
Che Guevara
Ernesto Guevara, also known as Che Guevara, was the Cuban revolution’s Argentinean-born leader. Che was the eldest of five children born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina, to a liberal, middle-class family. Che’s actual date of birth, according to a different source, Julia Constenla, was May 14, a month before the date mentioned on his birth certificate (Anderson, 1997, p. 3769). Constenla claimed she was told by Che’s mother, Celia de la Serna y Llosa, that Celia and Che’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, were not married when Che was conceived; As a result, they had to change the certificate and keep it a secret to escape ridicule, not just for themselves but also for their beloved son.
Che Guevara, or Tete as he was known by his family at the time, had suffered from severe asthmatic conditions since he was a child, which plagued him throughout his revolutionary life. His family was then moved to Alta Garcia, a mountain resort town near Cordoba, at his father’s request. His father, hoping that the new location’s dryer climate would benefit Che’s health, decided that it would be better if he stayed and spent his youth there, which he did.
Che Guevara married Hilda Gadea Acosta, an exiled Peruvian Marxist, in his first marriage. Hilda was pregnant with their first and only child, Hilda Beatriz, when they married on August 8, 1955. After four years of marriage, they went their separate ways, which led Che Guevara to meet Aleida March, who would later become his second wife on June 3, 1959. The couple was so devoted to each other that they traveled together, fought together, and, most notably, raised four children together.
Che Guevara’s career had a lot of ups and downs from 1955 to 1967, when he was a revolutionary (Bethel, 2003). Che Guevara was promoted to head of the industrial department of the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria, or the Cuban National Institute of Agrarian Reform, on October 7, 1959, after joining the Cuban revolutionary army led by Fidel Castro in 1955. On November 26, he was named president of the Cuban National Bank.Che Guevara was named head of Cuba’s Ministry of Industry in 1961, and his career seemed to progress inexorably until 1965 when he abruptly abandoned all of his responsibilities and chose to remain hidden. Che pursued his revolutionary mission as a guerilla leader in Bolivia a year later, but it was a total disaster, leading to his capture and execution on October 8, 1967.
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