Che Guevara is best known for The Motorcycle Diaries as well as his relationship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The latter is outside the scope of the former, so in this section, we will take a deeper look at this famous revolutionary duo.
Guevara and Castro met in July 1955 when Castro was exiled in Mexico after a failed attack to overthrow Batista. They connected immediately and spent hours sharing their ideals. In his journal, Guevara wrote, "I talked all night with Fidel. And in the morning I had become the doctor of his new expedition. To tell the truth, after my experiences across Latin America I didn't need much more to enlist for a revolution against a tyrant. But I was particularly impressed with Fidel. I shared his optimism. We needed to act, to struggle, to materialise our beliefs. Stop whining and fight." Journalist Georgia Anne Geyer wrote of this, "It was like Lenin and Trotsky, like Hitler and Goebbels, like Mao Tse-Tung and Zhu De.”
A year later, Castro was imprisoned along with Guevara. Guevara was released first, but would not leave Castro there: he helped him attain his freedom.
After two years of guerrilla war in which Castro, his brother Raul, and Guevara fought side-by-side, Castro proclaimed victory in the Cuban Revolution in January of 1959. He began to insist that Guevara step out of the limelight, and Guevara was happy to accede. He was made the president of the national bank and instructional director of the armed forces. Guevara became a Cuban citizen, divorced his first wife, and married a Cuban woman named Aleida March.
In 1962, following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevara became uncomfortable with Castro’s move to get closer to the Soviet Union. In 1964, Castro decided to keep Guevara out of Cuba by appointing him as an ambassador. This reflected Castro’s growing pragmatism, prioritizing political ideas over friendship.
Guevara angered Castro the following year when he criticized the Soviet Union at the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria. When he came back to Havana, he was immediately kidnapped and detained in a “security house” for almost two days; he was then out of the public eye for months. Castro announced months later that “El Che” was dismissed from the Central Committee because Guevara had apparently written a farewell letter (this was a lie).
Guevara was primarily concerned with the guerrilla war in the Congo by now, but that failed. He was interested in returning to Argentina, but the Argentine Communist Party and Castro disapproved. Castro orchestrated a different international guerrilla operation for him in Bolivia, but this was where Guevara was wounded, arrested, and executed. One of Guevara’s biographers, Jorge Castañeda, said succinctly, "Fidel did not send Ché to his death in Bolivia. He simply allowed history to run its course." However, journalist Alberto Muller wrote that there was a guerrilla unit in Havana ready to rescue Guevara, but Castro never approved it: “[Guevara] died in a pitiful manner. Without medications for his asthma, without boots and only rags wrapped around his feet, without water, without food, and without allies.”
