Episode 19: Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (,born on June 14, 1928, commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary and a major figure of the Cuban Revolution.
While living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and invaded Cuba aboard the Granma with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the successful two year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.
He also played a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to incite revolutions, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.
Read more about this topic: International Terrorism Since 1945
Famous quotes containing the words episode and/or guevara:
“Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist or a biologist who is asked if he is a “Newtonian” or if he is a “Pasteurian.””
—Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–67)