Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew up… in Argentina, in an educated leftist family. After traveling throughout South America and witnessing the widespread poverty and disease, Che vowed to use his training as a physician to help the poor.
Living… in the Cuban jungle, fighting the imperialist brutes in Fulgenico Batista’s U.S. sponsored army. Che believes that Cuba will be the spark that sets the fire of revolution through all of Latin America, and he’s vowed to be on the frontlines of that great war. “Ours is a fight to the death!” he tells his soldiers.
Profession… physician, writer, diarist, theorist, and revolutionary. Che carries a romantic belief in the power of the revolutionary to liberate “the people.” A humanist who uses his skills in battle to help the exploited, Che believes that a revolutionary has a “… love of humanity… of justice and truth. A real revolutionary goes where he is needed.”
Interests… the revolution. Everything that Che does, he does in service of the worldwide socialist revolution. His dedication to the cause colors everything in his life.
Challenge… freeing the Cuban people from the hands of the U.S.’s imperialist puppet, Batista. Che knows that shedding blood is a vital part of the revolution, and he’s not ashamed of his violent actions. “Executions?” he tells the United Nations, “Yes, we have executed. We execute and we’ll continue to execute.”
Personality… romantic and idealistic. Che is obsessed with what he sees as his duty to fight for the oppressed people of Latin America. Even after the battle is over, he understands that the real work of re-building society will begin. As he tells his men, “We have only won the war. The revolution has just begun.”
Get to Know him in...
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After the Cuban Revolution, Che is at the height of his fame and power. Then he disappears, re-emerging incognito in Bolivia, where he organizes a small group of Cuban comrades and Bolivian recruits to start the great Latin American Revolution. Through this story, we come to understand how Che remains a symbol of idealism and heroism that lives in the hearts of people around the world.
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The Argentine, begins as Che and a band of Cuban exiles (led by Fidel Castro) reach the Cuban shore from Mexico in 1956. Within two years, they mobilized popular support and an army and toppled the U.S.-friendly regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista.
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Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution. Jon Lee Anderson’s biography traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro’s government to his failed campaign in the Congo and assassination in the Bolivian jungle. Anderson has had unprecedented access to the personal archives maintained by Guevara’s widow and carefully guarded Cuban government documents. He has conducted extensive interviews with Che’s comrades—some of whom speak here for the first time—and with the CIA men and Bolivian officers who hunted him down. Anderson broke the story of where Guevara’s body was buried, which led to the exhumation and state burial of the bones. Many of the details of Che’s life have long been cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Meticulously researched and full of exclusive information, Che Guevara illuminates as never before this mythic figure who embodied the high-water mark of revolutionary communism as a force in history.
