Ernesto Che Guevara

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By Lauren Cheree Challens
Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967) not only played a pivotal role in Cuba’s revolutionary movement’s seizure of power in 1959 but also in Cuba’s social revolution that elated the island nation into a communist state. He was the unifying and driving force behind the revolution playing a significant role as an unrelenting guerrilla soldier taking shelter under the giant Neotropical leaves and shrubbery of the unforgiving terrain of the Sierra Maestra Mountains and serving as a dedicated and loyal official in Fidel Castro’s victorious regime. But still today, the question of Che remains was he the good guy or the bad guy? A murderer and terrorist or a martyr and saint. Even today the young faces of Cuba pledge to be like the man whose face adorned the 3 peso note, women light candles and burn incense in remembrance of their sainted leader and his stern frugal gaze glares out at you from every grey city wall in Havana.
But do not look down on the people of Cuba with a “developed world” haughtiness, for indeed El Che must’ve done SOMETHING to deserve such decoration, something so pervasive that more than 40 years after his murder, his portrait is still plastered on the walls of many of the world’s student residences, something so powerful it blinded a nation to all his natural human faults. How is it that one man’s actions and contributions to a small island off the American coast could impact on the world in such a way and be recognised as possibly the most famous face in the modern world? This investigation will aim to pull El Che from his charismatic mystique and look behind the idolized revolutionary whose image was demoted to a heaping mound of overcommercialised crap and expose him as a man, a l...

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... candles, or the flowers that decorate the stone table where his body was laid and his overall sainthood… after all, Che dismissed religion himself. I’m not sure if he even deserves this idolatry… But I do believe he was truly a symbolic leader and a vanguard for the voiceless and oppressed, He was no, unresponsive Stalin duplicate; or a hush-hush misrepresent like Mao, or even a megalomaniac like Castro, but a real man, a man who desperately wanted to relive his glory days. In a sense he was a hippy afore his time, an admirer of poetry, starlight conversations, travel, food, motorcycles and women…. But his politics devoured his entire being, he made himself hard and obsessive and it in turn resulted in an unfortunate ending.
His legacy forgotten… his Cuba forgotten … his proletariat…. Forgotten.
Never has there been such a tragedy in the life of a single man.

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