Introduction

Popular biographies, memoirs, academic articles and political tracts have focused on Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s military commitment to revolutionary social change, the infl uence of his travels in Latin America, and his participation in guerrilla warfare in Cuba in 1956–58, the Congo in 1965 and Bolivia in 1966–67. Guevara’s written accounts of the war against Batista and the publication of Guerilla Warfare in 1961 to promote his foco theory – that a ‘vanguard’ of armed fi ghters could spark successful revolutionary movements throughout Latin America — contributed to his narrow characterisation as a rebel commander and armed internationalist. Debate over the foco theory and about the Cuban road to socialism, fuelled by attempts to apply it elsewhere, cemented Guevara’s immortalisation as an armed revolutionary. His disappearance from Cuba, his farewell letter to Fidel Castro in 1965, his message to the Tricontinental calling for ‘two, three, many Vietnams’ and fi nally his capture and execution in Bolivia where he was leading a foco group in 1967, have placed blinkers on history, blinding it to other aspects of this multifaceted man. His Argentinian nationality and his death in Bolivia Latin-Americanised the impact of this image — his contribution to the war in Cuba was reminiscent of that continent’s independence heroes, such as Venezuelan Simón Bolívar and Dominican Máximo Gómez who crossed national boundaries to liberate ‘our America’ — thus strengthening Guevara’s claims about the universality of the Cuban model.