Ernesto Guevara
The mid-twentieth century saw a wave of anti-colonial and revolutionary politics sweep through Latin America, producing figures who moved between the battlefield, the government office, and the written page. Ernesto Guevara, born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928, emerged from that turbulent era as a man who combined several roles at once: physician, military partisan, diplomat, politician, and writer.
Educated at the University of Buenos Aires, Guevara held both Argentine and Cuban citizenship and worked across multiple disciplines throughout his life. He wrote in Spanish and produced works that spanned the political, the personal, and the tactical. Among his notable writings are The Motorcycle Diaries, an account drawn from his early travels; Guerrilla Warfare, a text on armed insurgency; and The Bolivian Diary, a record kept during his final campaign. As a diplomat and politician he operated within formal structures of power even as he simultaneously pursued the role of partisan and revolutionary. The range of his output — essays, opinion journalism, poetry, and military analysis — reflects a career that resisted easy categorization.
Guevara died on October 9, 1967, in La Higuera, Bolivia, at the age of thirty-nine. During his lifetime he received several formal honors, including the Order of the Republic, the Order of Augusto César Sandino, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Southern Cross, and the Collar of the Order of the White Lion. These decorations, conferred across different nations, mark the international reach of his political and diplomatic activity in the years before his death.
Quotes by Ernesto Guevara
Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.
A petty concern with mere evidence is an antiquated and bourgeois feature of the captalist legal system. We are revolutionaries. We convict from a revolutionary passion.
O siamo capaci di sconfiggere le opinioni contrarie con la discussione, o dobbiamo lasciarle esprimere. Non è possibile sconfiggere le opinioni con la forza, perché questo blocca il libero sviluppo dell'intelligenza.
We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla is a social reformer, who takes up arms responding to the angry protests of the people against their oppressors, and who fights to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and poverty.
Individuals start to see themselves reflected in their work and to understand their full status as human beings through the object created, through the work accomplished. Work no longer entails surrendering a part of one's being in the form of labor power sold, which no longer belongs to the individual, but becomes an expression of oneself, a contribution to the common life in which one is reflected, the fulfillment of one's social duty.
I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel...