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
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“The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“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)