How Did Che Influence The Cuban Revolution

The Cuban government was not ideal for its people at the time, so they decided to initiate a change. Before Castro’s revolution, Cuba’s economy was highly based on tropical fruits, sugar, and tobacco. During this time, the government of Cuba mainly consisted of wealthy land-owning conservatives. Fidel Castro, a strong liberal who thought the Cuban government was corrupt, decided to bring together a band of two-hundred revolutionaries (Carey, Jr. 15). These revolutionaries attacked the Moncada Military barracks on July 26th, 1953 resulting in a failure that earned both Castro and the revolutionaries a ten-year prison sentence. Two years into his sentence, Castro was exiled to Mexico and began to plot another attempt in Mexico City. After many battles with Cuba’s National Army, Castro’s rebels were able to keep Cuba in a state of turmoil while other rebel groups were able to gain control. Through his actions, he was able to gain the support of the Cuban people who thought he was the logical choice for the new leader (Carey, Jr. 15).

The Cuban Revolution was touchy topic for the United States and Cuba. America’s alienation of Cuba didn’t help when communism from the USSR was brewing over the revolution. When the revolution gained Castro as its leader, the worry and hatred from the United States was unbearable, especially when the Soviet Union landed in Cuba to interest Castro in its aid. The US’s fear of communism, Fidel Castro, and aid from the Soviet Union was significant because it changed the US’s political role in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution.

Instead , the people of Cuba started slowly focusing on Fidel Castro, a rebellious leader who strongly opposed Batista, and Lenin, a Russian Communist Revolutionary. Castro traveled to Mexico in 1955, where he met Che Guevarra, who was a very important figure, giving him advice in succesfully defeating Batista.In 1956 Castro returned to Cuba along withhis brother and Che Guevarra . They launched a number of attacks against Batista's forces, however they lost,most of their men being captured. They escaped and hid in the Sierra Maestra Mountain Range, using guerilla war to successfully capture major areas of Cuba, causing Batista to fly to the Dominican Republic in 1959.Lenin, also a strong , rebellious figure in Russia, was exiled prior to the Revolution, focusing his energy on revolutionary politics. He returned to St. Petersburg and began working with other Marxist thinkers. Their ‘work’ attracted some unwanted attention and they were arrested and exiled to Siberia. He returned once more and stepped up, vocalizing his views . His number of supporters soon started increasing , mainly due to the devastating effects the war with Japan and WWI had on Russia’s economy, pushing people of all classes to side with Lenin. The “Bloody Sunday” pushed the Czar to offer several political concessions, most importantly an elected legislative assembly, or Duma. Lenin wasn't pleased, and believed that a

Methods: This investigation will describe Che Guevara’s involvement in Latin American independence movements, focusing specifically on his involvement with Fidel Castro’s “26th of July” movement. His actions and words will be analyzed, and his conduct this period of political upheaval will be used as evidence in order to answer the investigative question.

An individual’s discovery is transformative on their perceptions of the world. This is the case for the book ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and Keats’s sonnet “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”. In this book, we are taken on Che’s journey as he travels Latin America as a young man, before the fame. His diary entries lead the reader into his own eyes, as a typical young man on an adventure, not the revolutionary figure we all associate him with. Through his descriptive entries of the landscape he journeys across, we discover his deeper connection to the land of South America and the love he has for its people. As well as the beautiful things that South America has to

“A revolution is not a bed of roses ... a revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.” – Fidel Castro, 1961. This statement was certainly true for Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries during the Cuban Revolution, an armed revolt that took place between July 26th 1953 and January 1st 1959, which ended successfully. During this revolt, many of Fidel Castro’s fellow revolutionaries were killed in this process of violent revolution (My Life, p133, 2006). However, Castro and his accompanying revolutionaries, of which he was the leader, also caused their fair share of deaths using brutality in the name of revolution and political justice. Using various combat tactics, the most prominent being guerrilla warfare, the

In Mexico he began to organize a guerrilla voyage to Cuba for a violent uprising against Batista authority (Castro, 2009). On December 2, 1956 Castro, joined by 81 other revolutionaries (which included big names such as Che Guevara, and Jesus Montane), reached the Cuban cost. (Castro, 2009). For the next two years Castro helped the Rebel Army organize their forces throughout the entire island. Here is a timeline of events during the two years during the rise of the rebellion (Frank, 2013):

The next portion of the paper analyses the film “The Revolution is Us” by David C. Stone. She criticizes this documentary by saying that it only tells a single story of what it means to be Cuban under the Revolution. In this instance she is referring to this Pacheco, who in the mind tells the story of what it means to be Cuban in the eyes of a manipulative government. Pacheco is a man who mentions that he would die for the revolution and feels that he in forever indented or at the service of the Revolution. Later on in this section Guerra mentions the “absence of all the most integrated Cubans from the collection deliberately provides tunnel vision into Cuban society; yet this is an advantage in that one sees citizen- deputies actively

Che Guevara was a revolutionist, a liberator, and a medical school graduate. He was also an anarchist, murderer, and communist. It is possible to see Guevara through either fo these looking glasses. The same goes for Chris McCandless, a young man trying to escape society, or a reckless idiot who wandered around the country full odf himself. Regardless of how they are perceived, they both met the same fate, death.

