone, solitary”.
In 1956, convinced to join the struggle of the Cuban people against US imperialist domination and the dictatorship led by Fulgencio Batista, Che left with 81 others on a boat called Granma. They were confident that they could add a new spark to the struggle of the Cuban peasants and workers. On arrival they were met by the Cuban army — only 15 people survived.
The survivors helped strengthen the movement among the peasant poor and their links with the urban opposition. Every successful armed operation had the same aim, to strengthen their leadership unit and inspire further confidence to struggle in the growing opposition. The July 26 Movement, as the grouping was known (following an unsuccessful 1953 attack on that date on the Cuban Moncada barracks), united the peasantry in the struggle for land and raised, as Che explained in a 1959 article, “workers' demands that unite the proletarian masses under a single banner of struggle”.
According to Che, “the principal actors of this revolution had no coherent viewpoint” to start with. Among the July 26 Movement there were various conceptions about how the revolution could be won and what it would look like. The