On this day in 1967, Argentine revolutionary socialist, Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna,
familiarly known by the Argentinian slang word “Che", was executed on the orders of the CIA after he had been captured by the Bolivian Army in Vallegrande, Bolivia.
The hunt for Che in Bolivia was led by CIA agent Felix Rodriguez. A informant told the Bolivian Special Forces about the location of Guevara's guerrilla unit, and on October 8, 1967, the unit's camp was surrounded, and Guevara himself was captured in the Quebrada del Yuro ravine.
Che was wounded in the leg, and another bullet pierced the magazine of his rifle so that he was unable to fire back. Rodriguez, upon hearing of Guevara's capture, immediately reported it to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Che Guevara spent the night of October 8-9 in captivity on the floor of the village school of La Higuera, with the bodies of his two murdered comrades lying next to him.
On October 9 at 12:30 a radio order came from the high command in La Paz. The message said: "Proceed with the elimination of Señor Guevara." The order, signed by the president of the military government of Bolivia, Rene Barrientes Ortuño, was transmitted in encrypted form to CIA agent Felix Rodriguez.
The executioner was Bolivian army sergeant Mario Teran, who drew the short straw in a dispute between soldiers over the right to kill Guevara. When Terán, the soldier who would execute him, entered the room, Guevara reportedly said “I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man.”
Guevara’s body was strapped to the skids of a helicopter and flown to Vallegrande, a small town 65 kilometres away, before being moved to an open-air laundry in the grounds of a hospital. It was here that the international press was summoned and the famous Christ-like photograph of his lifeless bearded corpse taken by Bolivian photojournalist Freddy Alborta.
Alborta's post mortem photo of Guevara, 1967
It is probable that Che would have been compared to Christ being taken down from the cross in any case. He was in his 30s when he died, he had long hair and a beard, and he gave his life for the cause of the working class and the peasants in a deeply Catholic country. And probably his image would only grown in its inspiration – that change would arrive in Bolivia and that the poor could eventually live in dignity. But the photograph that emerged seems to me to be a powerful visual and artistic reminder of Che’s redemptive powers.
Fearing that it might become a place of pilgrimage, the authorities decided not to bury the revolutionaries in the local cemetery. Instead, they were concealed in a mass grave in the corner of an airfield.
A mural dedicated to Che Guevara in Vallegrande, where his body was taken and displayed to the international press. This is now part of the Che Route, sponsored by the Bolivian government and foreign solidarity groups.
On October 15, Fidel Castro announced Guevara's death to the public. Guevara's death was considered a severe blow to the socialist revolutionary movement in Latin America and around the world.
In his last letter to his children, Guevara wrote “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”
Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna was born to a well-off family in Argentina in 1928. While studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, he took time off to travel around South America on a motorcycle; during this time, he witnessed the poverty and oppression of the lower classes. He received a medical degree in 1953 and continued his travels around Latin America, becoming involved with left-wing organizations.
In the mid 1950s, Guevara met up with Fidel Castro and his group of exiled revolutionaries in Mexico. Guevara played a key role in Castro’s seizure of power from Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and later served as Castro’s right-hand man and minister of industry. Guevara strongly opposed U.S. domination in Latin America and advocated peasant-based revolutions to combat social injustice in Third World countries.
Guevara resigned from his Cuban government post in April 1965, then disappeared from Cuba, traveled to Africa and eventually resurfaced in Bolivia, where he was killed.
The legacy of Che Guevara is constantly evolving in the collective imagination. As a symbol of counterculture worldwide, Guevara is one of the most recognizable and influential revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. An icon of global popular culture, as well as a hero of Third World communist revolutionary movements and a symbol of the Western Leftist Movement. He remains a monumental figure in Latin American history, influencing a half-century of political ideals and movements.
In Cuba, an economic blockade led the island to act in defiance of U.S. power, creating in its wake an internationalist foreign policy. Guevara played a key role in the ideology and action needed to carry out these policies.
Today, despite a 66-year-long US blockade of Cuba and the current intensified blockade that has caused a humanitarian disaster, the country allocates about 14% of its national budget to education. According to the World Bank, Cuba had a 98% literacy rate as of 2021, and UNICEF reports a 100% primary school completion rate.
