Before Che Guevara was a revolutionary, he was an asthmatic rugby-playing medical student
Ernesto Guevara battled acute asthma all his life yet swam, cycled tirelessly and played rugby for several Argentine clubs. As a medical student he crossed South America and returned convinced the continent was one nation needing one liberation. His face later became a worldwide emblem of rebellion.
He was born in Rosario, Argentina, on 14 May 1928, the eldest of five children in an upper-class family with leftist sympathies. His father backed the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and welcomed its veterans into the house. Young Ernestito showed an early affinity for the poor. He learned chess from his father and entered tournaments by twelve, and he loved poetry all his life, from Pablo Neruda to Walt Whitman, filling notebooks with sketches of thinkers such as Buddha and Aristotle.
In 1948 he began medicine at the University of Buenos Aires but broke up his studies with two long journeys. The first, in 1950, was a solo ride of about 4,500 kilometres. On a later trip, in Chile, he was angered by conditions for miners at Anaconda's Chuquicamata copper mine and shaken by a night in the Atacama spent beside a hunted communist pair so poor they had no blanket. That journey carried him through Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama, and he came home seeing Latin America as a single entity.
His belief that the region was being exploited by the United States drew him to Guatemala, where President Jacobo Árbenz was pursuing social reforms until a CIA-assisted coup removed him. Guevara then became a central figure in the Cuban Revolution.
In the new Cuban government he held several posts: he reviewed appeals and death sentences from the revolutionary tribunals, pushed land reform, helped lead a successful literacy campaign and served as president of the National Bank. He died on 9 October 1967. Opinion about him remains split between reverence and revulsion. His vision of a new man motivated by moral rather than material rewards, together with his perceived martyrdom, turned him into an enduring icon in songs, films and memoirs.
Source: Che Guevara
