Che Guevara

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara or el Che, was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, political figure, author, and leader of Cuban and proletarian internationalist guerrillas. As a young man, Guevara studied medicine and traveled "rough[›]" throughout Latin America, activities that brought him into direct contact with the poverty in which many lived. Through these experiences he became convinced that only revolution could remedy the region's economic inequality, leading him to study Marxism and become involved in Guatemala's social revolution under President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.
Later while in Mexico in 1956, Guevara joined Fidel Castro's revolutionary 26th of July Movement that fought a guerrilla war and ultimately seized power from the regime of the U.S.-supported Cuban dictator General Fulgencio Batista in 1959. For a few months after the success of the Cuban Revolution, Guevara was assigned the role of supreme prosecutor, overseeing the revolutionary tribunals and executions of suspected war criminals associated with the previous regime.
After serving in several important posts in the new government, traveling around the world meeting important world leaders, and writing a classic manual on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare (foco theory), Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to incite revolutions using his guerrilla tactics, first in a failed revolution in Congo-Kinshasa and then in Bolivia, where his foco tactics also failed and he was captured and executed.
Although a controversial figure during his life, after his death, Guevara became an icon of socialist revolutionary movements worldwide and a countercultural hero. An Alberto Korda photo of him (shown) has received wide distribution and modification. The Maryland Institute College of Art called this picture "the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century."[1]