Education has long been a cornerstone of the Cuban Revolution, and universal education is one of its greatest successes. In 1961, Cuba launched a mass literacy campaign targeting rural areas. Illiteracy declined from 23% to 3.9% that year alone.
Education is completely free in Cuba, even at the highest level. This means that, in addition to primary and secondary school, Cubans can access university education, postgraduate studies, medical school, and all other fields of study at no charge.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, 79 per cent of adults in the United States had sufficient English literacy skills as of 2019. This means that one in five adults in the United States lacks these skills.In September 2025, the Nation’s Report Card revealed that high school seniors' reading scores dropped to their lowest average since 1992, signalling falling literacy rates.
Professors at the University of California system are expressing frustration that their students also lack basic middle-school math skills.
While the United States has long targeted Cuba and its socialist system, it seems that the island country's dedication to investing in accessible educational opportunities for every citizen has generated results superior to those of the capitalist United States, even though the latter has a much larger economy and more global power.
The following photo was taken on March 5, 1960, seven years before Guevara’s death, at a funeral for workers killed in an explosion in a Cuban port that Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government blamed on the Americans.
Guevara, looked on as Castro delivered a fiery funeral oration. For about thirty seconds, he stepped to the front of a crowd near Castro’s rostrum, into the view of newspaper photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, also known as Alberto Korda. Korda snapped two shots of Guevara, his face resolute and his long hair flowing from under his trademark beret, before Guevara retreated back into the crowd. Perhaps due to his background as a fashion photographer, Korda took a liking to one of the images and cropped it into a portrait, even though the newspaper La Revolución declined to use it.
For several years, the now-iconic photo remained nothing more than a personal favorite of the man who took it. Korda named the picture Guerrillero Heroico—“Heroic Guerrilla Warrior”—and hung it on his wall, occasionally handing out copies to guests. It was not until 1967 that the public would first see the image, which appeared in the magazine Paris Match alongside an article about Latin American guerrilla movements.
During Guevara's, memorial service in Havana, an enormous print of Guerrillero Heroico was hung over the façade of the Ministry of the Interior. The service marked Che’s canonization as a martyr of global revolution, as well as the ascendance of Korda’s image as an icon of rebellion.
The following year the image of Guevara went viral. It appeared on the cover of a copy of Guevara's memoirs, published in Italy. It was also used as the cover of a literary journal advertised on the New York City subway.
In the same year, Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick created a stylized version of the image, setting a black-and-white Guevara against a red background, and distributed it as widely as he could to honor Guevara’s legacy. The poster bearing this image was shown at the Arts Laboratory in London. It quickly became the image used prominently in the student riots that swept across France in May 1968.
Since then, Che’s face has been commodified, merchandised and objectified, appearing on T-shirts, ice cream wrappers, posters and mural art. His life is told in films, such as The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), in documentaries, plays, and in songs.
Yet the rights to Che’s face are not owned by the Guevara family, but by the photographer and artist who created the image. The famous photograph of Guevara in a beret was taken by Alberto Korda (Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez) in 1960, titled Guerrillero Heroico (Heroic Guerrilla Warrior). British pop artist Sir Peter Blake regarded it as ‘one of the great icons of the 20th century.’
This photograph was the beginning of the commodification of the image of Che. Che’s image is an ever-present political and social emblem that has been morphed in popular culture. It operates as ‘both a fashionable de-politicized logo, as well as a potent anti-establishment symbol used by a wide spectrum of human rights movements and individuals affirming their own liberation.’
Che’s image has become a counter-cultural symbol that operates independent of who he was as a person, metamorphosed from his life as a revolutionary appropriated into a work of art. Hannah Charlton writes in The Sunday Times (2006) that ‘Possibly more than the Mona Lisa, more than images of Christ, more than comparable icons such as the Beatles or Monroe, Che’s image has continued to hold the imagination of generation after generation.’
Che's short life reveals Cuba’s resilience in the struggle to provide the needs of the people through the Cuban Revolution, especially those whose ethnic identity and race are factors in their economic and political oppression.Time magazine selected him as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century.
