Ernesto
“Che” Guevara was not born a revolutionary. He grew up in a
middle-class Argentine family and trained to be a doctor, preparing
to live a bourgeois life. But unlike others in his class, he was
unable to shut his eyes to the injustices upon which material wealth
was based: generational poverty and state-imposed policies designed
to keep the poor ignorant and exploited.
Life blessed
him with the opportunity to live out his days in comfort, but instead
he died age 39, fighting for revolution, murdered by CIA agents on
Oct. 9, 1967, in the jungles of Bolivia.
Guevara’s
eyes were famously opened to the harsh reality of capitalism for
those born less privileged than him when, as a medical student in his
early 20s, he hopped on a motorcycle and went on a tour of South
America. He found disease, destitution and illiteracy – along with
the sort of compassion and generosity that appears to be inversely
related to the amount of wealth one possess.
From that
point on, he labored to uplift the working class from Cuba to
Guatemala to the Congo. And, although his death was premature, his
legacy continues to serve as an inspiration to revolutionaries around
the world today.
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