Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna
Che Guevara, 1928-1967
Argentine Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader
At two years old he developed asthma from which he suffered all his life, and his family moved to the drier climate of Alta Gracia (Cordoba) where his health did not improve. Primary education at home, mostly by his mother, Celia de la Serna. He early became a voracious reader of Marx, Engels and Freud which all were available in his father's library, it is probable that he had read some of their works before he went to secondary school (1941), the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, Cordoba, where he excelled only in literature and sports. At home he was impressed by the Spanish Civil War refugees and by the long series of squalid political crises in Argentina which culminated in the 'Left Fascist' dictatorship of Juan Peron, to whom the Guevara de la Sernas were opposed. These events and influences inculcated in the young Guevara a contempt for the pantomime of parliamentary democracy, and a hatred of military politicians and the army, the capitalist oligarchy, and above all the US dollar/ imperialism. Yet although his parents, notably his mother, were anti-Peronist activists, he took no part in revolutionary student movements and showed little interest in politics at Buenos Aires University (1947) where he studied medicine, first with a view to understanding his own disease, later becoming more interested in leprosy. In 1949 he made the first of his long journeys, exploring northern Argentina on a bicycle, and for the first time coming into contact with the very poor and the remnants of the Indian tribes. In 1951, after taking his penultimate exams, he made a much longer journey, accompanied by a friend, and earning his living by casual labor as he went : he visited southern Argentina, Chile, where he met Salvador Allende, Peru, where he worked for some weeks in the San Pablo leprosarium, Colombia at the time of La Violencia, and where he was arrested but soon released, Venezuela, and Miami. He returned home for his finals sure of only one thing, that he did not want to become a middle-class general practitioner. He qualified, specializing in dermatology, and went to La Paz, Bolivia, during the National Revolution which he condemned as opportunist. From there he went to Guatemala, earning his living by writing travel-cum-archaeological articles about Inca and Maya ruins.