Che remains a polarizing figure; admired by some as a symbol of idealism and revolutionary dedication, a heroic defender of the oppressed and poor,while others criticize him as a violent adventurer, an executioner and the "Butcher Of la Cabaña" while Jean Paul-Sartre, Susan Sontag, Nelson Mandela and many others have regarded him as a hero and an inspiration, a man who was prepared to die for his beliefs.
What made Che unique was the unorthodox current of Marxism-Leninism he represented. Unlike those who believed revolution had to wait until all the perfect material conditions emerged, Che argued that revolutionaries had a duty to create those conditions through struggle itself. His theory of guerrilla warfare held that even a small group of committed revolutionaries could spark broader popular movements rather than waiting indefinitely for history to move on its own.
He believed that revolution was not just an external process, but an internal, almost spiritual, struggle to develop new values, ethics, and forms of consciousness: the creation of a “New Man.”
Che also rejected the idea that socialism could be built in one state and survive indefinitely in isolation, and his life reflected the belief that the struggle for socialism had to be global or risk total defeat.
Che understood the centrality of ethics in politics, the centrality of subjective factors in revolution, leading to the rapid transformation of Cuban society into a giant school of reclaiming Cuban culture and ethical values.
Hence, the literacy and “voluntary labour” campaigns, the advances in education and medicine, and the large scale involvement of people in movements for agrarian reform, housing reform, and so on. These movements and campaigns converted idealistic goals into on-the-ground realities that have continued to evolve, making possible what one could have never imagined even in one’s wildest dreams.
Rejecting the use of capitalist methods to fight capitalism, Che alongside Fidel Castro used the methods of socialist praxis to transform what began as a national liberation struggle into a socialist revolution that would transform institutions and social and human relations through an organised and conscious “praxis” that—despite errors recognised publicly by both of them and their successors—continues till today.
Che also repeatedly warned about the dangers of not seeing the deficiencies of “existing socialism” and of mechanically copying Soviet manuals and methods. He had spoken about this often, and this is also explicitly stated in his writings preserved in Cuba and available around the world. He observed that the “intransigent dogmatism of the Stalin era has been succeeded by an inconsistent pragmatism . . . returning to capitalism.”
He saw the actions and programmes of the Cuban Revolution as “clashing with what one reads in the (Soviet) textbooks” and contributed insightful socialist critiques of both capitalist and socialist societies and their theories.
History has never agreed on what to make of him. His story resists simplicity. What remains certain is that he lived—and died—according to absolute conviction. In the final hours before leaving for a war he would not survive, he was thinking about his children. Not about fame. Not about legacy. But about what values he hoped they would carry forward. “Study and read diligently,” he wrote. “Remember that an individual has no value alone.” Stand for something. Learn everything you can. Never be indifferent to suffering."
In death, Che Guevara would become the iconic symbol of revolutionary martyrdom; giving up his own life with no fear, for the cause of fighting oppression and liberating others. His ideas and actions inspired many leftist movements across Latin America and beyond, particularly among youth and radical groups in the 1960s.Murals, paintings and pictures of Che Guevara can be found all over the world in the poorest areas.
Che went down in history as a man who devoted himself entirely, without reserve, to the noble and difficult struggle for the liberation of man, for the triumph of communist ideals. Che Guevara's life today is an inspiring symbol of heroism and devotion to the ideals of revolution and socialism and he remains a global symbol of hope, resistance, and fighting oppression. Martyrs don't die, they live through us.
In July 1997, his remains were discovered; and sent back to Cuba, where they were reburied in a ceremony attended by President Fidel Castro and thousands of Cubans.In October, the Council of State of Cuba issued a notice designating the period from the 11th to the 17th of that month as a national period of mourning, and his remains were interred at the Che Guevara Square in Santa Clara.
Comrade Che dedicated his life to the struggle against the imperialist bandits who oppress and exploit the world's peoples, chief among them the greatest enemy of the human race, the USA.
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine. ” -Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
"Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary"- .Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
"Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons." -Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
Salute . Comrade Che is immortal! Patria o muerte y venceremos! Hasta la victoria siempre!
Photo: an activist paints a mural honouring Che on the apartheid wall in the occupied West Bank.