The Cuban revolution was a revolution of contradictions (Class notes, March 3rd). This highly debated revolution is said to have started in 1959 when Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries forced Fulgensio Baptista to flee the island allowing for a new revolutionary government, however others have argued it started in 1953 when Fidel Castro first attempted armed insurrection, or in the various failed rebellions of 1844 to 1933 (Chomsky, p. 15). Even the timeline of the Cuban revolution is prone to contradiction, as is so much and despite so many thousands of words devoted to the subject very little consensus has been gained. This topic is important because the Cuban revolution is still ongoing in Cuba, and through the march of time has endured where others have failed, remaining perhaps the most consequential revolution in history. Therefore it is important to try and examine Cuba, its origins, it’s history, and effect.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was a part of the 26th of July Movement in Cuba. He became a revolutionary leader who inspired many and brought the guerrilla to victory in 1959. He was a part of the eighty-two men who sailed on the Granma from Mexico to Cuba in December of 1956 (Staten 114). The biographical film, Che: Part One directed by Steven Soderbergh, shows the journey of Che and the guerrillas as they attempted to defeat Batista’s military. Che: Part One is not simply just a depiction of Che’s life, but it brings you right into the action of the armed struggle the guerrilla faced. The revolution shaped Che into the leader he became. He started out as a simple doctor who wanted to bring the people of Cuba what they deserved. Che went through changes as the periods of the revolution went on. He grew to be a leader that would bring his people to the victories they achieved. Throughout the portrayal of the revolution, it can be seen how Che changes and adapts based on what situation he is facing and how the movie shows it. The film goes back and forth between the times Che is in Cuba fighting and after he wins the revolution and talks about his experiences.

The film Che is about the man, Che, who joined forces in Cuba and start a revolution to end of the Batista regime in Cuba. The men that fought in the revolution were in bad conditions because they were on a really hard and dangerous combat, most of them got hurt during this fight. Also, the film shows that a lot of peasants were tortured and murdered by Batista’s army because of two men that decide to betrayal to the revolution and one of them was the messenger of the Rebel Army. Indeed, I think that Che became a hero in Cuba because he was a doctor but during the revolution, he was the commander and the one who protect and gave Cuba the freedom again and everyone respects him and him made sure that everyone was doing the right thing.

All revolutionaries except Castro and his family were massacred. Although this rupture failed, Castro's movement gained popularity and prestige all over the world. In fact, Castro called the Revolution the 26 of July Movement. Castro himself was caught and sentenced to jail for two years. Between 1955 and 1956,<br><br>Castro went to United States and Mexico looking for supporters and money to fund his revolution. On December 2, 1956, eighty-two men including Castro and the physician Ernesto "Che" Guevara, set sail once again for the Oriente on their yacht, the Granma. The campaign was doomed from the beginning. "Nobody could navigate the boat properly, everybody was seasick, most of the supplies were jettisoned in a storm, and the expedition landed in the wrong place."(Sinclair,15) On one occasion Guevara followed the wrong star to travel North, and on another, his comrade put the only the drink they had, milk, upside down in his pocket. By the end of the day the milk was gone. On December 5 in the battle of Alegría de Pío, Batista's troops killed all of the rebels except twelve. Among these survivors, coincidentally, were Castro and Guevara.<br><br>Meanwhile, in the cities and universities, a revolutionary movement was also taking place. The Ortodoxo political party favored a violent revolution against Batista. Its leader and University of Havana Professor Rafael Bárcena organized the

In 1953, after he graduated as a doctor, Ché took off through Latin America but this with a more conscious interest in political education. It was in Costa Rica where he met six Cubans who had participated in their failed assault on the 26th of July 1953 on the presidency

Like the much used stencil of Guevara's determined visage, the general perception of his life is flat and two-dimensional. No where more so, it seems, then in the country richest in Guevara's history, Cuba. An article printed July 21st 1997 in Newsweek, entitled 'Return Of The Rebel', explored Cuban society in the wake of the long-awaited discovery of Guevara's skeleton in Bolivian town of Vallegrande. In it journalist Brook Lamer explains how 'the Cuban Government played a pivotal role in creating the Che mystique, and it is not about to let its franchise slip away'[2].