LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Che Guevara
built 142 days ago
At 1:10 p.m. on October 9th, 1967, Sgt. Mario Terán stepped into the room where Che Guevara was being held and shot him. After a year of guerrilla warfare in Bolivia with only a few fighters, the legendary revolutionary leader was now dead. The one person singled out as ultimately responsible for Guevara’s capture was his former lieutenant, Ciro Bustos. When captured earlier by the Bolivian Army, he drew portraits of Che and his men. Since that time he has been living quietly in Europe. In this investigative documentary, Bustos for the first time tells his story.
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Che Guevara's most famous book is titled Guerrilla Warfare. His famous photo is captioned "Heroic Guerrilla." On the other hand his most resounding failure came precisely as a guerrilla, while there is no record of him prevailing in any bona-fide guerrilla battle. In fact, there are precious few accounts that he actually fought in anything properly described as a battle. The one that describes his most famous military exploit is referred to as "The Battle of Santa Clara," which took place in December 1958. The loss of this "battle" by the Batista forces is alleged to have caused Batista to lose hope and flee Cuba.
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Later, in his reflections on the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara underscored the need to educate the people in armed self-defense. The Guevarist insurrectional foco or center is a revolutionary commune for living and fighting together. Its principal task is to catalyze the masses into taking independent action in defense of what are taken to be their basic interests. Since people have reason to fear repression and are generally unprepared to resist a military coup against a popular government, they have to be educated for that eventuality from the start. Moreover, they have to be encouraged by the exploits of the insurrectional foco to follow its example and to provide armed support for a popular movement of resistance.
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By the age of 12 Che Guevara learned chess from his father and began participating in local tournaments.As a teenager he became passionate about poetry, especially that of Pablo Neruda. Guevara... wrote poems throughout his life. He was an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, with interests ranging from adventure classics by Jack London, Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne to essays on sexuality by Sigmund Freud and treatises on social philosophy by Bertrand Russell. In his late teens, he developed a keen interest in photography and spent many hours photographing people, places and archaeological sites.
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During the postinsurrectionary phase... Che Guevara continued to be concerned with problems of armed strategy, and in 1965 he renounced his role as supreme director of Cuban industry to return to that of a guerrilla commander. Among his reasons for doing so was the conviction that the parallel construction of socialism and communism in Cuba depended for its success on opening new revolutionary fronts in the Third World and in Latin America in particular. The development of Che's thought was accordingly more complex than his own two-stage analysis of the Cuban Revolution might suggest.
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Che Guevara is widely remembered today as a revolutionary figure; to some a heroic, Christ-like martyr, to others the embodiment of a failed ideology. To still others, he is just a commercialized emblem on a T-shirt. But for Latin Americans just now coming of age, yet another image of Che is starting to emerge: the romantic and tragic young adventurer who has as much in common with Jack Kerouac or James Dean as with Fidel Castro.
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Che Guevara